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There's an explorer-type game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that's just been released by the Spanish group J.B.G.V. In Retro Obsesion II, you must guide an adventure around several locations in order to collect the different objects while avoiding the roaming meanies. This will unlock different areas in which you will get the opportunity to play various mini-games. The first Retro Obsesion is available through the World Of Spectrum archives, but it has Spanish instructions and text throughout. This sequel is not only in English, but is much less buggy and faster.

It's entirely written in Sinclair Basic (and presumably compiled). It's a lot of fun, but has no instructions, so you sort of have to guess each task. This shouldn't be too difficult; after all, who reads instructions to games anyway? To download this thoroughly playable game, head over to tinyurl.com/RetroObsession2.

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Also hailing from Spain, and from the creator of the excellent Retroinvaders, a Space Invaders clone with a literal twist is an as yet unnamed Snow Bros clone for the old Speccy. The task is to traverse each screen while avoiding or encapsulating the roaming nasties with icy precipitation by hurling snow balls at them, and then dispatching each by knocking them out of each arena. To see an early preview of this, head over to tinyurl.com/SnowBrosSpec

Meanwhile, Bob Smith is working on his two Sinclair project, one an ASCII-based game for the Spectrum, and also a 3D ray-casting game for the ZX81. Bob has been keeping his Speccy project under wraps, as it's panned for release on the 30th anniversary of the great rubber-clad 8-bit. To find out more about Bob's work, check out facebook.com/bobs.stuff or www.bobs-stuff.co.uk

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Amstrad CPC owners may have been somewhat disappointed that the official version of the 1987 smash hit arcade shoot-'em-up R-Type was almost a 1:1 conversion straight from the Spectrum... not that the Speccy rendition was in any way poor, but that the CPC was a newer and more sophisticated machine with better colour handling, a larger palette and more memory, so why wasn't the game converted to take advantage of these new features? To be fair, there were plenty of games for the CPC that looked almost identical to the ZX counterparts, so this wasn't unusual, but the gameplay didn't always port across well, which is the important thing.

Now there's a conversion for the 6128 machines in which Bob Pape (the developer of the highly revered Speccy version) has got involved in.

This classic, horizontally scrolling blasterama sees you take on the malevolent forces of the evil Bydo Empire by piloting a class R-9 nuclear-powered space fighter, which had many upgrades to its arsenal, which aids the process of taking out the invading forces. This new version has many more features, including some of those included in the arcade original and other extras thrown into the mix for good measure. For more information about this, check out tinyurl.com/RTypeCPC