AS SOFTWARE houses plough through all the old favourites, English Software, hitherto known mainly for Atari games, has produced the first car racing game for the QL. Hyperdrive, looking remarkably like the arcade favourite Pole Position, pits you against a large field of drivers in a gruelling four-stage race.

The idea is simple enough. You have 40 seconds to complete each stage, at the end of which you must be in the first five to qualify for the next level. If you crash, you are wonderfully reconstituted in the twinkling of a sprite and put back on the track - at the cost of several race positions.

The cars themselves are very prettily programmed, well up to arcade quality. The customary globular blue oil slicks are hazards to be avoided, and the action is fast. The background scenery is pleasant enough but hardly inspired, and the tracks are either a continuous straight or a continuous curve. That is something of a pity, as the best Spectrum race games take a varied track with hairpins, chicanes and the like for granted.

English software tells us that the code occupies about 75K of RAM, not including the graphics screen. If that is the case then, maybe there wasn't room to vary the tracks. Maybe the programmer should be writing better code.

The sound effects are OK although, inevitably, unpleasant after a few hours' play, and the game itself is a step in the right direction for QL software. Prices still seem to hold more threats than promises, but at least Hyperdrive is a competent, if simple, arcade game. The company hopes to release further QL arcade games, and we look forward to the results with some interest.

ANOTHER stunningly original QL game belly-flops onto the market in the shape of Reversi, that ancient board game which nobody had ever heard of until it was recognised as one of the very few games you could fit into a 1K ZX-80.

Reversi, otherwise known as Othello, is the one where you put white and black pieces in turn on an 8 X 8 board. A valid move must make a capture, and to capture you must have two of your pieces at each end of a row of your opponent's pieces. Then the enemy men turn into your own colour - hence the name Reversi. Good stuff, eh?

A minute to learn, a lifetime to master, says the blurb. But you're unlikely to spend a lifetime with the game, unfortunately. Softschool's version is pedestrian, with eight levels of skill. The eight levels are produced by knocking a minute off the time limit for completing the game. Don't be fooled by the Analysis mode, either. It doesn't show you what the QL is thinking, as you might expect. Instead it allows you to set up a position on the board.

The computer does not make a particularly good player. Othello is one of those games where machines tend, on the best versions, to be almost impossible to beat. Not so with this version. Written entirely in SuperBasic, it looks like the sort of thing which would be rejected as a magazine listing.

It is quite ridiculous to expect people to pay for a game which they could obtain in listing form from any number of books or magazines at a fraction of the cost. A game, moreover, which was never very exciting at best, and whose interest lies mainly in the opportunity it allowed programmers to experiment with simple artificial intelligence routines.

Quite simply, it's an insult to the QL and the intelligence of those who bought one.

WHY ARE 90 per cent of QL arcade games like early VIC 20 rubbish? What possesses people in this Great Industry of Ours to attempt to flog the stuff they sometimes do?

We're talking about Frogger, folks. That's right, Frogger, renamed Hopper by Microdeal, presumably misled into believing the name sounded catchier.

Guide the bouncing frog through six lanes of traffic to the river. The fast lanes are fast and the slow lanes are slow. Then you have to cross the river. Jump on the logs and the sinking lilies. Which are lilies and which are logs? The lilies look like logs, except they're yellow. The logs don't look much like logs but they're red. That's how you know they're not lilies.

On later levels you get the highly original crocodiles and the breathtakingly novel snakes. They chug along happily, and if you throw a teacloth over the keyboard you can even convince yourself you still own that old Dragon 32.

Please, please, vote with your wallets and avoid this game. You might just save the QL games industry from premature extinction - because if Hopper makes money, why should anyone write anything better?