Beau Jolly's valuepacks take the limelight this week. They offer six games for the Commodore 64, Vic 20 or Spectrum 48K with a price tag of £19.99. The Spectrum 16K pack, with four games, is £14.99. This works out at well under £4 a game, a considerable reduction on normal price. Most of the games are from Imagine and include many old faithfuls. Further value packs are planned - including one for the BBC before Christmas.

Beau Jolly has also released a new Imagine game, BC Bill, available for the BBC, Commodore 64, Dragon and Spectrum. It's another on the caveman theme: you gather up as many wives as you can and keep your offspring adequately fed until they're old enough to leave the save to fend for themselves. It goes without saying that you're under constant attack from predatory dinosaures. We'll review the game in full soon.

Though PCN introduced Flight 401? (Oric/Atmos) as recently as issue 71, Knight Software has already re-released the instrument-only flight simulator. Changes include faster screen update and more accurate instrumentation.

Penguin Software's Stellar 7 comes on disk with the Commodore 64 version on one side, the Apple on the other. It's a tank game, along the lines of Battle Zone or 3D Tank Zone on the BBC. You command the tank Raven, whose instrumentation includes a radar (Gravatic Scope), Protonic Shield and fuel levels. Alien craft are shown as wire figures, but the 3D perspective manipulation is excellent.

Also excellent is Potty Pigeon for the Commodore 64. The quality of software for this machine is rising rapidly. Your task, as the eponymous pigeon, is to build a nest from twigs on the road. You swoop down, dodging cars and avoiding birds or prey which force you to drop your burder. Points can be scored by bombing the cars - only modesty prevents us from saying how. The smooth scrolling background is the best we've seen for a long time and even the 3D parallax is correct. Also emerging from Gremlin Graphics is Monty Mole on both Commodore 64 and Spectrum. On the model of Manic Miner, you play the part of Monty Mole, who collects scraps of loose coal scattered through the mine. It's far from easy, but life is made simpler collecting boxes of worms. Like Potty Pigeon, this one has exceptionally good graphics.

Merlin, the greatest wizard of all time, is once again the victim of a conspiracy by the forces of evil. In this Commodore 64 battle of good and evil, destroy the hordes by casting speels. Hazards include spiders, Hellwasps, parachutes and witches astride broomsticks. As your five lives run out you replenish your energy by collecting unsavory ingredients for your life-giving magic brew. The graphics are a bit limited, but it's all good fun.

As games prices continue to fluctuate, Comsoft has dropped its BBC games to £4.95. One of its new releases, Custard Pie Fight, wins our coveted Title of the Week award. This one/two player game is set in a kitchen where two chefs battle it out between fridge and cooker.

Penguin Software continues to churn out graphics packages for the Apple: Cat Graphics adds 55 new commands to Applesoft Basic and is compatible with the II, II+ and the high-resolution graphics of the IIe and IIc. It offers 108 colours, 256 in double resolution mode. Images can be scrolled horizontally and vertically as well as 'packed', and parts of pictures moved. The package also offers sound and text-font handling.

DAP1 and 2 are data analysis and curve fitting programs for the BBC, which allow graphs and functions to be produced and dumped to a printer. There are facilities for interfacing the programs to your own programs. Mach 1, a machine code utility featuring a combined assembler/disassembler, is compatible with Acorn's second processor and comes on disk or as a 16K EPROM.

Graph Easy covers the graphs and equations parts of the GCE 'O' and 'A' level syllabi, but can also be used as an applications program for data analysis. The large manual gives many examples and the program makes full use of the Beeb's function keys.