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A head for heights is needed in this fiendishly difficult and addictive game. Those who suffer from vertigo need not apply, nor need those who do not have the time or patience this game requires.

The idea is to get to the top of the castle wall, where you can pic up a bulging bag of gold and move on to the next screen.

However, there are certain impediments to your progress. Your man - an attractively animated figure with blond hair and a blue cloak - must first of all try to jump over three purple crustaceans (crabs?) in pits. These have popping eyes, waggling claws and the disconcerting habit of jumping up and down to give you a fatal nip.

But with a little practice you soon get the hang of this. You then gobble the gleaming cherries for your bonus and climb the ladder to the next level. This is where the going gets touch, because here you have to try and leap onto a moving platform which transports you across a gap in the wall. This is a particularly tricky business; you must time the jump precisely, keep walking while you're on the platform and then make another precision jump to get off.

It takes a lot of doing - rather more doing than most people in the office could manage.

Higher levels promise additional hazards such as rocks coming down ladders, snakes writhing in the pits, an assortment of bugs and faster speeds.

Castle Assault's graphics are excellent. The castle walls are a brilliant red, the hero moves nicely and the crabs are gruesome. Best feature, though, is the duck, which flies across the top of the screen. Authentically quacking, its beak opens and closes and its wings flag. On later levels, this becomes another fearsome adversary.