This is not a review of the same piece of software that has been reviewed before in Dragon User. As yet I do not even know if it will replace the original Rola Ball or be called Rola Ball 2 or whatever.

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When I first recieved Rola Ball for review from Helen many moons ago I was delighted as I had seen the game, before it was finished, at the Ossett Show in 1987. After many attempts at loading it I eventually got it to work; only to find that my fingers were not nimble enough to work the keyboard. Having accessed the cheat screen (hands up those of you who don't know it's there) I set the colours to red and green and also stopped the cubes moving around. This made the task of getting around the screen much easier. Then I set about mapping the 49 screens while my youngest son David took over on the keyboard.

Disaster struck in the form of an unmentionable and I was stiill experiencing loading problems from the cassette. Having contacted the author, Jonathan Cartwright, I was sent a disc version, but came upon the same unmentionable. After several phone calls to Jonathan, he eventually agreed with me that I was right although we both agreed that probably nobody would be able to get that far playing the game normally. Now I have received the updated version and this is what the original should have been.

To those of you who do not know the game at all I will give you a brief desciption. You guide a ball along a 3D landscape collecting 49 jigsaw pieces which form a picture in the top left hand corner of the screen as you pick them up. To move from one screen to another you select your exit, move on to it and press the appropriate key. At the start of the later version you are presented with a menu from which you can define your own keys for the directions, picking up etc, and this is a definite advantage over the original. There is no joystick option in either version of Rola Ball and this is because the ball moves over some narrow scenery and it would be even more difficult than using the keyboard. You can also select the colour set and the speed of play also improvements on the original.

The scenery in this version is slightly different to the original and a score of 100 points is now awarded for each jigsaw piece collected, whereas there was no score feature in the original game. At first I kept getting caught by the enemy cube as I arrived on a new screen but if you watch closely you might discover how to avoid this. Several of the jigsaw pieces appear to be impossible to collect at first but a little imagination and experimentation should help you to get them all. One piece in particular is very difficult to see but I can assure you that it is there. When (or rather if) you have collected the 49 pieces and the jigsaw is complete then a flying saucer appears overhead and the ball rises into it.

There is the usual Cartwright musical accompaniment and an unusual method of clearing the screen which I really enjoyed. I must thank my son David once again for doing most of the work. To sum up I found it to be a challenging game which has been greatly improved from the original. If I had not seen the game so long ago I would probably have thought that Jonathan had taken parts of Marble Madness and Airball and put them together to make one game. I think that this is now a very good game, albeit very difficult to get very far into, let alone complete, unless you can find the pokes for unlimited lives or for stopping the cubes moving about.