If you've ever pondered what you would get if you cross Irem's 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol with Rainbow Arts' The Great Giana Sisters (which is actually a very good rip-off of the popular Super Mario Brothers by Nintendo) then the answer can be found in Rallybug. This is yet another innovative game from the mind of Jonathan Cauldwell, which comes in the form of a free tape image for use on all good Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulators.

Actually, there is a third element to this game as well, being a six-letter hangman mini-game. In each level, lettered tokens will need to be hoarded, and on completion, you get to guess at the mystery word, but you can only use the letters that you have managed to attain so far. Once you've completed the word, your vehicle is refuelled, and with each incorrect letter, a small amount of petrol is lost, not good in the current climate of high oil prices. Once your car is completely drained, a life is lost. Sounds easy enough then, but for the time limit (the same for each level), and that trying to collect all of the lettered tokens will obviously run down the clock.

This production in many ways reminds me of another game by Jonathan - Loco Bingo. In a similar fashion to the Chuffin' Bingo platformer, Rallybug requires an element of good fortune to progress. For instance, with the letters appearing at random, you may get two of the letter Z in a row - hardly the most useful of the lot!

Also, you may have guessed that the word is 'RANCID' and require an A to refuel, but will not have collected one yet and, to make things worse, one doesn't appear on the next level either, so a life in lost, but not due to lack of skill on the part of the player. Then the order in which each stage is set doesn't entirely suit the difficulty curve (another slight fault with Loco Bingo), but thankfully you are eased in quite nicely.

The three elements to the gameplay would make a great 'edutainment' game, again another parallel with the aforementioned Bingo game. Whilst that helps to improve mental arithmetic, Rallybug has a diverse enough range of six-letter words to guess at to improve your word visualisation and spelling; Sir Clive Sinclair would certainly approve. But the hangman element can be disabled, thus taking out the refuelling part of the game, and replacing the lettered tokens with simple flags. This makes progression a bit easier. There is no password system included to skip those earlier levels, but thankfully this doesn't distract too much.

I prefer the word-guessing version, rather than simple flag collecting, the latter being slightly easier due to taking the elements of luck out of the proceedings. The title music is very good and also very typical of the composer, Yerzmyey, who has written musical scores for other games by Jonathan, most notably Rough Justice and Egghead Entertains.

In-game, scrolling is smooth as you like, with nicely animated graphics, and sharp collision detection. Whilst this is probably not the very best scrolling platform game to appear on the 8-bit monolith, it is one that I found has grown on me gradually - yet another solid and playable JC production, with the originality that we have come to expect. Download it now!

A good quality production with a mix of game mechanics to keep you interested.