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 always quite the time capsule for anyone with any interest in video games! And as always, a quick recap of where it’s coming from – I started collecting C&VG in earnest a few months into 1985, and carried 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 that though, so without further delay, let’s jump into the July 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 first order of business is maybe the state that this issue is now in though – of my entire collection, this is probably the most “loved” so let me quickly tell you why. In June 1985, when this was actually published, I went on a French exchange with school, where I stayed with a family there – close to Paris – for a week, then their lad came to stay with us. Unfortunately, he turned out to be utterly obnoxious, to put it kindly… He lived in an apartment with his mum and younger sister. Apart from either attending his miserable school or a couple of trips (and that’s me pictured above on one of them) that had been organised for the whole group, that’s where I spent my entire time, either sat in front of the TV with them, watching the equally miserable Roots, or Starsky & Hutch dubbed in French, or sat on the makeshift bed that had been set up for me in the same room, reading this copy of C&VG, over and over and over again. This guy had no interest in me being there at all, or, come to think of it, had any other interests whatsoever, besides listening to his Opus Live is Life record on repeat! At one point I remember him pulling a kitchen knife on his mum though, then on the reciprocal visit to England, he got lost on a school trip to Whipsnade Zoo and was dropped back at our house at about eleven that night! He never attempted to speak a word of English while he was with us, and never showed any gratitude to my parents for having him, and in return I didn’t even bother getting up to say goodbye the morning he left, and that’s the last I heard of him. Very good riddance! I was so glad he was gone, glad this hellish two weeks was over, and will forever be grateful to this very magazine for somehow getting me through the first of them!

I have far happier memories of what’s on the cover this month though, where we find Roger Moore and Grace Jones in all their illustrated glory promoting a competition tied to Domark’s new A View to a Kill game, where you could win an, er, Enterprise 128 computer, Bond t-shirts, copies of the game and Duran Duran’s best-Bond-theme-ever single! Second-best Bond movie in my opinion too, behind Live and Let Die, and one I unusually saw twice at the cinema, the second time involving being stood up by a girl from school on what would have been my first date… With several decades of hindsight that turned out to be a lucky escape though! Anyway, for the second month in a row, there’s a stack of other competitions to enter too, and I can’t believe I didn’t enter the next one, where you could win an Airwolf digital watch! Maybe it was the prospect of winning the game itself as a runner-up prize… We’ll come back to the game when we get to reviews, but there’s also a load of Rocky Horror goodies to win, and while I can’t stand the thing to this day, the screenshot that came with the review of that game always looked good! Then you can also win copies of enigmatic fairy adventure Elidon, and Beyond’s iconic icon-driven adventure Shadowfire, and Tomy’s more iconic again Omnibot home entertainment robot, but even that pales into insignificance with this last competition, which will give one lucky reader the chance to win tea with Super Gran – none more iconic!!!

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more about that one because the page is missing, possibly because I entered it, but more likely because it was attached to the equally missing 36-page book of games listings for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Amstrad CPC, BBC and VIC-20 that’s also splashed across the cover, so no type-ins to tell you about this month either. Sorry! The very last refuge for us poor old VIC owners too… Games News is back again this month though, as well as the Hot Gossip section which, as far I can still tell, is still just even more games news, but regardless, there’s some eye-watering new stuff being announced here, and with so little fanfare because, at the time of course, none of us knew any better… Things like the tiny little box announcing a new martial arts game for the C64 called Way of the Exploding Fist; the Wally saga is set to continue with Herbert’s Dummy run; Games Workshop is about to unleash Chaos, the spell-casting game for up to eight players that was such a blast; and Jump Jet is a new flight sim created by a real-life Harrier pilot (apparently) and it’s even coming to VIC-20! And it’s all so unassuming, which makes first glimpses of these all-time favourites all the more special now!

There’s more of these to come in Hot Gossip too, and a first look at the incredible-looking Frank Bruno’s Boxing, with the Spectrum version promising the “largest animated characters ever seen on this machine” and what turned out to be a pretty special take on Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! arcade game from 1984 wherever you played. I think we’ll come across a cool advert for that later too, so let’s jump to the full-on preview for Mercenary on C64 and Atari home computers across the page! This was a pioneering 3D flight sim with these unbelievable wireframe graphics, and while it might sound bizarre from a modern viewpoint, the fact that the giant radar dish rotated full-circle in three dimensions as you flew around it was absolutely mind-blowing back then! Elsewhere, the aforementioned Beyond Software have got the Superman license, so we can look forward to whatever that brings in the coming years, and there’s a disproportionately large amount of space devoted to the C64’s new side-on tennis game, the very imaginatively-named Tennis, with way more hype than this stinker deserves considering the guy who wrote it claims to have actually played it and not just read a press release!

