Snow Queen is yet another supposedly educational type of game, in which the player has to find the letters of a word presented in a confusing mess of black and white squares. The letters to be found are formed using the coarse squares of the low resolution format of Dragon Basic.

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A blue coloured rectangle must be placed over the required letter using either a combination of numbers and cursor arrow keys to direct the rectangle to its next position or a joystick to serve the same purpose. This has to be done against the clock and a score is accumulated as the player proceeds through the different words set. The length of words set can be varied accordingly to the level of difficulty required.

The problems are "set" by the 'Snow Queen' whom the player pleases by obtaining the correct answer. The successful player is rewarded by marks and a rather tedious display attempting to imitate a snow crystal.

It appears to me that this program was written for a lesser machine than the Dragon, as it does not make use of the graphics capabilities in any way. Although the program has been written in Basic, it repeats the tedious drawing of the 'snow crystals' each time, using the LINE command!

Much better crystals could have been formed using the DRAW command and then storing them with GET and recalling with PUT. This would have been much better, but would not have overcome the fundamental problem of this program in that the letters to be identified are very difficult to recognise because some of them, especially the "R", "W" and "M" are very odd. My children (ages six, nine and eleven) soon gave up on this game.

To summarise therefore, not a bad idea but poorly written and of little appeal to children (mine anyway).