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Power Pyramids is nothing to do with ancient Egypt, mummies, tombs, curses or three-week cruises up the Nile. Nothing could be further from the truth, so you can put away that pith helmet right now. No, this is a much more esoteric offering, a sort of combination of platforms, pin ball, bagatelle and one of those crappy little games you get in Christmas crackers where you have to get four tiny ball bearings into four holes.

Why Power Pyramids then? Well, because the thing is composed of screens laid out in a pyramid structure. There are four 'models' which you must complete to finish the game; the basic model has fourteen screens and the top-of-the-range Royal has 54. It goes without saying that the Royal is about ten times harder than the Basic.

What you must do is control this little ball, except you don't control it very much at all really. What you actually do is control the environment around it. You see the ball just keeps on rolling in whatever direction it happens to be going at whatever speed it happens to be travelling. There are really only two things you can do to change this state of affairs. You can press the fire button, which will cause the ball to take a little hop - hopefully over whatever happens to be in its path, or you can push the joystick up and one of several pretty crazy things will happen.

Pretty crazy thing number one is that pistons will come shooting out of the floor and propel the ball into the air - if it's in the right place at the right time. The other crazy stuff depends on what happens to be on the screen at the time, but generally it will be a case of diverting the ball's path. The angled slides for example can slope 45 degrees in either direction or lie completely flat.

You can vary the speed of the ball when it enters a 'speed changer' which looks a bit like one of those things the ball comes out of in ten-pin bowling. Once in a speed changer, the ball will stay there for one and a half seconds, which gives you just enough time to alter its speed from a slow crawl to superfast sprint - completely uncontrollable of course. Speeding things up isn't simply a question of getting your kicks by doing things faster, you need the speed to surmount some of the obstacles.

What's the point of all this? To turn on all the power points of course. When you turn on the power points, all the gizmos get going; the swords in the floor go up and down, floors open and close, sparks fly and so do you if you're not careful. There are a number of things to watch out for, some good - like the accelerators, permeable floors, energy boosters and transporters, some bad - water, daggers, electricity, and some I'm not so sure about.

So it's a platform game with a difference. More for your thinking, cerebral sort of games player really. I could tell this from the fact that the only way I could get anywhere was to hit the pause key every five seconds to work things out. Hair brained loony types who go in for a lot of killing will probably find it a bit tame.