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If you get a good idea you should exploit it. Sue Townsend has mastered the skill of expanding on a simple idea in a way that even Douglas Adams' mice would be proud of. The Diary that launched a thousand spin-offs now has a computer game to add to the books, stage play. TV programme and diaries. Once upon a time if you stopped someone in the street and asked them to name a diarist they would have said 'Anne Frank' or 'Samuel Pepys', not any more, they are bound to say 'Adrian Mole'.

In case Amstrad User is the only contact you have with the outside world and don't know what I am going on about I will explain. Sue Townsend wrote a book, or to be more precise a diary, from the point of view of a boy aged 13 and three quarters. The book explained how the body, Adrian, thinks of himself as an intellectual and keeps sending poems to the BBC. He is in love with a classmate called Pandora, looks after a pensioner called Bert Baxter and his parents' marriage is breaking up. In the game you have to fake decisions for Adrian and make yourself as popular as possible.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole can be loosely described as an adventure. It is more like one of those fighting fantasy books which allows you to make decisions by turning to an appropriate page. Each move is a multiple choice option. At various points in the game you are prompted to press 1,2 or 3. This indicates your choice and produces a suitable piece of text_ There is a lot of text in the 'adventure', not even the Austins' famous text compaction routines could cram the whole lot into RAM at one time so the program loads in sections from tape.

It is the tone of the text which makes the program, the game is fun but in a trivial way and I couldn't help feeling that the same end could have been achieved by a book. To some extent I felt that I was being tested on how well I knew the story, a dyed in the wool Adrian Mole fan would probably love that, I got bored. Level 9 have an excellent reputation for fiendish adventures with clever and amusing puzzles, they can, and have done, much better than this.

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