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If you are still prevaricating over whether to purchase the ZX Spectrum, maybe you should forget it and get Forty-niner instead. Forty-niner is an excellent game. It requires a little practice to master, but persevere, it's worth it. No sound or colour but the high resolution screen display gives another dimension to the trusty ZX81.

The 1949 Great American Gold Rush has just started and you are out there with the best of them excavating for the precious metal. Somewhat unusual hazards (for a gold digger anyway) are present to hinder you. Giant rats search through your excavations after yu and there are snakes which, when released, head straight for the surface and destroy everything in their path. There is also a gremlin to contend with and you have to deposit excavated soil on the surface to delay it capturing you.

The aim of the game is to collect all the nuggets of gold. When you have accomplished this awesome task, you pass on to a more difficult stage with more rates but less snakes to destroy them.

An interesting feature of Forty-niner is the faciity for the player to select his own control keys. A hi-score chart is kept by the computer and displayed at the end of each game and there are five levels of play. The hi-res display is excellent, those rats really do look like rats. A great game.

The Software Farm game of Asteroids is similar to the Mikro-Gen version reviewed above. It has three levels of play, and you have three lives per game. It requires a 16K RAM pack and the graphics are in "normal" ZX81 resolution. there is an option for up to four players to hold a contest, each player's highest score being separately recorded and identified in a score table.

I thought the action rather jerky, even at the hardest level but the game works well and is good fun nonetheless. More expensive than Mikro-Gen's game but with the additional facility to keep score during a contest.