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Here is an adventure set on a planet devoted to the recycling of refuse. You have been charged with a murder you did not commit, and cast away for life to run the plant. Guess what - your job is to escape. Here is a reasonable science fiction background, with plenty of scope for some interesting graphics and some original puzzles, to make a decent game. But as the ratings show, despite its budget price, it fails.

Why, and what exactly do the ratings mean? I have never really explained this, and perhaps Life Term provides a good opportunity to do so.

First, let us take the Graphics rating. Speaks for itself really. Your Magnetic Scroll type graphics would normally rank 10 on the scale - until and unless something ever better comes up. Life Term has graphics that are rather unimaginative, lacking in variety of colour, and often consist of squarish shapes and straight lines which are rather abstract and lacking in meaning. Let's be generous - rating 4. After all, they were probably only put in to sell the game.

Next comes that catch-all, Playability. As far as an adventure is concerned, this is mainly a guide to the range of vocabulary provided, and the command structure. Are the words that come naturally to the player in the context of the game recognised by the program? Plus a few synonyms for good measure? Of course, there's bound to be a number of unrecognised words, even in a top-notch adventures.

Also under Playability, come the responses to the player's commands. Are they helpful? Do they add interest and excitement? Have they a touch of humour? Is there always some reply? There is an intimate link between vocabulary and messages, and in Life Term, invalid commands elicit the response "You can't" (unhelpful - why can't I?) and unrecognised words produce "Perhaps another word"? Not quite so bad, at least we know it's time to get the thesaurus out, but it would have been better had the 'bad' word been mentioned. Some commands, though, seem to get absorbed. LIE ON BUNK, for example, produced no reply except "OK". But neither the location graphics, not the description had changed, so was I lying down or not?

All was revealed with my next command: GET OFF BUNK. "It's too heavy" came the reply. Aha! So I was not on it at all, and now, having foolishly thrown away my word OFF, the parser thought I was trying to pick up the bunk! Bad! Was I operating in a two-word environment? How coule I tell, the instructions did not say. And if I was, why didn't a message tell me that I had entered too many words?

Playability also encompasses the location text. Here it is fairly short. That in itself does not matter too much, if EXAMINE produced plenty of rich description. Unfortunately, in Life Term it does not.

But before we award Life Term a Playability Rating of 3, response time must be taken into account. Not bad - about GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) speed on the whole. It's a dead giveaway when the response time is instant for a common command, and almost infinite for an unrecognised command, that the GAC is behind it. Although no credit is given to GAC (I daresay it would be better off that way!) I would put money on the GAC at work here. Response is enough to bring the rating up a notch, to 4.

Puzzleability! Now with this rating I don't give 10 for the impossible and 1 for the easy puzzles. I take it to be a measure of the satisfaction gained in solving them, no matter how clever they are, how subtle, how complex, or how dead simple. Of course, if I can solve none because they are all too difficult, then I would have to award 0, but otherwise, difficulty is not the criteria. For example, one of the most satisfying puzzles I have solved of late is the demolition of the wall at the end of the damp passage in The Lurking Horror. Dead simple - when you know how!

I am sad to relate that I didn't even manage to find a puzzle in Life Term. I asked myself a few questions, like "What is the bolt on the door for, when I can apparently do nothing to it?" and "Why can't I get back inside the store room from the landing pad?". But you see, by then I had lost interest, for my previous experience with the game had shown that there may be simply - no reason! In other words, I had become bored. Puzzleability - 1.

And finally, Overall means taking the price into account, along with the ratings previously awarded, and the general feel of the game. It might be argued that a dull game isn't any value for money, even at 10p! And so, the Overall rating will tend to reflect, especially in the case of a budget adventure, that even if you don't like it, you haven't wasted an awful lot of cash. Life Term costs £1.99. Not an arm and a leg. Oh let's give it 5 overall, and forget about it, I say!