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This is a decent combat flight simulator where you fly around in your Spitfire and bash the Bosch without running up large repair bills for old Blighty. First though, one should read the flight manual. One feels very silly trying to accelerate down the runway with one's brakes on. Raising the old landing gear while still on the tarmac is also considered rather bad form.

The simulator itself handles quite well, loops barrel rolls, falling leaf spins, inside and outside loops and, of course, victory rolls over the runway it la Douggie Bader. Whether all this means it is too easy or whether experience counts, I don't know, but the first hands-on activity soon shows the games Achilles' heel: You can't see both the cockpit and the windscreen at the eame time. A bit unfair, what?

Mind you, both the cockpit instrument panel and the view up top (complete with rear-view mirror) are very well done in mode 0 technicolour. All the instruments are real rotating dials and needles - none of this new-fangled digital muck. A bit worrying not being able to see the prop, though.

Certain little things help to overcome the 'what am I supposed to be doing here' syndrome, such as a little stripe of pixels running down the right-hand side of the screen which start to disappear if you get too close to the hard stuff at the bottom. 'Seat of the pants' pilots of American persuasion can judge the airspeed from the noise of the engine. One can knock up a good 400 miles per hour in a steep dive and the wings still don't come off.

Before worrying about getting too low too fast, one has to get the jolly old bird of the ground. Push the revs up, cry chocks away, pull back on the stick and up we go. As soon as the Spit' is airborne, raise the gear and ease off on the stick and flaps. Failure to ease off results in a manoeuvure which is technically known as a stall - the nose goes up, the tail goes down, and the nose follows it. You bounce a bit hard on the tail-bone old boy.

Sound effects are there - you hit the ground with an awful crunch and the guns go rat-a-tat. The engine noise has a strange coming and going hum to it which would have me returning my plane to the hangar for a service. Probably something to do with the missing propeller.

There are three ways of getting at Jerry: Training, combat and combat training. Training lets you practise your technique of taking off without the hinderance of a damn Fokker blowing off your tailplane. The really tough bit is putting it all back down on the ground again in one piece. Nice of Jerry to leave us alone for a while, it gives one time to sit back and remember to put the wheels down.

Combat training is the best bit of this simulation, practically unlimited ammo and plenty of bandits, all capable of a brilliant dogfight. You start off up in the air at 10,000 feet (no worries about stalling) and usually with a bandit on your tail, trying to blow it off because he was barred from your practising session. That German chappie, Herr Ahrmannerleg, suddenly becomes less of a sport and more of an utter cad. always attacking you from the rear and refusing to come up front and take it like a man.

When you actually get round to it, the real thing is a bit of a let-down, There is the minor detail of trying to locate the odd invading bandits from a given bearing and altitude using your map and gyrocompass. It takes ages to find the Messerschmits and one tends to frequently run out of petrol just after one has sighted the bounders.

Not a bad little game really, especially if you buzz about in combat practice. Still no details (other than the runway) on the ground (the excuse of thick green fog doesn't hold up to close examination), but this is at least as good as the Digital Integration flight simulator. It's all a matter of taste- you may well be a speed fanatic and prefer Fills to Spitfires, but only this game lets you save your bag to disc or tape to prove your worth to your friends. Doing well in combat reaps its rewards for the few, in the form of becoming Group Captain, possibly the proud possessor of the DSO or DFC. You get more gongs at this game than the whole of 633 squadron.

One wonders what on earth Amsoft are going to do to this program when they try to sell it to the Germans? Have to be tactful here, mustn't mention who won the war must we? [Oh well we didn't really want to sell any copies of ACU to Germany - Ed] Could we have some new-style air aces, confirming their bags by sending floppy discs back and forth?