Back again for what’s now a no-more-gaps-in-the-collection, ongoing monthly delve into the pages of an exactly forty-year old copy of Computer & Video Games magazine, which is quite the time capsule for anyone with any interest at all in video games! As always, a quick recap of where it’s coming from – I started collecting C&VG in earnest a couple of months into 1985, and would carry on without missing an issue until well into 1992. A few years back, I decided to complete the set from 1985 with a bit of help from eBay, including the issue we’ll be looking at here in a sec, then inevitably decided to keep going backwards into 1984 so I had my own copy of the ones I’d first read second-hand from a friend. And obviously, while I was doing that, I thought I might as well keep going further back as and when the opportunity arose, and the price was right, as well as trying to expand out of the other end of my collection too, and while I’ve had a bit of success on that front of late as I write (see my recent Autumn 2024 Pickups feature for more on that), this is generally proving a lot more difficult for some reason! However, I do now have about eight years to keep working on that, but before we dive into the January 1985 issue at hand, I did manage to put together every issue from January to June, and then December, from 1984, and those were covered in the same format here, where you’ll also find a couple of pilot features taking in copies from 1983 too, so do check them out while you’re around!

As was the case with all of those, the plan here is to flick through the magazine together, checking out the news, reviews, type-in games listings, features and notable adverts (which are often the best bits!), pulling out whatever catches my eye, in the order it catches it, and providing a bit of commentary on top. Before we get stuck in though, one more thing to note for this issue in particular… Like most magazines, January on the cover means it was published a month previously, and while that makes no difference whatsoever at any other time of year, it means this month we’re looking at a Christmas issue which, if you’re reading this at the time of publication, is probably the last thing you want to hear about, but I’ll try and go easy on the festive, and it’s better than whatever confusion any alternative would cause! With that, let’s have a quick look at the cover feature, which is a competition to win one of fifty copies of English Software’s new mazey-platformer, and sequel to Jet Boot Jack, The Legend of the Knucker Hole on the Commodore 64! Apparently, Knucker Hole is a place in Sussex, and the legend is about a bloke buried in the church there who supposedly killed a dragon and subsequently married the local princess, which is more knowledge than I still have about either of the games based on it but I’ll make a note to have a go and report back in one of my regular Weekly Spotlight features soon! You can already read all about Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge advertised across the page though – huge deep-dive here into that, as well as the iconic Evel Knievel and all things motorbike stunt games!

Right, enough plugging of my other stuff and onto Games News, where you know it’s close to Christmas when the main headline involves the already-ancient (but timeless to this day!) Jetpac being ported to the Commodore 64. Fills me with dread already but we’ll reserve judgement for now and see how it reviews… Speaking of reserving judgement, Marks & Spencer are branching out from selling overpriced party food and old ladies’ knickers, and getting in on the ZX Spectrum act as well, with three titles on the way, including Start to Program, an introduction to programming, and Games Maker, which surely means you don’t need the first one after all, and The Games Pack, which means you actually don’t need either! Again, not really holding my breath that went any further than the few test stores it mentions, and likewise the success of “the country’s first phone-in computer information service” which is a Bradford number giving you a three minute recorded message with all the latest hardware, software and industry news! Meanwhile, Mastertronic are in hot water for their C64 budget title Chiller, and its music that sounds a lot like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, although they claim a royalty deal has now been set up for existing copies, while future runs will get new music. And now we know where all his money came from! Last up, my favourite kind of news, where you’re reading about a game you’ll go on to enjoy later for the very first time, and this time it’s Datasoft’s announcement that they’ve got a Conan game on the way, which followed the recent release of Conan the Destroyer in cinemas, and would end up being a very nice “multi-screen graphical adventure, similar to Bruce Lee” that I’m particularly now fond of on Atari 8-bit.  Unfortunately, US Gold’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Lost Kingdom – mentioned in the same piece as another very early movie license – didn’t turn out quite so well but if you ever want a terrible-looking, badly designed and downright bizarre puzzler for the Commodore 64 then be sure to give it a go!

There were a ton of reviews in the last issue, which would reflect getting the bulk of games onto the shelves in plenty of time for Christmas, but this month it’s certainly a case of quality over quantity because the three games book-ending what’s here are not only all-time classics but include some really big ones; in fact, looking at them today, it’s staggering to think they appeared all at once! We’ll start with another movie tie-in, and what in my humble opinion is narrowly pipped only by Atari’s Star Wars as the best ever, and that’s Ghostbusters by Activision on the Commodore 64! It follows the film’s plot closely enough but has you running your own Ghostbusters franchise instead, with all the gear you need to keep Zuul at bay funded by a bank loan, then you’re patrolling the city, catching ghosts, getting slimed, and eventually going face-to-face with Marshmallow Man (or the bank manager). It scored nines for graphics, value and playability, and a perfect ten for sound, which that legendary karaoke-style rendition of the theme tune on the title screen deserves all by itself! However much Texas Instruments is proclaiming “here to stay” on its dreadfully boring advert across the page from that review, the last few issues I’ve read have seen both the dominance of the Spectrum and the establishment of the C64 as its main rival, all at the expense of pretty much every other platform, but there’s a bit of a resurgence elsewhere this month, as well as the emergence of that weird Amstrad thing! We’ll go there next, where it’s now got its own port of the brilliantly addictive Football Manager, not that you’d know it from the review, which makes it sound like the accounting simulator it probably is in reality, as well as Star Avenger, which is a decent Scramble clone because every machine has to have at least one but ideally a dozen! 

