Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that this is the only Amiga computer game that has a vegetable as the hero. Before you write in, yes I know it's a fruit, but is anyone really bothered what the hell it is?

Bill's Tomato is a puzzle game, but it's nothing like Lemmings. The idea behind it is simple - you have to get your tomato from one side of the screen to another in the set time limit.

There's nothing I like better than a game I can instantly understand. It does sound so simple that you might think it's crap. Well, it's not. Bill's Tomato Game is one of the most challenging puzzle games I've ever played.

Your tomato starts off on a springboard and the idea is to get across to another platform situated on the other side of screen. There is a go/stop icon which amazingly starts and stops the process of your tomato being hurled.

The only problem is that the springboard throws your tomato straight up in the air, so there's no way the tomato is going to get to the other side unless some divine intervention is put into effect. The divine intervention comes in the form of fans, springy platforms, jack in the boxes and bricks.

As I said before the game is set against time, so your tomato will never die unless you don't complete the puzzle quickly enough. This enables you to test where your tomato lands, so you know where to put the objects to help him across.

Easy, huh? Nah mate, there are all manner of evil objects and beasts trying to stop you. These range from annoying wise Japanese men to fire monsters.

Well, the game is easy to explain that's all you really need to know. Unless you want the plot. Oh you do, that's good news because it's coming right up. The story goes that our hero tomato dreamed of all things peaceful and quiet and spending the rest of his days as a wrinkly tomato with his beautiful girlfriend. On the way to the dreaded greengrocers, our hero decides it's time to act and jumps with his girlfriend out of the van that was transporting them there.

Now without a care in the world, our tomato friends dreamed of that little house in the hills with 2-4 little tomatoes bouncing around their feet. This is where disaster strikes. Mr Squirrel is overly fond of our red chums, spies our hero's girlfriend and decides to kidnap her. Our hero is now distressed and decides to wage war against Mr Squirrel.

So, off he sets up Mr Squirrel tree to save his girlfriend. Will he succeed and be forever happy or will he get to the top of the tree and find that she's been made into a salad? OK, so there's the plot. Oh stop laughing, it's not that unbelievable, well OK it is, but don't tell the tomatoes, you'll hurt their feelings.

So is Bill's Tomato Game, any good? Well, yes and no. Yes, because of the original idea, the great graphics and the delightful little tune. No, because after a while it does get a bit monotonous and a little boring.

If you're waiting for Lemmings 2 as your next puzzle game then I'd strongly recommend Bill's Tomato's as something to be getting on with. Ketch up on Bill's Tomato Game, it's a reet smart laff to while the hours away.

If you were a tomato, and you fell off the back of a lorry (no, I mean you really fell from the back of a moving, heavy-goods vehicle) the best you could really hope for is to become low-salt ketchup. At least if you were a conventional tomato, that is. Terry and Tracy are no ordinary tomatoes, though. They are the hero/heroine of this new puzzler from Psygnosis. Our Tom and Trace simply bounce down the road in a manner more befitting those little 25p dayglo balls you get in bargain stores. Until the appearance of one Sammy Squirrel that is. By now you will have realised that alliteration is the order of the day, in this sickeningly cute scene-setting story.

But Simon, sorry Sammy, abducts Tamara, sorry Tracy and Timothy, sorry Terry, has to rescue her. Not only is this a preposterous premise (see, even I am getting the hang of it now) for a puzzle game, but it is completely irrelevant too. All I can say for the entire intro to Bill's Tomato Game is that it is best avoided. Problem is that you cannot. No amount of mouse clicking or joystick fire-button pressing will cut short this tedious tale.

Tedious intro
AH! Some action at last, once the nicely animated, but tedious intro is over it is time to play Bill's Excellent Tomato Game. Did I say excellent? Well it is. Psygnosis put out many games in the course of the year, most of them are solid, but uninspiring. But when Psygnosis put out a puzzle game around Christmas, it is time for every lover of Psygnosis puzzler games that come out around Christmas to sit up and play close attention. In 1990 there was Lemmings, in 1991 there was Oh No! More Lemmings!, and now in 1992 there is Lemmings 2 and Bill's Tomato Game. you can bet it is more fun than lots of things that are less fun than it...

So Steve Squirrel has nicked your bird and you have to rescue her. It is terrible how these computer games reinforce macho sexual stereotyping isn't it? The rescue involved climbing this kind of magic beanstalk plant that Sigmund Squirrel lives up. Along the way you are required to tackle various screens that require you to get from side A (the left) to side B (the right). Sounds simple doesn't it? But the clever coders at Psygnosis have put various obstacles in your way. And the only way to avoid these hardships is to strategically place various 'props' around the screen.

These props are the ludicrously alliterative frumulous (?) fan, the tomato trampoline, Jeremy jack in the box and the blocking box. Once you launch Trevor he interacts with these 'props' in a manner that can either facilitate his traversing of the screen or lead him to complete liquidation. The choice is yours.

The game escapes the problems of the usual set-it-up-and-let-em-go puzzle games by letting you stop Terry in his tracks and set him off again with a simple click of the mouse button. Indeed some screens actually require you to send an initial tomato salvo, let him trigger a switch, then send another to complete the screen.

