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Infocom games ain't what they used to be. The devilish packaging and design that used to have potential punters drooling over them back in 1984 have been dispensed with. Sorcerer used to have an Infotator, a rotating data wheel that served as off-disk protection.

In this re-released edition of Sorcerer, the Infotator data has been transcribed to the manual and is served up with a typically cryptic Infocom joke about Infocom going bust (or "The Frobozz Magic Grommet Company" as it's called). From there, Sorcerer continues from where Enchanter left off (after you killed the dread Krill and were rewarded with a position in the Guild of Wizards).

I ought to mention that you die a lot. If you've played Infocom games before (and died a lot) you might say, "So what?" But in Sorcerer you have a choice of painful deaths to experience before you even get going. You begin the game in the throes of a nightmare and it doesn't matter what you do.

Climb the tree to escape the hellhound and a viper will get you. Run from the hellhound and there's a minefield, double death by arachnids, fast-frying lightning and swarms of wasps. For starters, even if you type 'wake up' you return to a scene of carnage at the Guild in which devils have slaughtered your comrades. On seeing you wake they turn their attention towards fresh meat...

Although it's one of Infocom's easier adventures to solve, it's still blindingly difficult to see the clues, even when they're being paraded around in front of you by one of the game's characters.

For this reason, clues are paraded around by several characters as a sure-fire means of driving you up the wall, around the ceiling and back down the other side. Another piece of timeless magic from Infocom.