CRAWLING OUT from the dunghill of worthy utilities comes the Romantic Robot maggot. Romantic Robot has hitherto confined its activities to producing utilities and music programs, but its first arcade game demonstrates an appreciation of entertainment as well as a sound knowledge of byte lore.

Wriggler casts you as a maggot, big and white and squiggly, taking part in the four stage maggot marathon. First you must find your way out of the garden, then negotiate the scrubland, only to crawl underground into the tortuous labyrinth. Thence to the mansion itself and the final exit.

The game is essentially an extended maze, with plenty of confusing exits and entrances which defy the laws of normal map-making. On the way you must avoid or destroy the marauding denizens of the lawn. Particularly revolting are the giant deathshead spiders whose spindly legs inch along the corridors and paths with deliberate menace. Some of those monsters are relatively harmless in that they stick to known routes. Others such as the wasps and termites, zero in on you and soon digest your weak, white pulsating body.

Graphics are large - two or three character squares at minimum - and although the movement is slow, maggots do not exactly shift like the clappers themselves.

A piece of electronic muzak, titled Moons of Jupiter is thrown in on the B-side of the cassette - definitely music to squirm to. Wriggler represents a good few hours of fun. It contains plenty of humour and challenge in a rather different setting to the normal hi-tech or low-fantasy scenarios we have come to expect of arcade-adventure generally.

NOT MANY people play baseball outside the States, but to judge from the fervour accorded the game there, it must be exciting. Imagine, newly resurrected under the paternal eye of Ocean's David Ward, has brought out a simulation as its first release with the new regime.

The name Imagine gives rise to all sorts of suspicions, but we were gratified to see that World Series Baseball is not at all bad. You can play the computer or a friend, and the screen shows a representation of the baseball diamond with crowds and a giant screen for advertising and scores.

With loving attention to baseball hype, the game opens with the American national anthem and cheerleaders. Then the stick-like figures of the teams come onto the pitch. Control is simple enough. If you are batting you can use the joystick to adjust the strength and lift of your swing, and to hit the ball.

The pitching team may set a close or open field, and then adjust the speed and direction of the pitched ball while in flight. Control is then passed to the fielder nearest the ball, and the race is on to see if the ball can be brought to a base before the batsman reaches it.

The scoreboard adds to the realism by showing genuine advertisements and humorous announcements in between innings, although the wait could become irritating if you have read them all before. Nevertheless, the game is fun and apparently realistic. Welcome back, Imagine. Keep up the good work.

THERE MUST be a better reason for being in the computing business than Death Star Interceptor. The addition of a strangled rasp of a voice in the take-off sequence and the splitting of a standard, wholly derivative shoot-em-up into three sections does not alter the fact that blasting alien spacecraft along the corridors of the giant space station is boring, boring, boring.

System 3 Software also bought the right to use the Star Wars theme on the game, where the thin story-line originated.

First you have to take off. When you hear the Spectrum talking to you the spacecraft is launched and you have to guide it through a small window into outer space.

You get to see a picture of the earth receding and the death star approaching during the next section, but that is a mere visual bonus. The second stage is simply a matter of blasting or avoiding alien craft, which behave like stunted refugees from Galaxians. Once at the death star you get the time-honoured death-or-glory Luke 'make mine a milk shake' Skywalker run down the deadly corridor to plant a bomb in the exhaust port.

If you make it that far, why not toss the cassette in as well?

SHEER mental agony is the basic consequence of an hour playing Confuzion, the latest from Incentive. Deceptively simple, it will have you grinding your teeth and foaming at the mouth in minutes.

There is a tenuous plot to do with defusing bombs before they explode, but that is simply a peg on which to hang an unusual abstract maze game. You have to control a fuzzy ball which moves around a maze of interlocking lines and attempt to knock out the bombs at the edges before your time runs out. Rather than move the ball itself, you slide blocks of the maze about, creating new pathways, rather in the style of those slide puzzles where you have to make words or rearrange numbers.

There are 64 mazes in all to negotiate, and although the first few are easy enough, the introduction of enemy balls, extra bombs, and holes in the maze plan soon turn the play into a frenzied nightmare. The time limit is tight, but the faster you play the less chance you have of working out a logical plan in advance.

The presentation is pleasant, with thick lines for the mazes and good, solid sound effects. But the strength of the game is entirely due to the novel strategies and techniques you must develop to win.

Conventional wisdom demands that games should have strong themes and plots to succeed. It would be a pity if the abstract nature of Confuzion were held against it, as it generates more thrills and addiction than plenty of well-hyped intergalactic epics. 'Fun for all the family' as they say - give it a try and bend your brain to bits.

