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The best computer games drive you mad as a hatter. In this one you start off that way, playing the part of Lewis Carrol's character who had a penchant for tea parties.

Being loopy, he's not too good at pre-party planning so the aim of the game is to collect up treats to feed the impending guests.

Using a Kempston joystick or keys you control the animated character of the hatter as he roams the screen to gather up the ten scattered sweets. At the bottom lies a chocolate roll, but the ten sweets come first. Unfortunately, mice run across the screen and swallow them. You're not allowed to phone for Rentokil but must just keep out of their way (a collision is deadly) and wait for replacement sweets to pop up. There is some mouse poison floating around, but as it poisons you and has no effect whatsoever on the mice it's not a lot of use.

Two more hazards on the first few screens are a pair of vacuum cleaners. Again, contact is deadly, but grabbing one of the plugs that floats across the screen freezes them. Later a bouncing ball ricochets about the screen.

The more chocolate rolls you snaffle, the more the pace hots up. There's also a high-score table.

The graphics are far from wonderful, with vacuum cleaners looking more like a pair of moonboots, though the Mad Hatter does at least have a pair of short fat hairless legs that move up and down. With merely average sound, the game is also very repetitive as you'll soon get sick of collecting one sweet after the other.

Buyers would be mad as a hatter to prefer this to anything currently in the Spectrum top twenty.