Right, as we once again head past that picture of Grace Jones and her very high-waisted, crack-hugging fighting leotard from earlier, we get to reviews next, with no Game of the Month but a Blitz Game award going to the Amstrad version of Ultimate’s ultimate isometric 3D action-adventure, Knight Lore! That said, it doesn’t score anywhere near as big as the BBC version reviewed directly beneath it, which sounds like it was reviewed by a first-time player, while this one was done by someone who actively disliked the Spectrum version, but apparently the addition of one extra colour on-screen in this one makes all the difference! Across the page are two games that are just so C64, starting with Gribbly’s Day Out (which may also feature the last word in C64 loading screens!), and is by a fellow you might have heard of called Andrew Braybrook, known for such future masterpieces as Uridium and Paradroid, but this was his very first original game for Hewson Consultants! Great-looking game, bonkers premise, and a classic on the system, just like BC II Grog’s Revenge, the return of the Stone Age unicyclist (who’s obviously successfully completed his Quest for Tires), offering more jumping, dodging and collecting clams up the mountains and through the caves! 

As has often been the case here of late, there are way too many games being reviewed for me to cover everything, although a lot of them are just more of the Amstrad CPC playing catchup, with stuff like Ghostbusters and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon once again making strong showings. A few odds and ends on the other systems still hanging on in there too, with an old VIC-20 favourite of mine, The Wizard and the Princess, getting exactly the average scores you’d expect a port from there to the Commodore 16, while the VIC itself has at least one more game it in with Cave Fighter, a potholing platforming type-thing, and the BBC has the painstakingly realistic Formula 3 racing simulator Revs to keep the weirdos still hanging on in there with that more than happy! Back on the C64, Ghettoblaster was tapping into the ongoing breakdance phenomenon in a really cool music-based adventure with so much character, but if it’s character you want, Rat-fans, then you want Roland’s Rat Race, a mazey, platformy collect ‘em up that I still enjoy a game of to this day, just like Bounty Bob Strikes Back, a single-screen platforming masterclass and follow-up to another all-time favourite of mine on other systems, Miner 2049er. Rounding out the C64 though, I’ll quickly mention Super Huey, also on Atari 8-bit, which I reckon was a far more important helicopter sim than it’s being given credit for here, despite some big scores.

It’s a bit of a quieter month on the Spectrum, where the stunning 3D shooter, Glass, is probably the highlight, although as has also been the case with it ever since, it’s overlooked and overshadowed here by multi-format releases such as The Rocky Horror Show from earlier, which is another Blitz Game with you searching Frank N. Furter’s mansion for bits of some machine that sounds like it will be familiar to anyone with any interest in it. There’s also a third Blitz Game with fast-paced sliding-puzzler Confuzion, which is out everywhere, and like Glass, is a real looker, and a real hidden gem in retrospect too! I reckon both of those deserve a bit of a spotlight, so I’ll try and cover them in an upcoming Weekly Spotlight, and if future me also remembers, I’ll come back and drop a link here when I do! By no means a hidden gem but well hidden away in a little box at the back of this month’s reviews section all the same is U.S. Gold’s superb port of Bally Midway’s 1983 arcade machine Spy Hunter. One of the C64’s finest conversions, and not bad at all on the Spectrum and Atari 8-bit either, and if I was buying one game this month (assuming I didn’t own a VIC-20 and had a choice!) then this would be the one. And before long, it was, but that’s another story!

That’s the best of the main reviews now covered but we’re not quite done with them yet because further on into the mag, there’s a double-page bunch of mini-reviews (albeit mostly bigger than the one we just had for Spy Hunter) for something we’ve seen emerging over past few issues – the budget game! Honestly, the selection here isn’t quite the inundation we’d soon be experiencing, with the MSX version of previously reviewed elsewhere puzzle-adventure Finders Keepers rightfully leading the pack, closely followed by fantasy-adventure Taskmaster on the C64, while both Chopper and Sky Jet are decent side-scrolling shooting options on there too. It’s nice to see the VIC-20 and C16 getting even more love, even if we are just talking the very average Fourth Encounter and less than average BMX Racers respectively, then there’s a load more average to be found on the Spectrum with Short’s Fuse and Don’t Panic probably the best of them. However, don’t discount Don’t Buy This, a compilation of the self-proclaimed worst games ever that doesn’t even get a rating, but I did buy this when I got my Spectrum and I can tell you they’re not as bad as they make out!

On that bombshell, let’s check out Arcade Action, but hang on a minute, where’s my regular sunshine-bright yellow pages heralding all the upcoming miracles of video gaming that we’d never even dreamed of before??? It’s a single page this time, admittedly with a fantastic Frankie Goes to Hollywood advert across the page that before long would be transported to my bedroom wall when it appeared in what was obviously a later issue, and apart from two-thirds of a page of tips on the wonderful Kung-Fu Master and equally wonderful Hyper Sports, there’s only more of a run-down than a review of Magmax, a pretty obscure horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up from Nichibutsu. Disappointing, as is the discovery that the lavish Top 30 chart countdown sponsored by The Daily Mirror newsletter we’d got used to by now obviously isn’t being sponsored by them anymore because it’s also one page, it’s black and white, and it’s a very bland table of fifty games, seemingly now all machines combined, but we’ve also got Spectrum, Amstrad and C64 top tens underneath it. Still, better than nothing at all like last month, and this time we’ve got a QuickShot joystick advert to cheer ourselves up with across the page, and we’re going to have a look at some of the movers and shakers all the same!