SO YOU THOUGHT you had seen the last of it. No more Chuckie Egg, no more little yellow Harry to run up ladders and jump off platforms. You were wrong. Chuckie Egg II has arrived, and it's every bit as nauseating as the original.

Chuckie Egg was one of the earliest levels and ladders programs, a game which everybody loathed and nobody could stop playing. The sequel has Harry attempting to get a chocolate egg factory working again, and has a definite arcade-adventure feel to it.

Played across 200 odd screens of basic girder-plus-peculiar-monsters graphics, Chuckie Egg II requires much shinning up of ropes and jumping over rats and lizards to complete. Objects which must be picked up along the way are used in other screens to delay monsters or achieve a particular exit.

There is little or nothing original about the program, which relies heavily on all the old conventions of the genre, although to be fair A&F can lay some claim to having established a few of those conventions themselves. The graphics are lurid and not of the best detail, but have that special Chuckie Egg quality all the same. An improvement is the abolition of the requirement to complete each screen before proceeding further. That is no longer necessary, and the resulting maze of exits and entrances to different screens is one of the more complex we have seen.

A competition with cash prizes for the highest scores adds a little zest to the proceedings, and certainly A&F groupies will find Chuckie Egg II just as frustratingly addictive as their first encounter with the henhouse, those many moons ago.

HOW THE mighty are fallen. Quicksilva, which produced Ant Attack and Fantastic Voyage, has just released a platform and ladders game.

Entitled Mighty Magus, the game is packed with the usual complement of spells, traps, monsters, and dragons.

As the Mighty Magus, you have to descend all 30 levels to the depths of the Rising Sun Temple, battle with monsters en route, avoid dozens of assorted traps and kill your archenemy Faugy The Fierce and escape back to your starting point.

The screen scrolls left, right, up and down with staircases leading to each level. Walking along the platform is dangerous in the extreme as they feature hidden traps - each one waiting for the wrong step to hurl you across the screen, make you disappear or to release a flight of poisoned arrows.

Treasure chests are situated throughout the levels which when searched bestow upon you magic which can be used to cast spells to open entrances and jump off stairs.

Mighty Magus is not a difficult game, frustrating perhaps and a far cry from the quality of Fantastic Voyage. The graphics are outdated, unclear and flickery - a pity it was not released a year ago.

ONE OF THE more successful arcade games of last year looks set to have potential double agents roaring up to their local shops in hot pursuit for a copy of the game.

Sega has recently licensed Spy Hunter to US Gold and continues the trend of arcade games crossing the Atlantic as computer software.

Shades of the movie The Italian Job creep into the game which places you in the key role of a spy trying to escape the country with a posse of double agents on your tail.

Luckily your turbo-charged car could have been built for James Bond and will become amphibious, taking to the water like a drought-stricken duck.

The chase is fast and furious, skidding down stretches of icy road and hair-pin bends. You can shoot at the agents, try to bump them off the road, but blasting innocent civilian drivers will be to the detriment of your score.

You have a bird's eye view of the road which scrolls vertically downwards - the zig-zags are hair raising and do not leave much room for overtaking.

One innovative touch to the game is the weapons van. Just as in The Italian Job, the van drives past with ramps lowered. Should you be quick enough to drive in, the car will be re-armed with oil slicks, smoke screens and rockets - handy when shooting at the bomb-dropping helicopter. However, all weapons but the machine gun are lost if you crash.

The game is obviously not as fast as the arcade version, but in all other cases it is an almost exact replica except that there is no gear stick or accelerator. Those features are, however, notoriously difficult to fit onto the Spectrum.

A GAME of pool usually entails consuming large quantities of beer whilst playing in some smoky pub.

OCP has come to the rescue of both lungs and liver and has produced Video Pool.

The screen gives an aerial view of the pool table with six pockets which you can change from small to large size. The game offers three variations of pool - none of which are played according to the rules. For starters, there are only six numbered balls with the corresponding numbers on each of the pockets.

The three variations range from easy - where you have to pot the balls in any order into any of the pockets; a slightly harder version where the balls have to be potted numerically; and lastly a game where you have to pot the balls numerically into the correspondingly numbered pockets.

You gain an extra shot for each correctly potted ball and lose a life for a foul shot or wrong pot.

Video Pool is certainly worth playing despite the obvious dissimilarities with the real game. The movement of the balls is fast, smooth and flicker-free and the direction of the cue ball towards the cursor, positioned on the cushion, is accurate.

THERE IS a world of difference between the intellectual precision of chess and the imaginative power of good fantasy games. All the more peculiar, then, that veteran fantasy game designers Paul Reiche and Jon Freeman should have combined the two to produce Archon.

