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Brain & Brawn is a collection of four games written by Kevin Heywood, the games are NOT Public Domain and cost £1.99 plus 24p P&P (if you supply the disc) or ú3.99 plus P&P with the disc included. The first game, Crack-It, is yet another version of Mastermind (the board game with the coloured pegs, not the TV program) and is fairly well presented with a fairly good icon control system and a clear explanation of the rules of the game when it loads. The main problem with the game is its key detection which sometimes requires you to hold down the key for quite a long time before anything happens and sometimes this results in two pegs being placed instead of just one, which is only a problem on the second last peg as as soon as the last peg is placed the program thinks you have finished and won't let you take the pegs away. On the whole though this is a good but unoriginal game. The next game is called Rebound and involves two players smashing 'pucks' into an inverted U-shaped playing area with higher scores the further the puck goes. Unfortunately if the puck goes too far it hits a force field and is evaporated. This game is OK when played with a friend but as the best way to win seems to be to constantly smash the other players pucks into the forcefield, the friend will probably soon be an ex-friend. The game is let down by the irritatingly flickering sprites and, like Crack-It, by fairly bad key detection. After Rebound comes Annihilation (or Annhialation in the menu!) which is a sideways scrolling shoot-'em-up. Again the sprites, especially the main sprite (which looks like a flying bus!), flicker quite a bit and the game becomes very repetitive after about five or six levels as the only difference between the aliens appears to be what they look like. Another problem is that you can only fire one laser bolt (or whatever it is) at a time and they travel quite slowly, causing much tearing out of hair. Despite these problems the game is actually quite fun, for a while. The last game is called Asteroids and is, surprisingly, a clone of the ancient arcade game of the same name. It also suffers from flickery sprites and being repetetive and although you can fire several bolts at once they make the lasers in Annihilation look turbo-charged! Add thus to the occasionally dodgy collision detection and the fact that instead of wrapping round when they fly off the screen the asteroids appear apparently at random from another direction at much greater speed and you would think that the game is pretty awful but actually it isn't, it was my favourite one of the four! Overall, in spite of the flickery graphics and irritating problems with some of the games, I would recommend this disc as it only costs ú1.99 and will provide a couple of days amusement at least (it's cheaper than going to the cinema!). CD#14 | 
