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The idea of this game is to guide 'Pot-hole' Pete around 'a massive subterranean network of interconnecting caves, rooms and passages'. So now you know as much as I do about the plot. Oh sorry - you do have a reason for doing this you must collect four pieces of 'The Golden Lion' which somehow will help you escape, whereupon you presumably sell the Golden Lion for a vast amount of money, or perhaps not.

If Bubble Bus are after an award for best original game design they are not going to nominate this title. The scenario and gameplay are so close to the Spectrum classic 'Atic Atac' from Ultimate that the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that this was a conversion. A second glance would prove him wrong. Ultimate would have done a better job.

The game works with a joystick and the cursor keys, which, although they are not the easiest keys to use, are better than some games which don't allow use of the keyboard at all. You can also use the keys to which the joystick is simultaneously mapped, but as these are even worse than the cursor keys and I don't really suggest you try it. Unfortunately, this lack of attention to detail runs throughout the program and leaves you wishing the author had taken a few more days and tidied things up.

My first gripe about the game is the dirge of a tune that greets you after you wait an age for it to load at SPEED WRITE 0. This does not bode well for the rest of the sound in the program and in fact all the sounds in the program are worse than in the Spectrum version of the game this was converted from, It also stops completely sometimes and the game freezes for a second, presumably because the sound buffer isn't being flushed properly.

The second thing that spoils the game is the graphics. In the Spectrum version you of course had eight different colours on the screen, but because the game is in mode 1 (to be as similar to the Spectrum version as possible) you can only have four colours. What do you do? Well, you choose your colours carefully and with clever use of stippling you can get what seems like more than four colours out of the machine, e.g. red stippled with yellow would give a passable orange.

It can look great, look at those fantastic screen pictures drawn by Jill Lawson in back issues of this magazine to see how effective it can be. Unfortunately that is not the case in this game. The author seems so have chosen a random number and XOR-ed it with the graphics (read your manual) before printing, resulting in striped, speckled and blotchy characters and horrible surrounding graphics. Almost anything would have been better, even only three solid colours (and black) on the screen, or each screen having different combinations of the 27 available. This looks bad even on a green monitor.

Those gripes aside, how does it play? Well, after pressing the Enter key four times it finally starts (this is not always the case - most times only two will do). You run around a quite detailed little landscape from where your view of Pot-hole Pete is of the top of his head (although all the other characters are side on), and you are spinning axes at the other characters who are determined to finish you off. Some of them are immune to your weapons and fire back. There are various things around the place that will replenish your energy, give you more weapons etc. and bits of treasure.... and of course somewhere there are four bits of the Golden Lion.

Yet more gripes: firstly if you watch the Energy bar, although its general direction is towards zero, it is not altogether sure it wants to go there and it flickers up and down the scale while it tries to decide. When you collect a Spell and you haven't got enough gold to allow it to work, it tells you with a very noisy, flashing message for much too long, and ignores all my pressing of the keyboard to tell it that I have read it and want to get on with the game.

You get a similar problem when you run out of Energy. The game stops and the word ENERGY flashes and screeches at you for what seems like ages, and the first few times you think it is just warning you that energy is low and you wish it would get on with the game so that you can top it up.... then it goes and kills you! These last two things do not exactly help you to 'get into' playing the game.

Despite these problems I began to like it for the type of game it was, and ignored its limitations. If you want a mapping type game where you run around mindlessly killing things but with a bit of strategy involved in working out where your next batch of weapons is coming from, and avoiding the creatures that fight back, then you might enjoy it, and there is as yet nothing similar on the Amstrads.