Back again for our 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 all 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 shortly, then inevitably I 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, although that’s proving a lot more difficult than the older ones for some reason! Anyway, I now have about eight years to keep working on that, so without any more delay, let’s jump into the February 1985 issue, where, as usual, the plan 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…

Let’s have a quick look at the cover first though, which is covered in all flavours of Gremlin, who seem to be promoting a bunch of competitions, including chances to win Ghostbusters goodies (as one of them tucks into said logo) and System 3 games for life… Wonder if that includes the fancy new Last Ninja collection they’ve just announced as I write? Probably too late to find out now anyway, so in the absence of any further context for the Gremlins being present, the cover also promises maps of last month’s review darlings Knight Lore and Underwurlde to look forward to, and the annual book of type-in games, which I’m afraid I don’t have, so we won’t be looking forward to that unfortunately! We do have Games News though, and we’re going to start with Mike Singleton, who’s not only the headline news this month, with the announcement of his Lords of Midnight follow-up, Doomdark’s Revenge, but is also something of a headline act, receiving the Designer of the Month award, and getting his own two-page strategy and war games nerd-a-thon later in the mag, and he’s even provided a Spectrum type-in, allowing you to create some kind of dynamic galactic map! We’re not done with Mr Singleton yet either, but in other news, we learn there’s a new law on the way that means anyone selling, exhibiting or even possessing pirated software could now be fined two-grand or go straight to jail, which, with the benefit of hindsight, we know would go on to totally solve the problem! There’s also news of tons of new games (mainly for Commodore 64) that no one ever heard of again, some BBC and Electron compilations, and apparently pop-culture phenomenon Frankie Goes to Hollywood have teamed up with Ocean and will have a game out in mere months, so if all goes to plan then maybe we can look forward to reading about that here very soon!

Nothing quite as glamourous being reviewed this month, unfortunately, with top-down helicopter rescue game Cyclone on the ZX Spectrum heading-up the pack, which is by the guy who did Tornado Low Level, so you can still expect a little bit of sim and a lot of fun! Speaking of which, Rally Driver for the Spectrum is on the same page, and while more sim and less fun than Cyclone, you can’t fault its ambition, all cockpit view with directions from your co-driver, just like a modern rally game… Just a lot more magenta and a lot less sound, including when you run into a cow, which doesn’t moo like in Hard Drivin’ but will incur you a five-second penalty because that’s no doubt what it says in the rules of rallying! Loads of Spectrum stuff this month, with its excellent port of Boulder Dash next, and a belated one of Battlezone, which sadly doesn’t fair quite as well as 3D Tank, the clone it’s head-to-head with here. It’s also got its first 2000AD game in Strontium Dog: The Killing, which was decidedly average but a very good indication of what to expect from pretty much every 2000AD game that would ever follow! Over on the C64, we’ve got Combat Lynx, a superb proper helicopter flight simulator that was a real favourite of mine on the Spectrum, and it seems like this browner version is alright too! Even more flight sims on there next, with the no-nonsense (and not very interesting) Flyer Fox giving you a chance to escort a jumbo jet through hostile territory, while Fighter Pilot takes the classic F-15 sim from then Spectrum and makes it Top Gun on the C64 too! 

