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Trying to combine arcade and adventure games is nothing new, though what Phoenix have done is provide two tapes labelled "The Action" and "The Adventure", with success at the first bringing you a code that enables you to play the second.

The arcade section is a version of that aged favourite, Lunar Lander, in which you are rescuing men from the planet surface, while the adventure requires you to save your damaged ship from a fungus growth that is slowly moving towards it.

The tapes come in a colourful wallet and are well-documented, mentioning that you will need a joystick. I have to admit to a stifled yawn when I discovered the arcade action was merely Lunar Lander.

I yawned too soon, however, as this proved to be one of the best versions I've seen, with an impressive opening of explosive graphics, the theme from 2001, and the story outlined by a robotic voice via the TV loudspeaker. There are optional instructions and then you're on the first of the 12 skill levels, with four ships and 9,999 units of fuel to rescue as many trapped men as possible and uncover clues to that adventure code.

There are 41 men split between the four landing pads, though you needn't return to the mothership between each landing. You can hop from pad to pad and deposit them all at the end if you wish, and if you can manage it. The fire button activates your retro rockets in the direction of your joystick, and, as you might expect, all the controls have a slight delay mechanism built-in.

If this sounds fairly straight-forward, there is a complication in the shape of asteroids floating across the screen which transform the game from the merely tricky to the downright difficult. The rocket responded well to the controls, though the asteroids failed to respond to yells of "Get out of the way...!"

Across the top of the screen are four pieces of information: the number of men saved so far, the number you're carrying at the moment, the fuel remaining and the lives left. The only easy part of the game is docking with the mothership, where you merely float across underneath and the men are transferred automatically.

Success at each screen brings you some Morse-like bleeps and a message such as "Don't count your Drunics." Collect the cryptic comments and you should be able to piece together a running code for the adventure, which could take some considerable time as the screens naturally get harder as you go.

What a pity, then, that when you get there the adventure is something of a disappointment. It is divided into two parts, one on each side of the tape, and yet another running code must be discovered from part one to enable you to play part two. This could go on forever.

The first drawback is that you have to load the adventure completely before being asked to input what you think the running code is, and if you get it wrong or hit the wrong key the program crashes and you must reload.

I assume this is designed to prevent guessing, but it seems rather harsh when it would have been easy to have just the first few program lines load and then refuse to proceed till the right code was received. Guessing is impossible anyway, as you don't know if the code is a word, a phrase, a sequence of numbers or letters or what.

But when all this rigmarole is sorted and the adventure is running, you'll find your damaged ship is down on the surface of Sirus. You're told how long it will take to repair, which is about four times as long as it will take the deadly fungus to reach you and kill you off. There are four courses of action open to you, and you're given their respective chances of success: go out and find an antidote and you stand a reasonable chance of success, hope the fungus dies which is not very likely, attempt to control the fungus which is virtually impossible, or sit back and do nothing, i.e. commit suicide.

The first is the option to take as the others merely result in quick deaths. The main problem with the adventure, which is mostly text with a few graphics, is that wherever you're given a choice of actions, the wrong option will simply kill you off and return you to the start.

So you retrace your steps, make the other choice, are confronted with yet another choice, and if you get that wrong, you're back to the start to retrace your steps yet again, and so on. In other words, it's not so much an adventure as a series of guesses ... till you get to the point where you have to deduce another code.

The whole thing is more like a classroom examination than a genuine adventure. Once you do know all the right answers there is no point in ever playing the game again.

The poor impression the adventure gives is not helped by a succession of spelling mistakes which should never find their way into a supposedly professional program: there chance insstead of their chance, opennings for openings, unconcious for unconscious, and so on.

If the action game were sold on its own at half the price, Death Mines Of Sirus would get a good recommendation, but it's hard to see who the two games together would satisfy. Anyone interested in a good adventure will be disappointed, while arcade fans will only be keen on the action tape anyway.