What happens when you mix Jonathan Cauldwell's excellent take on a Golf Simulator (Albatrossity, released in 2008 by Cronosoft for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum) with a common explorer-type 2D platform game? Well, some of those answers can be found in Sir Froggy, which has been developed and released by the World of Spectrum (WoS) forumite Hikoki and is available in English and Spanish language versions.

One thing you'll notice is the game mechanic: you'd expect a frog to be able to jump, but you have a directional control before the amphibian is set into motion, in a 90 degree arc facing forward. Then the power is set for the height. This requires a little bit of a learning curve but it works really well.

The graphics are crisp and well-defined, and there's a great musical rendition using the beeper on the title screen.

Sir Froggy is built with The Mojon Twins' La Churrera game engine, which provides a fairly substantial framework for budding programmers and games designers to work with, and this production shows its versatility.

To find out more about the La Churrera engine, have a look at mojontwins.com/juegos_mojonos/la-churrera-english and Sir Froggy may be downloaded from tinyurl.com/Sir-Froggy.

Steve Broad has released the latest in his series of Horace games for the ZX Spectrum in the form of a platform game called Horace Miner. This one will work with all models with 48K or more, but it will be required to load from 48K mode or USR 0, which should be entered into 128 BASIC.

Each level is sparsely populated with platforms, and there are enemies that roam about, which will take one of Horace's lives - but they do move in a predictable fashion; the task is to guide our favourite bug-eyed blue hero to collect the fruit pieces and, once done, ring the sometimes awkwardly placed bell. Each level has a time limit to beat.

The game plays quite nicely and, for nostalgia purposes I'm sure, in a very 'Horace' way, being something of a throwback to the way Speccy games used to be pre-1985, with tearing on the software sprites and the obligatory beeper sound effects. I'm sure you'll agree, though, that it's not a bad thing.

For more information about this release, head over to the WoS forums at tinyurl.com/Horace-Miner-2.

Some of you more eager-eyes readers will have noticed that there was a typo to the listing for the Commodore 64 in issue 1315. Basically, in the scrolly text listing, the variable 'L' was used to store the number of characters in the message, rather than fixing it which would be faster, but then you'd have to count each character in the string. So although I had set this in line 20, I had not used it in line 30, the line that shuffles the characters in the string around.

To correct this, amend the listing on like 30 as:

30 A$ = RIGHTS(A$, L) + LEFT$(AS, 1)

Sorry for the inconvenience! If you would like to continue the BASIC programming conversation, head over to the Retro sub-forums on the Micro Mart community forum.