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Ah, the things we'll do for love, eh? Leap postboxes, shoot rampaging kangaroos, cross vanishing bridges, duck under the claws of lethal crabs... the list goes on and on in Kissin' Kousins, a little platform game from English Software.

The aim is simple - reach your girlfriend (or "kousin" I suppose) who is patiently waiting in the next village. You control a debonair (not really) chap, complete with green hat, who sort of scurries rather than runs, and you have a gun filled with an infinite supply of ammo. You start off with five obstacles to jump, including a pair of bins on which the lids rise and fall and you must cross nine screens in total to reach your mate.

The game gives the illusion of using all the screen's real estate by having a succession of background pictures scroll from right-to-left each time you arrive at the extreme right of a screen. There are shops, buildings, a wooded area and finally your girlfriend's village, all of them looking quite quaint. In terms of gaming though, you are actually confined to a strip of screen that is only a few pixels high. That's not a particular disadvantage; it works well in fact. Just don't go expecting a type of graphic adventure where you can go in and out of the background. This is purely a platform game, but with just one long single platform to run along.

One of the biggest challenges of Kissin' Kousins is in the timing of your jumps. They don't have to be absolutely pixel-perfect, but they do have to be accurate enough that none of your body comes into contact with any of the obstructions that litter your path. Whenever you get it wrong there's a grating noise and your man is removed from the screen line-by-line. The stationary objects present little problem, but when you reach the screens that feature moving worms and bugs, you'll need to learn their exact movement patterns and then time your run-and-jump wisely enough to clear them.

The other big challenges come from the aeroplanes, crabs and kangaroos that pervade certain screens. All are slightly different but all take quite a bit of skill to avoid. The aeroplane appears the very top of the screen, flying back and forth dropping bombs. The crab attacks in the wooded area, flying through the air just above your head. The kangaroo appears in the starting town and the end village and can be avoided in two ways. Firstly, by shooting it. Secondly, by ducking underneath it as it bounces toward you. The first technique also works for the crab, but your bullet will only strike it if you manage to shoot whilst in mid-air.

All of these elements add up to a game that, despite the low number of screens, is difficult enough to tax most gamers. You have five lives to try and reach your darling, but sadly the game doesn't prevent kangaroos and crabs from appearing on-screen even when you're about to exit it. The result can often be a frustrating loss of a life just when you were about to proceed to the next screen!

And yet, despite all the challenges, I have a sneaking regard for this cartoony-looking, almost "other worldly"-looking game. It impresses through its constantly changing locations, the animated nasties, and the fact that each screen puts up a different challenge, even if most of them are simply a mixture of said animated nasties and stationary obstructions. It's all so pretty-looking that I tend to forgive its numerous shortcomings and just have another go anyway.

Of course, that may well not be because the game is particularly good (and it's certainly not very fair!) but because I played it a lot in my youth and it sparks off a great deal of nostalgia. Someone coming to this for the first time today would find it very clunky to play - there's not a lot of room to manoeuvre between obstructions, some of the things you have to do, i.e. running over disappearing bridges, demand both pixel-perfect positioning and to-the-second timing, and whenever you lose your last life you're sent all the way back to the beginning again. If you do manage to reach your bride-to-be, you just get exactly the same animation that appears in the intro anyway, which feels pretty anti-climatic.

Kissin' Kousins isn't too hard to find; it was English Software's most popular title back in the day and with many of the same reservations mentioned above, the magazines nevertheless loved it. On cassette, it usually sells for between £6-£10. It's also compatible with a First Byte joystick interface, if you have one to plug into the back of the real machine.