Brainless is really a bit of a joke. However, I thought I'd mention it because it's the perfect example of a game with some great ideas that needs the support of other adventure programmers to improve it.

The game is so full of bugs that I couldn't make much progress, but the basic idea is that, as a newly-elected champion, you must rid the land of the Black Knight. On the way you encounter such characters as Deaf, Flesh, and Pain - as well as Sunflower, Cinemen, and Gorm.

"Look out for the biased judge," warns the author in his letter, "and the pouting wood-nymphos."

The combination of characters with names like Deaf, Flesh, and Pain and "pouting wood-nymphos" was encouragement enough for me to load up this game. There are some nice original touches, including a joust where you must select different weapons in order to win. and a bottle of grog that induces romps in stables. However the program itself is a major disaster area.

The spelling is so bad as to be occasionally misleading. I'm not sure if Deaf is really Deaf, for example - I have a sneaking suspicion he should be Death. And although I love the idea of celluloid characters, I suspect that Cinemen are not little people from the movies but actually a single person called Cinnamon. Ah well...

The bugs, however, are unmistakable and quite inventive. First they corrupt the text, substituting graphics characters for words, and then the graphics rebel and take over the entire display, having magically converted the text to Mode 0 and reduced the graphics window to a single black spot.

Brainless is quite unlike Malevolence. The latter is a carefully programmed, thought-out game that simply doesn't manage to seize the player's imagination. Brainless is anarchic, chronically programmed, but shows an energetic imagination that could, with considerable dollops of help, produce an interesting game.

Most homebrew games fall between these two stools - and in all cases the message is the same: the best games are collaborative efforts. Many players will play-test your software and assist in other ways without charge. So let's see some more software, home-brewers, and where there's space we'll fit you in.