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To coincide with Egghead's eighteenth birthday (and oddly enough, it was also World of Spectrum's twelfth anniversary too on the same date), creator of the oval-shaped hero Jonathan Cauldwell has finished the latest outing for the 128k Sinclair ZX Spectrum Egghead Round The Med, available as a free download, and also coming soon on real cassette thanks to Cronosoft.

After impressing Shelley in his last adventure, Egghead decides to take a cruise in his yacht around the Mediterranean sea with friends. During what can only be described as one almighty drinking session that would put Micro Mart's Christmas party to shame, our hapless hero must collect his stranded friends in the many locations he vaguely remembers visiting, including Gibraltar, Greece, Spain, France, Egypt and Italy. The game can be played as a collect-'em-up, in which you need to find all of the hidden eggs, or as a puzzle game, in which three items can be carried at a time to be used to unlock and solve the game.

Accompanying play is some superb AY music, with a feel of Monty On The Run to the proceedings. Hints of other games by Jonathan are evident (see the Casino onboard, for instance), though the whole thing is a little more straight forward than Loco Bingo, Quantum Gardening or The Fantastic Mister Fruity, well so far as I've played into it anyway.

At the moment, I'm enjoying the collect-'em-up game as there's a lot to explore, with a massive 140 screens to discover, and I'll be delving into the puzzle elements in time to review this colossus. Until then, you can grab your copy from http://jonathan6.fortunecity.com/egghead/ - don't forget to keep an eye on Cronosoft's homepage for an announcement of this pending release. As ever, point your web browsing software to www.cronosoft.co.uk.

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Thanks to Old School Gaming (www.oldschool-gaming.com) for pointing out this release for the Atari XE/XL machines. The XXL team (you know, the folks who ported the Speccy classic Jet Pac to the Atari), have sympathetically brought another revered Spectrum game to Atari's 8-bit. This time, Matthew Smith's well-known Jet Set Willy is now available to play and is once again pretty damn close to the original, but with obvious cosmetic differences.

For those of you who don't know the storyline here, our hero Willy finds his fortune in abandoned mines and buys a lavish mansion. After one almighty party, his house keeper Maria insists that he must tidy everything up before he can go to bed. In desperate need of sleep, Willy sets diligently sets about his chores. Although I'd personally like to see original software for the 8-bit, this remake is a worthy enough effort to take note of. The imaginatively entitled Jet Set Willy 2007 can be had from http://atari.online.pl/v01 - and if your Polish isn't up to much, then try the news archives at the aforementioned Old School Gaming site for a direct link.

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If you have missed it, Yoomp! is a superb release for the 64k Atari 8-bits, being a mix of Trailblazer and Bounder, and is one of the most enjoyable releases this year. Anyway, www.lemon64.com forum frequenter Fr^hn is working on a port of this for the Commodore 64. So far, there's not much to see - save for a tunnel-effect, as featured in many demos, with an over-laid ball sprite. But it's progress at least. More news, including hopefully a spanky download, will follow shortly. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the outcome.