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Aarrrggghhh! That's the sound of me screaming at having brought home what looked like a brand new, stonking conversion of Toki for the Spectrum, only to find that it's a sodding La Churrera MK2 job with all the finicky pixel-perfect positioning rubbish I've come to expect from anything built with this framework.

I don't know why they do this to us... Take the characters from a classic game that we all loved in our youth and transplant them into something, well, the best word I can use to explain it is mediocre. Pat Morita team has even vandalised the story. In the original Toki, the ape you control was formerly human, and only became chimp because an evil wizard had designs on Toki's girlfriend, kidnapped her and cast a spell on Toki. In Tokimal, the 'girlfriend' has, we are informed, run off with a "thug monkey". Yes, presumably of her own free will. So, great news ladies and gentlemen, in Tokimal you get to play a first... a simp chimp, trekking lovelorn after a female who has shacked up with Chad. Well, it's nice that Pat Morita has moved with the times, but it's hardly a tempting premise.

On to the game itself then. And it's a monochrome platformer which, at time of writing, is only available if you pay £2.99 for a digital download of it. You actually get two versions of the game for your money - the 'arcade' version and the 'extended' version, terms that are fairly self-explanatory. The 'extended' version has an additional number of levels, although, even if you opt to play the shorter 'arcade' version, you're going to need a hell of a lot of perseverance to get through even the first couple of screens. And that's not because Tokimal is hard, it's just so damn fiddly.

Firstly, although it's colourful and nicely laid out, it's hard to see important things like moving nasties and obstructions. Pat Morita have designed the game in such a way that it retains some of the backgrounds of the original, right down to tiled cave walls, clouds and Romanesque architecture. The trouble is that the main Toki sprite is only about 14 x 14 CHR$. Whilst he's easy to pick out against a plain cyan background like sky, he's very difficult to see against mosaic patterns in caverns. Due to the limitations of La Churrera, when he stands in front of anything coloured (like grass, for example), he becomes completely transparent. The same is true for all of the patrolling nasties. Although they might look and behave like the original Toki characters, they're just far smaller and more difficult to see.

What was so good about the original Toki was its large, cartoon-like sprites, and its very colourful, scrolling screens. Tokimal does its best, but a flick-screen, small sprite, mostly-monochrome-with-colour-bleed just doesn't measure up to the original in any way. And, as if that's not depressing enough, getting through a screen can take ages! To jump from platform to platform, for example, which is easy in the original Toki, is incredibly vexing here. Your ape needs to almost walk into the air Wile E. Coyote-style before you press the jump key if you want to safely leap from one platform to another. And if you die, you're sent back several screens. Couldn't the programmer at least have reincarnated you in the same place?

As you can probably tell, I'm bitterly disappointed with Tokimal. It's hard to believe that this originates from the same people who gave us Gimmick! Yumetaro Odyssey and Ninjakul In The Auic Temple, which are also La Churrera-built games with a similar scale/ambition. The question is how can I consider those games to be pretty good, but think Tokimal is dire. And the answer is that Tokimal should never have been built on La Churrera. If you're going to do a Spectrum version of Toki, you've got to really go the whole hog, with smooth-scrolling levels, big, multi-coloured sprites, and even stick in that animated intro with the sneaky nipple-slips. Essentially, that's what I thought I'd be getting when I stumped up my cash for this. The only thing it really gets right is the music, which genuinely sounds like that of the original. Without it, I'd be rating this even lower.

In summary then, steer clear of this. Play the original Toki on the Amiga, the Atari Lynx or even the C64. Really, I haven't been so disappointed with a Spectrum game since World Cup Carnival!