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Occasionally your humble scribe will awake with a start, hackles bristling and digits trembling because his mind has become cluttered with ladders. It's an alarming occurrence at the best of times. The condition has become affectionately known as 'Miner Madness' and is something of an occupational hazard, understandable when you consider the unstoppable horde of Miner 2049er clones currently clogging up the software scene. With barely a fistful of pixels to distinguish between them they've become the stuff of reviewer's nightmares (I fear the day might soon come when I'm asked to look at nothing but climbing games)!

Ledgeman is a typical offering. The title character perambulates about the screen attempting to collect treasure for no other reason that to make it to the next sheet. A baffling array of levels, ladders and lurgies of course exist to thwart him. So much for the plot.

Unfortunately, the various adversaries and obstacles in this clone are not particularly inventive and thus the addiction level is pretty meagre. You're even given an escape clause that enables you to enter at any level. This effectively removes any inventive that you might have had for playing. By way of compensation the graphics are nice, the animation smooth and the sound FX neat.

The only puzzling aspect of Ledgeman is in the title. Why didn't Software Projects just tag it as another Miner Willy adventure? It seems the obvious thing to do.