This book is a follow-on from the author's previous title. Arcade games for your Commodore 64, and carries a foreword by no less famous a person than Tim Hartness (who seems to get his name everywhere these days).

There are ten games featured here, which is not very many, considering some of the omnibus editions that are now around for the C64. However, there is quite a nice selection. You can choose whether to dodge a hall of boulders as they hurtle towards your spaceship in "Speedy Boulders" or you can climb ladders and jump over barrels that a mad lizard is hurling at you as you try to rescue your beloved from his clutches. Other themes are a variation on Pacman (surprise surprise), foiling a nuclear attack, beating the pinball machine and a few others.

The instructions are adequate but a few more ideas would have come in useful here. For example, it would have been nice to have some programming tips to show how the programs were built up, and perhaps some tips for people to develop the programs further.

Something else that the book lacks are screen shots, which are always useful to give you an idea of what you're aiming at. Still, it has some nice illustrations to brighten it up a bit.

The coding is printed out direct from a Commodore printer and contains all the special Commodore graphics characters. This makes the listings much easier to key in than with books that use other printers and then resort to odd codes to indicate the graphics characters.

The programs are not too taxing, about six pages long each, and clearly reproduced.

I couldn't say this book is particularly good value for money, but it's short, simple and might be a good book for anyone just starting out on getting to grips with their C64.