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The first Superior retrospective plus new game is excellent value as well, however the back catalogue material is slightly weaker and so drags down the excellent new Gary Partis shoot-'em-up Syncron, previewed here a couple of months back.

Following exactly the same format as Volume 2 (and Volume 3, the Electron-only compilation), this collection includes two excellent re-releases from the extensive Superior catalogue - this time the gems being Tim Tyler's classic Repton (if you don't know of the lizard by now, then there's no hope for you!) and Martin Sykes' Karate Combat, not my favourite kung-fu simulation (that's Melbourne House's Way Of The Exploding Fist) but still an excellent game.

Following close behind are the following games, all still playable but sadly starting to show their age a little - Jim Daniels' Star Striker (last seen as a Cumana Astron Card release and reworked as Moon Cresta), Peter Johnson's Airlift and Wallaby, Walter Mansell's poor Smash And Grab and Tyler's earlier weak game BMX On The Moon.

Hardly the most inspiring collection, I'm afraid, but still worth their share of the collection's cost.

However, most attention is going to be focused quite rightly on Gary Partis' new Syncron. This, you may recall, was the game rejected by another software house as being too fast to play and, although it has been tidied up a little since the preview I had some months back, it is still a fiendishly fast game that is going to enthrall or repel in equal measure.

Based on a vertically scrolling landsccape, your aim is to shoot anything you can, avoiding certain fixed landscape points and the enemy ships. So far, so like Psycastria. However, the game is commplex and worth persevering with as I've discovered but my one fear is that the fearsome energy and adrenalin levels you require to play it may be a little off-putting to some players. The detail is intriguing but the game slips past so quickly that there is little time at first for anything other than sheer survival!

An excellent piece of coding but, perhaps in the final analysis, more interesting than repeatedly playable for the majority of BBC gamesters.

However, this is a good beginning for Superior in creating a new format for compilations and it is bound to sell well.

A peaceful exercise for those moments when you're not playing the games might be to work out other combinations of Superior's back catalogue, bearing in mind the almost constant series of smash hits since Tempest a couple of years back.

Dave Reeder