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This is, I'm sure, the first ice hockey simulation - a curious omission after the seemingly endless slew of sports games that have clogged up my tape deck in the last year. This one, from Margaret Stanger (authoress of Bug Byte's Skyhawk and Tennis) does not represent the final word on the subject, almost certainly.

I'm not a great exponent of the 'budget games can be substandard' school of marketing and this game is, to be frank, a little disappointing. The graphics are rather poor (scratchy figures with a life of their own), the game is seriously unplayable (player control is poor and the speed of the puck outruns any player) and, most seriously, we have here a sports simulation with no scrolling.

How can you seriously play a game like this with three screens that don't scroll? By the time the puck has entered a screen, the screen has been drawn and the players drawn, it has shot most of the way across the screen, leaving no time for action.

The music is jolly and the ricocheting puck is quite amusing but there is not enough here to hold my interest. Ice Hockey is definitely a 'budget' job that in a world of Repton 3, Citadel and Psycastria does seem to be a retrograde step.

Dave Reeder