The Good Housekeeping magazine has presumably given its seal of approval to Mr. T's Money Box from Ebury Software, but it does not have mine!

First, I found it very tedious to load - fifteen tape sectors are apparently taken up in just producing the title picture in a ghastly pink colour, and installing the loader. After three minutes loading machine-code programs (tiny print tells you to *RUN the program, not CHAIN it) you are expecting great things, up to Snapper standards!

What you get is two games designed to assist the very young in recognition of coins, and in a very elementary way to assist them with money values.

My own experience was that this subject was picked up only too fast by my children without a computer's assistance! There is some supplementary value in the abstract shape recognition involved, but I cannot help feeling this is better learned using real money, or a Mothercare toy shape box.

A program of this simplicity and length should not need an instruction manual to help the parent set it up. All the menu programs should be self-explanatory. Clarity has been sacrificed to Mr. T's graphics.

There are odd quirks too. One is that though copper coins appear as red in the full display, both copper and the gold £1 coin are yellow when you have to match them. Now we all know the £1 coin is close in size to both 1p and 2p coins, but it is not difficult to distinguish by eye. Yet Mr. T expects you to distinguish between yellow circles differing in diameter by less than 1mm. Another annoyance was a seemingly meaningless collection of coins and Mr. Ts which kept appearing at the end of a game. I was unable to discover why.

The graphics are dull, the sound is pathetic. I preferred the failure sounds to the success ones - surely a disastrous teaching point! No, parents. Save your money! Put it in your own money box, not Mr. T's.