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Dear The Powers That Be, How can Commodore Format possibly award Mayhem a perfect 100% score? Have they gone mad? Is it just a shallow bit of circulation boosting hype? I think we should be told. Yours, Arthur Reader Esq. (Retired)

Some things are so eagerly awaited that it becomes almost painful to wait for them. Christmas morning, exam results, first dates, driving tests, Erika Eleniak appearing in Baywatch, the home-time belt at school, an ice cool Diet Pepsi on a summer's day, the first pint of the weekend; they're all capable of turning the strongest willed personality into a gibbering wreck. Which is precisely what has happened to the CF crew whilst we await this game.

Mayhem In Monsterland is a cutesy platform game. It's not an Elite 2 epic. There's not a texture-mapped wall in sight. It has no 3D, no CD surround sound, no multi-million pound marketing budget, no hundred strong team producing it, no novella, no stickers, no badges, no marketing launch in a Soho brasserie, no London PR agency, no cinema advertising, no celebrity sponsors, no film footage and to top it all you can only get it on the C64. So why are we so hyped up over it? The answer's simple: it's a game.

Mayhem In Monsterland comprises five levels of platform leaping and bouncing action. Each of these levels is made up of two sections; happy and sad. The idea of the game is to make each of the levels happy, thus returning Monsterland to its former cheerful state.

In order to cheer things up a bit you've got to collect magic dust and stars. The magic dust is returned to Theo Saurus at the end of the sad level so that he can transform things. The stars are for your own benefit, think of it as a bit of pocket money.

Of course it's not that easy. Monsterland is populated by lots and lots of (Forgive me if this is obvious) monsters. There are spikey monsters, blobby monsters, bird monsters, underwater monsters, robbing monsters, gloomy monsters, indestructible monsters and jumbo monsters. In short, the levels resemble the casting room for Jurassic Park.

Learning how to deal with all these different monsters is what Mayhem's about. It's all too easy to go flouncing down the level blithely leaping on every dinosaur in sight, only to discover that the ones with spikes on their backs can do serious damage to your life counter.

Ironically enough it's the small dinosaurs which are the most dangerous which are the most dangerous, not the whopping great diplodicus's of extinct reptile. The single most annoying monster of all is the rubber ball monster, an indestructible behemoth who zings around the screen oblivious to absolutely any attack; a sort of bouncy ball Arnie Schwartzeneger.

On the sad levels the monsters only require a single bounce on the bonce. When you make it through to the happy level, those same monsters require two or even three hits, all of which makes life jolly tricky. You often find yourself precariously leaping off a platform onto a moving monster that requires at least three hits. It ain't easy.

But what about the power-up goodies that are sprinkled around the levels, I hear you asking; surely Mayhem gets some help on his perilous journey to happiness? Well, yes, of course he does. Cleverly distributed throughout the levels are loads of handy performance enhancers.

The most important power-up Mayhem can get is the 'charge' booster. This enables Mayhem to scream down the level at top speed in a blur, taking out dinosaurs left, right and centre. As long as he's charging, Mayhem can take out practically all the dinosaurs. Besides the charge icon there are extra lives/half lives hidden away in the recesses of the rocks, limited invincibility icons and high jump icons. You really do have to examine every square centimetre of the level to discover the secret bits.

It is possible to spot where the secret stuff is, but only if you look really hard. The Apex chaplettes have slightly changed the graphics where there's a drop-through, so you could squint really hard. However, the easiest way to find power-ups is to explore all those seemingly empty dead-ends; you rarely come away empty-handed.

All the best games have a nice diagonal learning curve. That is to say, that as you become more proficient at the game, it increases the difficulty level, so that it's always a challenge, but never a chore. Getting that learning curve set correctly can make or break even the best of games. After all who wants to play the hottest looking slice of joystick action since Rocket Ranger, if you can't get off level two?

Mayhem doesn't disappoint with its learning curve. The first levels, ease you gently into Monsterland, enabling you to pick up the basics of Mayhem movement. Then once you've got a bit more confident you can tackle the happy levels with their resilient monsters and tricky jumps.

