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 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, this was the second issue I bought for myself, so another really special one for me, just like it was at the time – as you can see from the well-loved state it’s in! 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 plenty of time to keep working on that though, so without further delay, let’s jump into the May 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…

The cover is always a decent place to start, and this month it has The Fantastic Four plastered all over it, who aren’t my favourite comic-bunch but I’ve always enjoyed the boldness of this image. It’s here to promote a competition to win a copy of Scott Adam’s latest Marvel superhero adventure, Questprobe 3, a series which I’m always surprised doesn’t get more attention, considering both the subject matter and that it’s by one of the greats of the text adventure genre (and also the guy who created Pirate Cove, the very first game I ever finished)! I don’t suppose the placement of this competition helped its cause though – it might be Marvel but it ain’t no Bob Holness across the page, advertising his Blockbusters TV quiz tie-in, which I’d also become very fond of when I got my ZX Spectrum a while later! Just quickly on a couple of other competitions while we’re here, the decidedly ancient by 1985 standards text adventure The Hobbit is still doing the rounds, now on C64 and BBC disk versions which you can win, and given the big cutout a few pages later, it looks like the Cauldron competition was accompanied by a decent image because that’s gone as well as the entry form… More on that later!

Normally I’d jump straight to Games News next but this month we’ve not only got a full colour, double-page 3D map of Ultimate’s latest instant classic for the Spectrum, Alien 8, but also a full screen-by-screen guide too! This would probably have been a magazine-seller in itself back in 1985, but it’s also got the high profile positioning because in a first for C&VG, they’d teamed up with a company called Dimension Graphics, who’d come up with a way of “transferring computer graphics to paper,” which might sound a lot like what a printer does or used to do!) to us now but was actually pretty sophisticated for the time, and results in what’s probably the most impressive game map I’d ever seen to this point. Quite the impressive game too –  a kind of sci-fi spiritual successor to Knightlore, with insane isometric graphics and even more insane puzzles, which scored very high when it was reviewed in last month’s issue. And while not quite so flashy, while we’re on the subject of maps and guides, there’s also a full set, spread out across several pages and including a ton of colour screenshots, for Sorcery on the Amstrad CPC, which to this day I reckon is the best-looking game on there!

Before we get to this month’s reviews, we will have a look at Games News, although it’s another quiet one – an upcoming Super Gran game based on the dreadful TV show, and a petition to the BBC to bring back Doctor Who are about the best I can offer! Be careful what you wish for… They have got a bit more in the newly-introduced (last month) Hot Gossip section though, which is actually just more news but I’m still struggling to give you anything exciting… When two new Commodore 16 games, Petals of Doom and Tycoon Tex, are your headliners, you know it’s definitely a quiet news month! That said, we have got a preview of what I reckon is a pretty iconic Commodore 64 game, Ghettoblaster, and there’s a tiny footnote about Oric going into liquidation, which is probably an indication of how many people cared, and on that basis, marginally more people cared about Games Workshop bringing their D-Day war game to the Sinclair QL…

Right, Software Reviews, and speaking of iconic, Game of the Month is Gyron on the Spectrum, a stunning 3D maze game that’s way more than just a 3D maze game, with sorcerer scientists, laser towers and some groundbreaking movement techniques! Tough as old boots too, and that’s before you get to the Necropolis version on the other side of the cassette, which was so hard that Firebird were offering a Porsche 924 to the first person to beat it! There are way more other games reviewed this month than I can get into here, so before I do get into yet another bunch of all-time classics tucked away in the third batch of reviews near the back of the mag, I just want to mention a few really solid but less well-known titles that have been pretty much overshadowed ever since on what by now were clearly established as the big two systems of the day, with a never-ending parade of new releases every single month… I’ll start on the Commodore 64, where Shoot the Rapids is a really nice canoe sim; Seaside Special is a weird environmental action-adventure that knows its politics and couldn’t look any more C64; Slapshot is a fantastic early Ice Hockey game that still plays great; and Blagger Goes to Hollywood is a very stylish cultural adventure.

On the Spectrum, Wizard’s Lair is a bit of an Atic Atac rip-off but you won’t find a better one… You’ll definitely find a couple of better versions of Bruce Lee though, even if this one will do fine if you’ve got no choice! And while Dukes of Hazzard on there is even more average today than it was scored back then, Scramble in the General Lee instead of a spaceship is a pretty irresistible concept regardless! I’ll also quickly mention a few games reviewed on other platforms, and in particular on the MSX, with what must be two of its highest-scoring games ever covered, and on a single-page! Both Konami arcade conversions too, with Hypersports II basically a cut-down version of the original but a really good one, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu an absolute stunner of a port of the pioneering one-on-one fighter! Over on the Amstrad, there’s a whole dedicated section of reviews but there’s an awful lot of very average to be found in it, like platformers Ghouls and Blagger, side-on tennis game Centre Court, and Osprey, a kind of educational bird game. Then we’ve got Artic’s terrible World Cup, presumably ported from possibly the worst sports game ever on the Spectrum, but there’s a decent attempt at the groundbreaking (or air-breaking) flight sim Fighter Pilot, and you can’t go wrong with conversions of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy in the event that nothing else particularly appeals! Elsewhere, In Space on the Commodore 16 sounds like a Jetpac clone minus most of the fun, but that’s more than enough average for now so let’s head over to the BBC for Castle Quest, which is a very vibrant-looking puzzle-platformer that’s almost scoring as big as those MSX games just now… 

