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You remember the old gag about the Japanese being no good at writing software? Well if the first batch of MSX games to arrive in this country is anything to go by, the Japanese are going to have the last laugh. At just under £19 per cartridge, buying the stuff is liable to be a painful exercise, but most of it is good enough for distributor Micro Peripherals to end up with a winner.

The ten games I saw were all produced by Konami, and each sported a handy Japanese-only instruction sheet. The names of the games are in English, as is any on-screen writing, and you also get the odd tantalising bit of English on the packaging, on the lines of '(bit of Japanese here) Great! Farout!' and 'I love (more Japanese) Comic Bakery'. Fortunately you can work out most of the controls by a bit of trial and error.

There are several notable pieces in the collection, my personal favourite being Antarctic Adventure. It's not an adventure as such, unless you happen to be a penguin. I've noted that very few of PCN's readers are penguins (their stubby little wings can't turn the pages).

The idea of the game is to skate around the edge of Antarctica within a time limit. You get a screen display showing you, the penguin, skating along a downward scrolling ice floe. As you skate you're confronted by a series of penguin perils - crevasses, black ice, polar bears, etc, which you can skate round, jump over or bashfully bump into.

In the latter case it just slows you down, as this is a blood-free game, but it's worth falling down the odd crevasse so you can observe the animation of the penguin scrabbling back up. I'm not sure about the difficulty level of this one, but I found it so funny to watch I didn't really care.

But enough of this frivolity - come with me through the pain barrier, to an Olympic effort of Wagnerian proportions (or vice versa). The pain barrier in question is what happens when you spend around £70 for Track and Field 1 and 2, Hyper Sports 1 and the peculiar little two-button joystick thingummy that goes with them.

These are Decathlon writ large, and again the animation is superb. The idea is to score a qualifying time in a number (a large number, I suspect) of Olympic events. I say 'suspect' because I ran into a little bit of bother in the gymnastic event.

This consists of a short run up, a mat then a horse (gymnastic, hay-stuffed rather than hay-eating variety). The two button joystick thingummy (TBJT hereafter) has Run marked on one button and Jump on the other, but no matter how I ran and jumped the little figure always stopped at the mat, scratching his head, and the word 'foul' appeared on the screen. Next time I play I'll look to see if someone in the crowd is throwing beer cans.

The other events were a little easier. Sprinting uses the same techniques as Decathlon, where you waggle the joystick to move your leg, but the TBJT means this is a lot easier, as you just have to rattle the run button. I was particularly taken with the high diving, where you bounce up and down on the board then twirl your way into the water. A bad dive has your athlete surfacing rubbing his head (concussion?) while after a good one he waves his arms in triumph.

But overall I'd be dead chuffed if I got this lot in my stocking this Christmas - note to Micro Peripherals: please phone for my stocking size.

You might think Athletic Land came out of the same mould - but it doesn't. It's actually a neat implementation of the one where you control a small boy jumping over barrels, hopping over crocodiles and swinging on creepers through a dangerous park.

Circus Charlie is more original, but uses similar techniques to top through fiery hoops and the like. Comic Bakery is not in fact misleading - that's actually what it's called, and is worth a look, while Monkey Academy is an entertaining stab at educational programming.

Finally, we come to the golden turkeys. Time Pilot is a tedious and relatively slow arcade game - it wouldn't be worth paying a fiver for a tape, never mind £18 for a cartridge. Super Cobra is also pretty naff - Defender in a helicopter, basically - but these two apart, Konami looks like a company worth watching.