The game is played out on a chequered board with 81 squares. The opposing armies remind one instantly of chess, with pawn-like knights and goblins, and stronger, more mobile pieces on the back row.

When two pieces clash for a square the game shifts to arcade action, and the monsters fight it out, blasting with fireballs or trying to close with fang or blade. White squares favour the forces of light, black squares darkness, and there are five power points with healing qualities and variable colour.

Although well packaged and presented, the graphics are predictable and seem old fashioned.

The problem is really that the abstract nature of the game serves to dissipate most of the creativity involved in producing interesting monsters. You rapidly lose any sense of involvement in the fantasy myths surrounding the struggle, and play the game mechanically.

The inclusion of magic spells for two of the pieces is a good idea, but again they are used merely as extra options in play, and have no real emotional force of their own.

Viewed as a board game, Archon is a competent invention, and clearly has strategic possibilities. But it is not ideally suited to the home computer, and we would have preferred to see Reiche turning the talent he used to good effect with the creators of Dungeons and Dragons to more adventurous material.

Archon is a game for the collector of such things, not for those who want good entertainment at a fair price. The price is certainly not fair, and our rating would have been higher if Ariolasoft had charged less.

MACMILLAN has previously collaborated with Sinclair Research in a number of educational programs but the new range is produced on its own account.

Snapple Hopper and Tops and Tails are two packages aimed at the four- to eight-year-old age range. Both are devised by Betty Root who is the 1985 President of the United Kingdom Reading Association.

The Sunflower Number Show is a game to practice mental arithmetic for all ages. All the programs are flexible in that there is a choice of speed and in the maths program a choice of difficulty.

Snapple Hopper contains two routines to practice the initial two letters of a word in a Snap game for one or two players, and a game to practice matching rhyming. Both can be played by one or two players.

Tops and Tails has a snakes and ladders game with players moving according to the numbers generated on a dice, and receiving extra points for recognising the first two letters of a word on a picture square.

The graphics in the games are well devised and the routines fun to play, at least for the younger members of the age range. Eight year olds may find it all rather unsophisticated. The only quibble I have is the price.

SPORTS superstars endorsing computer games seems a trend that is likely to continue until all the superstars have been used up.

Jonah Barrington's Squash is endorsed by the former world champion and the score is called out in his own voice which has been 'accurately reproduced taking full advantage of the unique Reprosound system'.

However, plugging Jonah into the MIC socket produced a fuzzy unintelligible gabble as if he was speaking from the belly of the whale. Better get that throat seen to, Jonah.

The screen is divided, one half being the score table and the other a small 3D representation of a squash court.

The ball bounces off the walls in a convincing style and depending on the length of time the fire button is depressed, you can alter the angle at which the ball leaves the racket. The 3D illusion is effected by the use of a shadow on the ball, in much the same way as Psion's classic Match Point.

Hitting the ball can present a problem. It is very difficult. Whenever the ball comes within striking distance, press the fire button and you will automatically play that shot whether forehand or backhand. Obstructing your opponent is a foul and a let is called, but unfortunately you can't assault him with your racket.

The game is an accurate simulation of the game and play is fast on the higher levels. Jonah seems impressed and says that it "is fun to play and will teach players at all levels to improve their game". Personally I would prefer to exhaust myself in the more conventional and sweaty way, actually playing the real thing.

"HEY GUYS, I just had a great idea in the bath. How about a game about a Porsche?"

"Triff, boss. And we could get a major tyre company like Dunlop Tyres SP Tyres UK Ltd to endorse it."

"Won't that cost greenbackwise?"

"No way. All we have to do is underline Dunlop Tyres wherever it appears on the insert and in the game. We could only allow players to use Dunlop tyres in the game. The possibilities hypewise are endlessville, boss."

"I like the way you're thinking. What do the programmers reckon on schedules? Can you do it for Monday, kid?"

"Uh, like, that's a bit heavy. I mean, I was going to take Sharon to the Motorhead concert tonight ..."

"No sweat. Just lay down that old scrolling routine we used in all the other games."

"But the Porsche doesn't jump fences like the horses in Grand National, boss."

"So what? Put some bushes and logs 'n' stuff in the middle of the road. I saw this great ZX-81 game a couple of years ago in a mag which scrolled up the screen with bushes and things. You remember - I was playing it in the bath when I got the idea for Kokotoni Wimp."

"Don't you think the punters will notice?"

"Punters? Shmucks. No more arguments, boys, or its P45 city for the lot of you. Besides, when they see Dunlop Tyres all over the cassette they won't bother about the rest. We're talking action, we're talking hype, we're talking spondulistani ..."

911TS. Another great game from Elite. Don't buy it.