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Maddog Williams conforms to the Inverse Title Length Law which I've just made up: the longer the title, the worse the game. Written by an American games company called Gamecrafters, this is a poor man's Secret Of Monkey Island - though since it's £25 you'd have to be quite a rich poor man.

The game is supposed to be a humorous graphic adventure in which you help Maddog as he attempts to save his village from evil, rescue the Princess and free her father. First point to note: if it's meant to be a graphic adventure the graphics really ought to be quite good. Somewhere along the line, this principle must have been abandoned because the graphics in Maddog are abysmal. Sure, they wouldn't look out of place on a ten year old's screen, but this is supposed to be a professional game with professional displays. Everything is made of very simple shapes, with a few blotches of colour, and it looks as if the graphics have been done on a Spectrum. Animation isn't much better: Maddog walks like he has some serious personal problems.

Second point to note: nowadays, for any graphic adventure to complete with the likes of Monkey Island, it needs to be icon- and point-'n-click based (or have a huge vocabulary), rather than rely on text input. Guess which method Maddog uses? It's the old problem of finding the right word or phrase - the game doesn't even understand "it". OPEN DRAWER is okay, but then try EXAMINE IT.

And point tree: whose bright idea was it to include beat-'em-up sequences? Adventure players don't want to be distracted by these pointless exercises and arcade game lovers don't want to wade through the adventurey bits before reaching them.

You may think these shameless comparisons to Monkey Island are unfair, but that's the best adventure currently available on the ST and any other game has to at least match it. Maddog Williams doesn't even come close.