Richard Hurley is a dangerous man. His previous book, Making the Most of your Spectrum Microdrives, showed a tendency to present the reader with monstrously long listings, but his latest work shows that was merely a curtain-raiser.

Graphic Adventures for the 48K Spectrum is mainly listing, and if you divide 194 pages by seven (the number of adventures included) you'll get an idea of the complexity of the adventures. In the first of the batch, Mr. Hurley even resorts to space-saving techniques, proudly boasting that he's saved 6K of memory.

The flip side of this is that he uses expressions like VAL "1" instead of 1, which may not sound too bad to you - until you meet the three pages of DATA statements that all use VAL "32" etc. If you can face hacking it in, you should wind up with a pretty complex adventure.

There's not a lot of overtly educational stuff in the book, and the techniques used generally aren't frontiers of Basic material, but there are a few useful tips, such as how to design a full alternative character set and how to save space by using psuedo arrays stored above RAMtop. Personally I'd tend to the view that a few more radical programming techniques, such as strong and amending whole screens for graphics, might have been more welcome than endless PLOT and DRAW and DATA statements.

Still, if it's cheap and cheerful adventures you want, and you don't mind wearing your fingers down to the elbow, you won't find much better value.

John Lettice