Before you start playing Clockwiser I would advise you to take a week or two off work (or school, or whatever you do for a living) and get ready for a big electrical bill. This game is seriously addictive and almost anyone who plays it will end up suffering from the just-one-more-go syndrome that plagues the most irritating Amiga games.

TURN ME ROUND
Clockwiser revolves around blocks. That is right, those little square things that houses and garages and office blocks are made of. It is all about rotating blocks around other blocks until your blocks look like the picture of blocks on the other side of the screen.

Easy enough you might say, but when you discover that some blocks are affected by gravity, some explode, some multiply, some do not move at all, some make other blocks float and some make other blocks teleport around the screen then you begin to notice Clockwiser's hidden complexities.

COPY CAT
On one side of the screen is a pattern of blocks. This is the pattern that you rotate your bricks into. Blocks are rotated by creating a rectangle 'thing' and clicking on one of the appropriately drawn rotate icons. Sometimes it is painfully obvious what you have to do but the time limit runs out too quickly. The first twenty or so levels represent little problem if you pay attention to the helpful demo before you play. But from then on the game gets to infuriatingly difficult that you will destroy your Amiga head-butting it! It is, though, the frustration which makes the game so annoyingly addictive.

Clockwiser's level editor is easy to use, allowing you to make levels harder than some of the original ones (if that is possible). Mind you, you do need a friend to have a go at your level for you, because you would obviously know how to complete it yourself (probably).

The game's difficulty level rises and falls more often than a rollercoaster. You can spend half an hour on one level (and we are talking the easy levels here!) and then complete the next level in a minute (or even less).

CON
The worst levels are the ones that look really easy (destroy all the blocks on the screen) but one wrong move and the diamond self-reproducing block sets to work and before you know it the screen looks something like a diamond thief's heaven!

It is hard to work out which way you are going to rotate the bricks. Oh so many times I rotated the wrong way because of a genuine misunderstanding and messed up the whole level when I was one lousy rotation away from finishing it! Some arrows denoting which way you are about to rotate might have been nice (yes, you can tell if you look at the rotation path but you have to stare for ages to work it out).

The following may offend those people who subscribe to BRICK POWER, and get all excited when they see an authentic 1958 sandstone weathered building brick, but the subject matter of the game makes for boring graphics which are all a teensy bit samey (usually square).

So if the graphics had been more interesting and the controls a little easier this would have been a fine game.

For a new software house, Rasputin seems to be making a fair old name for itself. Its first release, Jetstrike, seems to have shifted more units than anyone every expected, and now it is entering the puzzle arena with Clockwiser, a simple game of block arranging that is so simple, it is brilliant.

The game works like this: you are shown a screen split directly down the middle. On the left-hand side are your blocks scattered about, and on the right is a layout, showing you how your blocks should end up. As you have probably guessed you have to make both sides match.

To do this, and this is the really clever part, you have to select groups of blocks by dragging a box around them, and then slide the group clockwise or anticlockwise. Different blocks have different effects, while others are affected by gravity and then even others can't be moved or destroyed.

To begin with, the moves you need to make are few and relatively simple, but as the game progresses, things get very hard indeed, until you reach the later of the 100 levels, and things get downright impossible.

That is about it. Like most successful puzzle games, the premise is a very basic one, but that isn't to say that all basic premises make for good games. In fact, the first couple of times you play Clockwiser, the actual gameplay seems too simple to be entertaining. It is only after you put the game down for a bit and start seeing the patterns in your head that you realise you have been hooked.

It may not be packed with variety, but then neither was Tetris. The game has been very nicely implemented, with colourful visuals, smooth animations and a very cute intro animation. There is not really a lot to fault with Clockwiser. If you like puzzle games, you will love this.