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! And as you can see, I managed to get hold of a copy of this month’s issue in the nick of time! 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 now good for this month and next but then we might need to take a break for some gaps in my collection as it stands start appearing for this year. I’ll keep doing my best to plug any them though, then no question we’ll be monthly as originally planned very soon!

We’ve done a few of these things now, and 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, and I think I’m going to start with the cover feature, as it actually relates to something other than a type-in for a change! As you can see by the wonderfully bold image at the top, we’re talking Marvel stuff, which honestly doesn’t excite me in the slightest, but as the text adventure pioneer behind the very first game I ever finished, the name Scott Adams does! And while Pirate Adventure on the VIC-20 does get a mention, this big interview is all about his new connection with Marvel, and the upcoming Questprobe Featuring The Hulk and Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man adventures, which were part of a trilogy concluded by a Human Torch and The Thing game, and if I remember right that will get its own cover feature in a year or so! In the meantime, The Hulk one is also reviewed in this issue so we’ll come back to that later.

Next up are the movers and shakers in April 1984’s Software Top 30, sponsored by the Daily Mirror newspaper! Before we get to the games though, this recently introduced format, covering all systems at once, does give an interesting snapshot of the changing landscape of both what’s hot and what’s available where. The ZX Spectrum still dominates but the Commodore 64 has gone from only recently getting any chart coverage whatsoever to being represented by around half the top thirty, although you’re into the bottom half by the time we see Mutant Camels and a couple of other exclusives. Diminishing returns for the VIC-20, Electron, Atari, Dragon, Oric, BBC and Atmos though, which brings back painful memories of seeing this increasingly reflected on the game shop shelves I used to visit every Saturday afternoon! Jet Set Willy straight in at number one though, followed by Manic Miner and Hunchback. Not sure why The Hobbit wasn’t combined but looks like that would still have been flying high for the umpteenth month on the bounce had it been too. We’re seeing all the big 8-bit players starting to take hold though – Ultimate, Ocean, Imagine, Melbourne House and so on – and I also noted a new entry for Blue Thunder by R. Wilcox, who would shortly go on to rebadge himself as another household name of the era, Elite Systems!

I just noticed no console charts this time, although they have been separate in previous issues so I’ll keep an eye out later. Interesting they also moved the charts to the front of the mag now, meaning Games News must be next! Sounds like the first two months of the year were pretty rough for software houses in general, and over at imagine they’re not only cutting the price of games like Alchemist and Ah Diddums from £5.50 to £3.95 to try and boost dwindling sales but have also lost a £500,000 contract with publisher Marshall Cavendish to write programs for a new magazine. Seems like they were a bit crap so they were told to pay back all that money, which it sounds like they were paid in full in advance. Ouch! Or maybe GOSH because in an apparent £100 million separate blow to the industry, The Guild of Software Houses is up in arms about some anti-piracy software by JLC Data that’s been confiscated by the Ministry of Defence because it was so good they wouldn’t be able to get into any computer using it either, which unfortunately was seen as a final straw for some struggling companies! K-tel is apparently “one of the record industry’s few successful record labels” and having had a bit of success with their double-sided computer games venture on the Spectrum (but probably less so on the VIC-20), they’re expanding to the Commodore 64 with the what was, I think, their only popular game, band sim It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, backed by a shooter called Odyssey. There’s a bunch of other new games on the way but the only one that jumped out at me was an old favourite on the C64 called Aztec Challenge, so we’ll close this part with the news that WHSmith are now stocking the Master Class tapes, taking advantage of “another fast growing home technology – the video recorder.” I love seeing stuff like that! Anyway, it’s a series of programming how-to guides, starting with a couple for the Spectrum, covering BASIC and creating simple programs, then more complicated stuff like array handling and animation. Also included three games recorded onto the VHS tape it came on, which sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for a game of Hangman!

