Welcome to a new monthly retro round up feature, for all of you who, like me, found your Christmas stocking stuffed with items like a handheld MegaDrive, an Atari Flashback and a PlayStation 1 Grand Theft Auto and memory card.

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This month we'll be taking a look at some of the new professional games for some of the classic British microcomputers - the Spectrum and Commodore 64 - and, directing you to those web sites that sell them on the original media. In case you don't know, gone are the days when such media invariably found its way to the local charity shop after a few years. These cassettes and discs now offer savvy retro collectors something of an investment opportunity. Publishers generally only sell a very small number of them (Most buyers opt to buy an emulator image for their PC for a fraction of the cost) and those people who, later in time, want to collect up such items, have been known to dig deep into their wallets to do so.

The Spectrum, being the most popular 8-bit UK home computer, remains the best supported retro machine. Cronosoft offers around 30 new games for it, and its latest release is Shape Shifter, an overhead puzzle game to tax the old grey matter. All you have to do is to drag and drop the shapes you are given (which look remarkably similar to Tetris-pieces) into a square-shaped grid in the centre of the screen. The trick is that all the shapes need to fit into that grid, and, to obtain any points, you have to complete the task before the bonus runs out. You cannot rotate the shapes either, and even by the third level the shapes you are given seem to be impossible to fit!

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Also from Cronosoft comes Splattr, an arcade blast-'em-up from the angle of a person peering down into an overhead maze. From a screenshot, this game looks like a rather bad, blocky, basic game - but get hold of it and you'll find it's a frighteningly fast arcade machine code number for the 128K Spectrum only. It has big sprites and pulsating sounds to rock out to as you play, and you can see it in action with commentary here.

You'd also be hard pushed to find a better platform game than the fifth Egghead in Jonathan Cauldwell's series, another 128K Spectrum only game named Egghead: Round The Med. You're placed in Egghead's yacht and tasked with collecting up the aspirins (a la Jet Set Willy) from each room. However, find the navigation chamber and you will be able to steer the yacht to many different continents, each almost an additional full platform game in its own right. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNNTTEbzq1w)

All of these excellent games are all still available from Cronosoft for just £3.99 each. Quite apart from the fact that they will keep you entertained for a good few winter nights, collectors of early, now unavailable, Cronosoft titles are regularly paying over the £20 mark for them on eBay, giving you even more reason to snap them up.

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Monument Microgames, a relatively newcomer to the Spectrum, has also churned out a number of new Spectrum games too. The most recent of these is Game About Squares - written by Andrey Shevchuk - which is a grid-based puzzle game.

You don't need any instructions for this game other than the game controls, and all these do is move one of the four coloured squares in the direction of an arrow in the centre of it. Squares push each other along and the objective is to get each square to its "home" position, represented by a dot of the same colour. It has a very gentle learning curve and the 128K Spectrum version features a bouncy theme tune which plays throughout - and will need to be turned off when you need to concentrate. Again you can see a little of the fun that awaits you on YouTube.

Next up is Forest Raider Cherry. This game isn't quite as new as it appears, having done the rounds as a Public Domain release in 2010. It's a forest-based overhead maze game, in which you are tasked with finding 24 diamonds in each of the 24 "rooms" of the forest. Instead of a lives system, a simple timer counts down from 100. The diamonds don't appear until you have cleared each screen of cherries, and so the race is on to: collect them all, collect the diamond you need and then progress to the next screen and repeat. Bats and bugs have made the forest their home too though, so you'll need to tread carefully. Colliding with any of them will see that timer countdown speed up. See here for more.

Finally, check out Genesis: Dawn Of A New Day, originally available from Retroworks until a few years ago. Genesis is a superb monochrome shoot-'em-up where you have to defend your planet against the threat from the "Dork Menace" (Really?). Like many more recent homebrew games, Genesis results from a collaboration between developers and the game has already achieved cult status. You have to shoot/avoid the aliens then defeat the level-concluding big bosses. There are many options to play about with, including toggling inertia on and off; turning it on makes the game twice as hard. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COusxZBh5-k.

As with Cronosoft, what's fascinating about Monument is the sheer quality of the finished product. Game About Squares, Forest Raider Cherry and Genesis all come in professional cardboard boxes, with stickers, CD, cassette and instruction leaflet as standard, for just £7.00. Again, despite virtually no marketing, Monument's earlier games have already sold out.

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Both Cronosoft and Monument Microgames are a little behind the homebrew market god, Psytronik Software which has been supplying tapes, discs and CDs for the Amstrad, Vic 20 and Commodore 64 for the last 20 years. Its most recent releases are for the Commodore 64.

Darkness, written by Trevor Storey and Achim Volkers, is available in six different versions, including an Ultimate Edition of which only ten units now remain. In the game, an overhead maze game in the flick-screen Sabre Wulf style, you are tasked to find eight mask pieces scattered around a jungle environment. Putting together the mask will allow you entrance to a sanctum where your girlfriend is being held.

As you move from room to room, you need to shoot at all of the animals that threaten to touch you, and I found holding down the fire key throughout was preferable to pressing it over and over. All the versions of Darkness come in professionally designed boxes, with prices ranging from £7.00 for the standard cassette version to £24.95 for the Ultimate Edition, which includes a keyring, sticker and a poster. It's up to you to decide if these extras ultimately justify the increased cost but to assist you, why not watch an unboxing?

Late 2014 also gave us Phase Out, a ball-based puzzle game in which clusters of different coloured balls must be flipped Bejewelled-style to erase them from the playing area. As with Game About Squares, Phase Out dispenses with instructions in favour of starting you out on a level that you cannot lose. In completing the level, you are forced to understand how the game actually works - and from that moment on, the game has hooked you into completing screens of further and further devilish complexity. For more, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFBjsZfpq0I.

Whilst having to lay out more money for a retro title than a second-hand PC game won't be to everyone's taste, I hope this article has piqued at least a bit of additional interest in this scene. The eight games above are not necessarily the cream of the retro crop for 2014 by any means, and you'll find many other games for sale out there for you to either play, or display on your shelf as a great talking point.

If any of you go on to order any of them, make sure you tell the web sites why - and that we sent you!