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Codemasters' last foray into the 8-bit market was the game Bee 52, seeing the light of day on Nintendo's popular NES around 1993 and supposedly also on the Commodore 64 too, although it wasn't officially released by the popular budget label, just as mail order only by its coder Nick Taylor. Being distributed in such a way affected sales of the game and limited it to those users with disk drives, and many potential punters missed out as a result.

Bee 52 is basically a horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up in which our hero, a diligent and hard-working honey bee, must go out to collect the sweet nectar to make the natural sweetener, while avoiding the many hazards that patrol the levels. There's the added complication that someone is out to steal honey from the hive and should he reach it before being scared off, things become a whole lot harder as more nectar must be collected to meet the quota and finish the level.

For those who missed the game first time around on the C64, it's available again thanks to those folks at GameTap.com, though you'll need to sign up to the service to buy the game. It's available from tinyurl.com/gpndot, along with some other Commodore titles, though you'll have to use the site's search facility to find them.

Jonathan Cauldwell has two ongoing projects for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum at the moment, with one being at the playable preview stage. The first is a game called Ubris, with no real details about it yet, other than being "a chance to show off a bit of creative game design, so that's what I'll be doing - something fun, and a bit daft" - not that creative game design seems to be difficult for Jonathan. An educated guess is that Ubris will become his idea, whereby you have strands of DNA, which can be genetically modified. As these changes to the game's double helix take place, so does the game mechanic. This is one to keep an eye on...

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His second project is a little more traditional, called Slubberdegullion, which takes his 2003 Cybernoid-inspired game, Rough Justice, and adds a new control system, a better arsenal and more polish. You find yourself once again searching the lost but protected caverns in search of treasure. The ship rotates, in a similar manner to Atari's 1979 arcade classic Asteroids, with gravity taking control if you don't use the thrust as in Rough Justice, and finally three weapons to choose from.

I'm really pleased to see this game in development, as Rough Justice is one of Jonathan's games that I like to go back to time and time again, mostly because I like the concept, but also because it's a whole lot less frustrating than Raffaele Cecco’s Cybernoid. The preview states that this will be a Cronosoft release, so expect it to cost around £2.99 plus postage on cassette when it's finished.

To read the development log on this and Jonathan's other projects, and, indeed, to grab the preview snapshot which will work on all good emulators, head over to www.tinyurl.com/j-cauldwell.