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A quick sortie to the Paris Amstrad Computer Show bagged a couple of really good games previously unseen in Britain. This is one of them.

Professor Gem B. Dick has been involuntarily clenched on a planetotde artificiel. This is probably a huge inconvenience for him but it won't bother you much. However it does provide you with the excuse to explore a large underground world and beat the daylights out of assorted robots.

The game starts with you, a normal looking and presumably French humanoid, standing on level one of a multi-level world. The humanoid sprite remains in the centre of the screen with the world scrolling by. Joystick control will also allow you to leap the holes in the floor. If you don't succeed you'll fall through to the next level. There are blue zebra-crossings that will hurl you up a level. Dotted around are square, round, and diamond shaped black objects. These correspond to holes in the wall near the holes in the floor. The right object will allow you to cross the holes and reach other parts of the complex.

While skipping around in your carpet slippers you'll probably bump into the odd robot or two. And when I say odd I mean odd, but beautifully animated. To dispose of them, a few Karate kicks or a dash of Kung Fu will convert them to scrap. After a certain number of objects have been collected you go to an intermediate stage between games. This has you running along a temple corridor while unseen foes hurl spears at you. You can jump, duck, or fend off the spears but if you fail to get the timing right you'll end up with one through your head, stomach or feet.

Should Le 5eme Axe make its way across the Channel you can look forward to seeing its brilliantly animated sprites. I think it has some of the most imaginative creatures I've seen in computer games and I look forward to being able to read the instructions and play the game properly.