We’re back again for our regular 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, and 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! There’s still plenty of time to keep working on it though, so without further delay, let’s jump into the June 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 have one more literal pitstop on the cover first though, because although the image at the top of the page is a bit sci-fi at first glance, it’s actually meant to be a Formula 1 driver (and definitely not a motorcycle racer, once we accept it’s also not an astronaut), and he’s here with a chance for you to win tickets for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in a Pitstop II competition! That was the race where Alain Prost won after they waved the chequered flag a lap early and caused all sorts of upset! Anyway, good new Commodore 64 game too, but that’s not all you can get your hands on this month because there’s also the chance to win a trip of a lifetime to Hollywood, care of Alligata Software’s new Blagger Goes to Hollywood. That’s a lot of Hollywood but there’s even more to come, with a chance to win signed records and copies of the new Frankie Goes to Hollywood game, which it appears someone may have started entering in my copy but never finished! And the same is true of the last of this month’s competitions plastered all over the front cover, where you could win an MSX computer or a copy of the new action-adventure The Wreck on there, although I totally get not bothering to finish that particular coupon!

We normally get into a bit of Games News next, but this issue is excitingly straight into the reviews instead, so we’ll follow suit for a change too! We begin with a “Wings of War” flight sim special, and big-scoring reviews for both The Dambusters on Atari 8-bit and Spitfire 40 on the Commodore 64, and while the polish and accessibility of both seems to be what’s earned them some special treatment at the front of the mag this month, I’ve always thought both of these also brought with them a level of “heroism” to what wasn’t exactly a new genre by now, but could still be a very stuffy one! They both hold up pretty well today too if you get the chance. A couple of pages on (and opposite a pretty wonderful Airwolf advert that’s way better than the game ever was), we’ve go another review special, this time because they’ve taken CRL’s new Formula One game to the William’s Grand Prix team’s Oxfordshire HQ  (where I myself once gave a speech on a new-fangled technology called LED lighting!) to get an expert view. Speaking of stuffy though… It’s an F1 management game that’s way more complex than the lack of meaningful instructions can support, and as such seems to have been a bit of a wasted trip!

We’re onto normal reviews next, which are still unusually early, just eighteen pages in, but having been really spoilt for choice by some all-time classics over the past couple of months, it’s more quantity over quality this time, unfortunately. That’s not to say the Game of the Month, Starion on the ZX Spectrum, wasn’t also a classic in its own right, and I remember being as blown away by its scale and ambition when I finally got hold of it just as much as I had been by its 3D wireframe space-combat when I first laid eyes on it here! The headline act on the Commodore 64 is Beyond’s Shadowfire, which followed up their Doomdark’s Revenge with an equally ambitious against-the-clock space adventure, although my eyes couldn’t help but be quickly drawn to the review next to it, Grand Larceny, a graphic adventure by Melbourne House that I’d forgotten existed but used to totally baffled by on my friend’s C64 just after this! There are two more batches of reviews later in the mag this month, and far too many to cover everything, but I’ll quickly highlight the not dissimilar Ice Palace and Gates of Dawn on there as a pair of future cult classics, and if we’re talking cult classics, then maggot maze-a-thon Wriggler back on the Spectrum also needs a mention, and is fully deserving of its nines and tens across the board rating!

Likewise, Jonah Barrington’s Squash back on the C64, which wasn’t just surprisingly fun but had some very cool software-generated speech in it too, and the very odd Give My Regards To Broad Street – featuring members of another well-known Liverpool band – also scores surprisingly highly! Nowhere near as high as Zaxxon on the MSX though, which would have been all perfect tens if it wasn’t for the outrageous £11.95 price tag! Excellent conversion of Buck Rogers on there too, while the best of the BBC this month is Caveman Capers, a really fun side-scrolling running and jumping thingy. The Commodore 16 got a decent set of arcade-type games in Berk’s Trilogy, but not a lot else (yet…) away the two 8-bit powerhouses this month, where I’ll finish by returning to the C64 for Jeff Minter’s latest bonkers puzzle-shooter-affair, Mama Llama, which wasn’t really his finest hour but is fun all the same, and Ultimate’s Entombed, also on there, which I still reckon is one of the best-looking games on the system, even if they’re not quite as enamoured with this as with previous higher-profile releases by the company. By the way, if you want some more best-looking, check out that glorious advert for Wizardore on the BBC across the page from the Mama Llama review pictured above!

