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Twenty years ago, a wayward meteor arced across the warm American night sky and ploughed into the backyard of a towering gothic mansion. A brief explosion followed, a sudden flaring of lighted windows, and then... silence, broken only by the sound of the crickets.

So begins Maniac Mansion, the latest from Lucasfilm Games, and an affectionate spoof of mad scientist B-movies and campus splatter flicks. It's Psycho, Friday 13th, the Adams Family and Rocky Horror Show all rolled into one; a story of chainsaws, shower-curtains, obscene phone calls, microwave ovens and mondo stereo.

It's also one of the new breed of adventure games, eliminating keyboard input by opting for a joystick-controlled cursor, which hovers over objects in the animation window and selects verbs and nouns from the vocabulary list at the bottom of the screen. It's fast, effective, and will probably have text-adventure purists up in arms.

In the depths of the 'maniac mansion', the sinister Dr. Fred has kidnapped Sandy Pantz, a cheerleader from the local college, and is apparently preparing to dry-clean her brains as part of his plans for world domination. Dave, Sandy's clean-cut boyfriend and all-round hock, gets together a search party of six fellow students, including streetwise punks, bookworms and surfer dudes, each with his or her own talents and obsessions.

From the six, two kids must be chosen to accompany Dave on his rescue mission, and how they go about thwarting Dr. Fred depends on which students are selected. Not only will their individual skills be called upon, but their personalities will also influence events. Physics wiz Bernard (winner of the college geek award) might be handy when it comes to messing with the nuclear generator in the basement, but he's a definite liability when he comes up against the inhabitants of the house.

According to the instruction booklet, these inhabitants are 'weird', which is a bit like describing Hitler as eccentric. For starters, there's Fred's wife Edna, an ex-health care nurse who's into electric cattle prods, and her son Ed, a paranoid self-styled commando with a hamster fixation. Then there's Dead Cousin Ted, embalmed and living in a sarcophagus.

This crowd are relatively sane when compared to the others to be encountered - such as the potted fern called Chuck, and a disembodied Green Tentacle who's a depressed hi-fi freak and wants to make it as a rock star. And there's a Nameless Something behind the scenes, an alien being who's pulling the strings and who's got something to do with the meteor in the backyard.

The mansion is a warren of rooms and corridors on several floors, and includes a photographic dark room, a recording studio, and a room packed with arcade coin-ops. Through all this moves your team of three, either independently or as a gang, doing all the usual adventure things - opening locked doors, picking up useless objects, completely failing to either solve the puzzles or to avoid the clutches of Fred & Co. Some problems - like using the hidden lever to open the generator room door - need two characters.

Fortunately, the programmers have done away with that infuriating convention which allows each character to only carry one or two items at a time, and Dave and his chums can stow away as many rotting turkeys, chainsaws and keys as they can lay their hands on.

Much of the action is animated, at least to the extent that characters can walk up and down stairs and across rooms. More complex actions, like playing the piano or tunin in an antique radio, are represented by the character standing in front of the furniture with appropriate sound effects. And from time to time you're treated to a short film sequence of events elsewhere in the house. So that you get to see Sandy being menaced by a 'purple slime geek'.

With character interaction on and off screen, and all those large sprites to animate, it's not surprising that both sides of the disk get accessed continually. This doesn't hold up the action, and swapping sides is kept to a minimum.

At 15 quid, Maniac Mansion isn't much more expensive than disk versions of other animated adventures (such as Stifflip & Co.) and the opportunity for replaying the game using different characters more than compensates.

But, ultimately, Maniac Mansion is still an adventure game, and the flash graphics and black humour won't appeal to those punters who prefer the immediate delights of arcade games. Of its kind, it's one of the best around, and if, like me, you can eat this kind of stuff with a spoon, then you won't be disappointed.