All you've never wanted in a diary

Producer: Leisure Electronic/Domark
Out of Pocket: £6.95 cass, £10.95 disk
Author: Intelligent Design

A diary is usually a little book with loads of dates and 'vital' info in it. It is customary for elderly aunts and uncles to give you one of these supposedly useful items at Yuletide. You usually write in it daily for about a week, then leave it in a dusty drawer for the rest of the year. Now, thanks to Intelligent Software, we have the electronic version, with some unique features.

The contents of the diary are accessed using a simple menu system. As you'd expect you can make entries for each day (but only about six words long), access an imperial/metric conversion table (there's no calculator, though) and look up the phone numbers of computer magazines, software houses and hardware makers. Then there's the special features, like a weather forecast for any day in 1989 (Ian McGaskill could do with one of these) and a similarly fictional daily horoscope (just like the real thing, in fact). A more modern pseudo-science, biorhythms, is also included.

Marginally more useful is a snack bar which includes a number of vomit-inducing ideas for what to put on your sandwiches (eg sardines, jam and pickle). If you want boiled eggs for a sandwich then you might also use the egg timer, which lets you input egg size, how you like it and so on. Unfortunately the timer, like the alarm function, makes no sound whatsoever - all that happens is that the border flashes various colours!

Finally, to keep you amused while you're trying to crack your concrete egg, you can play any of the three games included. Hangman allows you to guess what the computer's secret word is (out of about half a dozen possibilities) while the wordsearch is self-explanatory (just press a button to reveal the answer, teletext-style). Trivia quiz presents you with just three questions (wow!) although more can be loaded from side B of the tape (only three at a time though!). Oh, and not to forget the amazing 'crash of the day' option - it actually crashes the program (probably the best option!).

Despite its many features, Computer Maniac's 1989 Diary is really just a gimmicky product aimed at bewildered parents, shopping for Christmas presents. The blurb on the inlay asks 'Who said a diary can't be fun?' - well whoever it was, he was certainly right in this case.

Domark
£6.95
Reviewer: Ciaran Brennan

Dear Diary, I'm glad to find out that today is a Bratislavian bank holiday, that it's also a good day to attempt to cut out some of my more unsavoury personal habits and that the temperature in Sierra Leone will be somewhere between zero and boiling - but can I now please make some entries of my own?

The Domark twins describe this timely release as 'a little bit of light entertainment' and that it certainly is, combining a series of loosely related sub programs inside a clever and easy to use 'diary' format. The only thing that's missing is the ability to make daily entries (other than the 30 character reminder message), so budding Adrian Moles will have to look elsewhere.

The basic idea is that you load the program up every day. enter the relevant data (the time, your own birthday and so on) and the screen will fill with loads of info including horoscopes, games and personal statistics. However, try as I might, I couldn't get it to remind me to phone my mother on July 7th, but I assume that this is an isolated error as everything else I attempted worked fine.

The games section is quite entertaining, comprising a short trivia teaser, an even shorter hangman outing and the silliest thing I've ever seen on any computer screen - a wordsquare! It's like giving you a blank crossword grid on screen and expecting you to fill it in with a pen.

Other little pieces of daily tomfoolery include a snack recipe (usually consisting of some type of inedible sandwich) and a guide to your own daily bio-rhythms - some sort of scientific way to tell whether you're in a bad mood or not. There's also a section on phone numbers of major software producers, but a quick glance at this was enough to reveal that two out of the first three entries were incorrect so I wouldn't care to think how accurate the whole list is.

The weather forecast section is a bit dubious as well - I mean how can Domark possibly predict the weather for every day of the year? Ian MacCaskill can't manage it and he has the massed technology of the British Met board to consult with.

Silliness aside, this diary will probably be well used in the Brennan household. After all, there are not many programs outside of the games world that provide as much entertainment as this - and it's also a bit useful in its own little way. Give it a try if you fancy stretching your Speccy out of the realm of alien zapping.

Label: Domark
Author: LED
Price: £6.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

The Filofax. Probably the greatest invention ever. Inside it you can cram all sorts of items of information. Names and telephone numbers, a day-to-day planner, a calendar, lots of little facts and figures, street and world maps, even all your business cards. The only problem with a Filofax, aside from when you lose it, is what do you write in it?

Fear no more. CMD IS HERE! CMD is a computerised diary, telephone directory, games compendium and amusing facts book, and it's all completely, 100 percent, utterly and totally useless. It's not portable. It's not instant access and it's pooh.

The diary allows you to enter details for each day that you want to remember so desperately that you're prepared to load up a program on your Spectrum just to remember them. It also comes with historical details about each day. A completely useless concept because the whole point of a diary is that you can take it with you and jot down important information in it as you go about your daily life, such as 'must buy that £350,000,000 TV I saw in Harrods today out of my small change'.

The facts section is probably the best thing in the game. It contains a telephone index of all the computer mags (including us), software manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, freelancers home numbers and a list of the best Chinese massage parlours in London!

You also get lots of other exciting elements like a horoscope generator (completely random, is this how Patrick Walker does it?), a weather forecast (gives you the average lowest and highest temperatures for the time of year, depending on the date), an egg timer (tell it what size egg and how you like it, and it tells you to boil it for seven minutes 40 seconds), a reaction timer (press fire when the red light turns to green to make the cars advance up the track) and a games menu.

The game menu is a bit of a disappointment. You get a wild and wacky choice of three games. Hangman, pretty easy, Wordsquare, press any keys to reveal all the answers, and a trivia quiz with three questions.

As far as visual design goes the screen is very nicely laid out, with half size proportional lettering and some very attractive window layouts. What spoils it all is the bit of spasy vector animation going on in the corner. The shapes don't rotate smoothly, as you'd automatically think they would on a Spectrum, they flap about uselessly. Honestly, LED.

I can see no way that this can receive any merit as a full price game. Maybe as a free bonus with another game, yeah, but standing alone it's just too short lived.