Good stuff but a bit dry in the first reviews section all the same! Business picks up in the second batch further into the mag though, starting with the wonderfully brutal platformer Henry’s House on the C64… And you know how brutal I mean when it’s only got eight screens total but you’ll be very lucky to ever see half of them! Real looker though, possibly deserving its ten out of ten for graphics, maybe, but definitely preferable to the other vaguely Royal platformer Di’s Baby it’s reviewed alongside! My dear old favourite Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge gets covered on the Spectrum (where it plays better) and Commodore 64 (where it looks better), while Alien on the C64 is worth a look too, not because of it’s an early tie-in of one of the all-time great sci-fi movies, but simply because I’ve never seen a game score one out of ten for graphics in C&VG before or ever since! No wonder the advert elsewhere in the mag (and pictured a bit further below) filled what I assume was originally the space for some screenshots with some very out of place cast photos instead! Just to close on reviews, it is pretty much all C64 and Spectrum again this month, but on the BBC there’s a couple of F1-style racers, with the excellent Grand Prix, and what appears to be called “Position” but is actually a crappy port of Pole Position, so stick with the other one! The Amstrad CPC has a Q*Bert clone called Er*Bert that’s “among the best of the limited range of Amstrad software currently available.” Atari 8-bit has had Jeff Minter’s madcap Defender-ish, Empire Strikes Back-ish, Attack of the Mutant Camels ported over from the C64, and it’s a winner on there to this day, while the poor old VIC-20 is just about still clinging on with Maze Gold, although with that kind of release propping it up it’s probably better off just fading into oblivion now!   

And on that topic, after stating how aware they are of the current dominance of the C64 and the Spectrum in the mag this month (and beyond), there’s also a new feature introduced, listing other stuff out on CPC, VIC-20, Atari, BBC, Electron, MSX, TI-99, Dragon and Oric, but there’s really little of either contemporary or modern day interest there, so I’m going to jump to the Top 30 Software Charts (sponsored by the Daily Mirror newspaper) instead, which, I’m afraid, does just about as much to make owners of these machines feel any better… As usual, it’s multi-format with each position taken by a single platform version of a game, which means you can see multiple games appearing twice, just like Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, once again taking the top spot on the Spectrum, with the C64 version dropping down to number five. That version of Ghostbusters is straight in at two though, with Knight Lore climbing to three and Elite on the BBC (the only game here on any other computer this month) at four. One other point of interest is the continued emergence of budget games, with the brilliant Booty by Firebird on the Spectrum appearing at six, then there’s Mastertronic following behind with Chiller, BMX Racers and Alcatraz Harry, which was the very first game I ever finished on the Spectrum! Other notable new entries include Doomdark’s Revenge and Cyclone from earlier on the Spectrum, as well as Skool Daze and Jet Set Willy back again for a bit more of the pie, while on the C64 there’s its excellent takes on Zaxxon and Bruce Lee among several others bringing it much closer to parity with the Spectrum in terms of overall representation here than ever before!

We’ll head to the familiar yellow pages of Arcade Action next, which were a bit disappointing last time out and don’t start much better this month, with news of the effective demise of pinball legends Gottlieb, although they’ve still got a certain Spy Hunter up their sleeves, so maybe watch this very space next month for more on that! For now though, we’ve got Equites, a curious arcade game by Sega that looks like a top-down run and gun game but plays like a vertical shoot ‘em up, and as such isn’t massively original but it’s not unpleasant either, which, I’ve just realised, is pretty much exactly how they summed it up in the magazine too! The rest of the feature is a bit of a sports special, which does reflect a lot of what was around at the start of 1985, and in turn reflects the industry trying to literally kick some life back into itself, although I’m not sure 10-Yard Fight (rather than “10 Yard Flight” as it was written!) was going to be any kind of saviour in the UK at least. That said, it’s one of my all-time favourite sports games so you won’t hear a word said against it here! It’s a really, really arcade take on American football and it works brilliantly, stripping out all the plays and defending and all that nonsense, and just focussing on the exciting bit with the ball. Absolute classic! As is the personality-filled boxing game Punch Out!! from Nintendo, although I did once get so badly addicted to its NES version that to this day I’ve never dared play the SNES sequel, despite actually owning it! Also from Nintendo we’ve got Vs. Tennis, which I think was just the NES game arcaded-up but good game all the same, and it came with two screens here! Their Golf is also briefly mentioned, which I assume has a similar background, but I really don’t know much about those Vs. things so I’ll have to do some digging sometime! 

