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"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." And, in this case, what you've gotta do is mosey on down to the old Spectrum and make peace with them thar injuns (Well, it makes a change from blowing their brains out, doesn't it?).

You're the Sheriff of the town of Kane, and in order to make peace with the locals you have four tasks to complete. The first is to shoot down some birds so that you can trade with the indians for peace tokens. In this part of the game the screen shows a small cowboy figure at the bottom of the screen with mountains in the background and birds flying overhead.

Using the keyboard or joystick you move a sight around the screen and attempt to shoot the birds down with your bow and arrow. You've got a limited supply of arrows, and with the birds being a moving target, you've got to have a good sense of timing to get a decent amount of tokens. You need a token to move onto the next stage, and additional tokens give you extra lives in the later stages.

Once you've demolished the local bird population, you hop on your horse and ride across the prairie back to Kane. But along the way you've got to make sure that your old hoss doesn't go stumbling over any rocks or bushes or else you'll be out of the saddle and out of the game.

Once you've made it back to town you still don't get to rest as all the bad guys around have decided to take a pot shot at you. They're all hidden in doorways and around corners of the town's buildings, but every now and then they'll stick their heads up just long enough for you to get your sight on them and show who's boss.

After cleaning up the town, it's back onto the horse for a race against the train as you try to overtake and stop it. Again you've got to jump over all the bushes and rocks, but this time there are small trees thrown in as well and some of the obstacles are so close together that you'll need a terrific sense of timing to make it past them all.

When I first saw Kane I thought that it looked pretty primitive - like a magazine listing in fact - but once I'd given it a couple of goes it turned out to be fairly good. It is a very simple, but the difficulty of the tasks has been well pitched so that you can get started easily but still need to practise in order to get anywhere. Going through the same four stages in their fixed order al the time could get boring, but sensibly there's a practice mode which allows you to choose any stage of the game and one of three difficulty levels. This allows you to get a bit of practice on all the different parts of the game and then, when you think you're ready, you can try to tackle the whole thing in one go.

Overall, Kane isn't going to set any new standards in games programming, and if it looks old-fashioned that's because it is, but it's enough fun to while away the odd rainy afternoon with and will probably appeal to younger computer owners who don't require state-of-the-art megagames.