Any parent with younger children will have come across SpongeBob SquarePants, a very silly and quite funny cartoon with massive merchandising potential.

Since decent PC software for children is scarce, we though we'd give this a go and use a six-year-old as a guinea pig. As the age rating was a confident '3+', this seemed to be a fair expectation, especially since the six-year-old in question is quite capable of opening her favourite BBC Web site herself and playing a number of Flash-based games, as well as being quite proficient in Adobe Photoshop, choosing brushes, colours, etc.

Supplied on a CD in a DVD box, this game runs on Windows Millenium Edition upwards and requires a 733MHz processor with 128MB RAM and 800MB of free hard drive space. The game apparently has quite a substantial storyline. You are to guide SpongeBob through his home, Bikini Bottom, to save a new episode from going horribly wrong as nobody shows up for the casting call.

In fact there are several smaller games as part of the same installation, which is presumably what justifies the 3+ age rating, since most of the game was a little beyond our six-year-old tester.

Among the smaller 'mini' games are 'De Fence', which was incredibly difficult to play due to really poor mouse responsiveness (an issue with many of the games), Checkers, which was probably more fun for the grown-ups, and several others.

Two of these smaller games found favour with our tester; 'Mart Madness', and 'Dirty Bubble Trouble', which were liked because the premise was simple and the characters were easy to control. Another game, 'It's a Drag', lived up to it's name, causing us to hunt around for a way to quit the game. We're not sure the 'Esc' key is an obvious choice for a six-year-old.

After trying these smaller games, we thought the main role-playing game must be where much of the development effort went, but we were disappointed. Graphics weren't much better than the poor efforts in the mini games and apparently the game was unfinished. An audio commentary accompanied subtitles, which was necessary for our tester who is still learning to read. The problem was that many of the audio clips just didn't play, and our tester was pronouncing herself bored before the game crashed in the second scene.

Given the large installed size of 800MB, we were anticipating nice modern graphics and smooth game play. Unfortunately, we were disappointed. Additionally, the introductory screens, credits and other obstacles before you even arrive at the main menu screen went on too long, and general navigation and usability was poor.

Although one or two of the smaller games got the seal of approval from our six-year-old tester, we reckon you're better off putting the money towards a DVD compilation of the TV series. Overall this publication was dismissed as 'boring'.