For leisure and learning

XWord and Crossword Call Up are both based on the familiar crossword puzzle, but use it for very different purposes. XWord is the more conventional of the two, consisting of 12 quick and 12 cryptic crosswords - all played for pleasure. Crossword Call Up uses the puzzles as an educational tool, and very effectively too.

The choice of quick or cryptic is determined by which side of the reversible XWord disc you boot up. One advantage of the computerised crossword over its hardcopy counterpart is the interactive aspect that can be incorporated by the thoughtful programmer.

Tim Tanner has included two such features - Answercheck is a routine that refuses to accept wrong answers, while Cheat will conjure up the correct answer if you feel you must stoop to desperate measures. Both can be disabled if you wish to complete the puzzle unaided.

Based upon a 13 x 13 square grid, both the quick and cryptic puzzles are of a high standard and even my ace puzzle solving wife struggled with some of the clues.

On the negative side, I was a little disturbed by the ease with which I could crash the program - by entering a large number when asked for a clue I was dumped back to Basic and Control-V followed by a number can be used to change screen mode while the program is running thereby corrupting the display. Sneaky, yes, but these things should have been trapped by an otherwise well-written piece of software.

Crossword Call Up is a superb educational tool that uses the puzzle as ameans of reinforcing more formal classroom study. Teachers can create databases of clues and answers that release to specific areas of the curriculum. These can be tailored to the age and ability of the pupils concerned - young children can be given clues relating to objects in a garden, secondary school pupils could get their teeth into European geography.

The disc comes with four example subjects - Christmas, trees, 98 most frequent words and granny's garden. On selecting Make Crossword from the main menu you are prompted to choose one or more subjects from the list displayed. Having determined the level of difficulty required, the program goes away and searches the database for clues and answers that meet your selection criteria.

As it is unlikely that each pupil will have a micro on which to complete the puzzle, the software can print multiple copies of the crossword and clues and answer sheets are also available on request. The printed crosswords are well laid out and of superb quality.

Crossword Call Up is so easy to use and has such enormous potential that I strongly recommend it to educational estabshments of all levels. XWord contains puzzles of a high standard but is let down slightly by a few minor niggles.

Jon Revis