We’re back again for what’s hopefully an increasingly regular delve into an exactly forty-year old copy of Computer & Video Games magazine, which it turns out might just be quite the time capsule for anyone interested in gaming! Just to recap as is now usual, I started collecting C&VG in earnest a couple of months into 1985, and would then carry on without missing an issue until well into 1992. A couple of years ago, I decided to complete 1985 with a bit of help from eBay, but inevitably then decided to keep heading backwards into 1984 to have my own copy of the ones I’d first read second-hand from a friend, then, while I was there, I thought might as well keep going back even further as the opportunity arose, as long as the price was right! As I write we’re good for this month from 1984’s issues but May is where some gaps in my collection as it stands start appearing for this year. I’ll keep doing my best to plug any short-term gaps though, then no question we’ll be monthly for years to come very soon!

We’ve done a few of these things now so as always, the plan is to flick through the magazine together, check out the news, reviews, features, type-ins and notable adverts (where that time capsule thing really comes into its own!), pulling out whatever catches my eye, in the order it catches it, and providing you with a bit of a commentary, starting with what’s going on in April 1984 in the Games News. And we start with some bad news for Commodore 64 owners in the UK, who are no longer going to be able to buy the likes of Zaxxon, Quasimodo and Blue Max by Synapse Software because of a tradename dispute between the US games house and a small English business software company of the same name, meaning all their stock here had to be shipped back across the Atlantic! Hopefully we’ll find out if it ever got resolved in a future issue – that Bue Max was a decent game so I hope so! There’s also news of a new flight-sim called The Dambusters, which was a real thrill for me to see here, as well as The Snowman arriving on the ZX Spectrum at exactly the wrong time of year, and a new series of Marvel superhero text adventures on the way by the legendary Scott Adams. Which I definitely remember being covered in a future issue! Girls are about to get a new line of games too, covering non-masculine pursuits such as showjumping, mental arithmetic and, er, diamonds, in a wonderful example of progressive thinking by Case Computer Simulations! The BBC’s Newsnight programme is in hot water for implying that British copyright law doesn’t apply to computer software, while C&VG comments that children, not organised criminals, are responsible for almost all piracy, so lower prices and a “more original approach” to games software is what’s needed to solve the problem. I’m sure a “more original approach” is the solution to most of the world’s problems to this day, but we finish this month with the Memotech MIX 512, a new computer with a bright future ahead of it thanks to over thirty-thousand units ordered and over twenty software companies backing it. And no, I’ve never heard of it either!

I think that’s the most exciting news section we’ve had in our Retro Rewind features so far, and is actually reflective of what seems to be a subtle change in C&VG’s format this month, but I’ll come back to that later because it’s time to discover what’s new in Blackpool in Arcade Action! Apparently there’s a big arcade industry show to report on there, although it doesn’t say what it’s called, but before we hit the Las Vegas of the North regardless, I’ve got a gripe, and that’s the ongoing reliance on abstract illustrations rather than screenshots in this section! It’s not like they’d never published a photo of an arcade cabinet before, and even I owned a hand-me-down camera by then, so how hard can it be to walk down to the local chip-shop and grab a few pics? Anyway, back in Blackpool, it sounds like a hell of a show whatever it is, headlined by “a very playable action game” called Star Wars, with “linear graphics” and samples from the movie, and in a very short while it’s going to become one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ll ever have in a video game! Another all-time favourite of mine, 10-Yard Fight, is giving off positive vibes for American football fans, and that’s followed by yet another, Spy Hunter, which they strangely find reminiscent of The Italian Job but otherwise give another dryly positive but unexcited account of one of gaming history’s upcoming greats! They do stretch to “amazing” when describing M.A.C.H.3’s laser-disc flight-combat scenery though, and a “great” when talking about Discs of Tron! There’s also plenty of racing going on, albeit hardly the genre’s pinnacle, with Sega’s Up ‘n Down, Taito’s Laser Grand Prix and Atari’s TX-1, complete with three screens and a cockpit cabinet, and a bunch of other mostly forgettable stuff. Big song and dance about Firefox on the second page though, which Atari had shown a prototype of in Blackpool after a year of hushed speculation about this miracle of gaming that apparently Philips had designed a laser disc player specifically for! Seems to have been built from footage from the massively underrated Clint Eastwood steal-a-MIG movie of the same name, which was a gaming first, and followed the plot of the film – complete with sampled Clint – as you tried to get out of Russia in your stolen fighter jet. Which in the end turned out to be a bit of a crappy precursor to After Burner with nice backgrounds!

