RUMBLE ROSES: Publisher: Konami. Platform: PS2. price: £39.99. Family friendly? Too much naked flesh for the little ones.

I'VE always had my suspicions about American wrestling. Of course, I knew all the bouts were scripted and that as a "sport", it was just a ritzy charade, but what really bothered me was the way it mixes bone-crunching spectacle with FHM-style soft porn. Rumble Roses takes this idea to its ultimate extreme in the name of "adult" entertainment.

All the women in Konami's latest wrestling extravaganza are generously proportioned, beautiful looking and wear the kind of gear usually found only by the more adventurous couples on the top shelf at Ann Summers. This is a 15-year-old adolescent's wet dream turned into a video game.

The last time someone tried to do something similar (remember BMX XXX?) the game turned out to be a trashy and rather tedious affair where naked flesh took precedence over gaming enjoyment. Rumble Roses has been produced by the same team responsible for the Smackdown wrestling series so, in this case, at least the brains behind the bottoms have a proven gaming track record.

Unfortunately, the prospect of creating so many good-looking ladies seems to have had a rather detrimental effect on the game as a whole. For while Rumble Roses certainly looks good, the game underneath all the boobs and bums is rather shallow.

Choice wise, there's the (rather aptly named) exhibition mode where you pick a wrestler and challenge a pal or the PS2 to a bit of rough 'n' tumble. There's also a story mode and the controversial mud-wrestling mode, where your semi-naked avatars do battle in what looks like a vat of custard.

This is fun (in a puerile, post-pub drinking session kind of way) for a while but winning a bout is more often down to random button bashing than any kind of skill or thought.

The camera, too, seems to be more concerned with zooming in on heaving breasts or getting the best knicker shot than it is with covering the action - leading to disorientation and frustration.

I'm no prude, and it's not a completely bad game, but after playing my way through Rumble Roses I felt a little bit grubby.

Maybe it's because Rumble Roses isn't really aimed at a grown man my age - but then the 16+ certificate leads me to suspect that the game's core audience won't be old enough to play it anyway.

It's certainly a "lads' game" and not the sort of software to get a doubtful girlfriend interested in your PS2 collection.

If you really insist on ogling pictures of scantily clad lovelies, forty quid would buy a 12-month subscription to FHM with change to spare.

ABILITY OFFICE: Format: PC, DVD. Price: £49.99. Publisher: Ability Software.

MICROSOFT'S Office package has become so powerful that it is the de facto standard for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation tools and databases. Ditto Adobe Photoshop for image manipulation.

Both of these packages are superbly capable but their high price (running into hundreds of pounds) makes them unattainable for the majority of PC users.

There are alternatives from Microsoft and Adobe but I find MS Works an unsatisfactory mix of a terrific word processor with a dumbed down spreadsheet/database, and Photoshop Elements still costs almost a hundred quid.

So what to do? You could always go the open source route and use something like Openoffice or the Gimp but, by their very nature, these free packages are a bit rough around the edges.

Alternatively, you could buy a cheaper "compatible" suite from a company like Ability Software that gives you 90 per cent of the functionality at ten per cent of the cost.

Ability Office has been around for a while now - long enough to mature into a stable and cost-efficient suite of productivity programs. All the office apps are as close to their Microsoft equivalent as the copyright lawyers would allow. If you use Word, Excel or Powerpoint at work you will have no problems adapting to their Ability counterparts on your PC at home. Even better, you can open MS Office files and save them in their original format - Ability Office integrates seamlessly.

Ability Photopaint looks like an earlier version of Photoshop (say version 5.0 or 6.0) and has a pretty powerful set of image tools. This extends to extensive use of layers and some decent drawing tools (although the Pro version of Ability also throws in a fully-fledged art package called Ability Draw). The Photoalbum is a useful search and batch conversion tool.

Of course the killer question is: Does it feel like second best?

I've been using it at home for a few days and I can honestly say it doesn't. I miss a few of Photoshop's more powerful tools but Photopaint has everything Photoshop Elements has, plus over 90 free filter effects (you can use PS plug ins as well). The word processor and the spreadsheet are virtually indistinguishable from Word and Excel, and while the database is no MS Access, it does the job far better than the program you get in MS Works. And all this from a suite that takes up less than 100MB on your hard disk and requires just 64MB to run successfully.

If your version of Office is getting a bit long in the tooth and you want to upgrade without spending a fortune, then give Ability a go.

Published: 04/03/2005