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...

Also 'in' are 1950s styles, as Silverbird acknowledge with Video Classics (05% - oh dear). Simple bat and ball versions of tennis, football, and squash are featured alongside the more original Four Bat Blip and Asterbliperoids! All these games (load together) take up about 11k of memory - but it seems less. The minimalistic graphics are identical to early video game consoles, with the exception of some garish, chequered backgrounds. A serious contender for The World's Worst Games Collection.

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!

BLIP
Silverbird
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Good grief! First we get two Breakout clones and now someone's harking back all the way to Pong! (Pong? Ed) Yes, Pong, the first ever arcade game, invented by Someone Whose Name I've Forgotten in about 1902. This is the old bat and ball game - tennis, football, squash and sundry other variations which are nearly as bewhiskered. Not surprisingly, Blip has been neatly programmed and it looks lovely, but the basic game is terribly old, and unlike Arkanoid and co, there's been no attempt to update the formula. Blip is just Pong with pretty backgrounds, and it's really rather dull.