Various: Cases Computer Simulations (01-858 0763) has published a dozen games that mix adventures, strategy games and shoot'-em-ups for the ZX81, Spectrum, BBC and Oric 1. For the Spectrum there are Airline, Autochef, Brewery, British Lowland, Corn Cropper, Dallas, Print Shop and Manage for £6 each. For the same price are Gangsters, Polaris, Plunger, and Smuggler. For £5 there are Abyss, Byte, Camelot and Solitaire - many of these are available on other systems; contact Cases for full details.

Spectrum: Automata (0705 735242) has launched another assault on good taste in the form of Piballed, the latest game to feature its egregious little creation Piman. The game can be played with a Kempston joystick and has a musical single, no less, on the flipside. The price is £6. Phipps Associates (01-393 0283) has released four games for Spectrums, all at £5.95. Killer Knight, House Of The Living Dead, Loony Zoo and Bull Run are the titles.

Oric: Tansoft has released Rat Splat, which pits a sewerman against cheese-crazed rats. It is £7.95's worth of good clean fun, as you can imagine.

Apple II: A spreadsheet more powerful than Visicalc is the claim made for Ultra Plan from Videx. Designed to be used with Videx's Videoterm 80-column card you can generate screens with up to 128 columns. It can also work with additional memory cards for models as large as 512K and is compatible with Visicalc files. It costs £139 plus VAT from Pete and Pam.

IBM: Also from Pete & Pam comes Sideways, a program that lets you print out all the spreadsheet columns you need with one command. As the name suggests, it gets your printer to turn the spreadsheet through 90 degrees effectively printing the sheet out sideways - great if you want to print a 120 column spreadsheet on an 80-column printer. It works with a number of printers, including Epson and IBM graphics printer, and is compatible with Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc, Multiplan and Supercalc as well as most word processors. Sideways costs £50 plus VAT.

Spectrum: Richard Shepherd Software (06286 63531) is bidding for the title of first professional software for ZX Microdrive with its Cash Controller program. It is a home budgeting program that can handle 400 transactions which can be automatically allocated against 16 selected budget headings. The program costs £9.95 and comes on cassette but includes an option in the main menu to save the program onto a blank Microdrive cartridge when supplies are more readily available.

Seiko 6800: A 16-bit version of the multi-user Oasis operating system is now available in the UK from Intelligence (UK) (01-740 5758). In addition to supporting compiled and interpreted Basic, RM Cobol and C, the operating system comes with CP/M86 and MSDOS emulators so that you can run your existing software.