Unless I’m mistaken, for the first time ever there’s a compilation topping the chart, and it’s Soft Aid, which is also topping the C64 and Spectrum charts. Which all adds up! Anyway, Soft Aid offered incredible value for money for a good cause, and that’s before you factor in Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? on the other side of the tape, which was ideal preparation for Live Aid in a few weeks too! I won’t go through all the games as there were ten mostly different ones on each version, including stuff like Spellbound, Gilligan’s Gold, Horace Goes Skiing and Falcon Patrol. And like the single that kicked it all off, I’ve a feeling this won’t be the only time we’ll be seeing this at number one in the charts either! Spy Hunter is getting the limelight the review from earlier should also have given it at number two, although that just seems to be from Spectrum sales so far if the C64 chart below is to be believed. We saw what I always thought was a very striking advert last month for World Series Baseball at number three, then the current obsession with combat-helicopters continues with Combat Lynx at four, then Brian Jacks’ Superstar Challenge rounding out the top five. A few re-entries this month, with stuff like Knight Lore and Steve Davis Snooker possibly back again after new ports getting released, but not so many new entries – TV tie-in Minder on the Spectrum and CPC, and Entombed on the C64 seems to be it, and even in the individual system charts, BCII that we also saw reviewed earlier is about the only other one.

I know I’m going long despite it being another relatively slimline issue at just over a hundred pages, so we’ll just have a quick look at a few of the other features in this month’s mag before bringing it home… The semi-regular Letter From America starts with a couple more of those “home-entertainment” robots from earlier, including ANDY from Nolan Bushnell of Pong fame’s new company, AXIOM, which retails at a pretty reasonable $119 considering how aware and programmable it is, while Androbot’s more educational one, FRED, is going to set you back $499 for something far more boring, although you can control it wirelessly from a C64! Elsewhere, we find out that LucasFilms’ Ballblazer and Rescue and Fractalus are finally on the way from Epyx, following a load of problems with piracy then the apparent demise of development partners Atari the previous year, and while it might be a spoiler for a future Retro Rewind feature, they were worth the wait! Speaking of spoilers, here’s a proper one I also addressed when I did a deep-dive on Bruce Lee, whereby we’ve not only got a walkthrough in this issue but pictures of pretty much every screen, including the final boss, and a description of exactly what happens when you beat him!

Back when we were looking at the March 1985 issue, I mentioned a Gift of the Gods competition where you could win some very cool artwork and other stuff related to the very cool Ancient Greek ‘em up, and all you had to do was map out the entire game. That winner’s map is now here in all its glory, and it’s a really nice one too, as is the crazy detailed one for Wizard’s Lair from another reader over the page. I don’t think I could even get off the first few screens of either! I was (and still am) a huge fan of Max Headroom, the first computer-generated superstar who’s been an icon of eighties TV culture ever since, and next up is a feature that tells you how to create your own talking head with your computer, an off-the-shelf art program and a video camera! The trouble is, rather than the in-depth set of actual instructions that would have been more useful, what you have is what I just said but in more words, and I do wonder how far anyone actually got from this alone! For even more words, the Adventure section has its usual fill of them, spread over six pages that I only mention because we’re also starting to see far more sophisticated graphical text adventures appearing in there now, like the disc-only Mindshadow on C64 and those exotic Apple things, or The Fourth Protocol based on the Frederick Forsyth book of the same name. Something to keep an eye on, especially if it means they have less room for even more boring words in future!

Right, that’s us done, so let’s finish off with a look at the rest of the adverts that didn’t make it to my bedroom wall yet! I mentioned the Frank Bruno one already, and it’s suitably big and bold and spread over two pages in full-colour, and does such a great sales job for the game! Bruno was massive at the time, so he obviously takes centre stage in what seems like a very realistic bit of air-brush art, but that graphical list of opponents plus the small but perfectly-formed Spectrum screenshot at the bottom are something else again! Jump Jet from earlier also has me totally sold on getting that for an upcoming birthday, which I did and it turned out to be one of a couple of VIC-20 games I simply couldn’t part with when I had to sell the machine! I think this is the first but certainly not the last Spy vs Spy advert we’ll come across, so maybe we’ll get into that another time, but it’s certainly not the first time Sega are wheeling out their ancient double-page arcade ports advert, seemingly because they’re all coming “SOON” to the Amstrad CPC. Can’t wait! We’ll definitely get into Street Hawk in a near-future issue too, even if it’s still looking way more cool than the reality of the game itself, then there’s Herbert’s Dummy Run and the very atmospheric (or decidedly gloomy!) Dun Darach making an appearance too, and Frankie and Willy and Daley, and this magazine really is starting to fall to bits now so we’ll call it a day there for this month! I hope you’ve enjoyed our little flick-through together though, and I also hope you’ll join me for the same again as soon as August 1985 arrives!

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