There is an increasing tendency for authors to produce books for the new micros which give a compendium of programs, mainly of the games variety, under the guise of showing how to use BASIC to produce fun programs, whilst at the same time teaching new techniques. The offering under review is one of this variety.

Each of the 21 games that the title refers to has a chapter to itself. Each chapter is split into several sections, namely an introduction to the game, how to play it, typing tips, the subroutine structure of the program, programming details, scope for alteration and (at long last!) the program. Also included at the start of each chapter is a snapshot display of the program to be described. It was looking at these that sowed the seeds of doubt as to having a Killer Gorilla or Jet-Pac-like set of programs on my hands.

The programs offered are all available on two cassettes (at extra cost, of course) and so the frustration of typing in the programs accurately was not a problem that I encountered. However, for those without the tapes, claims in the book are made of full testing and listings within the book are direct from printed computer outputs.

The programs covered ranged from the zap-'em type through to the board-game variety, but whilst I found the Mirror Tile and Capture The Quark programs excellent, I found just as many (and in fact many more!) extremely disappointing.

Of the 21 programs I could only rate five or six as being programs that I might want to play again. However, I must avoid being too deprecating. One of the stated aims of the book is to promote techniques availabnle from within BASIC and for the beginner there is no doubt that some very good methods are described. The section "Programming details" within each chapter has been well thought out as a useful set of pointer to those parts of the program which are most interesting. Ideas for the use of user-defined graphics in animation and the use of high-resolution graphics for smooth movement are covered several times.

I feel that anybody with little experience in BASIC programming with a wish to start programming games should seriously consider looking at this book. It is well structured and easy to read, but I doubt the usefulness of the cassettes since I feel that they could instil laziness in the user and so the teaching power of the book would be greatly diluted.

For those who have done any games programming, this is certainly not the book to keep you slaving over your keyboard for hours at a time.

Peter Mujtaba