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The Spanish developer Kabuto Factory has recently released Knights & Demons for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX computers, which is available to buy at either €2.50 (currently around £2.20) or €4.50 for the basic or deluxe versions respectively plus shipping costs, or it's free to download for your favourite emulator (and with the correct transfer methods, it will happily run on a real machine).

The plot tells the story of a distant world known as Garnik, with the 'Lord of War' and King of the Single Knights Bakelor leading an army against the evil Lord of Darkness. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, it is down to you to lead this force into battle. This is shown as an 8 x 8 square board, and your mission is to turn all of the demons to knights.

This is done when you select one of the quadrants therein; the adjacent areas will then flip, so if they're currently demons, they'll become knights and vice versa. This is quite a nice puzzle game with three difficulty levels to pick from, and the real cassette tapes are worth the money, as they're nicely packaged, if you like collecting such things. To find out all of the latest information about this release, head over to kabutofactory.netne.net, which is a Spanish-language site, but it can be easily translated by some modern browsers, or through the Google Translate facility.

Johan 'Dr Beep' Koelman is developing a new 1KB game for the Sinclair ZX81, which requires the WRX high-resolution schema. The current public beta is a very tiny and tidy implementation of a pinball game, and it reminds me of some of those LCD pocket games from my youth.

There are no surprises here, except that it's a fairly good attempt considering the memory limitations. I can only imagine what Johan could achieve with double the available RAM (which was standard on the official North American ZX81, known as the Timex Sinclair 1000), or even a 16K RAM expansion pack connected.

His other recent releases, again in only 1KB of memory, are Outlaw, and Sokob-One.

Outlaw is a two-player only game (not surprisingly, there was no space for any computer AI here) in which you must dodge a competitor's bullets while trying to shoot him or her four times. How you'd comfortably get two players around a real ZX81 with the touch-sensitive keyboard is a bit of a mystery, but at least you won't have to worry about the infamous 'RAM Pack wobble'.

Sokob-One is an implementation of the popular puzzle game Sokoban, in which you must move boxes from one area to a specific marker. The problem is that you can only move in one of four directions, and obviously there's a limited space in which to work. This is a good attempt with numerous levels.

For more information, head over to the RWAP ZX80 and ZX80 forums and join up, or for the direct links, tinyurl.com/DrBeepPinball will take you to the 1K Pinball development thread and tinyurl.com/NewZX81Games has the links and downloads for Outlaw and Sokob-One.

A friend of mine and recent Computing and Digital Media graduate Peter Shillito has agreed to take part in an experiment for me, and he will be reporting back on his findings through this page in about five or six weeks' time.

I have loaned him a Commodore VIC-20 with a cassette player, a 3K expansion, a joystick, some paddles, magazines and games. As he grew up with the Nintendo GameCube and doesn't remember personal computers before Windows 98, this is a chance to see what someone younger thinks about 8-bit computing.

If you'd like to follow some of his progress, you may follow him on Twitter via twitter.com/theshillito. His first announcement was made via twitter.yfrog.com/esjm4ygfj

This experiment may be extended, as I may throw a Sinclair machine at Peter or some other unsuspecting graduate or undergraduate.