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 few months into 1985… In fact, with this very issue, so a really special one for me, just like it was at the time – as you can see from how dog-eared, torn and taped-up the cover is! Anyway, I would then 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, 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, although that’s proving a lot more difficult than the older ones for some reason! I still have a good few years to keep working on that though, so without any more delay, let’s jump into the April 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…

This month’s cover has always been one of my favourites, although until I was looking at it just now, I’d never noticed the Death Star up in the sky! I’ll come back to that but the rest is dominated by the most wizardy wizard that ever there was hanging around the great stone circles of The Dragontorc of Avalon, Steve Turner’s sequel to the huge fantasy adventure, Avalon, published by Hewson Consultants the previous year. And if you’ve got a copy, you’re in with a chance to win an Amstrad CPC with a colour monitor (rather than the crappy green one) to go with it too, although you really have to jump through hoops to answer the ten riddles based on the game involved. Very well thought out competition though, and it’s accompanied by nicely atmospheric maps to help you, and some high-fantasy fiction on the side. Just a shame it’s to win something no one in their right mind wanted! Only kidding, but probably time to move on all the same… Speaking of crappy prizes though, in this month’s Games News, we’ve got the winners of the Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge one, proudly displaying their new, er, “Toshiba MXS” machines, presented by the man himself, while elsewhere on the page, Band Aid’s Bob Geldof is backing the new Soft Aid compilation from Ocean and Quicksilva to raise money for Ethiopia. Quite the collection that was too… We also have a first glimpse of the now-iconic Everyone’s a Wally, although I wish the screenshots were in colour because that wonderful colour-clash on the Spectrum version is even more iconic, and one of the best examples you’ll ever see! Great game though, and it’s so cool to go back and see stuff like this appearing for the very first time.

There’s not much else happening in the new this month – Daley Thompson’s Decathlon is getting a sequel, Super Test; Scott Adams is bringing his brilliant text adventures to the Commodore 16, Amstrad CPC, MSX (or MXS!) and Atari XL; and Mastertronic is about to launch its first games in America. However, we do have a brand new feature called Hot Gossip next, which I reckon they’ve been saving the juiciest news for! Actually, this very page was so influential on me, it being mostly dominated by spooky arcade adventure, Cauldron. The little image of the witch on her broomstick with all the bats over her gorgeous hovel in the best-looking forest I’ve seen in a game to this day is still one of my favourite sights in gaming, and I even have a framed picture of it right above my head here as I’m writing this! I never wanted a Conmodore 64 more than at that moment, and then every time I read and reread this issue for years after, and yes, eventually I did get my hands on the game, albeit on the Spectrum, but its aesthetic has never left me. “A lot of people have been very frustrated looking for Commodore 16 software.” Mmmm, not sure it’s that many, but anyway, their prayers are about to be answered because Commodore is converting some C64 classics for it, such as Jack Attack, Fire Ant and Purple Turtles. Blimey… Okay, there’s not much else here either, so let’s have a look at some game reviews!

I’m sure this will be the case as we continue through these issues I owned and read word-for-word, dozens and dozens of times over, as opposed to those I borrowed for a weekend previously, but Game of the Month this time is Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64, and it’s hard to state what an impact just seeing this epic platform-puzzling adventure also had on me, let alone playing it for the first time a while later, then loving it over the decades ever since! It’s also another case of seeing what must be considered one of the all-time great games for the first time, and hearing these very early impressions – which, in this case, are about as gushing as you’d expect for something so groundbreaking… And that somersault animation will never get old… And that speech!!! And with the benefit of a lot of hindsight, they certainly got the “impossible to master” bit right too! There’s classics everywhere else you look this month, with stuff like Staff of Karnath on the C64, Sorcery on Amstrad CPC, and the big-scoring, incredible-looking spiritual successor to Knightlore, Alien 8, on the Spectrum, as well as Monty is Innocent, Technician Ted, Brian Bloodaxe and Finders Keepers. Some really cool (and mostly high-scoring) lesser-known stuff around too, like Buggy Blast and “can’t believe they got away with it” Star Wars rip-off Death Star Interceptor on the Spectrum, Athletic Land on MSX, The Quadra and Squish on VIC-20, Gryphon on the C64, Conan on the Atari 800 and C64, The Hacker on BBC… And not forgetting conversions of some more of the greats like Ghostbusters on the Spectrum and Pyjamarama on Amstrad CPC! It’s really unbelievable to look back at, all crammed into just a few pages of a single magazine like this!