The BBC is doing alright this month too, with what sounds suspiciously like another clone, Mr EE, the highest scoring of a bunch of new releases, with you tunnelling to collect fruit while being chased around underground… Even the poor old VIC-20 got a rare look in again, with the excellent (and insanely frantic) horizontal shooter, Dodo’s Lair, giving me something to look forward to for Christmas on the latter after all! As if Ghostbusters wasn’t enough, the C64 finally has what was a brilliant version of the sequel to David Crane’s other game, Pitfall, and a couple of board games in time for Christmas too, including the little-known strategy game Kensington, which looks to be little-known for good reason, and the much more exciting Cluedo, and that translates really well, albeit in a no frills kind of way that probably means you’re as well sticking to the original after all! I’ve just noticed that for once – Texas Instruments aside – we’re getting some decent adverts across the page from the reviews I’m highlighting this month, although I’m not sure even Arthur Daley can wheel and deal his way around this next pair of games… We did see some very cool adverts for these last month too but now they’ve arrived for real, and in case you didn’t already know, both Knight Lore and Underworlde have lived up to expectations and then some! I should say there were a few other Spectrum games reviewed, but the likes of Star Bike, Battlecars and even the mighty Jasper just don’t register alongside such gaming royalty! “I’ve never seen graphics as good as this on any micro game” is exactly right about Knight Lore, clearly the headline act here despite deservedly similar mega-scores for both of them, but this was and is something else, and is without doubt the gold standard 3D action adventure on any 8-bit system as well as most since, and simply reading this review here seems like such a privilege today!

Worth mentioning that consoles have, for the time being at least, now completely disappeared from C&VG. Not a trace this month! Arcade Action is next though, and reporting on a few highlights from a recent trade-only arcade games show in London, which honestly can’t have been great if this is the best they’ve got, which is not to demean Konami’s Mikie in any way because I’m a huge fan of this oddball kiss ‘em up’s ZX Spectrum conversion! It’s not exactly an arcade classic though, and likewise Future Spy, which is more or less Zaxxon, or the third game covered, Super Don Quix-Ote, a laser disc game along the lines of Dragon’s Lair… Actually, it is just a poor man’s Dragon’s Lair as far as I can tell! There will be occasions in the coming months and years that I’ll be gushing over this section, just like I did at the time, but unfortunately this really isn’t one of them! Some decent games listings to type in yourself though, and they start now with Super Sharks on the BBC, which is a beast of a program and a decent one by the looks of it too, unusually for one of these things getting a full double-page screenshot behind the opening code, showing a kind of reverse Missile Command meets Space Invaders with a very impressive shark sprite! Several pages of BASIC later, we get to 64 Synth, a surprisingly fully-featured musical synthesiser program for the C64, while the less-cultured Spectrum owner gets to run around a post office looking for letters once they’re done with the massive listing for Post Mania, which, joking aside, seems to be another really sophisticated game for a type-in, with what could easily pass as commercial-grade graphics from what I’ve seen of it! I’ve done more than see this last game though – I actually typed it in when I originally borrowed this copy of the magazine from my friend for the weekend, which was generally how I’d been reading it for a year or so, although that was about to change…

For now though, I’m giving you the full screenshot treatment for this one too! It’s Hunchback for the VIC-20 with a 3K memory expansion, which was an unusual size for a to game fit into – more typically, it was sometimes 8K but mostly 16K where one was needed, for stuff like Perils of Willy or Submarine Commander, for example, Anyway, as was typical of these type-ins, it was a cut-down take on the arcade game from 1983 of the same name, although such blatant use of the name was less common! You play as Quasimodo, the legendary Hunchback of Notre Dame Cathedral, and you’re trying to rescue your sweetheart, Esmerelda, from the clutches of the evil Cardinal and his guards. You begin by running along the outer wall of the cathedral, jumping  over the parapets and dodging the arrows being fired at you until you reach his famous bell on the other side. Once you’re past that, you’ve got to jump more of these things on the second screen but this time there’s a guard with a spear tucked away in each one, so you need to time it while they’re retracted. The third and final screen then has you jumping over the soldiers standing between you and Esmerelda’s prison cell before you go again. You really couldn’t ask for more of a type-in than this, or, indeed, a VIC-20 arcade conversion! Okay, it’s clearly at the mercy of BASIC, but it looks perfectly authentic, it’s got some sounds and a nice tune, and it plays just fine, in that utterly brutal and unforgiving 8-bit platformer way! The descriptive text even told you what variables were behind the different bits of Quasimodo’s body, and the arrows and so forth, so you could get in there and change the colour of his legs and stuff too. So cool!

