Note to software publishers: If you wish your company's product to be included, please send only the very latest releases to Bryan Skinner, Software Editor, PCN, 62 Oxford Street, London W1A 2HG; and please don't forget to include prices and a telephone number.

Foreign software is filtering slowly but surely into Britain. Among the latest imports are four Spectrum games from Spanish company Ventamatic. They will soon be available from retailers, with games for the Commodore 64 and Oric Atmos close behind.

Escalador Loco (Crazy Climber) is the best of the bunch; you control a well-drawn figure scaling the side of a building, using windows for hand and footholds. You move your figure's arms and legs by keyboard or joystick and life is made difficult by irate tenants dropping flower pots on you, or closing the window blinds.

Ventamatic's other games are competent arcade-type games; for example, Tuneles Marcianos resembles Lunar Jetman or The Pyramid - you operate a spaceman and must blast approaching aliens. While their games don't quite take your breath away, it's interesting to see the direction of software export reversed and it may stimulate the imagination of British programmers.

Following its superb Psytron, Beyond has released its long awaited graphics adventure Lords of Midnight, where scenes are drawn according to each character's viewpoint. Though simple, they are drawn quickly and adequately. Unusually, commands single-keyed and the package includes a keyboard overlay marked with directions and commands like look, move, think and choose.

There is a prize associated with the game; simply drump chosen screens to a printer, and the best sequence will win. The winner will be the co-author of a book written around that specific story and will share royalties.

3D Tank Duel from Realtime joins such Spectrum versions of Battlezone as Rommel's Revenge (Crystal) and 3D Combat Zone (Artic), but our review copy wouldn't load...

Sabre Wulf is Ultimate's follow-up to Atic Atac and it's very good, even if it is just Atic Atac again, but in the jungle. You control a Pith-hatted explorer wandering a maze of luxuriant foliage and tackling a host of noxious life forms such as tarantulas, rhinoceri and poison orchids. The excellent graphics and a number of features make it better than its parent program; picking up objects when you pass over them is automatic, for instance. The sound effects are reminiscent of Atic Atac and the game is best played with a joystick.

Cosmic Cruiser from the Imagine stable is now marketed by Beau Jolly. The Spectrum version gives you two games in one: the first is rather like Rabbit's Paratrooper, except that here you fire the cannon to open airlocks in a revolving space station. In the second part you can move into the station to rescue imprisoned spacemen, but you must also kill any aliens in the station before you can leave. The Spectrum version's graphics are smooth and the scene inside the station is detailed, but the Dragon version lacks the interior game, the cannon has only five positions and the game on this machine is hardly worthy of the same name.

The BBC's viability as a small business machine is advancing by leaps and bounds due to a steady flow of new accounting and other packages. Each of three programs from CYB, Payroll, Mailmerge and Mailing List is available for a BBC with Torch pack for between £10 and £30 extra. Up to 600 employees are catered for by the Torch pack version of Payroll.

More upmarket is Xenix, the Unix-like Operating System for the IBM and Lisa II, currently being pushed by Sphinx among others. New software includes Multiplan from Microsoft, and word processing, database management and business accounting modules from Tetraplan.

Xenix on the PC allows users to hook several terminals to their IBM and share programs and data.

The £3.50 Maths Utilities programs from Solway, which can be bought together as a single package for £8.95, offer such useful mathematical routines as graph plotting, linear regression, mean and standard deviation, polar coordinates and base charging.

Most of the routines are straightforward and available in listings in books, but you don't have to type them in and debug them for yourself, sparing your powers of concentration for the arithmetic. Besides which, they're excellent value, especially at the three-in-one price.