The Complete Sinclair Database

Personal Computer Games

Steve Cooke

PUBLISHER: Big Brother PRICE: £6.95 Big Brother has been keeping a close watch on the Sinclair software market, and now he's put it all down on paper. 'The Complete Sinclair Database' by Big Brother Publications is the result. The book is a compilation of software and hardware reviews, together with brief sections on Sir Clive Sinclair, Spectrum history, and fault-finding. At £6.95 this book doesn't look a very promising buy. There are 114 games reviews, but the market changes so quickly that these will soon be out of date. Updates will be available but these will cost about £2.00. The hardware sections might be more useful, but glancing through the ads of the popular magazines will probably give you as good an idea of the market, and a more up-to-date one at that. Book publishing is an expensive and lengthy business, and the Spectrum software market is fast and cheap. 'The Complete Sinclair Database' falls uneasily in the middle. There are better ways of spending £6.95.

Personal Computer News

John Lettice

SUFFERING FROM KEYBOARD FINGER? TAKE A BREAK WITH A BOOK. 'The Complete Sinclair Database' by Stephen Adams, Ian Beardsmore and John Gilbert, published by Big Brother Publishing (1984) at £6.95, (paperback, 199 pages) A complete Sinclair database? Listing all software and hardware you can buy for the ZX81 and Spectrum? It's an excellent idea, but it's one of those notions that are easier to have than to put into practice. The Ccomplete Sinclair Database kicks off with it fairly extensive list of games and serious software. It would be unreasonable to expect such a list to be comprehensive, but the comments after each listing tend to be very short, and the way the listings are presented - two per page, mostly - wastes a great deal of space. This means the book covers a lot less software than you'll find listed in many magazines. The hardware section is considerably more useful, and makes a fair stab at telling you about the whole range of peripherals available for the Spectrum and ZX81. But again it falls down on presentation. The tables look as if they have been produced with a bent felt tip and a typewriter with no margins, and although the information's all there, it's sometimes difficult to work out what you're reading, and what the bits actually do. Having dealt with this, the book does something I reckon is really bizarre, it launches into a history of Sinclair (both Sir Clive and Research), with reference to competing companies and to - Stephen Adams? Seminal in writing the book, perhaps, but I feel modesty really should have prevailed. So it's a book that is worth having, and it's nearly worth buying, it's the sort of thing that should really be updated regularly, and if the authors tidy it up while they're doing this, it will he a must for every Sinclair owner.