You owe Luigi four grand, and if he doesn't get it next time you meet, as he so subtly puts it: "Issa concrete well for you." Luigi runs a betting shop, and you have a good tip for the 4.30 - but Luigi seems unlikely to let you win what you owe him at his own expense! So, with only $50 in your pocket, you resort to crime.

This is a text adventure originally released some years ago by Atari for Atari computers. Now Bug-Byte have re-released it for Atari 800 machines, and brought out a C64 version. It strikes me that the game was never exactly sophisticated, even in its own time. However, one would have thought that a re-release warranted some upgrading of what can only be described as the stone age parser, display, and the not only terse, but generally unhelpful and unfriendly reply messages.

Input is by two words, and although not presenting great difficulty, the range of vocabulary, proudly proclaimed on the title screen as being over 100 words, means that the computer is pretty fussy about which ones you use. Let's face it, 100 words these days is peanuts.

Scott Adams' classic "I see nothing special" was at least logical and even became something of a catchphrase in my neck of the woods, but there the messages are poor. "Nothing to see" is the sharp reply to EXAMINE (object) if there is no further detail to be offered - and it happens all too often.

Thus I found myself, halfway up a drainpipe, and climbing into a window cleaner's hoist. I couldn't get out, and in the end, resorting to my fairly old copy of the solution, I decided I was trapped by a logical flaw in the program. It seems you have to GET HOIST and then carry it - whilst still climbing the pipe! The mind boggles.

There are no graphics - this is a text only game. I've no complaints about that, but the white text on black background is fairly poorly presented. To start with, it looks like a split-screen presentation, with messages scrolling below a fixed location description. But that illusion is soon shattered as play commences and the top half starts scrolling away too.

The plot is reasonable enough to make an interesting game, even if it is none-too-inspiring. At its budget price, The Pay-Off is still not a bad buy - but what a pity it wasn't upgraded into a format more acceptable by today's standards.