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The Oric development group Defence Force has recently announced the release of its port of the classic Skool Daze, which was originally developed by David S. Reidy and Keith Warrington, and released in 1984 by Microsphere, and released on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, among other popular 8-bits of the day.

Skool Daze is played in a simulated and typical mid-1980s high school in which you must help our hapless hero, Eric, to find his yearly report before it comes to the attention of the headmaster. Of course, it's a little more complicated than that: Eric must be guided to infiltrate the school safe to retrieve the report while keeping out of as much trouble as possible, otherwise he'll spend most of his time writing lines and it'll be too late.

In this Oric version, everything has been kept as faithful as possible to the original, and it has been a labour of love by all involved, with the lead development from Chema Enguita Gonzalez. As the website over at skooldaze.defence-force.org states, "This game has been written by fans, for the fans. The game is entirely free", so go and relive your 'skool daze' with this excellent port to the quirky British 8-bit.

The popular 1978 electronic memory game from Milton Bradley, called Simon, is now available for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, called Gnarly Simon.

This has been developed by Swashbuckling Disappointment, and it's the first publicly released game to use only the border, rather than any of the normal screen area. There isn't even a loading screen to it. As with the original, you must remember the order in which the lights flash (or, in this case, the border changes colour), and a tone is played to aid your memory. Each time you successfully match the sequence of lights (or tones, depending on how you look at it), another one is added for you to remember, until you make a mistake.

This game is a little less bland than you may think, as it uses the 'BorderTrix' effect. This technique was developed earlier this year by Andrew Owen, and it changes the colour in the border often enough to draw block characters within the boundaries of the outer screen. This therefore allows Gnarly Simon to display a title and game over message. Talk about thinking outside the box.

BorderTrix is available from tinyurl.com/BorderTrix, and Gnarly Simon may be downloaded from tinyurl.com/GnarlySimon.

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Platform: Atari XE/XL 64K
Developers: Marcin Zukowski, Lukasz Sychowicz, Piotr Fusik and Bartek Wosiel
Publisher: Self published - yoomp.atari.pl

When I first played Yoomp in 2007, I wondered whether this was as much a technical demo as a game: the fast 3D graphics and superb music was impressive from this Atari 8-bit colour computer, especially when you consider that some of its technologies date back to December 1978, at least in prototype form.

After a few plays, I soon realised that this was definitely a game first and a technical demo second: it's thoroughly playable and a brilliant concept. The task is to guide a bouncing ball around a tube, being a mix of Gremlin Graphics 1986 hits Trailblazer (by Shaun Southern) and some Bounder for good measure.

Taking control of an ever-bouncing ball, you must guide this around the coming tubular track by moving clockwise or anti-clockwise while trying to avoid the pitfalls, with certain coloured squares affecting the play. You start with three 'power jumps', which add a bit of extra length to your bounce, and very much like Trailblazer, it's up to you to learn the best route for each track.

With the circular movements, the controls can become a bit confusing at first, but this is something that you'll get used to. Early levels act as a tutorial, but never seem tiresome, but you may start the game from the last level that you played. Going through earlier levels can itself be rewarding, as you may have missed a bonus square, or a better, faster route.

Yoomp is one of the best games released in the last decade and isn't just one for Atari fans. Get it now.