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Already available for both the Amstrad CPC and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Nanako In Classic Japanese Monster Castle (with a title that sounds as though it has been translated directly from Japanese to English word for word) has now been released for the Commodore 64. The game tells the story of Mya, a young witch apprentice and Nanako's younger sister.

She decided to break some very important rules in her palace by heading to Helin Tower to practise in the dark arts.

In this mystic and malevolent old tower is the army of Karakasas, and Mya is jailed on the 25th floor - it's down to her big sister to save her.

The task is to rearrange the blocks to form safe routes upwards to the top floor by creating temporary staircases, with each screen representing one floor within the game. This all makes for a rather fun and entertaining piece of software that may be downloaded from the Commodore Scene Database at https://csdb.dk/release/?id=95999.

The Spectrum edition of this nifty title is available from the World Of Spectrum archive by using the infoseek facility, while the CPC version may be obtained from mojontwins.com/juegos_mojonos/nanako-in-classic-japanese-monster-castle-v2.

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Retroworks Software has released its horizontally scrolling 2D blasterama Genesis: Dawn Of A New Day, for the 128K ZX Speccy. Containing seven levels and over a dozen musical compositions to accompany this shoot-'em up, it's a fairly familiar tale of one man against an intergalactic menace, which happens to have an entire army of minions as its disposal.

Known as the evil 'Dork', this menace was never taken very seriously and mankind's complacency really didn't help.

Assuming that an attack would never take place was our first mistake, and then the thinking was that the Dorks would be weak and easy to beat anyway. Now Earth and all of its inhabitants are in grave danger and it's up to you to save the day, and with the Genesis spaceship - Earth's one hope of reasonable defence - being outsourced to other planets rather than manufactured on our home planet, it's up to you to visit the planets that currently have the parts so that it can be built before it's too late.

Genesis is good to see on the ZX, as there simply aren't enough shoot-'em-ups released for the platform (which is just my opinion, but I'm sure others would share that view). It has silky-smooth scrolling and great, though only monochrome, in-game graphics. The music sets the scene nicely, with a tried and tested game mechanic that will at least keep people like me happy. To find out more and get hold of the download, point your web browser at retroworks.es/php/game_en.php?id=8.

Robert Hurst has released his latest game for the Commodore VIC-20 requiring an 8KB RAM-pack or better. It's a take on Taito's 1978 seminal arcade hit Space Invaders, including fully commented source code and documentation, which demonstrates most of what Robert's software sprite engine can do.

This game should hardly need any introduction, and is more focused on the programming side of things as much as anything else, especially as the game engine has 40 crisply defined animated software sprites on screen at once. It's not just about how much you can make happen on the screen, as Sprite Invaders is a pretty solid game too. For anyone interested in learning 6502 assembly language, you could do worse than reading through the source and experimenting with it to see what you can do for yourself.

This project (along with a link to the relevant files) is discussed on the Denial VIC-20 forums over at tinyurl.com/Spritelnvaders. Talking of assembly programming, you may remember that I mentioned I was planning to cover the 6502 CPU in a similar way that the Return Of The Bedroom Programmer series did with the Z80. This is still in the works at the moment, and has been penned in for early 2011.

Finally, I'd just like to point out that if you have any comments on this column, then please tell me by e-mailing shaunb@micromart. co.uk. Or, of course, the Micro Mart forums are open day and night; pop along there and look for the Retro Computer Mart sub-forum.