I’ve got some BASIC games listings for you next, starting with Starship Victory on the VIC-20, which I actually typed-in at the time so can give you some first-hand impressions of! Most importantly, it worked, and from there it’s a very simplistic Asteroids kind of thing based on Star Trek where you’ve got “Clingons” trying to decimate four different planets shown on the screen, which you can fly around with left, right and thrust as you try to destroy them all first. It’s incredibly slow but these things were always fun to enter and see running regardless! Over on the MSX, we’ve got Stuntman, where you’re diving out of a plane onto a trampoline, and it’s a pretty complex listing for one of these. Commodore 64 owners have Helicopter, which is a bit like Choplifter on an oil-rig, while on the Atari 800 there’s a massive dungeon-crawling text-adventure called Portrait Dungeon to sink your teeth into, although I assume you’ll know the full story by the time you’ve typed it in, so maybe ask a friend to do it for you instead? Finally, on the Spectrum, we’ve got Creepy Crawly, which is far more straightforward and about five pages of DATA commands shorter, and seems to be Snake-meets-Pac-Man from the description, as you take a caterpillar to lunch in the garden while making sure to not swallow any rocks or, er, skulls! I might have a go at typing this one in on my The Spectrum replica console with its authentic rubber keyboard, so keep an eye on my Weekly Spotlight features to see how it turned out!

The familiar yellow pages of Arcade Action next, and blimey, here’s another all-time favourite of mine jumping right out of the page at me for the very first time! “Go to the Devil’s temple where the sons of the Devil will entertain you” can only mean Irem’s pioneering side-scrolling beat ‘em up, Kung-Fu Master, where you follow in the footsteps of Bruce Lee in Game of Death (although officially you’re actually Jackie Chan in Wheels on Meals), up various floors of a very dangerous building to rescue your girlfriend. I played this to death in a local leisure centre not long after – and there aren’t many arcade games I can say that about – and it’s always a thrill to see it here every time I’m flicking through this issue! Elsewhere there’s Atari’s totally bonkers but equally pioneering 3-D shooter I, Robot, which was the first arcade game to entirely consist of 3D polygons, but, together with Return of the Jedi that we saw last month, still ended up being the last of the arcade games ever released under the legendary original Atari, Inc. banner. I still don’t think I’ve ever seen either of the other games featured here, with Bally / Sente’s Chicken Shift, which sounds like a platforming-maze-thing, and Konami’s Attack Rush, which I’m struggling to find anything about (mainly because it sounds like Konami’s Rush’n Attack) but seems to be a top-down combat racer. I’ll have to keep digging on that one!

Oh good, it’s the Adventure section next, and all those hundreds and thousands of nerdy words about text adventures no one remembers, although I do quite like the sound of Holy Horrors, a Dracula-inspired affair on the BBC despite the three out of ten rating! I honestly can’t face three pages of live-action fantasy role-playing chat though, despite having done it not long after at the place they’re talking about, so let’s move on! Actually, that’s about it this month – no special features of note at all really, and only about a hundred and twenty pages all in, albeit filled with reviews of an amazing amount of all-time greats, as well as a ton of cool adverts, which I reckon will be a very cool place to finish off until next time… I want to particularly highlight an early appearance of the long-running ad for the fantastic follow-up to Miner 2049, Bounty Bob Strikes Back, which I always thought was responsible for really filling in the gaps that its graphics couldn’t and bringing the game to life in your imagination, while also not really representing the gameplay at all! And over the page we’ve got DACC’s 747 Flight Simulator, with it’s incredible, lifelike 3D cockpit view and all those instruments, just like the real thing – and for once I’m not being facetious in the slightest when I say that; I thought this thing was unbelievable at the time! Which was also the case with the ads for Gryphon and Dropzone on the C64… Amazed I ended up with a Spectrum when I think back to those things, as well as the other games on there we’ve already covered here!

As well as that new Daley Thompson game on the way, Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge is looking pretty fine too, with all that joystick waggling and the promise of some unusual events for this kind of thing so far, with canoeing, football, er, squat thrusts and the like! Monty is Innocent is another long-running and pretty iconic advert I think we’re seeing unveiled in this issue, although I’ve never thought the screenshots do it justice at all, big dancing skeletons or not! And I’ve never got the Beyond adverts like the one across the page from it either, this time for Psi Warrior – give me ratings turned up to eleven (genuinely!) all you want but there is nothing here that makes me want to buy the game whatsoever… At least it’s not that horrible orange colour they’ll become so fond of in upcoming months though! Elsewhere, Alien 8 is looking very stylish in that typically Ultimate Play The Game way, and there’s still lots of stuff we’ve seen previously too, like F-15 Strike Eagle, Everyone’s a Wally, all the Ocean games like Match Day and Kong Strikes Back, Sega’s stuff like Spy Hunter and Tapper… Amazed half of these pages are still in the magazine too, given how much of them ended up on my bedroom wall. I guess that’s something else we’ll encounter in the next few months too, so with that, I think we’ve reached a good place to call it a day for this month! I hope you enjoyed our little flick through though, and I also hope to see you when May 1985 rolls around for more of the same!

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