Breakout

A BBC adaptation of one of the earliest arcade games. Eight lines of bricks have to be knocked away, using three balls and either a large or small bat, which is controlled with the keyboard.

The large bat takes a while to get used to and the smaller one is almost impossible except after many hours of practice. To make things more fun, once you're through the fourth line of bricks the ball speeds up.

If you do manage to clear all the bricks, a new screenful is presented for you. Altogether it is a good addictive version, which can be incredibly frustrating.

Dodgems

You drive a car around an oblong maze of roads, running over dots while attempting to evade the persistent attacks of the computer car. With a little practice it gets easier to predict the movements of the computer car, and so by changing lanes at each junction (by using the keyboard) you can usually get most of the dots before things get too tricky.

The added option of speeding up your car allows you to eat more dots but also makes it more difficult to change lane - and thus avoid the pursuing computer car.

The graphics and sound are good - particularly the vivid blue/yellow crashes.

Flash

A deceptively simple memory game - do you remember "Simon"?

Four blocks of colour, each with an accompanying sound, are flashed onto the screen. You have to remember and enter into the computer the colours/ sounds, in exactly the order in which they were shown.

Although you can choose the speed that the colours/sounds appear, even the slowest is difficult to remember when the sequence reaches more than twenty.

Flash is an attractive game, in which the computer takes an almost human delight in instantly telling you of any mistakes the second in which they occur.

Snake

This is perhaps the best of all of the four. You become a letter-hungry snake, slithering around the screen in search of letters to eat. The further down the alphabet the letter is when you eat it, the more points you get.

Unfortunately, as you manoeuvre the snake around the screen it grows longer and longer, and so it becomes more difficult to avoid crashing into your own tail.

Also, of course, you musn't hit the surrounding walls, or just when you think you are getting the hang of things a letter appears in an unexpected place, and the snake inelegantly bites the dust.

Jane Jackson