Over the past few months, CRASH has tended to neglect the cheaper end of the software market - the ninety-niners - in favour of critical comment on all the full-price games. So in an effort to cover every single piece of software available for your Spectrum, CRASH has decided to introduce a new section, devoted entirely to budget software (games up to £5.00 in price); Budget Bureau. Each month, we'll pick out and feature our favourite cheapies, anything with 80%+ will receive a CRASH House Hit award! Each game still has its own overall rating (in brackets), so there shouldn't be a problem choosing the best games to buy. Only Blackbeard gets a House Hit this month. Read on, read on...

Dullness seems a positive virtue by comparison with Mastertronic's Motorbike Madness (20%), however. This has good isometric graphics, ten multiloaded courses and prize money for quick finishes. Unfortunately control is extraordinarily fiddly and every time you die you have to reload the course - even if it's only the first one. No wonder it's called Motorbike Madness.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Yes it's Marcus Berkmann again, rootling around in the lucky dip for all the latest cheapoid games. And what did he pull out? A bunch of bargains no less!

Mastertronic
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Nice one this, not unlike Pro Skateboard Sim earlier, but more sophisticated and more addictive. The main difference, of course, is that you're riding a motorbike on this one, and scrambling around an extremely testing mountain course. There's a time limit, natch, and the faster you complete the course, the more dosh you get to upgrade your machine. It's not terribly original, true - I mean, there's a virtually identical game on another part of this page - but above all it has been well designed. Your skill is always being tested, which can be a problem if you don't have any - but even I got the hang of things, so it can't be too difficult. The programmers were Binary design, who have done a lot of Mastertronic games, but this, I think, is one of their best. Neat stuff, and worth two nelsons of anyone's wad.

Label: Mastertronic
Author: Binary Design
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Strap on your leather gear, stick your helmet on your head and get ready to burn some rubber. Motorbike Madness makes Kikstart look like Noddy's Scooter Ride, and if you can master it you're just about ready for the Barry Sheene Tin Leg Award.

The 10 levels of obstacle-avoiding zaniness are loaded separately from the tape. The landscape is in many ways similar to that of the classic Glider Rider; about half the screen, scrolling in all four directions, shown in glorious monochrome and consisting of various slopes, planes and ramps. Your task is simply to steer your motorbike around each course, avoiding all the obstacles and heading for the gate to the next stage before time runs out.

But it isn't that simple, is it Barry? No, because the landscape is littered with things which are likely to turn your bike into a little heap of scrap, not to mention you. The first challenge is a ramp. Steering carefully around the trees, simply pushing the joystick in the direction you want your front wheel to turn, you must line up with the ramp, build up speed (shown on the bar graph to the right of the screen) and zoom over the ramp, veering sharply to the right to avoid a pile of tyres. Too slow, or inaccurately lined up, and you'll end in a crumpled mess, probably sustaining a punctured tyre or leaking petrol tank in the process. Damage to your bike is shown on the display at the bottom of the screen, and each bit of damage impairs your performance more.

Other hazards to contend with include patches of cinders. water, spiked blocks and skiddy patches. It's pretty blinking difficult to control the bike, though; it tends to jump suddenly from left to right, rather than coming around smoothly. I don't know if this is deliberate, but it makes it remarkably difficult to concentrate on finding your way around the course. Fortunately, if you get knocked off, you're returned to the last ramp you jumped, rather than right back to the start of the level.

The 10 levels are ridges, floodlands, parapets, slopes, maze, origin, hillside, speedway, mud trouble and final. Goodness knows what the later levels look like, because I'm having enough trouble slogging my way through level one. Sound is OK, but for some reason you have to reload each level after losing all your lives.

Great fun, then, but too difficult for my feeble brain.