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 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 – the last of which is 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 still have about eight years to keep working on that, so without any more delay, let’s jump into the March 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…

We’ll start with the cover, which is a take on the box art of a very old ZX Spectrum favourite of mine, Gift From The Gods, an Ancient Greek action-adventure set in a mind-boggling underground labyrinth. And that’s the subject of the competition the cover is promoting, where you can win not only a specially created, hand-painted diorama of the game but also a stack Ocean Software software, and all you need to do for a chance is map the entire beast of a game out! I’ve been meaning to go back and try and finish this one for ages so hopefully they’ll publish the results in an upcoming issue too because with my sense of direction, it’s about the only chance I’ve got! We’ll jump to Games News next, where we begin with the exciting news that the “long-awaited” Elan home computer is ready to hit the shelves! At just £249 of 1985 money (which is getting on for a grand today), this “should be a main competitor to MSX machines” which is obviously what we were all itching for at the time… Or you could go for the soon-to-be relaunched Atari 800XL at half the price, although alongside a very unflattering picture of Jack Tramiel, we also learn there’s apparently a £300 16-bit offering on the way in the summer, soon to be followed by a 32-bit one. Can’t wait because one day I might just fancy one of those… In not so good news, Coleco are pulling both the Adam computer and the ColecoVision console from sale in the UK, apparently a continuation of the “gradual demise of the dedicated video-game machine.” Wonder if they’re right? Tons of games on the way too, mainly for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum despite all this new competition, including Knightmare, Gandalf the Sorcerer, Beamrider and Pitfall II. And finally, Jeff Minter is back with a light synthesiser called Psychedelia, apparently coming to the VIC-20 and Commodore 16 as well as the C64, and which “looks like being one of the greatest entertainment programs ever!” Having recently experienced it for the first time on last year’s Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story compilation-meets-celebration, I’m not sure about that, but it’s definitely got his mark all over it!

Time for Software Reviews now, where Game of the Month is 3D Starstrike on the ZX Spectrum, an incredible take on the Star Wars arcade game that was only really surpassed on there by its sequel. The 3D vector graphics are genuinely amazing, and it still plays fantastic, but is it really better than “School Daze” (better known as Skool Daze)? I might be in the minority that would say yes but regardless of my opinions, I absolutely love seeing these all-time classics emerging for the very first in these magazines! Even as early as 1985, it’s being lauded for its originality but obviously they had no idea quite how pioneering and influential this thing would be seen as for decades to come! You could say the exactly same for how difficult Airwolf on the Spectrum is too, although there’s not a hint of “one of the most brutal games to date” even by mid-eighties standards – just how cool the show is, how good the game looks, and how addictive it is! They liked Lode Runner on there as well, and rightly so, and also Firebird’s budget strategy war game thing, Viking Raiders, which I always liked the look of in their adverts but never got at the time and still haven’t played to this day! Maybe keep an eye on my Weekly Spotlight features because I really need to fix that! And to close on a bumper month for the Spectrum, they also really liked Manic Miner-alike Mutant Monty (but not that Monty), and the aforementioned Gift From The Gods too, and I really am going to have to go back to that one as soon as I’m done here! Before I jump to the C64, I’m going to stop-off for an increasingly rare review for my beloved but almost extinct VIC-20… Fatty Henry is a bizarre but very fun game where you’re an Octopus in the middle of being cooked, and you’re trying to grab drops of condensation from the ceiling and fling them on the flames below the pot you’re in. Great to see but I reckon every time we see anything on the VIC-20 from now onwards, it might be the last time. Very sad!

Speaking of bizarre though, the highest-scoring C64 game this month is CADCAM Warrior, about a computer-aided design exhibition where the machines have taken over! Nines across the board, which I reckon is what Blue Max deserved too but the reviewer here found it dull and less fun than than River Raid, and although I very marginally prefer the Atari 8-bit version, you should really check out my Top Ten Favourite Isometric Shoot ‘Em Ups feature for a proper take on that… And at the very least, I compare it to Zaxxon and not stupid River Raid!!! Anyway, next on the C64 is Black Thunder, which I’ve never played but is another one I think I really should – kind of like Moon Patrol in an armoured car with a bit of route planning to boot and a real looker. I am very familiar with Breakdance though, which is like the electronic game Simon but instead of remembering a sequence of flashing lights, you’re remembering a load of breakdance moves! They score it much higher than I’d have expected but I’m pleased they did because I’ve got a real soft-spot for it, and it really couldn’t be any more 1985 either! We came across an advert for Indiana Jones on the Commodore 64 here last month but I hope you weren’t tempted by it because it turns out this quirky puzzler really doesn’t live up to the license… Who’d have believed it? It’s very average and it’s really not surprising it never gets mentioned anymore. Right, let’s see what that young upstart, the Amstrad CPC, is up to this month, starting with American Football, which is a primitive but decent simulation reviewed by someone who’s got no idea about the sport, which isn’t a knock because few of us Brits (including me) did back then! If you don’t fancy that though, then how about yet another version of Hunchback from Ocean for your lovely green-screen monitor? Maybe not…

