You must guide Rockman, or Boris, depending on whether you read the inlay or the screen, through ten caverns in the hunt for precious diamonds. No prizes for guessing you are playing a Boulderdash rip-off.
The caverns are made up of hundreds of boulders perched precariously on top of one another and the diamonds are to be found nestling in between.
After what seems like an age, but is probably about five seconds, the pink square transforms itself into Rockman proper. And what a sorry sight he is.
There is a very slight delay between moving the joystick and Rockman actually going anywhere. This can be crucial when the slightest wrong move can result in an avalanche of boulders falling on your head. There's nothing more frustrating than losing lives because of someone's bad programming rather than your own lack of skill.
While we're on the subject of poor programming there's another thing. Most maze games that feature scrollerama - i.e. the scenery scrolling behind as you move around - keep your man in the middle of the screen so that you can see what's going on all around. Not so Rockman. He moves up to within about half an inch or so of the screen edge, then things start to scroll. This is completely and utterly hopeless. Unless you progress one tediously slow step at a time you don't know what's about to come at you from the edges of the screen.
Quite honestly I didn't discover any of this because the game proved so boring and frustrating on level one I couldn't bring myself to go any further. This game has so many other drawbacks that I find it hard to see it being well liked by anyone.