We’ve hit the centre pages (but don’t let that worry you…), and that means the multi-format software charts, sponsored by The Daily Mirror newspaper! As usual, it’s the slightly jarring mix of the top thirty games listed by lead format but then with any other formats shown alongside it in a little table, perfectly illustrated by Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the Spectrum (also available on Commodore 64) at number one, closely followed by Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the Commodore 64 (also available on the Spectrum) at number two. Which, by the way, is the correct order! I wonder how much of the relative resurgence for the BBC elsewhere this month has been down to the success of Elite on there, still holding on to an impressive third spot, considering the competition, whether another of the all-time greats and most influential games of all time or not! The aforementioned Perils of Willy on the VIC-20 and Rubik Cube – listed under “other” but for the Sharp – are the only other representatives for the rest of the machines here, continuing an ominous trend for anyone still hanging on to their Electrons and Orics and so on, although I wouldn’t change the time I spent with Miner Willy on my VIC-20 for anything! Elsewhere, we have Monty Mole, Beach Head, all the Ultimate stuff, and Mastertronic starting to make an impact too, and Manic Miner is still hanging on in there, and there’s loads of slightly lower profile but really interesting (and still well-liked) games in the mix too – Kokotini Wilf, Pyjamarama, Backpacker’s Guide to the Universe, Avalon, Tir-Na-Nog and, er, Steve Davis’ Snooker, to pick out just a few. What a time to be alive!

I’ve said it before but even though I’d pore over every other word in these magazines, over and over again until the next issue arrived, I used to find the Adventure section so boring, and generally just skipped past it! That’s a bit more difficult this month though because it’s one of those enormous Adventure Extra specials, so despite saying we’d only just hit the middle pages just now, I’m not sure how much of the rest I can face in reality, so we might be onto adverts and then out of here sooner than you might have thought! There’s just so much text here, and so many games no one has ever cared about, and the authors are just so annoyingly into it, and then there’s that stupid recurring sketch of what I assume is one of these nerds dressed as a wizard… I suppose we should be thankful for the coming of the graphical text adventure though, even if examples like Return to Eden on the BBC here are hardly festive feasts for the eye. Aside from a million adverts, the rest of this “special” mostly consists of a tabletop, pencil and dice version of Doomdark’s Revenge, which is actually pretty cool and a nice Christmas bonus for us fantasy role-playing weirdos, but for everyone else, probably best to focus on those adverts instead!

When I started doing these with a handful of issues from 1983, apart from a few early giants like Ultimate and Ocean further staking their claims, there was very little colour to be found anywhere, and adverts for games were mainly single-page, multiple title ones, or just massive lists of them from stockists. Fast-forward to 1985 and it’s the total opposite, with all the colours the mid-eighties had to throw at you, and across double-pages too, which is also why we’ll increasingly be finding missing pages for everything that ended up on my bedroom wall! All the same, there’s not a whole lot of note that’s new to us this month… One of the most unforgiving games of all time, Airwolf, makes its first appearance, added to the regular Elite ad with the terrible air-brushed versions of The Dukes of Hazzard and Lee Majors in Fall Guy (see my Super Stunt Man deep-dive for more on him)! Actually, that’s followed by equally dreadful adverts for Cliff Hanger and Shoot the Rapids, sharing a double-page composite photo of a cowboy holding a gun to a canoeist’s head, or for some really bad air-brushing, you’ve already seen the Boilerhouse advert back up the page! There’s a couple of Christmas games too, with Merry Christmas Santa and the Very Wally Christmas Automania and Pyjamarama twin-pack, and we’ve got Boulder Dash appearing on the Spectrum in time for Christmas too. And Gift From The Gods, which I think is the first of these that would end up blu-tacked to my wall in the not too distant future!

As said, we’ve got all the usual suspects too – huge ads for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, Knight Lore and Underworlde, then there’s the likes of Ghostbusters and F-15 Strike Eagle, Bruce Lee and Match Day we’ve seen previously, and all the obscurities like Frenzy and Frak, where the big, full-colour, custom-illustrated adverts probably cost more than the game ever made back. Which makes me sad, so maybe I’ll give them a go in a future Weekly Spotlight too! Right, let’s close by mopping up any other features we’ve missed, and the one that jumped out at me was part two of the New Micro Guide from last month, where we learned all about the exciting new Amstrad, MSX, QL and Enterprise computers that would be setting the world alight in 1985! This time it’s the turn of the new Commodore machines, the Commodore 16 and the Commodore Plus 4. The C16 was like a sequel to the VIC-20, and I’d have loved one at the time for all the games like Paperboy and Yie Ar Kung-Fu that just about made it onto there, where the VIC had had no chance… But obviously I’d have like a C64 even more! And the Plus 4 is just an oddity – like a more serious but more rubbish C64 designed to compete with the Sinclair QL, as if anyone needed to worry about competing with that. Could run C16 software too though, so if you were worried about missing out on Rolf Harris Picture Builder on there then worry no more! Not for the first time, we’ve run long here, so I think that bombshell is going to do us for this time, but do join me again as soon as February 1985 comes around for more of the same! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a sage piece of advice from this buyer’s guide article… “If your friend has an MSX micro, you may also consider buying one. You can lend each other games and peripherals.” And don’t you forget it! See you next time!

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