MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £5.20

Some of the games that have made their way to the White Wizard's Fortress of Solitude this month are pure rubbish. First into the bin was The Five Treasures of Ryzar from Space Age Software.

This 'original and exciting adventure' is about as original and exciting as a spell for making lizards burp. 'You are not limited to single-letter commands' boasts the press release. Big deal. You are, however limited to a very small vocabulary and an extremely repetitive scenario.

The display shows a line drawing of the room you happen to be in. You can choose between 'Olde Englishe Text' and the normal Spectrum character set; and a brief message tells you the number of the room and which direction you're facing in.

The direction is really pretty pointless since the program doesn't understand words like North, South etc. You have to type in 'Go forward' or 'Go backwards' to move about. Most of the time you type in instructions you are told that 'You can't do that here', without it being at all clear why you can't.

Every time you enter a new room another ugly line drawing, featuring a number of blank walls and a door or two, is flashed onto the screen. Sometimes you appear to be in a new room but the display tells you that you are still in the old one. All very confusing.

Your task is to collect the five treasures of Ryzar from the five different levels below the city, but however exciting the objective may sound, the game, I assure you, isn't.