Right, as much as I’m enjoying myself with this issue, I think I’m going a bit long so far, so will try and catch up with the Software Reviews, which, of course, are the home computer reviews, and then we’ll get to “Video Gaming” on the consoles shortly! There’s not a huge amount of interest here this month though, with Boog-a-Boo claiming the Game of the Month award, bringing “breath-taking graphics” that are “easily the best to come from a British company,” as well as “perfect animation,” to the C64 and ZX Spectrum, where you’re trying to climb a flea up to the top of the platform-filled cavern full of pterodactyls it finds itself in. TI owners get a frustrating stinker of a Donkey Kong port while the C64 does better with wonderful versions of both Robotron and what I didn’t realise was a Miner 2049er rip-off until I read it here, Manic Miner! Meanwhile, over on the Spectrum, Zippy – the star of Doomsday Castle – is being tipped as the next Miner Willy, and that Snowman game from earlier is scoring big with another take on the same platforming formula too. And I’ll let you guess what Zaxxan on there is and how it then scored! Rounding out this month, the Dragon 32 has Leggit, a decent port of the okay Spectrum single-screen platformer Jumping Jack, and over on the BBC B there’s Diamond Mine, an equally decent methodical maze ‘em up.

The Video Gaming section begins with a full page guide on how to play strategic vector-based cavern-shooter Cosmic Chasm on the always-impressive Vectrex, which I’m genuinely going to take advantage of once I’m done here because it looks fantastic! On the reviews front, we start with a less impressive and decidedly 2D take on Q*bert on the Philips G7000, although it sounds like it plays okay all the same. Business really picks up with Space Shuttle for the Atari VCS (or 2600), a pioneeringly realistic space flight sim that had you launching, piloting and bringing back a shuttle, and it was quite the feat all around! Also on there this month is Super Cobra, a pricey but otherwise average take on Scramble, while the ColecoVision take on it, Looping, costs the same but did enough to warrant the £29.99 price tag. We return to the Vectrex for the last review this month, and it’s something else I need to return to because while I’m very familiar with the brilliant port of Pole Position covered here, they reckon Hyper Chase is the better racer on there, so we should look at that instead. So I will because I don’t know that one!

We’ll move to the cover feature next, which represents a recurring theme through the rest of the issue too, although I have to say that in well over a decade’s worth of issues I now own, it’s probably my least favourite cover image – a soft, jazzy, musical number with too much non-descript pink going on! Anyway, what I’m far more impressed with is that not only do we now have a bunch of music creation type-ins, in both BASIC and horrible machine code, for the C64, VIC-20, BBC, Spectrum and Atari, but we’re also being invited to make some actual music once we’ve typed them in – assuming they work – which will then be judged by Vince Clarke, of Depeche Mode and Yazoo fame (not to mention The Flying Pickets’ Only You, which had just been a massive Christmas hit for the first time)! Anyway, you had to send in your tune on an audio tape and he’d decide what was worthy of winning a Yamaha CN-100 keyboard, which was a pretty big and expensive piece of kit to be giving away, no doubt subsidised by the unusual presence of a load of full-colour Yamaha keyboard adverts propping up this section! Vince Clark though!!!

The regular games listings to type in were also all present and correct this month, starting with Pole Position on the Spectrum – which is also the start of some very blatant name grabbing too, although it’s a nice version for a type-in! There’s a game of two parts for us unexpanded VIC-20 owners, with the first setting up the graphics for Minefield while the second runs the game, which involves driving a tank, avoiding mines and shooting enemy planes. Q*bert for the Dragon 32 sounds vaguely familiar but probably no worse than that Philips conversion from earlier. Beast of a game for the Commodore 64, with just the instructions for Centre Crystal taking up a full page of code, though with four phases of space combat and stuff to get your teeth into, it sounds like you’ll need them. Then there’s Hunchback Rescue for the Texas, which is a nice and simple type-in giving you a take on the brutal platformer of a similar name this time. It’s another biggie on the BBC, with Harrier putting you in control of said jump-jet and trying to land it on an aircraft carrier before your fuel runs out, which was apparently inspired by a recent real-life event off the coast of Spain. Last and probably least is Walk the Plank for the ZX81, where you have to guess a number or get kicked off the pirate ship. Poor old ZX81!

