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The year is 1984 and Los Angeles is preparing for the Summer Olympics. But, while all the athletes are completing their final training and the dignitaries are preparing their speeches, something strange is happening out on the streets.

Not to be outdone, the stray cat population of LA are planning their own Cat Olympics.

Bat Cat features four games, each interlinked with a city screen, in which you must get from one venue to the next, perferably without being run over. Each event must be completed within a certain time limit and bonus points are awarded for excellence. You have unlimited lives (whoever said a cat had only nine lives?) but suffer a time penalty you lose one.

Event one is the obstacle course, featuring a number of graphically impressive side-on views of climbing frames, walls, trampolines and swings. Each screen must be negotiated as quickly as possible without falling off the frame, hitting any of the walls, putting a paw into the water, or banging your head. In the last screen, you have to build up enough momentum on the swing to catch a key hanging from a street lamp.

The second event takes place in the swimming pool where two spring-mounted bumpers are sliding backwards and forwards in the water. All you have to do is gather enough momentum to jump from one bumper to the other, at the same time punching a geometrical shape, displayed on the overhead electronic scoreboard. It sounds easy, but the joystick control makes this event too hard and very frustrating, although, once again, the graphics and digitised sounds are great.

Event three finds you where you belong: in the sewers beneath the city. Here you must make your way through a number of unsavoury screens, infested with rats and other 'notorious creatures' as the manual describes them.

Bad Cat is an imaginative package which scores highly in the sound and graphics departments but is sometimes a little frustrating to play because of the rather bewildering set of joystick controls used in different parts of the game.

Apart from this one niggle, Bad Cat is entertaining and, in parts, quite challenging.