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I looked Tetris up in the dictionary and there's no such word. Sounds authentic though, doesn't it? (Derived from something to do with four-sided shapes no doubt.) Could be a goldfish or even a disease that makes your hair fall out. In fact, it's none of those things, but, as you probably guessed, a game. I can honestly say it is really weird and I haven't seen anything like it for a long time, if ever.

Don't be put off by this, but the nearest thing to this that comes to mind is the kind of thing you used to get in the program listings at the back of C.U. I'm not saying it's bad, I quite liked it, it's just that it's based on an amazingly simple idea and it looks, in the words of the programmer, "nothing mega".

So, what's it all about? Shapes, that's what. Square shapes, rectangles, T shapes, L shapes and shapes that look like two staggered bricks, if you get my drift. These shapes are all different colours, but as far as the game is concerned that's largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that there's this rectangular window in the middle of the screen.

The shapes fall, one at a time from the top of the window to the bottom. Sometimes when the shapes fall, they slot into each other ("tesselate" is the word for it I think - ask your maths teacher) but most times they don't. You can, of course, increase the chances of this happening by moving the shapes to the left or right and by rotating them with a quick press of the Fire button. Regrettably (as this would make life a lot easier) the shapes can not be flipped.

If you can get the shapes to fit so snugly that they form a complete horizontal line from one side to the other, the line disappears and everything above it moves down. The object is to make the game last as long as possible, if not forever, by making all the shapes fit together, getting lots of lilnes and lots of points.

That's really all there is to it. This game was obviously written by someone with a real obsession for geometry. The game gets more and more difficult as time goes on and the bricks pile up. As the floor reaches the ceiling, so to speak, you have less time to think about where you're going to dump the things. There are a few things to help you out here. One is the panic button which freezes everything by pushing the joystick up. A bit annoying that you have to hit the space bar to unfreeze. The other thing to look out for is the "what's coming next" indicator which tells you what's coming next. Handy.

It sounds simple and it is. It could have been written in Basic and probably was. One thing's certain, it's a lot better than it sounds. The music, which lasts for a full 25 mins is pretty good and I'd guess that more work went into the loading screen than the game itself.

Two criticisms, one fairly minor, the other one pretty serious news. The blocks scroll down a character space at a time which is pretty rough and amateurish looking, why no pixel scroll? The heavy duty moan is that this is very entertaining for fifteen minutes, but when you've seen all there is to see there's, er, nothing left to see. Or, to put it another way, the fun, if that's the word for it, is very shortlived.