Can’t believe I almost forgot to head back into the midst of those type-ins for Dave Lee Travis hosting the 1983 Golden Joystick Awards! All the stars are out this issue, including the legend that is Matthew Smith, who’s Miner 2049er clone somehow won Best Arcade Style Game! Best Strategy Game went to The Hobbit, Best Original Game was Ah Diddums, and finally The Hairy Cornflake announced Jet-Pac as the Game of the Year 1983, beating off fellow nominees The Hobbit, Manic Miner and Arcadia.

You’ll also find most of those games still hanging around the all-new, all-seeing, official multi-platform Top 30 chart – sponsored by The Daily Mirror newspaper – that replaces the platform-specific top tens in previous issues. The Commodore 64 version of Manic Miner actually takes the top spot, followed by Atic Atac, Ant Attack and Hunchback, followed by a bunch more Spectrum games before Pole Position on the Atari at number eight. “Mr. Wimpey” and Revenge of the Mutant Camels then round out the top ten. The vast majority of the chart is on the Spectrum, plus six C64 titles and a mere handful on the BBC, TRS-80 and Atari combined. Not a sniff of the ZX81, VIC-20, Dragon 32 and the like anymore, and I’m intrigued to see if there’s any last hurrahs for those creaking old machines appearing here in the next few issues!

There are definitely hints of other changes afoot in this issue of C&VG too because as well as the regular boring old text adventure column and various programming guides, we’ve got a few special features to quickly cover, giving more of a games journalism vibe than previous issues. The first is a buyer’s guide to the Atari home computer range, with rundowns of the top games in major gaming genres, including Invaders, Pinball (“one of the most realistic simulations that computers can create”), War Games, Adventures, Arcade and Other Bits for everything else. There’s also a very comprehensive list of every game available, who makes it, what format its on, how much RAM it needs, and the price, most of which retail at an eye-watering £20-30, although I’m sure we all spent that amount on various dodgy arcade clones (or klones) where these are near-enough the real deal! Sometimes… On this point, the Arcade section made me laugh, even if it didn’t really help with any buying decision, because it starts by saying there are actually two official versions of Frogger, one from Parker Brothers and one from Sierra Online but they’re both perfect copies and both immense fun! That said, the comprehensive list I just mentioned isn’t that comprehensive because I can only see one of them there, so I’m now more confused than when I started!

There’s also a report from the recent CES in Las Vegas, where show stalwarts like Atari and Activision were now seeing competition from young upstarts such as Synapse, Broderbund and Electronic Arts! Apparently personal robots were all the rage this year too, with Topo being a walking and talking deluxe model that will be able to do other stuff on top of those when planned add-ons arrive, and Fred, who’s more of a toy but looks like as much fun as chess compared to Scalextric or a BMX! Words like “IBM PC” and “Apple” are making early appearances too, together with dozens of Penthouse Pets from the rhythm magazine of the same name handing out signed pictures too! A different time… Let me quickly mention a few of the upcoming games on show too – Epyx has Summer Games, which is the start of another all-time favourite series of mine; Parker Brothers has Star Wars; Datasoft has Dallas Quest – the world’s first computer soap opera, complete with JR; Broderbund has Lode Runner, which had just become a sensation in America; and EA had some war games, which, as we learnt in a previous Retro Rewind, were going to make shoot ‘em ups redundant very soon, so good on them for catching the wave early.

Concluding that musical theme running throughout the issue, there’s a double-page of music software reviews but it’s really boring and we’re running really long now, so just stick with those type-ins from earlier instead! And concluding our own wander through this issue, as always we’ll take a look at some of the adverts that survived being cut out of the magazine and stuck on a bedroom wall, which is something we’ll have to confront here pretty regularly sometime soon! That said, there’s really not a lot of note this time, and, in fact, a bit of a return to the days of pages and pages of black and white hardware listings. Nice buy one, get one free Easter offer for the Atari 2600 (or VCS) from Activision though, and I spy Seaquest in there, my favourite game on the system! Always nice to see Chuckie Egg and Cassette 50 making an appearance too, and The Dambusters has a dramatic bit of artwork in its area of the Alligata page, and there’s some cool very eighties air-brushed stuff elsewhere, but honestly I’m not really feeling much else this time so I’m going to call it a day. Apart from that slight comedown though, I’ve really enjoyed this issue, and I hope you have too, so I’ll see you next time!

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