At least there can be no Universe 2. (Infinity joke!)

Listen to this. It's a game that goes out of its way to be friendly. Controls are kept to a minimum, so you can get on with solving the puzzles without grappling with ridiculously unlikely action combinations. It's very funny. It takes your side at every turn: it recognises external drives, is hard disk-installable and you can't die in it. Technically it's linear, but there's plenty of 'give' and you don't feel like you're being bustled around in a tour group. Sounds great, doesn't it? And it is. It's The Secret Of Monkey Island.

Universe, on the other hand, is completely terrible.

But why is it completely terrible? Let us investigate with the aid of these helpful sub-headings. Exclusively inside. Etc.

Universe trounces Monkey Island in every way graphically. It uses angles and perspective to fabulous effect, with your bloke hacking around smashing backgrounds in finely-rendered 3D without ever looking blocky or cartoony. Great shading, too, especially on the introductory asteroid bit with the planet's atmosphere boiling away in the distance. Actually, the graphics aren't at all terrible. Hurrah.

Adventures are stories. And the point with stories is that the telling is everything. Even old jokes can be put across if neatly written and told with panache.

Universe starts with a 'funny' manual and careens downwards from there. The game seems desperate to undo all the good things about a graphics adventure and harass you with screens of dull and badly-written text pointlessly describing what you can see perfectly well thankyouverymuch. As an example, when you try something out, the pointer changes to a thumbs up or thumbs down icon to let you know if you're on the right track - a great idea. But if you're wrong, you also get a random, standard message like "I don't think that would be a good idea", or, "You can't do that", because, obviously, you're an imbecile. Thanks, guys.

Universe is unbendingly linear. You will not progress to the next puzzle until you solve the present one. Solving the present one is made infinitely more of a brain-melting chore by the unfathomably complicated control method. Not only can you 'use' objects, you can 'throw', 'push/pull', 'open/close', 'combine', 'wear' and 'insert' them. (And yes, I know you could open and close or push and pull things in Monkey Island, but those were obvious objects in the background, like doors or handles, rather than stuff in your inventory.)

As an example of how stupendously awful the interface is, here's the very first puzzle. You find a satellite dish, with its controls obscured by a panel. You're carrying a couple of small rocks, a circuit board and a bent metal bar. The solution is INSERT METAL BAR IN PANEL. Not, for example, the equally likely OPEN PANEL WITH BAR, PUSH/PULL PANEL, ATTACK PANEL WITH ROCK or COMBINE BAR WITH PANEL. Nope, in the worst text adventure tradition, only the exact verb/noun combination will do the trick, rendering the whole puzzle-solving process a moronically tedious series of attempts to try all the action icons with everything in your inventotry.

Still not convinced? Arguing that inserting the bar as a lever is fairly obvious and logical? Right. Straight after fixing the satellite, you have to climb down an exhaust vent (because there's a mirror stuck in it that you use to deflect some lasers that kill you as soon as you try to walk through a perfectly ordinary door, that's why.

Oh yes - you can die in Universe as well, as you end up saving every time you move to avoid having to start again from the beginning. Except, and you'll pardon my digression, you don't die outright, but are captured and send to a prison planet where - and this is the best bit! - a text screen tells you that 'you realise there is no escape from this penal colony'.

But isn't the whole game about overcoming ridiculous odds to overthrow an evil galactic empire (Consistent game logic, eh? I love it!)... which you manage to do not by opening the vent, or clicking on it, or 'inserting' yourself or any one of a dozen other stupid but plausible things, but by 'push/pulling' your way down.

It is, of course, about now that you realise how the action icons can apply to just about anything. Except 'wear' of course. That's a unique verb. Phew. Oh, wait... apart from the time you have to put on a jacket by 'combining' it with a console because it's got a wrist computer or something. Sob!

But it's not just puzzle-solving. Now and then, there's a bit requiring you to use the point-and-click interface in real-time action situations. Gasp, eh? Doesn't work, of course. In the first scene (look, I know I keep banging on about the first bit of the game, but it took me 45 minutes to complete the initial puzzle, and that was with Cam's help, mainly because unless you click exactly on the side of the screen you go around the planetoid and get utterly lost) you have to jump on a moving asteroid, but have to aim ahead to allow for the time it tekes your bloke to make the leap.

Miss and you hurtle off to another bit of the asteroid and get lost again. Later on in the game, you get chased by security robots and have to open a door before they catch you (by attacking it with the bar, of course). Much later (we're professionals here, no matter how much it hurts) you have to dock with a spaceship in a life-and-death struggle with manual landing claws and inertia. Sob!

You can't skip the introduction, the sound's awful, with an infinitely repeating bar of music that sort of gets dramatically louder and then sort of gets dramatically quieter and then sort of gets dramatically louder and then sort of gets dramatically quieter and then sort of gets dramatically louder until you mock up a letterhead and fax Core purporting to be from a small music company about to branch out into computer music CD compilations, asking for their musician's home address so you can get him to write some sleeve notes and then going round and shooting his family, and it doesn't recognise a second or hard drive despite coming on six disks.

The Secret Of Monkey Island's three years old, you know.

Uppers: Truly lovely graphics, with an exciting use of forced angles and 3D space. Great name.

Downers: These people really have no idea which makes a good point-and-click adventure. Friendly controls, good scripting, leeway with the plot and satisfying puzzles are just some of the things that have vanished without trace. And you can die too.

It's the sort of game where you can feel the programmers looking over your shoulder, exchanging uproarious laughter when you get stuck or die, without ever realisting exactly what they've done. Detestably unplayable.