I think Sega’s Bull Fighter was an ice hockey game and Konami’s Super Basket Ball was exactly that, before fun basketball games like NBA Jam started appearing, but we’ll leave the arcades now and skim through a few of the hundreds of adverts now padding out this magazine (as well as 12-year old me’s bedroom wall!) every month; as I always say though, a real time capsule in themselves! It might be (vaguely) promoting the ugliest game ever but that’s one cool Alien advert, weird cast profiles or not – actually, I’ve just realised it doesn’t even name them, just their job title and a few character traits! Curiouser and curiouser, although probably for the best if the screenshots of Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom across the page are anything to go by… There’s a very good reason no one ever remembers this tie-in! I’ll probably be spending my pocket money on Monty is Innocent this month instead, part of a wonderfully vibrant Gremlin Graphics double-pager that also features his friend, Sam Stoat Safe-Breaker, with his very weird and none-more-Spectrum spin-off game, and two other less fondly-remembered characters, Grumpy Gumphrey Supersleuth and Beaver Bob in Dam Trouble, and again, good reasons! There’s still all the old stalwarts like The Fall Guy with its weird air-brushed Lee Majors illustrations, all the Ultimate stuff, Ocean’s greatest hits like Match Day and Kong Strikes Back, and, of course, Football Manager, which must be the longest running advert for any product in any magazine ever, although quite excitingly, this month it’s gone full-page and full-colour, so you can finally appreciate Kevin Toms’ iconic bearded-face in all its glory!

We’re also seeing one of the first appearances of what would become another long running advert, not for a game this time but for new kid on the block, the Amstrad CPC 464, with its choice of full colour or green-screen monitor included in the £349 or £239 asking price respectively, with the latter being a fantastic option for parents who don’t just dislike their kid but really hate them! I always thought this advert and variations thereof that would follow for years to come made it look pretty cool though. Kind of! Another game that jumped out at me was from a new single-page advert for Melbourne House’s Castle of Terror, a Commodore 64 graphical text adventure that had some really atmospheric visuals (as well as some really crap ones) but is a game I’ll never forgive for what was a game-breaking bug right near the end where, if I remember right, had you trapped in a room you shouldn’t have been trapped in at all. Jeff Minter is splashing out on a suitably psychedelic ad for Psychedelia: A Light Synthesiser, which I’m glad I never spent money on myself but nice to see another beardy-faced developer on display all the same! We’ll close on another familiar advert by now, for Bruce Lee, although this time it’s more of a footnote to its new (but not entirely dissimilar) stablemate Conan for the Commodore 64 and Atari home computers. Good bit of Schwarzenegger art too if you ever want look it up.

As mentioned earlier, this magazine is stacked with adverts for all kinds of historic artefacts but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon so I can always come back to a few I’ve skipped this month, and we can finish off with a look at a few other features in this issue. Shame I’ve got no more type-ins though – in this issue last year, where I did have the Book of Games, there was still a bunch in the magazine itself but maybe times are starting to change… No stuffy old Adventure section this month either but I think they might be saving that for another bonus supplement next time! There is a big nerdy feature on the pioneering Zork trilogy though, which not only goes into all the totally bonkers lore of the very original text adventure series, then runs through the games and covers the books, but also has a bit of a buyers’ guide to all the different versions and the wild number of platforms the games were already available on, even in 1985! All sorts of weird stuff too, like the DEC Rainbow and PDP-11, as well as what I guess was a recently released C64 version. I said we’d come back to Mike Singleton one more time, and this is really cool – C&VG is serialising an official Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure novelette, based on his absolutely remarkable Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge games. This is really something else for magazine content and early gaming bonus content, not to mention fan service, with a huge, fully-fleshed out and professionally written adventure, just like the real thing! Finally, I think I’ve worked out the Gremlins thing on the cover – there’s a bunch of movie reviews, mostly related to tie-in games, and that’s one of them. Tenuous at best though, just like this feature, which is little more than a re-hash of one (featuring many of the same Hollywood properties) from a few months ago. Doesn’t spoil another great issue though, which I hope you’ve enjoyed skimming through with me, and with that I’ll see you again in March 1985!

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