Thanks to the half life function and the continues, it's possible to progress a bit further every time you play Mayhem. It's not one of those games which includes insuperable obstructions; a little bit of thought and the hardest jumps can be completed.

Mayhem In Monsterland pretends to be nothing other than a slab of game. Everyone else might have lost the plot somewhere along the line, but the Apex Twins, proud fathers of Mayhem didn't. While the rest of the computer games industry have become obsessed with marketability, cross-over potential, target sectors, frames per second, DSP chips and other utterly tedious matters, they got on with serving up the single most righteous game to ever appear on an 8-bit machine, console or otherwise.

So. you may well be wondering how we can justify that big 100% rating; after all, nothing is ever perfect. Are we saying that Mayhem is without a blemish on his rosy face? Maybe not. What we are saying is that this is as good as you can realistically expect it to get. The perfect game? No. The best you'll ever see on the C64 in this decade or the next? Yes. Point made. Enough said.

Mayhem, eh? This is a game (or rather this is a review) that has caused a great many arguments (full scale wars) between me and Clur - sometimes to the point that people have walked over from Edge (they're right next door) and asked us (me) very politely to shut up (or die in some hideously violent manner).

What is the highest mark a game can get? More to the point, why has Mayhem got the mark it has? There's a lot more involved in the answer than a mere computer game - we call it circumstance, and it really should be taken into account when reviewing any game.

You see, when we play games like Rainbow Islands, all we're playing is a completely unoriginal conversion of a game running on an Amiga or something. This is all very well, but the odds are it was written by someone deep within a major software house, who's only actually working on the C64 for the money, or because someone forced him to. This does not result in a quality version of any game, if the programmer wasn't willing to spend time putting in any kind of detail.

It's at this point that Mayhem comes into play. It was written by dedicated C64 users, you see, and it shows. Detail. Lots of it. When Mayhem walk up to the edge of a platform, his facial expression changes to a slightly nervous look. This is good stuff. You see, it's not a conversion in any sense of the word - you won't find this game on any other format.

If you want the full lowdown on the game, you'll have to read the main review (courtesy of Hutch), but bear this in mind - when you take a game that's worth over 90%, add the background of a C64 dedicated project (this is not a conversion), divide by a low price tag (as opposed to the 15 most companies would charge you for a new game on disc, you get 100.

Oh yeah - for all the reviewing snobs (not that everyone who disagrees with this is a snob, of course) who'll undoubtedly took down their noses at this for aeons to come, what's the point in having a rating system with an inaccessible top mark? Surely our rating system is (or should be) a percentage of "this is as good as it's ever going to get" as opposed to "nothing is perfect, as you'll never win because we'll always find something to gripe about, so clear off"? 100%

OK, I'll admit Mayhem In Monsterland is a great platformer, it's kept me amused for hours (well, days actually). But that's all Mayhem is, a platformer - not the perfect game. To me a score of 100% implies that a game is the best that a game could ever be. The percentage mark shouldn't have anything to do with the marketing strategy of the company or how small the C64 market now is. 100% should simply mean that each and every one of our readers will feel that they're getting value for money if they spend their hard-earned dosh on the game. And I am absolutely positive that a significant percentage of our readers would not get their tenner's worth of fun wandering around Monsterland.

I'm the one that answers most of the phonecalls around here. No-one can deny that I have more contact with our readers than anyone else here in the office, so I feel I know our public a little better than you lot. I mean, a committed adventure gamer will get very little from Mayhem In Monsterland, while the confirmed platformer (like myself I have to admit) will get weeks and weeks of playing pleasure.

Don't get me wrong, dear old Mayhem does deserve a Corker, I won't deny it that. And I may be waiting forever for the perfect game, but to pass the time I'm quite happy to have another blast at Cherryland. Bung us that joystick, Hutch. 96%

1. Stonking game by absolutely anyone's standards...
2. One which you could return to again and again and again.
3. This is as good as it gets.