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Rafal Miazga and Mister Beep have teamed up on Rafal's latest puzzle game for the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum named Marbles Of Wisdom. This ball-swapping game is based on Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords by D3 Publisher Inc., which appeared on many recent platforms including the Nintendo DS, Apple Mac, Windows-based PCs and even the XBox 360 in early 2007. The game presents you with some pre-sorted coloured marbles, which must be arranged so to group them together in rows or columns of three or more at a time to remove those matched from the playing field until it is completely cleared.

It's not quite as easy as it sounds, as no new spherical objects are introduced after each chain is removed, and you may end up with unbridgeable gaps, meaning no more legal moves are possible and therefore you have to begin that level over again. Fortunately, you are given nine lives to complete the whole game.

Mister Beep has provided some scintillating 1-bit beeper music simulating an amazing 8-channel sound from the rather quirky and unsophisticated speaker built into the rubber-keyed beast. And with no random events (at least none that I've noticed so far), this is one of those puzzle games that can be learnt, so after a few tries, you should be zipping through the earlier levels, although no password system is currently available. Whether there will be a future revision that will include one is not known, but for now, take a break and download the emulator image of this game from tinyurl.com/SpeccyMarbles.

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For fans of interactive fiction (that's text adventures in English), there's a Zeropolis Element production - again for the old Speccy - which is based on the classic point-and-click graphical adventure The Secret Of Monkey Island by LucasArts Games and published by US Gold in 1991, for the Commodore Amiga among other 16-bits. Playing as the naive Guybrush Threepwood who has always dreamed of becoming the most feared pirate of them all, you must explore the islands of the Caribbean, starting at the famous Melee Island (famous, at least, to the hordes of fans of the original game). There are many mysteries to uncover on your quest, so to see if this graphical game has made it to text form well, you may download the playable demo from the World Of Spectrum archives at www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0025658, or search the archive for Monkey Island Adventure.

While we're talking about Speccy games, Jonathan Cauldwell has dropped a hint of a new vertically scrolling shoot-'em up for the old binary beast, though no details have been released yet, nor any previews, playable or otherwise. It was mentioned over at the www.oldschool-gaming.com forums, so there will be a good place to look for the full announcement when it happens. Look in the 'Ongoing projects' sub-forums and you'll see a thread called Milk, No Sugar.

I'll be back next week with more news, which will hopefully include something about this somewhat mysterious project.