The order of things is properly mixed up this time, and coming up next is Software Reviews, which, as usual, covers home computer games, while console ones will follow later. There’s loads of them this time too so I’ll start with Game of the Month, which is Chinese Juggler from Ocean, and probably the Commodore 64 version although it doesn’t actually say! It’s a plate spinning game, like you used to get on those Sunday night variety shows starring Bernie Winters and Jimmy Tarbuck on TV in the seventies and eighties. I’ll pick out a few more, starting with my old favourite Hunchback, also from Ocean, and this time the BBC version of the arcade game that you might like if you’re a fan but it’s not a patch on the Spectrum port. I think it’s the TI port of Donkey Kong by Atarisoft next but it’s hard to tell because the title and first paragraph allude to several Atari arcade conversions, and at £30 you might expect a bit more than just this old thing, even if it does sound like one of the best versions on anything… Unlike the £20 worth of Centipede on the VIC-20 over the page! Troopa Truck is an almost equally high-scoring Moon Patrol clone on the C64 though, and Bear Bovver looks good too, but if you want one game on there this month then it’s got to be War War II action compendium Beach Head, including that iconic anti-aircraft battle over the sea! Actually, I take that back – I’ll have Forbidden Forest instead, arguably the very first proper horror video game! What a time to be alive either way though, and over on the ZX Spectrum things were pretty rosy this month too, with that new chart-topper Jet Set Willy criminally not Game of the Month, although the reviewer as good as admits he hasn’t played much of it so say no more! Ocean’s Pogo is also doing the best impersonation of Q*bert on there this month, winning out on all-important playability over two other clones, Pi-Balled and Spellbound (but not that one!), and it’s certainly the version I’d go for on there! I’ll finish back on the C64 with Savage Pond, which I can’t agree deserves a single one of its 7s, let alone an 8 – proper stinker that one!

Speaking of which, Arcade Action begins this time with laserdisc shoot ‘em up Firefox, complete with the voice of Clint Eastwood and his titular movie cockpit, which apparently stole the show at the recent ATEI exhibition… Dragon’s Lair follow-up Space Ace was on display too, which is also the classic laser-disc style over substance but in a much more fun way! Nothing comes close to Irem’s 10-Yard Fight for me this month though, although “simulation of American football” does make me wonder how much they played of this one as well! Fantastic sport-inspired arcade game all the same though, which I will inevitably now be playing again once I’m done here! I can’t believe I’m also seeing Spy Hunter making its very first appearance here, although it is exactly why I decided to put this feature together in the first place – as alluded to earlier, we’re seeing history in the making!

Time for “Video Gaming” which means the console stuff, and it starts with a full-page guide on playing whichever port you fancy of Nintendo’s 1982 Popeye arcade game, which I think was licensed by Atari in the UK. Regardless, that’s particularly timely for me because I have a deep-dive into the original and the Atari 2600 version scheduled for later this year and currently need all the help I can get! Onto reviews, and two things that annoy me about C&VG during this period – firstly, knowing what system the game is being reviewed on, and secondly – and most importantly – what game they’re actually reviewing! And while I’m moaning, thirdly, the totally different scoring system here, including what I think is marks out of five rather than the ten before. Or the games this month are just really crappy! Which reminds me, games, and I’ll start with “that little carpenter Mario” in what you might eventually work out is Mario Bros. on the Atari 2600 (or VCS as it was known back then), although the closest you get to the actual title anywhere is Mario Brothers. Either way, apart from apparently being unoriginal, it all sounds great until you see the scores, which are remarkably average in retrospect, including only 2 for “Theme” whatever that means! At least it’s only £29.99 because the Buck Rogers arcade port on ColecoVision scores almost the same but also needs a £600-700 expansion module! Snoopy vs The Red Baron deservedly scores big on the VCS though, for its authentic presentation and dogfighting action but even that can’t compete with the perfect scores across the board for another all-time classic, platforming jungle adventure Pitfall II, also hitting the shelves on there this month!

