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A year or two ago sports games were all the rage: Track And Field and Hyper Sports were in the arcades and, on home computers, programs such as Daley Thompson's Decathlon were sweeping all before them.

The follow-up to DTD, Daley Thompson's Supertest, has now been released forthe BBC.

In common with other computer sports it features a series of events - in this case eight. You must pass a qualifying standard in the first to move to the next and so on. Each time you fail to qualify you lose one of your three lives.

Because of memory limitations, offering a variety of sports means loading the program in two stages. And if in either stage you can't qualify in at least one of the first three events you never see the fourth.

As its competitors - Olympic Decathlon, Hyper Sports, Micro Olympics and Commonwealth Games - have been on sale for a while, Supertest clearly needs to be something special. Unfortunately this proves not to be the case.

After pressing Shift+Break you are presented with a nicely drawn title page and an invitation to select day one or two. The appropriate section then loads and after you enter your initials the game begins.

My first impressions of the game were bad - poor graphics, jerky movement and minimal sound are compounded by a desperate lack of playability.

Second impressions - "my wrists hurt" - remained with me every time I played. The absence of a pause facility means that you have to play continuously, making the wrists ache still more.

You control the central figure by continuously battering two keys or waggling a joystick. Having seen this method used in the other games I find it an unnecessary waste of a good keyboard or joystick.

The grand-daddy of sports games, Summer Games on the Commodore 64, requires not brute force but precise timing. It seems a pity that more sports games have not followed this idea.

Two small points niggled: Firstly, as a diving teacher I found that the springboard diving "simulation" could hardly have been less accurate.

Secondly, surely it's common sense to put a write-protect tab on £13 worth of software?

Finely-detailed graphics, as seen in some of the competing games, combined with a more civilised method of control, would have resulted in a very enjoyable game.

Sadly, however, there will be no world records for Supertest.

Hac Man