Hareraiser was launched at the BBC Micro Users' Exhibition and "the first ever computer treasure hunt" - maybe Haresoft hasn't heard of Pimania? The treasure is either the golden jewelled hare (which readers may recognis as the trove from Kit William's book Masquerade) or £30,000. The program comes in two parts, the second to be released in October. Each part will cost £8.95 and provide "clever clues and amusing graphics" from which you should be able to deduce the whereabouts of the treasure. Versions of the programs will also be available for the Commodore 64, Vic, Oric, Dragon and Spectrum, and users will have to register with Haresoft to enter.

Mirrorsoft continues to produce good quality software, and not just in the educational field where it started. Hi Bouncer for the BBC may be based on Roger Hargreaves' characters, the Mr. Men, but is a very well-produced arcade type game from H & H Software. Nice touches are a practice program which allows you to alter the speed of the game, a pause facility and sound volume control. Both the practice session and the arcade speed game have four screens or eight versions each, just to keep you on your toes, and the graphics and sound are very good indeed.

Runesoft has added to its range of Spectrum adventures with Robyn Hode. This is a machine code adventure with over 400 locations and 120 commands, set in the 13th century and has been researched to the extent that the programmers made reference to the Domesday book and old maps to ensure that the settings were as historically accurate as possible. The adventure is in two parts, making it one of the longest available for the machine.

Flight 401? for the Oric/Atmos is a fairly primitive, instruments-only flight simulator. The screen display is limited to a few dials, an artificial horizon and various figures such as altitude and 'aircraft', which isn't explained in the instructions. According to the cassette cover, your task is to "rewright (sic) history and successfully fly Flight 401 avoiding its untimely end". The program appears to be written in Basic and, because the screen update is pretty slow, you don't fly in real time at all. There are flight simulators and flight simulators - this is not one of the best.

Because it's summer, the amount of new games released per week is dropping. At this time of year the emphasis is on converting programs for other machines, and this week saw a number of these.

For the Commodore 64 there's Blue Thunder and The Oracle's Cave (converted from the Spectrum), Classic Adventure for the BBC/Electron, a BBC version of Jetpac and for the first time, an Amstrad CPC464 program. Classic Adventure was originally translated for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 from the original 70K, text-only, mainframe adventure.

Terminal's Star Commando is disappointing given the features of the Amstrad. It's a pretty standard variant of Star Trek, combined with shoot-'em-up, but you only ever get three aliens at a time. The graphics are limited, though there's a fair attempt at sprite handling, and the sound is poor. Let's hope the next batch of Amstrad software is better, but it looks as if owners of the new machine will have to be prepared to fork out £8.95 as a standard price for games - rather pricey.

Another conversion is Dollarsoft's Suicide Island, moving from the Spectrum to the BBC and Electron. It's a two-part adventure and you have to complete the first bit to get into the second.

The Vic 20 may not be found in many schools, but now Chalksoft has converted its well-received educational program Decimals from the BBC. Aimed at the nine to 14 age range, its four parts cover most of the decimal handling rule and automatically adjust the difficulty level according to your progress.

From CDS comes an audio tape to accompany the company's vocabulary learning packages, French Is Fun and German Is Fun. The tape has words spoken by native speakers, the idea being that you can practice your pronunciation as you run the program (reviewed in PCN issue 57).

For would-be machine code programmers, New Generation has released two versions of its Machine Code Tutor for the Commodore 64 and any 32K Atari.