There is more (albeit not on the CPC) but I think we’ve seen the highlights, so I’ll close with some love for the BBC, which has Sim, and for the life of me I can’t work out what it is from the review but doesn’t seem worth worrying about from the vibe, as well as Labyrinth, an absolutely fantastic take on Berzerk’s maze-thing, scoring nines all the way, although the comparison with Elite at the end is pushing it a little! All the same, that’s an awful lot of very good stuff to sink your teeth into whatever system you’re lucky enough to own this month – even for us beleaguered VIC-20 owners! And we get a type-in games listing as well! Okay, it’s yet another one in the style of Hunchback, but it’s the most sophisticated of them so far, and probably the most challenging too… And on the picture above, I just noticed an advert for Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo across the page from it! Hard to follow that, I know, but there’s also Super Clown for the Atari home computers, where you’re dodging balloons to escape the circus tent, assuming you get the mass of DATA commands entered correctly! Meanwhile, over on the Spectrum, you’ve got a choice of Spider Fighter, a basic shooter, or Crackpot Climber, a slightly less basic platformer, but they’re both straightforward to get running which is always a bonus! Finally, there’s Bruce on the C64, which isn’t whatever you’re currently thinking a game called Bruce might be, but a kind of interpretation of Jetpac, which is also no bad thing!

I think we’ll have a look at the Top 30 Charts next, sponsored as usual by The Daily Mirror newspaper, and spread as usual across the middle pages, although I need to apologise for the obscured picture this month – we’ll get to the bonus pull-out Book of Adventure shortly, which is what’s obscuring it because it’s never been pulled out, and I’m not going to pull it out now! Anyway, it’s also the usual countdown by game by platform, meaning you might see individual titles appearing several times on different platforms, which are listed in a grid showing where else a game is available, most of which becomes more redundant by the month as the Spectrum and C64 continue to dominate on a pretty much equal basis. That said, The Perils of Willy on the VIC-20 has made a strange reappearance this month – could just be its appearance on recent adverts for their mostly Spectrum games. And the mighty Elite is putting a circle in the box for both the BBC and the Acorn Electron, where it’s a new entry. Atari, Dragon, Oric and Others are all very noticeably empty though. Ghostbusters on the C64 is at number one this month, with Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the Spectrum still hanging around at number two after eight weeks in the chart, and C&VG Game of the Month from earlier, 3D Starstrike, on there is in at number three. Other new and notable entries include Raid Over Moscow, Combat Lynx, Jet Set Willy and budget-classic Booty on the C64, with the latter also appearing on the Spectrum, together with Match Day, Pyjamarama, Hunchback II and Airwolf, and like I said earlier, it’s so great seeing these names that are now so familiar appearing for the first time!

As I’ve said in previous Retro Rewinds, even at the time, when I was approaching full-nerd, I always found the far-too-long-running monthly Adventure section in C&VG way too dry for me, and it was generally the only part of the mag I didn’t read word-for-word and several times over every time… And here we are this month with a 32-page bonus edition! Honestly, I’m looking at the news page that opens this thing and my eyes are already glazing over at the familiar sea of words that always makes up this feature, although legendary text adventure pioneer Scott Adams does look typically insane in the little photo of him, where we learn he’s coming to the UK in the next month – they don’t know why but now you’re seeing why I skipped this stuff! The interview with Philip Mitchell that follows is worth a read though, with the author of legendary text adventure The Hobbit talking about his new Sherlock Holmes game and how he puts these wordy games together in the first place. It’s a genre I’ve always loved, and joking aside, this is really fascinating! I am going to skip the gaming diary about some sci-fi thing where the author thinks he’s a real space captain and some other similar stuff though, and the pages and pages and pages of words reviewing a load of text adventures you’ve never heard of using way more words than all of them combined! If you’ve never played a Scott Adams game before though, maybe have a look at the reviews of his first four games for the Spectrum here, and pick one to have a go at – they’re genuinely all worth your time! Doomdark’s Revenge also gets a review but that should have been covered in the magazine proper rather than in this nerd-zone, as evidenced by its insane seven out of ten review!

