BARGAIN BASEMENT

Fixing a leaky tap in the basement, RICH PELLEY stumbled across a few spooky cheapies clogging up the U-bend. So here they are (damp and slightly mouldy)...

Mastertronic Plus
£2.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

Personally, whenever my Specct breaks down I just bang it against the wall a few times and hope for the best. (Well, it worked once anyway.) However (however! however!) Mastertronic seem to have had an even better idea - why not stick loads of little robot thingies inside your computer to crawl about and fix any minor probs before anything major goes wrong? Cunning, eh? Unfortunately, though, someone has to train these droidish minions in the first place to show 'em what to do. And no prizes for guessing who that someone is. Yep, it's yoou-hoo!

Sounds complicated? Nothing could be further from the truth. All you have to do is zoom your little robot jobby (in the shape of a mouse) around these tracks in the circuit board, pick up spare bits of track which have been dumped all over the shop, and then be on the look-out to plonk them down when a fault develops (or, more precisely, when a gap in your track appears). Loads of strange little circle things follow you about and sap your energy if you collide with them.

Of course, you may well think that all this seems a trifle on the boring side. And you'd be completely right. It's crap. The track is vastly small and nothing new ever happens - you're stuck on the same level for ever and ever and ever and ever. Which isn't a very nice place to be in the first place really. Exter-er-er-minate!

Label: Mastertronic
Price: £2.99
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

The other day I was burning some toast in the kitchen when I thought I heard a squeaky, scrabbly noise behind the cooker. Ever vigilant for signs of venomous vermin crawling over my condiments, I put a mousetrap down, and the following day there was a pop-eyed pest crushed to death in it. Sorry, I said, but if you pooh on my cooker, that's what you get.

So as you can imagine I'm not to keen on mouses, and Micro Mouse (Goes Debugging) would have had to be a lot better than it is to overcome my prejudices. After wading through the inane blurb, which is all about circuit-testing, robot-controlled repair droids and cybernetic intelligences, you soon figure out that this is a Pac-man variant, devoid of any real originality. Remember Alligata's Hypercircuit? It's the same idea; you control a little mousey droid scuttling around a printed circuit board, avoiding electrical discharges and attempting to repair damage to the track. It's a whole heap of yawn.

The gimmick is that scattered around the board are first aid stations where micro-mouse can pick up sections to repair damaged tracks. Trouble is, they have to be the right shape, so first you have to find a spot of damage, then find a station, then scroll through the selection of available parts until you find the right shape, then take it to the damage and drop it in place. Trying to fry you along the way are randomly wandering Pulsers, Homers which chase after you, and Drillers which cause the breaks on the tracks.

Meters show your remaining strength (as a block of cheese, ho-ho), and the amount of unrepaired damage. To complete the game you have to have the board fully repaired when the timer for each section runs out.

The graphics are unimaginative, the sound's average, and though the scrolling's quite fast and smooth, it's not enough to add any excitement to this pile of rodent droppings.