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Great, super, smashing - it's Loom 2: a game all about weaving! Sorry to disappoint you, but it's actually all about climbing into what is lovingly referred to as a "Space Shuttle" and then going to the moon.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it's not. Shuttle is an incredibly complicated game. Except, it's not really a game, or even a simulation in the normal sense. It's sort of a complete run-down on everything the crew of a shuttle has to do. In fact, it's so realistic, you might even have to run nervously to the lavatory several times before the flight.

There are twelve missions. Each is as complicated as, er, all the others. You can launch satellites in space, repair the Hubble telescope or recover broken satellites. You can even do military things so secret they can't be printed here.

Each mission involves prepping the ship, hitting the right buttons at the right time and steering it around the vast inky blackness of the cosmos. You've then got to steer it at the vast beigey brownness of the desert and land it on the small concretey thinness of the runway. Tough prospect, huh?

Instead of just pressing keys to do things (like most sims) you must select the correct panel in the shuttle's cockpit, then press the right key or select the switch with the mouse. There are dozens of in-cockpit views, most of which look like the wiring diagram of your ST. Do you really need - or even want to know all this stuff?

Well, not all of it. You can get your ST to do a large amount of the boring work while you have fun swinging round the Earth and spelling out rude words in smoke trails 40 miles long. But even on the simplest level you've still got to deal with a massive amount of technical info. The colour even drained from Clive Parker's moustache when he saw the manual - and he's our techie wizard.

Apart from the multitude of control panel views, you can view the shuttle from outside as well. This can be most impressive, especially when you catapult yourself into orbit and get a glimpse of the boosters dropping away, the main tank jettisoning and the co-pilot being vacuum-sucked through the toilet into the soulness eternal night.

Landing is far too complicated to even mention here... Er, except to say that the shuttle flies smoothly, drops like a stone and fully expects you to fiddle with 20 tricky computers while the desert rushes up to meet you like a big rocky arid thing. May the force be with you, because NASA doesn't seem to like making your landing too easy.

Buy Shuttle if you really want to know how these things work. It's a triumph of technical precision. But although there are some very pretty 3D graphics, it's not a game. You have to read the manual. You must understand what's going on. And you've got to be prepared for a lot of disk accessing and an update rate that is slower than a kipping whale's heartbeat.

It's well presented with tons of menus, loads of keyboard shortcuts and a fair degree of help when you don't really need any. But it's a massive program to get to grips with - to wring the best from it you might have to treat it like a big project - keeping you at your ST over the long winter months. So there you go. And not a single 7-Up gag in sight.

1. More complex than F19, MiG 29 and Their Finest Hour put together. And slower than all these as well. Unlike any other game around, really.