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Life for anyone writing commercial programs for the Commodore 64 used to be fairly easy. The vast majority of stuff being poorly put together sprite and sound programs or simple re-writes of VIC or PET stuff, with a few exceptional programs such as Virgin's Falcon Patrol standing out from the crowd or being exorbitantly expensive American software.

Now at last some British software is becoming available to show that the C64 is a wonderful machine. Perhaps the best program around is Revenge Of The Mutant Camels by Jeff Minter. I was never a great fan of Attack of the Mutant Camels but this program is vastly superior. A friend described it as a cross between Manic Miner and Planetoids, however it has much more in common with the former than the latter.

You control a Star Wars AT-AT like camel capable of jumping great heights and telephone boxes, spitting laser bolts, and being protected by a neutronium shield. A thread of wry wit runs through the topics for the 42 sheets. From the obvious to the subtle, careful with that Eugene, no doubt a side swipe at Eugene Evans of Imagine, portrayed as he is in Manic Miner as well as being the name of the Pink Floyd track. Some of the sheets are very funny. Inkey, Blinkey and Thud! has you battling against ghosts and pacmen.

Manic Minter has you avoiding dozens of camels being sheperded by Minter himself. Telecoms cumupance has you doing battle with telephones, telephone boxes, and 10 pence pieces, all of which are very nasty to touch.

The program is something of a soapbox for Minter. It starts with extensive and very funny credits of everyone including his dog and plays a great tune. The game shows that camels and llamas are 'llovely', you should be especially careful of all British Telecom property, and that "no cruise is good news", a CND vein that runs through a lot of the screens.

Llamasoft claim that it should take about three months of practice to get through all 42 screens, after which it just gets harder.

The program is recorded on both sides of the tape, once in normal format and once in TURBO format. This allows the 40K program to load in 12 minutes instead of the 18 it takes normally. I tried this with the old style C2N and a variety of adaptors which allow "normal" cassette recorders with the C64 and found the TURBO unreliable. However on the new style C2N it worked perfectly and the slow copy was usually all right with everything else. At 7.50 it is exceptionally cheap and I cannot think of anything I would recommend more wholeheartedly to a C64 owner. Buy it and prepare to stand by your beast.