Here's a virus that you will want in your computer: Bob Smith's new Sinclair ZX81 (with a 16K RAM pack) production called Virus. The first playable demo is only just released as I write, so I've not had much chance to play it, and there is yet to be a storyline but an educated guess is to imagine that you're the sole survivor of an outbreak of a highly contagious generic mutation, which has savaged a top-secret medical facility. Armed with bullets to which the viral entities are luckily susceptible, you must patrol and clear each area, some of which will require keys to unlock. Well, that might not be 100% accurate - or even 25% - but that's the world I was taken to by playing the demo.

I must also say that this is the best game I've seen on the monochrome beast possibly ever, and it's not even finished yet. Needless to say that this gem is something I'm definitely looking forward to. To find out more, and to download the latest demo, you can head over to Bob's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/Bobs-Stuff/396771680380, or check out his own web page at www.bobs-stuff.co.uk

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Those of you who had an Atari XE/XL in the mid-1980s will have missed out on Matthew Smith's Sinclair ZX Spectrum hit platform game Manic Miner (MM), at least while you still owned the 8-bit. Of course, you may have had a friend with the game on his or her micro that you could play, but Atari users must have envied the attention and support that other (lesser?) formats had over their mighty home computer. To make matters worse, the official Jet Set Willy (JSW) by Tynesoft [for the Atari] seemed like more of a token effort than a serious attempt at conversion (Commodore C16 and Plus/4 owners could have had a similar complaint with their official JSW game). This injustice is about to be righted thanks to the work of Terrence 'Tezz' Derby and others.

Not that this game should need much of an introduction, MM stars the world's favourite computer-animated miner, called Miner Willy, who embarks on an underground adventure after stumbling across some ancient mines, which are patrolled by advanced but long-gone civilisation.

The task is to guide Willy, collecting the treasures therein while avoiding the patrolling robots, toilets and other nasties before the oxygen runs out. Once all of the treasure has been plundered, it's time to head to the exit and on to the next mine. To find out more about this development, head over to the Atari Age forums as www.atariage.com/forums/topic/159246-manic-miner-port

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Star Sabre creator Axelay has finished another shoot-'em-up for the Amstrad CPC, and this one is an arena-based blasterama, and it's going to be released by the premium 8-bit publisher Psytronik too, which is great news.

The game is very much in the style of Axelay's previous horizontal-scrolling shooter, and with Dead On Time you're faced with wave upon wave of nasties to obliterate and only a limited time to do it in (hence the name). Any collisions with the attacking alien scum will see you lose time, but luckily this can be replenished by collecting the capsules that are left behind once they're destroyed.

It's a no-excuses and highly entertaining shoot-'em-up with some great, if a little short, title music and slick, fast-moving graphics. Keep an eye on www.psytronik.com for news of the real media release, or if you can't wait for that, you can grab the emulator-friendly disk image at tinyurl.com/DeadOnTimeCPC