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Cast your mind back, aged reader, to the Christmasses of your youth. Forget the holly, the sickly Christmas pudding and concentrate on your stocking. Do you remember getting a slide puzzle usually consisting of 15 little interlocked squares with either letters or numbers on them. One section of the puzzle was empty allowing you to slide the other squares around creating either words or numerical sequences.

Microdeal has computerised such a puzzle and presented it on the Dragon for a bargain price of £1.99. On loading, you are presented with a choice of attempting the decimal slide puzzle, the hexadecimal variant or having a go at the hardest puzzle of the three - a map of the USA.

All three puzzles are set out neatly on the now familiar green background graphics mode. Moving the pieces around the puzzle is simply a matter of using the cursor keys though I found the movement just a fraction slow. The numerical puzzles consist of 40 individual squares making the puzzle quite a brain teaser. I must admit to failure though I got quite close. With these type of puzzles the only solution is time and patience (well, that's my excuse, anyway).

One fault is that there's no way to get back to the options menu. This means that if you give up on one puzzle, you must re-load to try another. This was the one major complaint on an otherwise enjoyable game.

C.G.