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...

An even older bunch of games than Video Classics form the basis of Zeppelin's Las Vegas Casino (26%). You start off with £250 and must try to turn it into £50000 via four gambling games (all in one load again). The games are blackjack (just like Pontoon 21 here), baccarat (you choose whether to bet on player or dealer), roulette and craps (a dice game). The only game requiring real skill is blackjack, which is still pretty simple. In fact, without even matchsticks to play for, and human opponents to bluff, all these games soon become incredibly tedious. Highly recommended, in fact, as an antidote to the perils of gambling.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

What's going cheap this month? (Make any bird jokes, and you're dead, Ed). Certainly not Marcus Berksquawk. (BLAM!!)

Zeppelin Games
£2.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

One of the great old stand-bys in budget land is the gambling game. If it's not a fruit machine - which it usually is - it's a poker game, or in this case a Casino sim. Full marks, incidentally, to Zeppelin for not using the word 'Simulator' anywhere in the title of this game - the temptation must have been great.

Overall this is not a bad little casino game - you ghet to play craps, baccarat (Yes Sir, I can Boogie), roulette and my personal fave, black jack. None of the four is presented particularly impressively, but they're all playable enough if you like that sort of thing, and I do, from time to time. Neat, unassuming and in many ways what budget games are all about, Brian. but why is it £2.99 instead of £1.99?