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Psion Software's 1995 Horace game, Horace In The Mystic Woods by Michael Ware, is very nearly complete for the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum thanks to the dedication of Speccy-guru Bob Smith.

The game follows our big-eyed hero's 8-bit adventures, seeing him rather ravenous, then enjoying a spot of skiing and finally being chased by spiders as big as him, Horace was due to return with the game Horace To The Rescue. Alas, this latter product vaporised and he didn't re-appear (officially at least) until the Psion 3 series Palmtop was launched in the 1990s. This time, he's trapped in a haunted forest and his only means of escape is to collect each item and head for the marked exit. This should all sound fairly familiar, and is a perfect excuse for a 2D platform game, which is exactly what this is.

As the current beta can now be completed, Bob's task is to claw back some memory to add a beeper tune to the proceedings, but you'll want to pop along to Bob's site to catch the latest news.

While on the subject of new Spectrum games, I hear that Jonathan Cauldwell is currently developing a top-secret project ready for release this October. As soon as I'm able to tell you any more about this, I will. Unfortunately, I can't give you any clues either, but knowing Jonathan's previous works should make this a good one.

Don Priestley was king of the 'Super-sprites' on the Speccy (most notably seen in The Trap Door, released by Piranha in 1986), and one of his earlier works, Maziacs (published 1983 by DK'Tronics Ltd) has now been ported to the Commodore Plus/4, or the Commodore 16/116 with 64K of RAM. The task sees our brave adventurer travelling through a maze strewn with gold and evil monsters. The task is to collect all the said gold to increase your wealth and presumably happiness. To get this download for your favourite emulator (or real machine, with the right transfer methods), head over to plus3world.powweb.com/software/Maziacs.

Recently released for the Atari 8-bit is a puzzle game called Little 15, which is one of those annoying little 'slide picture' games that I personally find so difficult to complete. If you're not sure from that description, then you'll see a picture on-screen that is duly shuffled, being one of four images. The graphics are well defined and each picture can be swapped after shuffling as long as the game itself hasn't already started, as this might be helpful if you need a different view of things.

The game image can be downloaded from Pouet, where you'll also find other games and demos for the Atari and many other formats, so the Pouet portal may well be worth adding to your favourite websites, especially if you're a fan of the demo scene.