If you thought 2023 was crap, think again!

I like a good play on words. Vegetable Stock then, starts out well, with a solid 1-2 combo of an attractive, colourful loading screen coupled with a solid double-meaning title. Vegetable Stock, you see, is NOT a recipe app demonstrating how to prepare a soupy vegetable breakdown. It is a trading game, where you buy stocks in vegetables. Chuckle? I almost chortled. +1% for a well-placed exclamation mark A strong start then, ESPECIALLY when you consider that I also love a good trading game : 1984, Brewery, Football Manager. That kind of thing. I'm surely going to love this. So, skimming past the instructions, I prepare to invest my 500 pennies wisely. Are YOU the vegetative Gordon Gekko? This is the gamiest part. You can in fact, try to spend more than 500 pennies if you get your maths wrong, and the game beeps out a BANKRUPT message and STOPs. A quick GOTO 3 will get you going again, so no worries. Having navigated the financial wizardry of picking your vegetables (accidental pun th...

Introduction Cockwomble. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Since playing the latest submission I've come over something of a sweary Mary. Lee Prince has taken the wholesome family game of hang man, (where you innocently attempt to execute someone for the crime of failing to guess a word) and thrown a dark, expletive laden, twist in to the mix by populating the game with nothing but swear words. To be honest I am not sure how much of this game Lee has actually coded, as I'm pretty sure he's taken a pre existing type-in and simply changed the array of pre defined words. The twist being that all Lee's words are rather blue. Expecting four letter words, I thought this would be easy, but not so. Some of the swearwords are quite obscure. Naturally, I gave this game to my 11 year old, and he had no idea what a cockwomble was. That didn't stop him enjoying the game though. Give him the opportunity to legally type swearwords into an old computer and suddenly the zx spectrum...

 When I won the dubious pleasure of being this year's C.S.S.C.G.C judge I was aware that no matter how big my feet are I was stepping into some big boots. I wished that someone had compiled an instruction manual containing the vast wisdom of judges past. Failing a manual, then a training simulator would have been a vast help.  The old adage "nature abhors a vacuum" holds true and has driven Firelord to fill the required void with another quality product. For all who have entered this year or intend to enter beware, because one of you will be sat in my seat next year. Not my physical seat, but the metaphorical red leather Chesterfield with the comfortable hollow in the seat cushion formed by years of weighty posteriors. All of you need to download this product and get training. Unlike many entries, this one arrived with a comprehensive manual which is reproduced at the end of this review. But let's get into this thing. Like any truly professional piece of software, the...