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This one's really going to have you on the edge of your seat. Can you, clean-cut Cliff Hanger, put paid to two-gun-totin' El Bandito? Can you even figure out how to do it?

Cliff Hanger is the first of what may be a new breed of game - the arcade cartoon. You find yourself in one of three locations with certain tasks to perform but the action proceeds in hilarious cartoon style.

Our hero finds himself on a cliff. Out of the distance, down the dusty desert road, the hairy bandit() comes, guns blazing. When he disappears in the dip of the road before coming into murdermg distance, what do you do with the rocks, see-saws, canons, boomerangs or anvils that might by lying around?

To give you some help, each of the game's screens has a title, which gives a clue to the action, 'The Cannon' is fairly straightforward on the easiest of the three levels - just light it and watch the cannonball flatten the baddy.

But here Cliff encounters another of the game's difficulties: timing your moves correctly is essential. At the lowest level, Cliff lives to fight another day if he misses, but later on the punishment for failure can be savage.

'The See-saw' on the lowest level is easy to figure out. But what do you do on 'The See-saw's Revenge'? I'm not going to tell you. And as for 'Confused You Will Be', featuring a see-saw an a trampoline... well, only players with an IQ over 250 need apply.

Although the number of objects in Cliff Hanger is quite limited, they are combined in such ingenious and fiendish ways that the game does not become at all repetitive.

Added to this, the graphics and animation are excellent and the game has wonderful comic touches which will see you through your many failures.

Why didn't anyone think of this before? Building zany cartoon-style action into a game is a brilliant idea and this one kept me chuckling for ages.

There are dozens of delightful touches. If you move off the edge of the cliff, you just keep walking on thin air, then suddenly look down and... Crash! A man-shaped hole is left in the ground. Or you throw a boomerang at the bandit, miss, and... Slice! It zooms back round taking your own head off. It's great!

Some of the ways of nobbling the bandit are amazingly complex. But even once you've 'solved' the 50 screens, you'll still want to play because the timing presents a challenge, and anyway - it's such a good laugh!

What I liked most about this game, was good old Cliff Hanger, your resident hero. This little guy either manages to look totally confused or manically suicidal when failing to kill his opponents. In fact, the way that both characters act as if in a cartoon is superb.

I must admit, I barely ever killed the bandit, but it was fun just working out how to do each screen, and then remembering how to do it, since some of them are pretty fatal to both parties.

All my dreams have come true. I can now drop rocks and one-ton weights on my worst enemies and even chop their heads off with a boomerang.

Every success brings a great feeling of satisfaction as your character hops up and down in delight. This satisfaction is partly because it's so difficult trying to move around and time your attacks.