  The problem of pinning down the critical point of strongly interacting matter
still puzzles the community. One of the answers suspected to emerge in the near
future will surely come from NA61/SHINE - a fixed-target experiment aiming to
discover the critical point as well as to study the properties of the onset of
deconfinement. This goal will be pursued by obtaining precise data on hadron
production in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus interactions in
a wide range of system size and collision energy.
  This contribution presents new results on inclusive spectra of identified
hadrons and on fluctuations in inelastic p+p and Be+Be interactions at the SPS
energies. These are compared with the world data, in particular with the
corresponding measurements of NA49 for central Pb+Pb collisions as well as with
some model predictions.
