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Did you know The Flintstones cartoon was still quite big in the Eighties? Yes, every night at half past five the family would be sitting through another wafer-thin plot and failing to understand why the producers had dubbed canned laughter after every humorless interchange between its characters. I suspect that Caveman Capers owes a lot to the success of that show, firstly, because it includes the same sort of "comedic" mixture of prehistoric man with jurassic era beasties. And, secondly, because it seems every publisher in the world wanted to release Caveman Capers. Icon, Audiogenic and Alternative all published it as a standalone release, and as for the number of compilations it appeared on, well I for one have lost count.

The basic premise of the game is to cruise on-board a supersonic speed turtle without falling over. Your name is Og, your pet turtle's name is Kickstart. The game is a horizontally scrolling landscape game, similar in a number of ways to the classic Moon Buggy. The ground is littered with holes to jump over, spikes to jump over, grapes to jump over and frogs to jump over. That would be quite a lot of jumping then.

As you might expect, graphics owe a nod to the "modern Stone Age family" with a long-necked brontosaurus and a flying pterodactyl, as well as Og himself, all rendered in pleasing cartoon style. As an early Acorn Electron game, expectations for graphics weren't high and the largeish caveman sprite was impressive in its day despite his complete lack of animation. Even jumping, which by now you've gathered there's a lot of, simply shifts Og in an arc of a few pixels - honestly, even Jet Set Willy's legs had a few frames of motion!

Despite the simple controls - left, right and jump - the game is almost ridiculously hard. The way each 'sheet' is traversed is as follows: the screen wipes down to a new location: either open air, or cavern. The bone at the top right of the screen then begins counting down a 15 second timer. Survive until time up and the 'sheet' is cleared and the process begins anew, with different nasties now vying to knock Og off his segway substitute. What raises the game in difficulty is the speed at which it all runs and the small areas of play that Og is often restricted to. When the pterodactyl is flying over his head for example, he can't jump without coming a cropper, so a quick move left or right is called for. But the ground still comes hurtling towards him at the same speed no matter how careful he may be in trying to avoid the birdy. Even by sheet four - 45 seconds into the game, you find yourself having to jump spikes relentlessly in an area only a few pixels wide. Stray even a pixel outside of it and you'll career straight into a smiley-faced dinosaur and fall flat on your face.

Whenever that happens, we do see some animation, specifically the turtle shell bouncing right off the screen whilst Og nurses his head. But - and this is a big but - there is some difference in playing Caveman Capers on a real machine or via emulation. Elkulator 0.6, on which I played Caveman Capers in advance of writing this review, just doesn't seem to be able to react to keypresses in the way the original machine did meaning that, although I'm an expert at the original game, I just couldn't get very far when playing it via my PC, and I gave up long before the end of the level where a short animation of Og crashing into a phonebox is displayed. Try as I might, I just couldn't reach it.

Whenever death occurs - which is, frankly, a fairly frequent occurence - there's a nice game over sequence where Og flies around and around the border of the screen until you 'press space'. Replace the 'press space' with 'insert coin' and Caveman Capers could have held its own as one of those early arcade games of the type that were so hard that you would pump all your 10ps into them for roughly five minutes' total play.

As it's such a simple game, there's not really a lot that can be said about Caveman Capers. It's playable without being addictive and, unless you're playing it on the original hardware, it's a touch frustrating. Why it got so many releases I just don't know but, if you want to grab a physical version of the cassette, you probably won't have to wait long before you spot at least one of the standalone releases available secondhand. As with all the Icon releases, the box and cover art seem to elevate this release a little higher than the smaller cased "re-releases" that came along later in time. However, even the Icon release was a bestseller, so it's not hard to track it down in all the usual places. Expect to pay a few quid.