Tens to be found everywhere this month, and that’s before we get to the likes of Dropzone on the Atari 8-bit home computers, that timeless and absolutely gorgeous take on Defender that might have been a bit of a last hoorah for the system but what a way to go (although it did, admittedly, hang around a bit longer)! Back on the Spectrum, Everyone’s a Wally makes its mark as one of the machine’s great action-adventures, with you switching between a load of mundanely madcap characters to complete puzzles, as well as experience some of the best colour-clash you’ll ever see in any Spectrum game along the way! Finally, we’ll come full circle to the C64, first with Pitstop II, a split-screen Formula One classic – at least once you’ve worked out how to do the titular pitstops – and alongside Buggy Boy, Super Cycle and, er, others I’m sure, is one of the great 3D racers on the system! Just to prove I’m not really a Spectrum fanboy though, we’ll finish up on reviews with Cauldron, an illustration from which is peering down at me from inside a big frame on the wall above as I write, which tells you I love this witchy arcade-adventure (and some of the best-looking trees you’ll ever see in a video game to this day) even more than the reviewer did!

Time for this month’s type-in games listings, and first we’re heading to the BBC for Smarty Berty, which is upside-down Q*Bert! Actually, it’s got more configurations besides, and seems like a decent clone, assuming you entered that mass of CHR$ and VDU numbers correctly (see picture above for a taste of about five pages full of them)! On the Amstrad, we have Dot-Man, and you’ll never guess what that’s all about! Tanx 64 is a very BASIC Commodore 64 tank driving romp but is mercifully one of the shortest listings we’ve come across so far! As usual, we can rely on the Spectrum for a bit more sophistication with Pyramids of Aaron, an Ancient Egyptian-themed platformer with the best-looking loading screen – featuring the Pyramids of Giza – that we’ve come across so far! Finally, on my beloved unexpanded VIC-20 we have Defender, which is another short listing but one I actually typed-in at the time, so I can tell you wasn’t Defender at all, but a very simplified version of Galaxian that I reckon was pretty good, although by now it was definitely a case of take whatever you can get with that system!

Unless I’m very much mistaken, or it was potentially on the reverse of a poster I pulled out from the middle pages and put on my bedroom wall (which is increasingly going to be the case as we head into the future with these), I can’t see any software charts to look at this month, so I’m going to head to Arcade Action instead, and hopefully normal service will resume with our regular countdown next time. Anyway, we start this section with a new British record for Robotron, which took an incredible forty-two hours to achieve but was still not even two-thirds of the world record! Which is about how much of a page it took to cover that, and with even more taken up by a guide to Galaga on the other page, it’s a quiet news month here too! We have got news of Mr Do’s Wild Ride though, which I don’t think history has been quite so kind to as its predecessors, and there’s the very stylish, behind-the-door cowboy shooter Bank Panic from Sega closing things out, but really none the usual eye-popping excitement this section often delivers. Maybe the Adventure section can make up for it… In its defence, there are some decent games reviewed amidst the regular deluge of nerd-words, such as the very atmospheric text adventure Empire of Karn on the C64, and also the genre-classic Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Aside from those though, and the regular help columns and how-to guides and the like, that’s about all I’ve got for you in this issue, so let’s finish with a few notable adverts, and I’m going start with a first appearance of Starion on the ZX Spectrum, which at the time was a stone-cold stunner, with these incredibly detailed 3D vector spaceships promising epic space battles, like an arcade version of Elite – no wonder the ad was the very unique montage of screenshots you can see above! I must confess, I’m now starting to lose track of which adverts we’ve seen previously, but I think it’s also the first time we’re seeing the cartoon glory of Roland’s Rat Race, and the serious but fantastically accessible helicopter sim, Combat Lynx. We’ve also got those iconic ads for Cauldron, Gribbly’s Day Out and World Series Baseball that will now be hanging around for a long time to come, so if I didn’t manage to squeeze them in above somewhere, we’ll definitely have the chance to see them here in future. Otherwise, Daley Thompson is sharing a big double-page with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Street Hawk, which is something you don’t see very often, while the Ghostbusters are back again, on the Amstrad CPC this time. I already mentioned Blockbusters but I’ll finish with another Bob, Bounty Bob Strikes Back, and although we’ve seen this Miner 2049er follow-up previously, I don’t think it’s been spread across a huge, full-colour double-page before, and really would have looked great on my wall if it had been across the centre pages! Maybe I’ll also share that one here if it repeats next month, because while I could keep listing out games being advertised in this magazine, I think that’s us about done, so I hope you enjoyed having a look through this issue with me, and I’ll see you for the same again when June 1985 rolls around!

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