I can’t face any more of that stuff so let’s have a really quick look at some of the other bits and pieces in what’s a fairly slimline magazine this month instead… I’ll start with a competition, and it’s only notable because it’s to win a copy of Star Wars for the Atari 2600, or VCS as it was known at the time, and like we saw elsewhere earlier, the dismissive language used around gaming consoles in C&VG now is intriguing – they abandoned virtually all coverage many months ago by now, including any games reviews or presence in the charts, and even here, it’s all sarcasm and almost a reluctance to dirty their hands with these things again. Given the space handed over to the adventure snoozefest this month, there’s actually not a lot else going on, although the Letter From America feature does give some insight into the Atari-led games crash in 1983 that us UK gamers were still blissfully unaware of (apart from the lack of console games, I guess)! The rest goes into what’s new from Sega and Electronic Arts and others but I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t read about the likes of Tapper and Spy Hunter – both of which it goes into detail about – in Arcade Action sections in previous issues though, so I’m just going to head over to that now instead for what’s really new to us, and I have to say, I’m liking the look of this Paperboy thing a lot… That said, that’s The Empire Strikes Back underneath it! And that’s a vector AT-AT and it’s huge and you’re actually shooting it!!! Okay, in reality it didn’t turn out to have quite the same impact on me as its predecessor from Atari did, but I wouldn’t have known that at the start of 1985, and this blew my little neon towelling socks off! The same would eventually be the case for Paperboy but I distinctly remember that was from seeing it in action for the first time rather than here. And also on the page – and I won’t say it again but all of this at once here is just nuts – we have the 3D visual miracle that was Marble Madness. What a month to be alive!

Right, let’s finish off with a look at all the lovely adverts plastered throughout this issue, as always increasingly full-colour, across whole or double-page spreads, and for single games rather than entire catalogues like we’d seen in the past. And they’re all so eighties too! Amstrad are still going for it with their big CPC and loads of pack-in games offers but having already established their machine, Commodore are going in all guns blazing with a mysterious new add-on called a Modem! It lets you talk to other C64 users using Compunet, which also gets you into Multi User Dungeon to play against them, “on-line!” Then you can grab some educational software to help with your schoolwork because, after all, that’s why your parents bought the thing for you in the first place! And you can buy all sorts of less boring stuff too, or join the computer service for the British Library and browse their catalogue, or even try your hand at computer dating! I talk about these adverts being time capsules but this one is something else! Elsewhere we have a very cool Automan advert for the tie-in from the cult TV series, so hopefully we’ll get a review of that soon, then across the page (pictured below) there’s Death Star Interceptor, a very blatant take on another license (or not!); we’ve also got Spy Hunter and Gryphon, which I remember made me suddenly want a C64… But don’t worry, I soon got over it! 

There’s a very odd but seemingly official advert for Pac-Man, Mr. Do! and Dig-Dug on the C64 too, which I don’t remember ever seeing again because I guess someone at Atari did and pulled it! And speaking of odd, Animated Strip Poker, where the illustration of your half-dressed opponent is so bad it’s probably exactly what she looks like in-game if any better-known examples of the genre are anything to go by. Ocean is still doing its big budget thing with Match Day and its other long-standing big-hitters, while the long-standing Kevin Toms’ bearded face makes a double-appearance on a single page with Software Star – his follow-up to Football Manager – taking centre stage this time! Jeff Minter only gets a bearded cartoon of himself on the suitably psychedelic ad for Pyschedelia from earlier though! Not sure we’ve had an Everyone’s a Wally or an Alien 8 advert before, or at least I’ve not mentioned them, so I will now, but I think the rest is mostly usual suspects by now, which is a good place to call it a day for this month because for any we have missed here, they’ll mostly likely be back next time! And so will I, so I hope you’ve enjoyed having a look through the March 1985 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine with me, and I also hope to see you again in April 1985 for more of the same!

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