A conversion from the Tandy, The Dark Pit will in fact work with the Tandy Electronic Book plugged into the left joystick port, should you have such an item. Failing that, a common or garden joystick will suffice. The game itself is on the fairly familiar maze-like lines of Touchstone or Microdeal's QL and Commodore game Lands of Havoc.

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It will come as a surprise to no-one that the aim of the game is to escape from the dark pit itself, this comprising a number of linked rooms, each one taking up about three quarters of the screen area, with exits round the borders to other rooms. The joystick controls the inevitable little man, who runs quite gamely around, dodging the equally inevitable monsters and collecting anything he can lay his hands on. These objects are shown at the foot of the screen, and can be brought into play by pressing the 1-6 keys, the items being the likes of shotgun, shield etc, and there are also power packs to operate these.

Also lying around are red, yellow and blue keys, and astonishingly enough these open doors of a matching colour, giving you access to new areas of the maze, and as you collect objects, naturally your score increases. There are several keys of each colour, and you can accumulate these and use them one at a time as required.

Playing the game involves moving the man round the walls and barriers on each screen, avoiding the patrolling monsters and trying to reach as many of the assorted goodies as you can.

Most of the monsters move in regular patterns, and so there's plenty of bobbing and weaving and watching goes on, but there's also an element of Manic Miner-type strategy in working out how you reach the objects and exits. Other monsters will insist on messing things up by sensing your presence, though.

As such the game is smoothly done and is quite fun to play, but it's rather old hat and merely combines elements of other games we've all seen before, going back to Berzerk.

It also has to be said that the collision detection is appalling, and it's far too easy to lose a life with space between you and a monster.

The screens get tougher as you go, with plenty of variety in them, so if you buy it you'll probably get your money's worth playing it, but The Dark Pit is nothing to get wildly excited about.