These four sets of educational games were designed by an educational psychologist, Jo Westwood, to help children with specific language problems related to the written word, although it is thought that they probably have a wider audience.

The first disc/cassette includes three arcade type games which "disguise tasks which are often boring, because so much repetition is required by dyslexic children". In BeeDee, you have to shoot the initial letter for the picture shown, choosing from two b's and d's for the first picture and eight of each for the seventh. Points are gained for correct choices and lost for incorrect ones. The time taken is also given. The game is said to be controlled by using the number keys 2 & 9 and the Spacebar to fire the gun, although several other number keys also worked. The cursor keys were not disabled and pressing them gave nasty white flashes on the screen!

Citymaze is a game which assists directional awareness by guiding the car to the left or right along city streets. The same keys are used as in BeeDee, and choosing the wrong direction leads to a colourful disaster!

In Doors, the user has to select the left or right hand door in the hope of getting weapons (axe, spray or dagger) to kill enemies (skeleton, spider, snake). Personally, I don't like the suggestion that children should kill off spiders with flyspray or snakes with daggers and so far there's little that's new in either content or approach!

A To Z offers two options. In the first, pictures - quite nicely drawn - appear randomly in groups of 20 and the player scores a point for each correct initial letter identified. The level of difficulty can be varied by the player who can elect to have between two and 20 lower case letters on the screen to choose from. Again, the same control keys are used. The second option concentrates on similarly shaped letters or similar sounds, e.g. b & d, p & q.

I couldn't load the first part of Dam & Blast to start with, because the program had been wrongly named in the menu program. (At this point I listed a couple of the programs only to be congratulated on fiddling an out of work 16 year old out of 5... and warned that further listing of the program could result in the destruction of my Video Interface chip. I took exception to this - people do want to list programs for reasons other than ripping them off, so if the programmer doesn't want his work listed it should be properly protected. It was only the value of the disc that prevented me from throwing it in the bin.

Dam & Blast is described as "an arcade-type fast reaction game which helps to teach letter recognition and then gives practice in lower case to capital pairings". The letters appear in a red rectangle while a digger tunnels away at the bottom of the dam. The player must find all 26 letters to prevent the water flooding the valley. There are three levels of difficulty which relate to the speed of reaction." The second option includes number keys and all the symbols and requires the use of the Shift key. The graphics element certainly make this more appealing than the version schools already have available as part of the Micro Primer Pack, but not at £10.75!

Ervaders is a space invader type game which teaches eight different spellings of the sound "er". There are eight graded levels of difficulty, using words selected from a vocabulary of over 120 words. The Ervaders appear in the sky and gradually move nearer to the earth. The target word appears at the bottom of the screen and the appropriate Ervader must be shot down. There are three waves of attackers in each game, and the player is allowed thirteen shots for each wave.

Ratings of skill of performance vary from "Not bad" to "Super hero"! Arcade game enthusiasts will probably enjoy this game - whether the experience is transferred to their written work any more effectively than other forms of spelling lists with words taken out of context, remains to be seen.

Two of the first cassettes of programs I ever purchased were from an educational psychologist in Dorset. They included 13 games for children with language difficulties and cost 6. This set of eight games costs £43!

Perhaps IEC should look at the list of software houses that have gone to the wall in the last twelve months and the quality of the early reading programs produced by Highlight Software and another educational psychologist!