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Some of Sony's biggest successes throughout its reign with the PlayStation 2 were with titles that utilised additional hardware and controllers such as the EyeToy, Dance Mat and latterly the mini-guitar shaped tactile device that plugs into the PS2, allowing all would-be rockers to emulate their favourite axe-wielding musicians with the Guitar Hero series of games by RedOctane and Harmonix). Novel ways of interacting with games have been doing rather well recently - we only have to look at what Nintendo are doing to see that. Soon, owners of the Commodore 64 will be able to join in the fun by playing along with their favourite SID chip tunes thanks to Toni Westbrook's Shredz64 game combined with his own PSX64 interface, plus the aforementioned PS2 Guitar controller. Incidentally, this interface has been tested (and works) with other PlayStation control pads, so there's no reason why you couldn't use a DualShock to play Wizball, or something of that ilk, from what I gather.

From the YouTube demonstration recording, Toni introduces and explains his game Shredz64 (and the hardware that allows you to play it). Once loaded, you have a no-frills Guitar Hero-type game mechanic, with everything controlled through the plastic guitar-shaped interface. You may download .SID files (which are used on various PC SID players), and transfer them to disk to play along with your favourite tracks thanks to an in-built editor, adding to the longevity of this product. I have no doubt that some C64 musicians will be creating their own tracks for this game too.

The software looks extremely polished, and gimmick aside, this could be another step forward in C64 gaming, following in the success of Protovision's four-player adapter or last years on-line game Artillery Duel, which required an Ethernet interface such as the RR-Net. I certainly hope to get hold of the game and hardware for a quick blast as soon as available. For further information about this project, point your web browsing software to www.synthdreams.com/shredz64.php, or to Toni's homepage.

As reported here way back when, there's a new game for 40 column Commodore PET micro computers that are kitted out with at least 8KB of RAM. By Jason 'TMR' Kelk and Doug, this neat production is called Blok Copy, and as you can imagine, has been in progress for quite some time.

Announced over at the OldSchool-Gaming forums, it's described as an action puzzle; the task in hand is to re-arrange the play field (which has been shuffled around) and restore it to order as numbered. As with all of these sorts of games, there's a time limit, and this particular production has more than ten difficulty levels to play through. This game will only work on 40-column machines, although there were some utilities released to allow 80-column PETs to run 40-column software, Blok Copy hasn't been tested with anything of that nature. There is also supports vertical blank synchronisation and sound - which although some PETs didn't do, there's an apparently popular hardware hack which will allow the machine to beep away. To grab this download, head over to www.cosine.org.uk (a release is pending on real media through Cronosoft), and to discuss this release, head over to the already mentioned OldSchool-Gaming forums.

Apologies to all fans of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - I must have been looking elsewhere when the game Justin was released by the Spanish-based programming team CNGSoft in the latter part of last year. This game is a port of an earlier released Amstrad CPC game, which has been kicking around since December 2005, something that I also missed and can be downloaded from cpee.emuunlim.com/cpc_zip.htm.

The game is not too dissimilar to Ultimate Play The Game's classic Knight Lore in mechanic, with inspiration from the 1986 Dinamic release Dustin. The task in hand is to guide the burglar to find all of the keys to open each door in the mansion and then blast four safes to loot the gold. This should especially please those of you who like their 3D games at an isometric view-point. You can get the Speccy version at tinyurl.com/3cByIm.