Producer: C.R.L.
Memory Required: 16K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: BASIC & some machine code
Author: R. Rowlingson

The idea of this game is to pick your way across monster infested plains and through treacherous mountain ranges to reach the Pterodactyl's lair. There you must steal the monster's precious eggs and return safely home via mountains and plain, ensuring you are not eaten by a hungry beast on the way. You can only carry one egg at a time, and six are needed to complete a level.

So much for the cassette inlay blurb. The screen display doesn't look quite as thrilling. The lower half (which contains your safe home) has eight rows of various sized pre-historic monsters moving in alternate directions. The top half has four rows of blue coloured blocks with holes cut through. Above them are the six eggs, three to a side and the Pterodactyl on patrol above.

COMMENTS

Control keys: 1/2 = left/right, 0 = forwards/backwards
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: terrible
Use of colour: poor
Graphics: nice drawings, otherwise terrible
Sound: a few beeps, typical of a BASIC program
Lives: 3

It seems astonishing to me that the software house who can bring out a game of the sophistication of Omega Run can also offer rubbish like this. The graphics, which incidentally contain nicely drawn creatures, are small, unanimated and the whole thing looks extremely primitive. The control of your man in character size leaps is quite unacceptable by today's standards, and of course the keys are slow due to the BASIC. I'm afraid it doesn't even rate a rating in my opinion.

Caveman is a 'Frogger' type game where you must move your man up and down the screen avoiding the contrary flow of prehistoric traffic. The game is of poor quality. The graphics, small and jerky, and the key responses are not any good, and I had to force myself to give it 10% on addictive qualities.

I thought C.R.L were supposed to have a high reputation? I seem to remember reading something about them not long after Christmas, being one of the new great companies supplying computer games and getting them into the shops in huge quantities. I hope the shop keepers read CRASH - they might learn something. This game, together with the other one I have just seen, Lunar Lander, cannot possibly be doing C.R.L's reputation any good at all. It certainly isn't worth spending a penny on.