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Tubaruba - a name no doubt derived from the authors name, Tooba Zaidi - is a game in which you play the part of a mischievous schoolboy nicknamed Tubaruba. Being a real tearaway you are caught breaking a window and must collect the LSO needed to pay for its repair. Your disbelieving headmaster is so sure you won't achieve this that he has staked his Ferrari on it. (Who said teachers are underpaid?).

The whole game takes place in and around the school building where scattered money is to be found (I wish my school had been like that). There must have been some pretty novel experiments in the school biology labs because the building is also inhabited by the weirdest collection of monsters you could ever hope not to meet.

Tubaruba is reminiscent of the Wally series - Pyjamarama, Everyone's a Wally, and so on - but don't get the idea that it's an inferior copy. As well as walking about at floor level a jetpack enables you to reach the higher levels of a screen.

You can defend yourself by shooting elasticated chewing gum at your adversaries. How long you manage to last depends on whether you manage to keep your energy level out of the red.

Bumping into the baddies or even shooting at them will deplete your energy while picking up any of the money or one of the food items will boost it.

Some screens can have eight or more sprites pitted against you, each of which is able to shoot small bullets travelling at unpredictable speeds. Whenever you are hit you explode in a most satisfying manner while your energy level once again takes a turn for the worse. Just to be topical - even though it was written last year - the game includes a Sinclair CS, a ride in which helps to add to your energy while carrying you across to a new screen.

As well as just walking/flying from screen to screen and the CS, there are also things looking a bit like kitchen cupboards which, when you bump into them, whisk you randomly off to some other screen.

The locations in the game are many and varied and cover most of the likely rooms in a school including laboratories and even lavatories. If you do amass the £50 necessary to pay for the window, you get to drive the Ferrari in a similar way to the C5, though I'd guess it's a bit quicker.

The game can be played with either a joystick or on the keyboard and will work on all CPC machines.

Although similar to the rather stale Wally series, Tubaruba has its own humour that makes it eminently playable. The author seems to be one of the few writing Amstrad-only originals and doing it really well.

The number of sprites that are moving at once on some screens is quite amazing, though also quite infuriating. Infact I had to take a closer look at the code for an infinite lives poke. There I found a message saying exactly when the program was written and also suggesting that I shouldn't bother looking for the DEC (HL), because there wasn't one.

As it happens, typing the letters T-O-O-B-A before the game starts makes you invulnerable so a poke isn't needed. Being invulnerable allowed me to travel round most of the screens. At a rough guess I'd say there must have been at least 50 or 60 which is pretty good considering the amount of detail in each.

I look forward to the next offering from the same stable and would recommend this one to anyone who doesn't already have one of the Mikro-Gen offerings.

When a game comes in from a new software house I tend to eye it with suspicion - most of the games from unknowns have been written, packaged and distributed by the programmer. However good the code, programs from small companies usually fall down on the packaging, instructions and presentation.

Tubaruba is the first product from Advanced Software Promotions, a company run by people who have plenty of experience selling other people's software. Their quality control has obviously been very good.

There are some nifty touches in this, the explosions are defender-like, the sound good, although the tune does start to wear a little thin after a while, and the gameplay is addictive.

Wandering round rooms full of manic sprites accumulating objects isn't one of my favourite games, but this is one of the better ones. I especially like the explosions which happen far too often when I'm playing. It took me a few minutes to realise that going through windows wasn't fatal, despite turning funny colours and making disintegrating noises.

Often programmers take short cuts when writing games and they simplify things. It takes a great deal of time and effort to put in fiddly bits and frills. Tubaruba has lots of fiddly bits and is well worth a look.