Save the Earth! Battle the evil Xirconian empire! Play this game! Bomb Dash is a novel take on the classic game of Minesweeper. This version adds dramatic tension along with frantic action, and yet still requires you to flex those mental muscles. Picture a standard Minesweeper grid - hidden away are not only the key to exit each level along with many different types of bonus but also, of course, deadly bombs...

Fortunately, you are equipped with an ultra-sophisticated scanner, which will scan the eight squares immediately surrounding you and report how many bombs it finds, thereby enabling you to find a safe route. Not only that but your task is made even easier by a certain number of "Smart Bombs" which will blow up any surrounding unexplored squares upon use - very handy if you think that there might be several bombs nearby! Unfortunately, things are complicated somewhat by the fact that your presence on each level triggers a timer countdown - once the time runs out... it's good night!

Your mission is to battle your way through each level in an attempt to reach Xirconian High Command, so that you can destroy it - and save the Earth!

In the fair country of England where "intelligent" TV quiz shows still rule the day (well, for a short time during the afternoon on Channel 4, at any rate!), there is a quaint little show by the name of Countdown. With old grannies of 102 watching on avidly, two contestants battle it out - not literally, but via a series of word - forming and number games.

The premise is very simple: for the "Letters Game", 9 random letters are picked, with one contestant (the one whose turn it is) choosing whether each letter should be a vowel or a consonant. Once all the letters are picked, both contestants then have 30 seconds to find the longest word from within these nine letters.

In the "Numbers Game", a contestant chooses a certain amount of 'large' and 'small' numbers from six in total. These six random numbers are then posted up, and the computer works out a target figure - obtainable using these six numbers, and standard addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Thirty seconds are again all that both players have to arrive at the target.

Countdown 200 simulates a typical game and, as such, is really only suitable for two players (so, quick, rush out and drag somebody off the street, if nobody's in!). The other interesting little quirk is that it was written using the Lotus 1-2-3 macro language (everyone's got to start their programming somewhere!) - it is nothing more than a 1-2-3 spreadsheet! Upon opening it, the menu will load up automatically (Ooh! What user-friendliness!), so it should be a simple matter of point and shoot.

Incidentally, the game will work fine with 123g (a free program which gives Lotus 1-2-3 the same GUI menus as the other System Manager applications - available from S.U.P.E.R.), although unfortunately will still use the old-fashioned non-GUI menus!

First things first. This game is the "prequel" to Unlimited Hangman. If you're wondering which Hangman game to download for your palmtop, choose Unlimited Hangman and not this one!

Everyone knows how to play Hangman - suffice to say that this game was written in my pre-graphics era, so it runs in text mode and thus should work on just about any PC-compatible on the planet. The game offers similar gameplay options to Unlimited Hangman, in that you can choose from one to four players and, with the single-player option, any plain text file can be used from which words will be gathered (although it is a lot slower in this version!).

Unfortunately, due to its age and the fact that, when I wrote this, I was a real beginner at the time to programming, the program is slow and clunky. Anyone who downloads this shouldn't be put off Unlimited Hangman - although, the idea remains the same, the newer game is virtually totally re-designed (with no more waiting as words are counted in the single-player game!). As such, you should only download this for the following reasons:

- Your computer doesn't support CGA graphics.

- You would like to compare this to Unlimited Hangman, just to get an idea of how bad this one actually is.

- You have a burning desire to see words in a text file being counted one by one!

For all that, however, you can still play the beta version to get a feel for the game, which is a space strategy affair. If you would like to see a finished version, please write in and let me know!

"Unlimited? Why unlimited?", you might well be thinking. And, even if you're not, I'm going to explain anyway! The clever thing about Unlimited Hangman is that, in addition to providing multi-player support (up to four), with the single-player game, you can use any plain text file as a source for the words to be used in the game. What's more, Unlimited Hangman will use only "proper words" - ignoring whatever isn't! With this game, you don't need to manually edit a specially formatted wordlist to add new words - just use any text file of your choice! Thus, the game's vocabulary really is unlimited!

No, really. Any text file will do - there's virtually no size limit to the file you use, although I'm not sure whether it will work with files whose size is in the gigabyte range - sorry, I haven't been able to check! Naturally, you might want to use a dictionary as your words file, so I searched high and low and came up with the following:

10, 000 English words and phrases:

Also available at S.U.P.E.R. this is a free dictionary of 10,000 English words (size: 136 kb). The only downside is that a few of these words are actually two words or more joined together (e.g. "americanfootball", "dothehonours"), but hey! You need a challenge!

In/System Software:

Available from In/System Software's site, you can download a plain ASCII text file containing 30,000 English words for free. Be warned, however - the file, once unzipped, is 3.4 MB! This is one dictionary that should last you for some time! Bigger and more specialised dictionaries are also available but are, naturally enough, not free of charge.