I must admit I am generally suspicious of multi-games packs, since they often disguise low quality. Perhaps surprisingly, after the way it approached the Atom software, this is the only such package that Acornsoft is offering for the BBC micro. It contains a selection of old favourites including Invaders and Breakout.

Invaders is a one- or two-player game with nine skill levels. Each player may choose a different level of play, which is a novel feature even for standalone Invaders. The game moves smoothly and quickly, with plenty of flying saucers and all the standard features. The invaders and saucers seem very large and are quite easy to hit at the start. But so is your base.

They speed up quite dramatically when there are only a few left, and the last remaining invader really does move like a rocket.

Breakout is also of good quality and is attractively colourful. As well as the standard game, there are three optional features: double bat, moving walls, and captive balls. Any combination can be chosen, giving a set of eight different games.

As in many versions of Breakout, the bat moves quite slowly in normal mode. In this game, pressing the Shift key gives double speed, a feature that I liked.

The third game on the cassette is another early arcade original, Dodgem. You move a car through a maze of six concentric square tracks with four crossing points between them. A computer-controlled car is travelling in the opposite direction and determined to get you. This version is completely standard, with the favoured ZX*? keys for movement and the space bar for acceleration.

Finally, we have an interesting variation on the game where you must avoid crashing into your own tail, now immortalised in the film Tron. Snake is a one-player game in which you guide a small white square around the screen attempting to eat 'food'. If you don't reach the food in time, it fades away. If you do eat it, your points are increased and the tail which follows the course of your dot grows a little.

You end up with a long snake behind you. If at any point you guide the dot (now the head of the snake) into it or into the boundary lines, a life is lost. Each game consists of three lives.

Snake is an interesting and surprisingly addictive variant of a stunningly trivial game.