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Cute! Console-esque! Platforms! Quite good! Etc! Will that do? Thought not. One day they'll let me get away with that, y'know. One day they'll realise that there's really nothing to be said about this kind of game that you can't instantly work out for yourself simply by looking at the pictures on the pages and the percentage box at the end. It's a cutesy platform game, in that style that we jokingly refer to as 'console-esque' for no other reason than consoles are the flavour of the month and if we make something sound like it could have come from Nintendo or Sega, you lot are much more likely to actually go out and buy it. The fact that 90% of real console games are actually crappy beat-'em-ups or scrolling blasters goes conveniently un-noticed. Truth of the matter is, games like this are about as 'computer-esque' as it's possible to get - from Miner 2049'er back in 1873 or whenever it was, platform leaping has been the staple diet of the computer gamer. These days, if you're an 8-bit computer owner, it's practically impossible to buy anything else. Maybe we should just call this sort of game 'Spectrum-esque', hmm?

But (as usual), I'm getting away from the point. I supposed you want me to talk about Doodlebug now. [Yes please! - Ed]

Doodlebug is subtitled Bug Bash II, which for those of you with short memories refers to a game reviewed in our PD column way back in issue six (three stars, if you're interested!). It's got next to nothing in common with that game, though, as Bug Bash was a simplistic and pretty dull scrolling shoot-'em-up, so forget I mentioned it. Or just try not to think about it. Actually, come to think about it, there was something I was wondering about the name. How much is there to be gained from associating what you're trying to push as a big, bright, sexy, 'console-esque' platform game with a frankly not-much-cop PD shoot-'em-up from about two years ago? (Bug Bash was a £15 'budget' game before it became a sort of PD thing, y'see.) It doesn't seem like particularly smart marketing to me. Then again, what would I know about it? But I'm digressing again.

The game is made up of five levels, each with three sub-levels and a big boss screen. The graphics, as befits a game allegedly set in the kingdom of Cartoonia, are cartoony and colourful and all that sort of stuff, and depict the usual kinds of worlds that are found in this kind of game - forests, icy wastes, creepy castles and so on. There's some rather nice parallax scrolling, lots of cutesy sprites, and plenty of incidental stuff that you can see for yourself in the screenshots. Soundwise, we're also in familiar territory, with bouncy little nursery-rhyme tunes and twinkly effects, and it's all very pleasant.

In the gameplay department though, there's a distinct suggestion of some new stuff. While the majority of the game is spent running around picking up treasures and killing baddies by jumping on their heads, Doodlebug has a novel theme at its centre. By selecting one of five icons along the bottom of the screen (by the convenient method of simply pulling down on the joystick to cycle through the list), the game's eponymous hero can throw out one of five different colours of magic pencil (assuming he's collected some, that is).

The pencils will kill baddies if they hit them, but more importantly, if their flight path is uninterrupted they'll swiftly draw one of four useful devices that Doodlebug can use to help him on his quest. An umbrella saves him from death by long fall (yes, after a long absence the Platform Game Where You Can Die By Falling A Long Way is back in vogue), a balloon gives him a quick lift past some tricky obstacle or other, a magic potion renders him completely invulnerably and a clock stops the time limit from counting down for a while. The fifth pencil (not actually a pencil at all, but an eraser) fulfils a smart-bomb function. What these little doobries do is not so much make your life easier (It's possible, as far as I can tell, to complete the game without using any of them) but add a neat extra element to the gameplay which gives you a bit more to think about than where the next baddie to jump on is coming from.

It's a double-edged sword, of course - they also tempt you to venture into dangerous places where you'd otherwise not go in search of that useful extra smart bomb - but then that's part of the appeal of all great games, the balance between risk and reward, the gambling on your own skills.

So there you go. Everything you need to know about Doodlebug that you hadn't already ascertained for yourself from playing the demo that's impossibly handily sellotaped to the front of this very magazine. Except, maybe, that while later levels do get nastier (more baddies, needing more hits to kill and so on), they never really get viciously nasty or horrendously long, so if you're a real gaming hero you might get through this a bit quicker than you'd expect.

That said, I reckon the difficulty is going to prove just about right for most average players, so if that sounds like you and you're a bit fed up of games that you never get to see the end of, this might be just what you've always been waiting for. It's certainly enough fun to make it worth trying.

Uppers: It's cute, it's playable, and the control system works a lot better than you might expect it to. The pencil power-up concept is really sweet too, and there are lots of nice touches, like the various vehicles you can buy from other characters to aid your progress.

Downers: It's possibly going to be a bit on the short side for dedicated platform fanatics, and the loading gaps between major levels are pretty massive. Dying when you fall a long(ish) way seems ridiculously out-of-date these days.

Oh yeah, and I hate slippy-slidey inertia-heavy 'ice-world' levels - they're not big or hard or clever, they're really obvious and lazy and I'm completely sick of them. There, I've said it.

It's not really up there with Zool and The Addams Family, but it's not that far behind either. It reminds me of Fire And Ice, and it's good fun in a not-at-all-dissimilar sort of way.