This little game is based around the adventures of our Jack. You remember Jack; he was the chap who sold a cow in exchange for a handful of useless beans. As luck would have it, the little twerp (or so his Mother called him) threw them out of the window whereupon one of the beans sprouted into a very large and rather silly beanstalk. Jack, being more than a mere twerp, decided to climb the beanstalk and get into a lot of trouble. Up above the clouds he discovered a Giant's castle. Now read on. . . .

So your first task is to climb the beanstalk by jumping from one branch to another. The stalk extends for two screens, after which you must get past the cloud by jumping from one cloud to another. When you manage to reach the top, you are confronted by a series of rooms that all bear a resemblance to the screen concept of Jet Set Willy.

Each room has a series of levels. Jumping from one level to another is fine but for the moving nasties, found on each of the levels. You must avoid them if you want to get to the next level without losing a life. All told, Jack must explore twenty-three 'rooms', moving from one to the other by negotiating a path along the various platforms to reach the entrance to the next room.

Somewhere within the Castle are to be found the three objects that, as myth will have it, compensated Jack so well for the loss of the cow; these are a bar of gold, a talking golden harp and of course a golden egg (only a minor departure from that story). The three objects are brightly coloured so while they may not be easy to locate initially, you won't miss them once you do.

Jack begins the game with four lives, and when you lose one the game resumes on the same screen but not in the same position. If you have a bad memory or are unable to count to three, fear not, on the right hand of the screen there is an objects' counter to remind you of the objects collected to date. Instead of awarding points, the game measures your performance according to the length of time you take to complete the collection and make good your escape. For this purpose a clock is positioned at the top right of the screen. Taking more than forty minutes is not pat-on-the-back stuff, but anything less than half an hour is pretty good going.

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The first screen on this game looks suspiciously like the one in Thor's Jack and the Beanstalk, although it's a lot easier. I was quite relieved to see that the similarity disappears after this screen. The trouble with this game is that it's just another boring old platform game with no real original touches; collecting certain objects and using them was about the only thing that kept me going, otherwise I would've switched off there and then. The sound is pretty awful but there is speech, a 'FEE FI FO FUM' bit at the beginning of each game and a 'GOT YOU' when you die which is quite a good, if infuriating, laugh. Perhaps this game would do better with a £1.99 price tag, but as it stands it's rather overpriced for just another left/right/leap-em game.
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Htmlized by Dimitris Kiminas (29 Nov 2002)
SID added 15/6/2003. Ripped by Warren Pilkington

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