Drive yourself round the bend with this ancient puzzle game of shapes and numbers.

Once upon a time, there was a race of people known as the Transients. This fact has practically nothing to do with the game at all but their story is quite interesting anyway. The man who wrote the instructions to the game has thrown in many titbits from the fictional history of the Transients.

A proud, highly nomadic race, they made use of the written word but had no time to compile a dictionary. This made them exceptionally prone to spelling mistakes and their most important legacy, we are informed, is a writing system devised to inform any reader that the writer was aware of an error but had no time to make the correction. This could well be a excuse for spelling mistakes in the instructions but it could be that the author went mad trying to finish his own game. For example, he goes on to tell us that a plague of yellow robot officials armed with wads of parking tickets is a pest in any culture. To be the recipient of such a slip is the greatest shame to a nomad. What this has to do with the game is anybody's guess.

The real game starts when players learn how to go into a State of Trance. This involves fitting and manipulating coloured and/or numbered shapes about a spherical body to make coloured and/ or numerical patterns. It sounds very simple but it turns out to be quite fiendish. Players must progress through the many Trance levels to attain enlightenment; always a prize worth seeking but sometimes impossible to achieve. In this case, it means that players must somehow construct a three-dimensional object. This will be done mostly in the mind since the screen only shows a two-dimensional model.

In the unlikely event that anybody finishes the puzzle (and if you do your name is probably Einstein), the position and location of all the components used in the completion of levels 4 and 6 should be transferred to the Prize Entrance Form, included with the game, and sent off for entry into a draw.

All fitting or removal transactions are carried out at the mid position, S. The space to be filled or the piece to be removed is transferred to the centre using a complex series of keystrokes. The alignment of pieces on the ball-shaped body is carried out by using further commands. All this may sound easy, but isn't.

No doubt thoughts of the prize will spur on the fainthearted. Every copy of the game bought within the next twelve months will increase the prize fund by £1. Life would he made easier if everybody just sent in their £1 and a name was pulled out of a hat.

There again, there is bound to be some smart alec out there somewhere with enough IQ to solve it. Everybody else is likely to be driven insane. OK men, you can take me away now.