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A question, dear readers. What's the point of saving your position in a game? I'm predicting that you'll be saying something like, "Why, so I can turn off the game, play something else, and, perhaps weeks later, load up the original game and carry on from where I left off, you fool," in which case, you'll be crushingly disappointed by Simon The Sorcerer CD32. The save routine all by fill the entire CD32's store memory, destroying saves from other games.

Equally clumsily, if you then play another game and save your position, it will overwrite the Simon save. So you either have to play Simon exclusively until you finish it, or resign yourself to restarting when you play again. It's more than annoying, it's downright frustrating.

But you don't wave to hear about that. You want to hear about the all-talking version of the game. Which this is. Yes, in a shockingly innovatory sort of way, Adventure Soft have rewritten the game so that, instead of reading text, you get to hear people 'being' the characters in the game. It's a bit like a radio play, with pictures.

Now, being uncharacteristically appreciative of the aesthetics of a game with no regard to the design, this is a terrific idea. No matter how good a script, it's the delivery that counts. Look at, say, the Bilko scripts. They read well, you get the jokes, but it's not until you see Phil Silvers smirk his way through the show, machine-gunning the gags, that the scripts come to life. Yes indeed, I predict that once these 'talkies' get into their stride, we'll all have a lot of fun. Right, critical head back on.

Being at the forefront of 'talkie' games (Darkseed being the only other one), you'd expect Simon to have a few teething problems.

What you don't expect are the glaring faults.

The speech breaks up, misses words, and, in one memorable scene involving a troll bridge, clashes so badly with the background samples (in this case, a running waterfall) that huge chunks of it simply disappear. There are also minor but madly strange bugs involving Simon saying something that's just obviously wrong: for example, examine a statue and he'll remark, "I have something else to show you". And there's not even a token attempt at lip-synching. (Yes, I know, but it does affect the atmosphere, as anyone who's seen a dubbed film will attest.)

But most unfortunately, the actors employed to play the characters are fairly terrible. Apart from the two headliners (sitcom stalwart Chris Barrie and Bloke Who Does Voices On Spitting Image Roger Blake), the cast of unknowns perhaps as if at a school play, swapping timing and characterisation for silly voices and flat reading. Everyone plays more than one part, and you can tell instantly who's doing whom because they always sound exactly the same.

But let us not heap blame upon the actors. The script is diabolical. Jonathan's already dismembered the insipid humour in AP34, but I shall add that, unlike, say, ooooh, what, The Secret Of Monkey Island, the jokes of Simon The Sorcerer just don't travel. It's a bizarre experience, listening to the oh-so English Barrie deliver lines about "pizza bars" and "quarters" in his famously arrogant, flared-nostril style. And because you can't bypass single lines, or opt for the text version or anything, you have to endure the whole script, because, obviously, if you skip stuff you'll miss something important. (Remember, because of the stupid save routine, you'll likely be playing this to the end!)

So you sit there and fume while an owl mumbles its way through a huge speech riddled with clues, or while some wizards swap inconsequences before coming to the point, or while a depressed green lizard witters on about its non-existent friends before asking the vital question, or any one of a hundred exasperating sequences.

The actual game's unaltered from its Amiga incarnation: teasingly beautiful graphics that disappoint when you realise nearly everything on screen is scenery, tiny objects, blindingly obvious puzzles, a maze right at the beginning of the game, foolishly empty locations and dead ends, and shatteringly poor music. It is, basically, an utterly ordinary point-and-click adventure, and no amount of 'talk' can change that.

Uppers: Really gorgeous graphics with hundreds of main and incidental animations. Jokes a-plenty. You can't get killed. Splendidly sensible use of CD32 joypad. It's like an eager puppy, frisking and gambolling excitedly with a toy in its desire to please.

Downers: But one you have to kick and throw in the river because its bites the children. The 'talkie' stuff annoys no end, but you have to put up with it. (Darkseed did it all better with text and optional speech.) The save game feature is preposterously terrible, the puzzles are spread thinly over the pointlessly large playing area and the jokes just aren't funny. They really aren't.

A refreshingly different idea, but one that hasn't come off. Better writing would have helped the 'talkie' side, a closer look at the compact trickiness of, ooh, what, Monkey Island would have helped the sprawlingly colourless gameplay. It's at least 17% more annoying to play than the 'silent' version, so it's losing marks.