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Cold-blooded reptiles seem to be all the rage ever since those Turtles. So, here come the Twins, Punk and Funk, with their kickin', chillin' brand of hipness. But are they cool enough to impress that warm-blooded mammal, James Leach?

Despite all the radness built into Cool Croc Twins, the plot is pretty much the same sort of thing you've seen about 1.3 million times before. The two main characters are both in love with the same girl, called, for some reason, Daisy Crocette. Well, she's not really a girl, more of a hideous swamp-dwelling reptile with rotting meat stuck in her teeth and little birds pecking away at her cracked, scaly skin. For the purposes of cuteness, though, we'll call her a girl.

But Punk and Funk, our heroes, love her dearly. And the only way they seem to be able to win her heart is by switching on lots of weird lights arranged into banks of three. Of course.

Right. There are ten worlds, each with six levels (making, erm, 60 screens in total. A goodly number, I trust you'll agree). Each level is just one screen large, and has its own particular combination of platforms, lights, blocks and baddies. Each level within a world has the same background, and the backgrounds change only when you enter a new world. Don't worry, it's not that confusing and you won't to expected to know this for an exam.

What the crocs have to do is rush around the screen - up the sides or even upside down if they like - and bounce on the lights. Every time they hit a light, one of its three bars is illuminated; they have to bounce on each light three times to get the whole thing blazing.

But this is where the baddies step in. As well as chasing you around the screen, they occasionally visit the lights themselves and switch off the ones you've just turned on. Annoying? Yep, as annoying as having a next-door neighbour who plays Meatloaf at three in the morning and encourages his four Alsatians to bark along to the music into a set of amplifiers pushed right up against your wall.

Luckily you can kill the baddies. How? Simply by jumping on them. If you catch them in mid-air you get 1,000 points and they disappear (only to re-emerge a few seconds later, though).

So as well as switching on all the lights, you've got to avoid the baddies, while following them and making sure you switch on all the lights they turn off. You also have to choose carefully when to jump on the baddies to get loads more points and remove them from the arena for a few valuable seconds. If you time it right, you can then rush around putting all the lights back onto try to finish the level before they return to do more damage.

It's a lot for one crocodile to manage. Luckily there are two of them. Or rather not very luckily, because the fiendish programmers have set the game up so that each croc has to switch on every light, which doubles the amount of work that has to be done. What a depressing thought.

But once you get the hang of it, Cool Croc Twins becomes a very enjoyable game to play. Oh sure, it's frantic, and you get so annoyed by the nasties who undo all your work that you have to stuff old socks in your mouth to stifle the screams, but this is all part of the fun (honestly).

It's dead tricky, because if you run along the bottom of the screen, up one of the walls and, across the top, you've got to get used to the fact that you may still be pushing the joystick right, but because you're upside-down, you're actually travelling left the controls are effectively reversed. The same goes for the platforms which the crocs can also hang upside-down from, so you need to be careful which way you yank your joystick.

Bouncing around the screen is fun. To make the crocs bounce you just hit your fire button: if you keep it held down you can't be killed, because if a baddie hits you when you're in the air, he dies. Unfortunately you can't move around when you're bouncing so you do have to risk travelling around the edges of the playing area quite a bit.

To add to the general confusion, on the later levels there are hidden lights that are extremely difficult to locate. Also, on many of the screens there are loads of blocks that have various effects depending on what type they are. Want to know more about them? Then cast your orbs on the panel below describing them in gorgeous, luscious detail.

The graphics are very stylish. Someone has given the look of the whole thing a lot of thought. At the beginning, there's an intro featuring the three characters - Punk, Funk and Daisy. They wobble on to the screen and do silly things for a while, like break-dancing, waving their baseball caps and, silliest of all, producing love-hearts out of the tops of their heads for Daisy.

The sprites in the game itself are a little too small to see clearly, which is a pity. But they're well animated, and many of the incidental creatures that rush on to the screen are brilliant. Between the levels there are all sorts of trendy pics of the crocs doing various interesting things. The best one has to be when you lose the game and you see your crestfallen croc blubbing his eyes out and holding a six-shooter to his head. It's all very emotional.

Working out how to get to some of the lights on later levels is a major headache. It's not made any easier by the fact that some of the platforms you need to jump on are almost invisible against the detailed backgrounds. This might be a deliberate feature, but it really doesn't improve things.

Overall, it's a lot of fun. There's certainly enough here to keep you playing for absolutely ages. But I found that I got frustrated with Cool Croc Twins. Not being able to see many of the platforms is annoying, as is the rate at which the baddies switch off the lights on later levels. It's a case of running as fast as you can just to stand still. So for me, it doesn't have the storming addictiveness I look for. But it's still a good game, and if you like a challenge, you'll find a huge one here.

1. You can't see some platforms, making play a little haphazard.
2. The levels are all pretty similar.

1. 60 levels means that you're not going to finish this one in a hurry.
2. Loads of different blocks for you to learn how to use.
3. Excellent backgrounds.
4. The two-player game requires a lot of teamwork.
5. Peripheral graphics are smart and dead cartoony.
6. The soundtrack is very Punky and Funky (this means I think it's jolly good).
7. Smooth and quick enough for die-hard arcaders.
8. Code system makes repeated play fun.