In the spotlight this week are two games from the Spanish-based Computer EmuZone Games Studio for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and for the ZX81 is a puzzler from the Canadian ZX81 guru Andre Baune. They're available from cezgs.computeremuzone.com/cezgs/eng and www.zx-team.de/andre respectively.

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On your way back from a holiday spent cruising around the galaxy, your craft enters a mysterious wormhole and you find yourself in the midst of a strange and guarded asteroid field. What has actually happened is that you have entered an intricate and dangerous labyrinth, and the only way out is to break down the barriers ahead by using your cannon-shaped projectile.

This game is a rather impressive Arkanoid-alike affair, in that your craft must bounce a globular shell to destroy the on-screen blocks or asteroids. While not trying to reinvent the concept entirely, it does have some rather nice ideas added to it. For instance, on certain levels, asteroids meander around the play area, making an interesting change from the solid and motionless bricks, as not only do you have to keep your ball in play but also avoid the shards of meteorites as well.

Luckily, you have a certain number of shields and lives, both of which can be replenished on the static brick-filled screens by collecting the power-ups that fall intermittently from the top of the screen, while other items will fall when certain blocks are destroyed, which can affect your craft or take one of your lives. There's also vertically scrolling backdrops in parts of the game, adding a bit of class to the production.

Ragnablock is a very commendable homebrew release for the Speccy, and should be a nice distraction during your free time.

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Some games can be so annoying to get to grips with that before you know it, you've been playing for an hour and, even with the frustration building, you still want to give it another go. This is a good description of this 48k Speccy release. At first, the simple and sparse graphics, as well as the wily control method, hide away what can be an addictive little game.

Moggy must rescue his friends from the dark and eerie forests as they have been ensnared there by an evil wizard due to drinking a poison. The game is a static screen affair, and Moggy isn’t about to take his time in this quest, partly due to intoxication. Hence, the main character isn’t too easy to control, at first anyway. Movements are fast and Moggy can travel any direction horizontally or vertically. So for instance, if Moggy is going from left to right at full speed, and you then want to change direction to go down, he will follow a natural trajectory arcing downwards. To add to the mischief, venomous edibles strewn throughout the screen slowly take your life on contact, and your time limit is pretty tight, to say the least.

Perseverance and patience will ultimately reap many rewards as you strive to progress further into this binary world and rescue more of Moggy's friends. It gets 7 out of 10 from me.

This is a ZX81 game by Andre Baune, written in the famed but very limited ZX BASIC, and in the usual style for Andre, Alien Mind is one for logicians and puzzle fans among us. You control a gravity-defying alien whose mission is to move around the valuable stock from one shelf to the other, but only the crate stamped with the X on it needs to be moved specifically to the shelf baring the same marking. Each box will fall until it hits something solid, including the alien, which will die with a splat!

This production is a somewhat slow but thoughtful game which isn't too dissimilar to the educational titles of old (I certainly remember comparable affairs from my school days, anyway), but can be great fun with its plodding pace and monochrome graphics, especially if you ever owned a ZX81. Andre certainly knows how to get the best out of this limited machine using its restrictive high-level language, and his puzzles will keep you coming back for a short while at least. I give Alien Mind a 6.