The first of this month’s type-in games listings comes next, with The Tower on the Spectrum sounding like a stripped-down Chaos: The Battle of Wizards, which was still at least a year away! Micropoly was a stripped-down version of the board game on there this month too, although the length of the listing was anything but! On the Atari 400 there’s Rising Damp, which seems to be a platformer where you’re escaping floodwater while avoiding a monster in the attic. Sounds like a job for that carpenter from earlier! As does Krazy Kong on the VIC-20, which blatantly features Mario as well as stealing the names of a commercial clone. Or klone! But what are they going to do about it? At least Dotty for the BBC is marginally more respectful of Pac-Man though, and comes with a welcome explanation of what’s going on in the code, before normal copycat service resumes with Super Invaders for the Oric. Time Machine seems to be a multi-stage space dodge ‘em up for the Commodore 64, then we finish on the TI99/4A with Prison Run, which sounds just like Alcatraz Harry on the ZX Spectrum – possibly the second game I ever finished!

Time for some more reviews now because there’s a whole special section for adventure games, starting with Hulk or Hulk Adventure, depending on where you look in the review, or Questprobe Featuring The Hulk to use the name on the nearby advert, which I’m also going with! After moaning about inconsistency of rating systems earlier, there’s no ratings at all here, but I think they liked it, appreciating the no-wasted-location approach and the relative brevity of descriptive text… Unlike the rest of the reviews here, where it’s really hard to get a fix on the highlights with so many games with so many words and no score system! Let’s face it, you don’t want to read about reading about text adventures anyway, although El Diablero genuinely sounds like a fine bit of magical fantasy on the Dragon 32, and I remember God-bothering “educational adventure” Jericho Road, which sounds like £5.75 I’m glad I didn’t spend on the Spectrum! I do want to give a shoutout to Wizardry: The Legacy of Llylgamyn though, which gets a full double-page of its own, and while it’s very high end for the time – only running on Apple or IBM behemoths – it’s rightly being heralded as the future of adventure games, albeit assuming it will trickle down to more popular machines in future… Which it might have done to an extent but obviously these guys had no idea about 16-bit machines at this point, and quite how ubiquitous this stat-filled graphical screen format with 3D navigation that we’re seeing here for the first time would become in these D&D-style nerd-outs from then onwards!

I know I’ve made fun of this stuffy old Adventure section in the past, and will do so even more so the further we go with this feature, but good on them this month! Elsewhere, we’ve also got all the regular programming tips and tech features with science fiction stuff like modems and thermal printers but I’m going to close this time as usual with a quick look at some of the adverts in the magazine, which can often be as good a snapshot of the month at hand as the rest combined! And I can’t resist starting with the aforementioned Beach Head, and its iconic cover art and a screenshot of that iconic anti-aircraft stage. One of the first sightings of U.S. Gold there too, with another one later showcasing Zaxxon, as well as Forbidden Forest and Aztec Challenge from earlier, and then another for their Solo Flight solo flight sim! A sign of things to come there, for better or worse… Ocean are playing on that piracy theme from earlier, with a double-page galleon full of their increasingly impressive library of games that’s will have “the pirates dropping their duplicators to play Moon Alert!” Virgin are still finding their feet with their lineup, almost a footnote to a big jungle-themed cartoon making lots of in-references to their games that aren’t really well-known enough to land. They’ll get there too though! There’s still the usual gamut of boring black and white “get your micro here” directories, as well as all the light-guns and ZX Spectrum speech synthesisers and sound boosters (as if those sounds need to be any louder!) and forgotten bedroom-coded titles like Daddie’s Hot Rod, proudly identifying itself as written in BASIC! Interestingly, there are a few little box ads for lending libraries too, which is something I’d be taking advantage of at 50p a game not too much later! A story for another time though, which is also a good place to finish for this time, but I hope you’ve enjoyed having a look through this issue with me – I think it was pretty special one! And I’ll see you same time next month for the June 1984 one!

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