Right, last batch of reviews, and what must surely be the last hoorah for the poor old Texas Instruments TI-99! I’ve no idea where this lot came from, but they imply everything here arrived unexpectedly all at once, and presumably it all came from Parco Electronics, who I’ve also no idea about but are listed as the supplier for all thirteen games being reviewed en-masse for the oddity… A lot of which are very familiar, not to mention really good, to the point of us getting to witness that perfect ten score this month after all, then not far off several more times on top! We have to skip to that one first, and it is… Popeye! Now, I love the original arcade game, and as I type I’ve recently picked up an old cartridge of the Atari 2600 port too, which I’m still obsessing over, so I’ll measure this version along the same lines as I would that one – it’s the absolute best you could expect from the system but in reality is it perfect? I’d buy it regardless, whatever it scored, together with Pole Position, which is all nines and as such is amazingly at the lower end of the scoring spectrum among this lot but I love that enough that (relative) scores wouldn’t have mattered there either! Then there’s so many other mixes of nines and tens… Demon Attack looks like it’s based on the fancy Colecovision version rather than the 2600 original which would make it all the fixed-shooter you need; Microsurgeon is a well ahead of its time, er, surgery sim that’s got some wonderfully primitive speech too; Slymoids is a really impressive 3D-effect cowboy shooter; Tunnels of Doom is some good-looking fantasy adventuring; Fathom is a game I’d forgotten about but is another game I know from the 2600, where you transform from a seagull into a dolphin on your quest for a magical trident, and it’s as fun as it is a bit mad! And I’ll finish with Pirate’s Isle, the sequel to the first game I ever finished and a rather marvellous graphical text adventure by the master himself, Scott Adams.

 In the unlikely event anyone ever comes up with a TI/99 Mini, you’ve now got a customer here thanks to that lot! Anyway, back to flicking through the mag, I’ve just realised that the Frankie Goes to Hollywood competition from earlier is also the start of that elusive Games News section, although it’s not titled as such, possibly because once again there’s not a lot in it! Tir Na Nog is getting a sequel called Dun Darach though, and it’s said to feature “startling film-type animation” which, with the benefit of a bit of hindsight, was absolutely spot-on! There’s an odd instruction to buy Yie Ar Kung-Fu on the MSX if you own one, which was reviewed in the mag last month, so it’s hardly news. What I do need to do is edit my old deep-dive into Gryphon on the C64 because it says here its developer, Tony Crowther, had 10K to spare and dropped in a TV test card easter egg that I really should have covered in there! Over the page is Hot Gossip, which, as usual, just seems to be another page of regular news, but it’s good to know the upcoming Spectrum version of Spy Vs Spy is going to be better than the C64 one thanks to its “unique black and white graphics” because one day soon I’ll be buying it! And a bit later, I’ll also be buying an Atari ST, which Atari seems to have just announced, but despite possibly being the first mention ever of one of the two machines that will soon take the reins from the Spectrum and the C64, it only gets a tiny-text “In Brief” mention here… “The first, the ST 520, is a 32 bit processor and has comprehensive graphics routines, moveable icons – graphics characters – and an interface which allows you to connect the computer to a synthesiser and to store music and sound effects in its memory for £699.99 or £1000 including a colour monitor.” I don’t even know where to start with that so I’m just not going to, but feel free to throw in any pro-Amiga taunts at this point. I’d better keep a close eye out for that in upcoming issues too, in case it’s given a similarly lacklustre introduction here!

Right, I’m going to cheer myself up with the first of this month’s type-in games listings, Oggs Eggs, which runs on the Atari 400 with a luxurious 16K of memory, and is a really cool take on Pac-Man, and definitely worth the daunting amout of BASIC you’ll need to enter to get at it! Defuse for the Amstrad CPC is a simpler affair, a kind bomb disposal-based take on Snake. It’s probably not quite up their with the aforementioned Pac-Man, but I reckon Hunchback must come close to being the most-cloned type-in game in these things, and this time we’ve got Hunchy for the Spectrum, which might not offer much you haven’t seen before but does come with a lovely illustration on the page! Speaking of clones, a penguin in a maze of ice blocks you can push around also sounds familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it… Pengi for the Commodore 64 is the last of this month’s listings, and it’s another one that’s going to take some effort, with loads of weird control symbols being substituted by weird-looking mnemonics inside square brackets! That said, even in BASIC, this version probably ran faster than the slow-mo official C64 port from a couple of years earlier, so probably worth that effort after all, and I’d have welcomed the chance to type-in any of these regardless… Could this at last be the month my beloved VIC-20 was finally put out of its misery?

