Mind Games, from Oasis Software, featues Chess, Draughts, Backgammon and Invader Cube for the Spectrum. Aces High for the BBC and Electron is another collection of games including Blackjack, Pontoon, Draw-Poker and Stud Poker.

Cases Computer Simulations are entering the "pocket money" games market with Dix Mille, a dice game, and Whodunnit?, a sort of murder quiz.

Bug-Byte's Star Trader is difficult to describe; it combines aspects of strategy games with arcade features. In one part you have to buy or sell items such as sacks of grain and have to be careful to keep up your strength by partaking of nourishment - if you're not fit you're not deemed capable of flying your cargo vessel. On the way to other planets you're likely to be attached by pirates and it's here the arcade action comes in.

That's not all though, for once you make harbour there's import duty to be paid on goods. As these taxes can be crippling you may choose to lie, risking heavy penalties if you're caught. While each part on its own is a bit full, the combination and the multiplicity of possible courses of action make this quite a successful game.

Moving to the C64, Murphy, from Mogul Software, is the best of the bunch but bears a curious resemblance to Ocean's latest, Gilligan's Gold, which is a Donkey Kong set in a gold mine. Murphy scores with good graphics and sound together with some clever animation.

Hercules is being heavily publicised, but our reviewer described it as "ridiculously impossible, very fast with poor graphics and sound". Spy School gives you four games in one, each of which is a variation on Frogger and related games and has the air of being produced via a games designer program. Microdeal's Mr. Dig is a Dig Dug clone, while Star Trooper from Melbourne House is a competent Jet Pac.

Widgit Software extends its range of early learning programs with Adventure Playground and Castle Of Dreams. The first of these is a bargain as you get two good games, one having four parts on the one cassette. Of these, The Queen of Hearts is a child's first computer adventure, with all the standard trappings of "You can see...", "Exits are: North, East."

The other game on the tape, Crooked Adventure, is based on the Crooked Man nursery rhyme. One of the four sections involves moving a large cat around a field chasing a mouse. Each correct answer to a shape/sequence question allows one move, after which the mouse moves a square at random.

To complete the whole set you have to find keys and glasses, then get the crooked man, his crooked cat and crooked mouse into their crooked house. The games are appealing and novel, if a little limited in their educational content.

Software support for the Commodore 64 as a small business machine is growing rapidly, as witnessed by the release this week of Autocalc 64. This is a machine code, disk-based spreadsheet from Richard Shepherd. The package comes with a demonstration file and the row/column limit is 255 with the further constraint that there may not be more than 2,000 calls in a model. At £14.95, and with a fairly full set of standard operations such as replication, variable cell width, calculations and justification.

Omnicalc 2 is an upgraded version of the Omnicalc Spectrum spreadsheet, and existing Omnicalc users can upgrade for £8. The program allows you to make use of Microdrivers and there are facilities for up- and downloading data via an RS232 hook-up, and simple histogram charting - an unusual feature for such a program. The row limit is 250, while the maximum number of cells is 4,000.

At first sight, Omnicalc would seem to have better facilities than Autocalc 64, showing that 64K isn't necessarily better than 48 - it's what you put in it that counts.

Go Sprite allows you to design up to 32 sprites on-screen, then convert the information to DATA statements for use in your own programs. The design part is quite comprehensive and includes an animation facility so you can see how your sprites will look in motion.

Graphix from Zipprint adds 16 graphics commands to the C64's vocabulary, which has to be a good thing. The commands include Colour, Draw, Paint and so forth - all standard commands which you'll find on most micros these days, but which novice C64 programmers will find extremely useful, even if the program is rather overpriced for what it is.

White Lightning is a Forth-based graphics development system whose manual runs to some 130 pages and comes with two demonstration programs. The program has two parts; there's the character or sprite designer and Ideal, the Forth bit. The whole system looks very impressive. Given its built-in interrupt system for fore/background tasks, and its Forth-Basic extension and interfacing, it could be a boon for the Spectrum games designer.