With the deadline looming for the Game Over(view) Freestyle Jam (a competition set up to encourage development of new Commodore 64 games), a late flurry of entrants has saved it from being as dead as a dodo. Doubling the number of wares to just four, the groups Cache64 and Samar have released Battle Throne and Bomberman 64 respectively, with a possible fifth coming from the capable hands of Glance, with the game Beam.

The first title mentioned, Battle Throne, is a one-on-one hack and slash-'em-up in a similar vein to Barbarian II, but with less blood and gore. The backdrops are beautifully drawn, with some excellent music to accompany the proceedings. One or two people can compete, or a single player can take on the best of the medieval binary foes within the game.

Samer's Bomberman 64 should speak for itself, because unless you've been visiting a remote part of the universe for the past fifteen years or so, you should be familiar with Bomberman already. In this variation on the theme, the task in hand is to dispatch all of the evil roaming monsters from the arena and to find the exit to the next level.

Starting off at what feels like a somewhat pedestrian pace, the game soon heats up after about level three or so. Again, this game is aesthetically and aurally pleasing, and also has rather smooth and easy-to-use controls. Not that you can go far wrong with this sort of 2D game, but the main sprite isn't constricted to moving at 90 degree angles. That's just a little thing I know, but it makes the gameplay flow slightly more than you'd usually expect.

And finally there's Beam, a rather testing game of patience and skill. The object is to bounce the smaller ball on the top half of the screen with your bat, while balancing the ball on the bottom of the screen which is precariously placed on your beam.

The thing is that every time your bat moves left or right, the beam counteracts that movement, and so the ball at the bottom rolls. But if you miss one of the bouncing balls at the top of the screen, it is game over, and you can only lose three balls from the bottom.

This simple concept should keep you occupied for hours, as it can be more frustrating than Minesweeper. To get these games, head over to noname.c64.org/csdb/event/?id=1185 or the official competition site at www.artificial-stupidity.net/gameoverview/jam.html but, most of all, enjoy these and the other two entries.

Jonathan Cauldwell's Sinclair ZX Spectrum work in progress Untitled Blancmange now has been officially christened. It's now called Blizzard's Rift, and will come in two forms, a 48K version and a 128K version. The latter is expected to feature more levels and in-game music, although there will be no different in the actual game engine.

The storyline introduces hero Digby Blizzard, who discovers Henri Latrine's forgotten diaries in an antiques shop. These scribes reveal Henri's adventures and plunders from far off places. Heavily in debt, Digby heads off to seek his own fortune in the mines of a mysterious and extinct alien civilisation.

For those of you who don't know, Blizzard's Rift is a crossover between his games Lunaris and Higgledy Piggledy, and (from the demo at least) is both brilliantly playable and brutally frustrating. Needless to say, I believe that this is one of the many pending releases to look forward to for Sinclair's mighty Speccy, and should be available via the usual channels. That's Cronosoft in real-media form (www.cronosoft.co.uk) and Retro Soft (www.retro-soft.co.uk) for emulator fans.

That's all from me this week, and I'll be back again to round up more news in due course.