It’s Arcade Action next, and while on one hand it’s disappointing to see it relegated to a single page this month, on the other it does allow me to present the World Series Baseball advert I pronounced iconic here last month but, as is unfortunate usually the case for most of the wonderful adverts we come across in these magazines, I just didn’t have the space to include. The good thing is, they’re rarely one and done, so we can always come back to them! Anyway, there’s actually only a couple of games covered this month, hence one page, but I’m now really intrigued by both because to this day, I’ve never see either in action, and they both look pretty decent! The first is Namco’s Dragon Buster, apparently big in Japan, and a side-scrolling fantasy adventure where you have to make your way through three castles to take down the dragons holed up beneath them. The visuals wouldn’t look out of place on an (or a) NES, although some of the enemy sprites are better than that, and it sounds great and is really ambitious. Will be giving this a proper go! The second game is Acrobatic Dogfight from Technos (although it says Data East here), and this is a multidirectional shoot ‘em up that’s effectively a cuter, cartoon riff on Konami’s Time Pilot, which I have to say I think is what I’ll likely stick with, but it sounds like this was a hit with the author, so I’ll definitely give it a go!

I’m going to run through a few of this issue’s other features now, and it’s good to see a few here after not a lot else to dig into over the past couple of months! The Golden Joystick Awards have taken place, so there’s a rundown of all the winners, with pics of some very eighties devs, including everyone at Ultimate, who somehow collectively won Programmer of the Year, as well as Software House of the Year, and their Knight Lore was Game of the Year. Elite was best original game (I assume in the absence of a Best Game Ever award!), then Daley Thompson’s Decathlon got Best Arcade-Style Game, Lords of Midnight got Best Strategy Game, and Claymorgue Castle was deemed Best Adventure Game. I’ll have to look that up because it’s not ringing any bells, but that’s what you get when you skip over the Adventure section here every month because you think it’s boring! I am going to do that again this month too because I just can’t face another six pages of nothing but nerd-text, but I will quickly mention the glowing review for Gremlins on the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, because it’s fully justified and to this day a favourite Christmas game of mine!

Elsewhere, we have a big developer interview and feature on Minder, the Arthur Daley graphical adventure game where you need to buy and sell stuff to make as much cash by whatever dodgy means are necessary over the course of two weeks, and, of course, spend some time at the Winchester Club, while also keeping Detective Chisolm at bay! Then there’s a feature on upcoming nerd-interest films on the way to the cinema, mainly The Morons From Outer Space, but we’ve also got Terminator II, Red Sonja, The NeverEnding Story (which excitingly has an Ocean game on the way too), plus “Alien II” to look forward to as well, and what a time to be alive! Sticking with films, there’s also a visit to Digital Productions, the company behind the special effects in TRON and The Last Starfighter, which is a really great insight into where such things were at the time, even if nothing to do with video games! Then another world away entirely, if you thought the Adventure section was dry, how about two pages of text about chess moves? I’m not joking either, and I can’t believe this old relic is back again, but I’m also not saying any more about it so let’s finish off with some of the far more interesting adverts scattered across the mag!

I’ve also done my best to scatter a few of them across this feature but I wish I could just share the lot because it’s literally my entire life at the time represented here, with Roland Rat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Street Hawk and Airwolf! There’s another really iconic one that I think is the first time I remember seeing it here, and that’s for Firebird’s Silver Range of £2.50 budget games, with a mass of screenshots for what would eventually become so many memories too! That’s definitely going to run for years, so I’ll hopefully get to share a picture of that another time, but speaking of memories, the big Software Projects double-page with Jet Set Willy II and all sorts of other classics is probably this month’s highlight for me! Then there’s Daly Thompson’s Super-Test across the page from Everyone’s a Wally, The Dam Busters and Gribbly’s Day Out, and Sega’s double page full of Congo Bongo and Tapper, Spy Hunter and Zaxxon, and various other arcade ports accompanied by hand-drawn screenshots… Won’t be the last time we ever come across those shenanigans either but I reckon that’s us done for this month, so I do hope you’ve enjoyed have a look through this issue with me, and I also hope you’ll join me again when July 1985 comes around for more of the same!

As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense!