Producer: Mastertronic
Retail Price: £1.99
Age Range: Younger children

The aim of this game is to use the keyboard to untie the various characters by matching the correct letters and numbers. The quicker your reactions, the more points you get. On the left hand side of the screen, you see the character tied up with lengths of rope, one end of each piece labelled with a letter, the other with a number. By pairing the correct letter and number, the player frees the character.

The cover blurb tells us that "this ingenious program has been carefully designed for younger children and apart from providing them with endless hours of fun, it will help them with many aspects of their education."

I'm afraid I fail to see the educational value of this game. It may have a use in teaching the layout of the QWERTY keyboard, but there are other games which do this better Marketing programs like this under an educational banner is a bit dubious.

COMMENTS

Control keys: whole keyboard
Keyboard play good
Use of colour: fair
Graphics: very limited and dull

The grand old masters of budget software are still active and still keeping prices to £1.99. We've seen two new programs from them, both aimed at the younger user, but this should not deny more mature gamesters looking at them.

TYPE ROPE is a simple game where a picture is drawn of the cute character who is tied up with ropes. The ends of these ropes are attached to pegs marked with a letter or number and by pressing the connecting letters/numbers the rope is released and you have to free the character before time runs out! This is a simple game based on the "trace the path" puzzle found in many children's comics. With the time element and the well judged difficulty level this game can be enjoyed by all ages. I liked it.