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The idea behind Linel's series of Herbie Stone games, as if you hadn't already guessed, is to breathe new life into ageing classic game concepts. The first, Crack! was a fair attempt at Breakout that didn't make much of an impact due to Arkanoid taking all the limelight. This time, the game that's examined and updated with a prehistoric flavour is Atari's Dig Dug.

Herbie's task is to rid each underground screen of the enemy patrollers. When he comes across a monster, he produces a foot pump, which inflates through several sizes until it eventually explodes (in the best possible taste of course).

Following in the tradition of Crack!, a cute attract sequence begins the game. Herbie and his pals dash on screen and chisel the game title onto a rockface. Due to force of habit though, they foul up and write Crack! instead of Dugger. "Wait, that's wrong!" says a sampled voice and a huge Monty Python-style hand appears to point out Herbie's mistake, which he then corrects. Titter...

Rather than spending his time pumping up the volume, Herbie can earn bonus points by tunnelling under special rocks. If this action is timed correctly, the ground under the rock gives way and it falls onto the head of an unsuspecting enemy.

Hang around too long and the monsters mutate into shimmering entities that float through the earth and home-in on Herbie. A speedy Herbie can catch and pump them as they transform back to their normal shape.

Dugger's aesthetic advantage over its parent is the suitably prehistoric backdrops. Fossils, varying rock patterns, and the bones of long-dead dinosaurs all help to jolly up the graphics, but there's no animation or interaction in the backdrops.

Although there is a lot of potential for a game in the Dig Dug or Mr. Do vein, Dugger fails to realise it, as there haven't been enough enhancements made to the gameplay. There are no extra weapons to collect, no bonus levels and very little variation from screen to screen.

Instead, the programmers have opted to just touch up the background graphics, add a smart byte-waiting opening sequence... and leave it at that.

The sprites are none-too-impressive (those in the original Atari console game were larger and better defined!) which can only be put down to laziness. The final nail in the coffin is the repetitive gameplay, which seems to consist of killing two or three nasties before progressing to the next, all-too-similar, screen - a problem which never afflicted the original at all.

Herbie has failed to impress this time, but hopefully he'll be third time lucky with perhaps a stone-age Stargate or prehistoric Pac-Man. Then again, perhaps not.

There's very little to separate this version from its Amiga counterpart, so therefore each of the ratings applies equally here. The price is also identical.