Manic Miner has long been regarded as a classic game, and rightfully so. The prequel to Jet Set Willy, the game has you playing Miner Willy as you traverse underground caverns, collecting enough keys in each one to open the exit and allow you to proceed. Each cavern is only one screen in size, but they are jam-packed with enemies (weird and wonderful!), platforms, keys and other obstacles, making them seem a lot bigger. The graphics are fairly simplistic but still good, and the music is pretty catchy, and the whole game is a heap-load of fun. The levels are brilliantly laid out, and the difficulty is set just right - each go will take you further than the last one. Some of the later levels are a bit punishing, but not overly so. Great for a quick blast, and sometimes unbelievably addictive, Manic Miner is a game I recommend to anyone.

See also: Jet Set Willy.

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Le Manoir de Mortevielle
(Lankhor, 1988)

Jérôme Lange, a private detective, has been called to Mortville Manor by a former friend, Julia Defranck. She is seriously ill, and by the time he arrives at the manor, she is dead. But as you investigate the cause of her death and search the manor thoroughly, other mysteries start to arise... This is an absolutely stunning graphic adventure that will leave you awestruck. As well as excellent graphics, it also features digitised speech throughout - and you can even understand it! The digitised tune on the title screen is also brilliant. Of course, there's a lot to explore in Mortville Manor, and the solution involves a lot of lateral thinking and deciphering some very cryptic clues. However, this game is an all-time classic among French CPC users, and rightly so, but it's a great shame that despite talk of releasing the CPC version in the UK, it never was.

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Le Manoir du Comte Frozarda
(MBC, 1988)

Reports of several young girls going missing in Transylvania have greatly concerned the local authorities, who call on you to enter the nearby manor where some descendants of Count Dracula have returned. Worse, your fiancée has also disappeared... This is a text adventure with fairly crude graphics and some gruesome scenes. It's written using The Quill, and as a result, it looks and feels rather unsophisticated when compared with most other French adventures. The parser seems to be rather limited, and despite initially making some promising progress, I quickly become totally stuck. Also worthy of note is that a prize of 15 days in Transylvania was offered to the first person to complete this game - and someone did win it.

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You are one of a group of divers on a secret mission below the surface of the ocean, but a traitor has locked one of the divers in a cage. His supply of oxygen is running out, and you must find the key to release him - and soon! I found this game to be very confusing and boring to play. There is a dot at the bottom of the screen which represents your current location in the ocean, but moving off the screen never seems to take you to where you want to go, and I soon became totally lost. You can swim around and admire the pretty graphics (and the sharks), but there seems to be very little to actually do. Maybe I don't understand how to play this game properly, but I don't care anyway.

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Marble Madness Construction Set
(Melbourne House, 1986)

Guide the marble through ten screens of tortuous and twisting terrain, without falling off the edges or crashing into other marbles and creatures. This game was famous in the arcades because the marble was controlled by a trackball, but of course, that can't be done on a CPC. It was also a totally original game and has been imitated extensively. However, this conversion isn't as good as it could have been; the graphics move too slowly and it looks drab. The music is great, though, and it's possible to design your own screens using the built-in construction set. A deluxe edition of the game with different screens was also released.

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Turtles are invading the plumbing factory where Mario and his brother Luigi work, and they have to rid the factory of them. They do this by jumping and hitting their heads on the platforms (ouch!) so that the turtles flip over and are knocked unconscious - then they have to walk over to the turtle to remove it. When all the turtles are removed, it's on to the next level - which is more of the same. This is certainly one of the worst games to feature Mario and Luigi; it's one to forget about. The playing area is rather confined and it's difficult to reach the turtles in time when you've knocked them out. The graphics are poor and there are very few sound effects. Go and play one of the countless other Mario games on Nintendo's consoles instead.

See also: Donkey Kong.

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3

Marmelade
(MBC, 1988)

Stéphane Marlow is a detective who has been given the task of clearing a town of a group of gangsters. Starting in your bedroom in a dilapidated hotel, you roam the streets of the town, and among the characters you will meet are a dancer, a shopkeeper who sells music cassettes, a blind tramp, an ice-cream seller, and even a gorilla! The game is a parody of an old text adventure called Masquerade that was released before the Amstrad CPC existed. The pictures are OK, but there aren't many locations, and I don't like the way that some objects which need to be manipulated are hidden in the pictures but are not mentioned in the text. Overall, it's a mediocre game.

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5

The Markons have built a gigantic computer, the Brain of Markon, which has been sent out on a spaceship, on a mission lasting a thousand years to search for new lifeforms. However, the computer is under constant attack from Martianoids. You are the maintenance robot who must activate all nine sectors of the computer and repair it by picking up cones and using them. For each of the nine sectors to be activated, a program (represented by a piece of paper) must be guided from a transmitter to a receiver, using both yourself and the cones you pick up. This is quite difficult, as the program moves erratically. The graphics are lacking in colour and the sound is poor, and I found the game to be quite boring.

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5

Another game with which to test your skills at chess. I'll say here that I have never been very good at chess at all, and if you're any better than I am, then this game won't present much of a challenge to you. One effect of this is that it doesn't spend ages thinking about its next move, which may be a good thing if you're impatient like me. Unfortunately, it also has some small bugs which make the computer perform some illegal moves, which can be annoying. You can save and load games, though, and rearrange the board if you want, but I think that any experienced chess player might find this game too easy for them.

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6

Three genies have been let loose. A young prince must reconstruct the three lamps and banish the genies in order to save the kingdom from doom. Each piece is retrieved by flying through a twisting tunnel on a magic carpet, and then listening to a sequence of notes and trying to recreate the sequence by hitting coloured gongs. It sounds rather strange, but once you play the game, you'll understand it quite quickly. The tunnel part of the game can be quite tricky to master, but fortunately there is an option to practice flying through any of the tunnels, and the game also offers two playing modes, where you can try to reconstruct only one lamp, or all three. Although the graphics are simple, there are several excellent tunes to listen to, and the tunnel part of the game is great fun.

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