Cow & Chicken: Super Cow Adventure

We have a theory about cartoons. Once, they relied on extraordinary violence, or at least the best ones did. Characters like Tom and Jerry took violence to operatic heights, always escalating the level of destruction, inventing new ways to maim and torture, conducting symphonies of fizzing fuses, flying forks, baited traps, painted tunnels, poisoned feed, and hacking knives.

Then, the world changed. Tom and Jerry made friends and instantly became an embarrassment. Cartoon lost its edge.

To get it back, some cartoonists simply cranked the depravity up a notch and went adult, with shows like South Park and Family Guy, while others set off down a less travelled road: post-modernism. Stylised, arch, and pointedly bizarre, this is the form that has taken hold. Ren & Stimpy was the first, Spongebob was the first to really break through, and Cow & Chicken is a distinguished member of the tribe.

Starring the eponymous farmyard animals, Cobramobile's game of the show, Super Cow Adventure, is a faithful visual reproduction of the original cartoon, with crisp graphics and credible dialogue. However, whereas the show embraced post-modernism and tested narrative and aesthetic boundaries, the game belongs to the most unadventurous genre of all: platform.

Platform games can be great, of course, as the extraordinary SolaRola recently demonstrated. Genre is just a set of rules, and rules are made to be broken. So does Super Cow Adventure break them? Let's see.

You play as Cow. Your brother Chicken has been kidnapped by your arch enemy, Red Guy, and secreted in a field of topiary mazes. It's your job to rescue him by leaping and dodging your way through a series of levels across a forest, a night scene, and a desert.

Each level contains stars, and you need to collect these in order to gain access to each of the many diner-placemat mazes in which Chicken is trapped. On top of that, there are power-ups shaped like the Superman crest that allow you to squirt lethal milk from Cow's udders and, even more usefully, withstand one instance of contact with an enemy.

Why is this added resilience more useful than deadly projectile milk? Because Super Cow Adventure is really ruddy bloody hard. Although the levels are relatively small, there are no checkpoints and even the most glancing contact with a bat or a mole will instantly propel your Cow through the Pearly Gates.

True to life, moles scramble up from underground, killing you instantly if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When bats drop projectiles on you, meanwhile, they're rarely more than a few millimetres above your head, giving you no time to escape the immediate death that being struck with a bubble somehow deals to the 600lb bovine at your command.

Frustrating as it is, Super Cow Adventure isn't a bad game. The controls are responsive and Cow moves around quickly and fluidly, so the tedium of revisiting the same stretch of level is compensated for by your own speed. If you do die, it'll be over quickly and you'll be back before you know it.

Each level contains a liberal array of pork butts and taters, some right in your path and some tucked away on awkward platforms. Collecting them gains you points, and once you reach the end you get a run-down of your performance, providing some incentive to return to the levels to mop up the remaining stars, power-ups, and revolting foodstuffs.

The graphics are clean and charismatic and the music is unobtrusive. In presentation, certainly, the title succeeds in capturing the personality of its cartoon inspiration.

Personality doesn't make a game, however, and although Super Cow Adventure wears a fashionable outfit, the game underneath it is as old-fashioned, staid, and unadventurous as they come.