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At the time of writing, the ever-unpredictable British summer has arrived, and it's been a scorcher. If this warm weather has continued since is entirely another matter, of course, but if you prefer the winter months then a timely reminder has been released for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum: Speccy Bros is now available from the Spanish-based website Bytemaniacos. This production is heavily based on the 1990 arcade game Snow Bros, which was developed by Toaplan and published by Bootleg.

The task is to guide our sprightly hero around a single screen, which consists of platforms and many malevolent roamers, encapsulating the latter in frosty precipitation to form a huge snowball. Once this is done, it must then be rolled by kicking it. This can mean taking out other nasties, leaving sweets and other bonuses behind to collect as you do.

To avert the old colour-attribute clash problem on the technology, each software sprite will only move one character block at a time without any masking, but these are quite sizeable so as not to seem to clunky. This technique has been used many times before, and one good recent example of this was Thieves School, released in 2008 by World XX Soft Inc. Although it doesn't work quite as well in my opinion in this case, the graphics in Speccy Bros are fairly close to the arcade original.

You're treated to some excellent beeper music on the title screen, and the first stage (split into ten floors) should be fairly easy for the seasoned 8-bit gamer.

The original Snow Bros has been described by some as "Bubble Bobble with snowballs", and I guess this is a fairly accurate description of Speccy Bros. Head over to the aforementioned site to grab this download, which includes English instructions alongside the Spanish ones, or you may use the ever-reliable World of Spectrum database by searching for it through www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi.

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The Mojon Twins has released the latest Phantomas game in its popular series for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, namely Phantomas In The Museum.

After attempts to go into hiding, the master binary criminal receives a message from a friend informing him that a museum in a small country called Zaragoza has a haunted museum. You must therefore guide this unlikely hero around the popular tourist attraction, with the task to locate the valuable sculptures (of which there are five in total) by finding the security cards to access all of the areas of the building. Not a bad day's work for someone in his trade.

Throughout this 2D platform game are roaming spirits, arachnids and other nasties to generally avoid, which will make progress a little more difficult as contact will drain your limited life-force and slow you down. Phantomas's energy may be replenished if you are able to find the foodstuffs strewn throughout the binary world.

This game plays rather well, with some presentation niceties such as title music using the Speccy's infamous beeper technology. So that's two high-quality releases for the old rubber-clad 8-bit in one week.

To find out more, head over to www.mojontwins.com. Just to note that the related English texts and instructions are in italic font type usually after the Spanish ones. A very quick translation that you may need on the title screen of the game: Teclado is the option to select for keyboard controls, which are the almost default Speccy ones of Q, O and P for jump, left and right respectively.