A time limit decides your success on each screen and until this is exceeded you have an inexhaustible supply of tomatoes. Which is for the better really, because some of these screens are not quite as easy as they might be, in fact some of them are complete sons of female dogs. Altogether, Psygnosis have managed to do something original once again. There is no chance of this ever being as successful as Lemmings, but for many an hour of taxing distraction you could not do much better than this.

Now that Psygnosis have put back the release date of Lemmings 2 until after Christmas, Bill's Tomato Game is their big hope for a Christmas hit. And in essence, it is not too far removed from Lemmings in concept. (Oh no! More comparisons! - Ed).

It is pacifistic. It is a puzzle game disguised as a platform game, it is cute(ish). I expect Psygnosis believe anyone who bought Lemmings and is going to buy Lemmings 2 is likely to appreciate Bill's Tomato Game.

THE MORE THAN SLIGHTLY UNFEASIBLE PLOT
Bill's Tomato Game is one of those games that requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. In fact, put your suspension of disbelief on overtime and tell him he can have next weekend off if he just bears with this game for a little while.

It concerns the fortunes (or rather misfortunes) of Terry and Tracy Tomato. You see, they are in love, and they have been put on a truck to be taken to the market and suffer the inevitable fate of being eaten. Not wishing to suffer this dire fate, our Tel and Trace jump off the truck (it is never really explained how they manage this) and, er, run away.

All seems rosy, but then another disaster strikes. While they are wallowing in their new found happiness, Sam the squirrel jumps on Tracy and kidnaps her. It is now down to Terry to rescue the fruit in distress. It is funny that, I always considered squirrels a lot more cute and furry than tomatoes, but in this game our sympathies are forced to lie with the salad ingredients.

Now Sam (the squirrel, remember) has taken Tracy up a magic vine, and for Terry to get her back again he has to scale this mystical vegetation. And this is where the game starts. After the intro sequence has finished and you are fully clued up on what has to be done, you are given the task of controlling Terry on his perilous journey to rescue Tracy. (If by now you are wondering who Bill is, he is the guy who wrote the thing).

The game is made up of 100 levels in all, which Terry has to complete in order to save Tracy from the evil clutches of her furry abductor. The levels are organised into 10 sets of 10, so when you complete the 10 levels of one world, you are taken back to the magic vine where you have to move up the vine to the next world and complete the next 10 levels.

These inter-level sequences are the most frustrating parts of the game. Using the mouse (as you do throughout the game) you have to get Terry up to another branch of the magic vine, and basically it is tedious and frustrating,. I suppose it serves as a break after the 10 levels of puzzling you have been doing, but it is even more frustrating when you keep getting knocked off by a bee who is flying around the vine. I mean, since when could a bee knock a tomato off a vine? (I'm sorry, my suspension of disbelief just nipped out for a packet of biscuits and I lost it there for a minute).

THE FLESHY SUBSTANCE OF THE GAME
But all this is by the by, because the main gameplay of Bill's Tomato Game concerns an intriguing and somewhat original game. You start with Terry on one side of the screen, and you have to get him to the other. Now the problem is that, being a tomato, Terry cannot actually move (we'll skip the question of how he managed to run away from the truck for now, just promise your suspension of disbelief two weeks off at Christmas).

He is placed on a spring and without any help he'd simply jump up and down on the spring, going absolutely nowhere. Much like Lemmings in concept, you have various objects at your disposal which aid Tel in his progress. The most fundamental of these are the fans, which blow our squishy friend across the screen after he has been launched from the spring. You can place trampolines, jack-in-the-boxes, blocks and more fans on the screen to propel him towards the conveyor belt at the other side of the screen. The game works to the actual laws of physics - placing the fans at higher levels creates different air movement, and bouncing on trampolines depends totally on how you land on them.

Yeah, it is a puzzler, and a thoroughly engaging one at that. Each world starts off fairly simply, but the difficulty goes up on the later levels. To add to the problems there is a time limit, which mostly results in him being splattered on an object on the screen, or falling squishily to the floor. Once your time is up you have to start the level again, so all your carefully placed objects have to be re-placed on the screen - incredibly frustrating when you have set up a complex chain of events that are so close to working but need some fine tuning. But it is not the kind of frustration that makes you throw down the mouse and load up bought Lemmings again. No, it really grabs you, this one, and everyone I have played it with has just been unable to turn it off.

The thing is, you get so far towards getting the solution (and there is often more than one solution to a level) that you cannot bear to turn it off until you have got it. And the sense of satisfaction at getting it right is much like the feeling you get when you relieve your bladder after a long coach journey (Oh dear. You just can't get the staff anymore. - Ed).

When you finish a level you get a password, which you must write down and keep in a safe place so you can skip straight to that level later on. The passwords are all randomly generated, so you have to ensure that your disk is not write protected when you are playing the game - if you entered the same password on a friend's version of the game it would take you to a totally different level.

It may seem that this game has only a certain amount to offer, after all 100 levels of puzzles must get tiresome after a while. Well happily this is not the cause with BTG. Each level has different obstacles, and often completely different methods required to get the tomato to its loved one. The game demands you change tactics and strategies constantly, and completing one level can be no guarantee of successfully negotiating another.

The graphics look like they have come straight out of a platform game - they are bright, bold and, yes cute and the backgrounds are superb, so there is always something to keep you interested visually. It manages to bring humour into the proceedings too, mainly through the graphics and the alarming squelch that accompanies Terry's splatty demise. A great new puzzle game with an original(ish) angle that really hits the mark.