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This game has much in common with the ever popular Frogger. The principle is the same although the graphics and the atmosphere are new.

With Frogger, you had to hop the frog over a multi-lane highway and across a stream to home. Steeple Jack simplifies all that without losing any of Frogger's addictive qualities.

There are a number of vertical ladders on the screen. Your job is to hop your man (represented by a grimacing head) from ladder to ladder, avoiding the gaps which appear in the ladders from time to time.

The only way to avoid a gap is to leap on to an adjacent ladder, assuming it hasn't got a gap in roughly the same position.

Leaping is achieved by pushing the joystick to left or right and pressing the fire button. Holding the joystick down in either direction while repeating the fire button will leap the steeplejack rapidly from ladder to ladder.

To make the task a little more difficult, there is also a pink ghost who floats from bottom left to the mid-right hand side of the screen.

Touching or hitting any of these causes your man to split in half and costs you a life.

At the bottom, left edge of the screen a scoreboard keeps track of how far you have managed to climb. I managed 177 meters, which is probably not great.

There are all sorts of problems preventing a high score, most of them deliberate.

For a start, although the gaps in the ladders are usually staggered, they tend, when you least expect it, to coincide on three or four ladders.

You can only leap your steeplejack successfully from one ladder to another.

While you are still more than one and a half rungs from a gap (the brief blurb on the cassette cover doesn't tell you this - it's something you have to discover for yourself). The screen scrolls downwards all the time, so the mere act of leaping costs you about two rungs.

You have some control over the speed with which the ladders scroll down the screen. Pulling the joystick towards you allows you to climb down the screen faster than the ladder is descending but only as far as the foot of the screen.

You can't outrun a falling elephant (there's a moral in that somewhere) by going down a ladder, but it is useful sometimes since it can give you a chance to leap to another ladder before you hit the gap in the one you are currently on.

What makes this game work is that you are constantly fooled into believing that its strategic dimension is larger than the element of chance that really fuels it.

Like most tapes for the Atari, the loading is slow but reliable. As usual, the instructions are minimal and are written on the cassette wrapper, but they are adequate for the job.

A game I rather enjoyed.