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As we've noticed before, compilations are now the flavour of the month - partly because the software industry is becoming very similar to the music business and partly because re-packaged games can still show a healthy profit with no new development costs.

Trust Superior, with their background of innovation, to come up with an imaginative and welcome twist to the compilation game by including a new game in a pack of seven classics.

Superior, of course, have a massive back catalogue of excellent games (though don't expect many of their early ones to reappear) and this compilation includes two games that I would have expected still to be selling reasonably: the best game of 1985 Repton 2 and the superb arcade conversion Deathstar. Both have been discussed in these pages before and I surely don't need to commend them to you again.

Slightly more obscure, perhaps, are the other five re-releases - almost a Peter Johnson backlist with his racing simulation Overdrive and still playable Space Pilot, as well as Deathstart. Two more classic games, Charles Robertson's Missile Strike and Adrian Stephens' Crazy Painter offer a challenge still and it is only the previous overated Battle Tank by Mark Silver that lets the collection down.

However, the new game is worth most of the purchase price on its own - Alwin Adolf's micro version of the arcade classic Quix, now retitled Kix.

It's certainly not a new concept at all, but that doesn't matter. The object of the game is to control 20 screens by seizing at least 75%% of each screen - this you do by drawing a line from the quadrant's edge and enclosing space. Easy, huh? Well, not quite as each quadrant has at least one Sparkler; a constantly moving series of lines familiar from many graphics demos that kills on contact. In addition there are up to four Tracers which move around the borders and kill, again on contact.

Finally, any delay once you've begun to draw a line produces a Fuse that is very hard to outrun.

What is deceptive is the game's simplicity. Bonus points are available when, for instance, you split two Sparklers in separate parts of the screen but their constant movement and fairly random speed/direction changes mean that a cool hand is needed.

Nothing flashy here; no death-defying graphics; no state-of-the-art byte compression. Just a good, compulsive game that I am returning to again and again.

All in all, an excellent package and superb value. The unofficial word on these compilations is that the featured new games weren't quite good enough to warrant the full Superior advertising/prize promotion. That, I think, is a reflection on the Superior marketing strategy than on either Kix or the featured game on the first collection, Gary Partis' Syncron.

I hope the idea takes off and that other software houses will issue such imaginative compilations.

Dave Reeder