We’re back again for our regular monthly dive 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 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 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, and also try to expand out of the other end of my collection too, although that’s still proving a lot more difficult than the older ones for some reason! Plenty of time to keep working on that though, so without further delay, let’s jump into the August 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…

There’s loads to get through in this issue but the cover is always a good place to start, and after last month’s first appearance of the iconic advert promoting his game, this month we’ve got a really blurry photo to accompany an exclusive first review of Frank Bruno’s Boxing… Now I know why they typically went for illustrations, but anyway, there wasn’t much bigger than Frank Bruno back in the summer of 1985, whose star was back on the rise again after taking a beating from James “Bonecrusher” Smith the previous year. I’ll come back to the review but in a related competition, you could win a nice bit of Nike kit for the sport of your choice too, and actually, there’s competitions everywhere you look on this cover! You could win a Casio synthesiser courtesy of Ghettoblaster on the Commodore 64 (if the photo above of the two least hip-hop people I’ve ever seen didn’t put you off), or maybe you’d rather try your luck at winning the saddest holiday ever, at the TOPS activity centre, where you’ll have use of “either a BBC B with access to printer and disc drives or an Einstein also with disc drive” as you spend a week improving your computer skills. Just keep in mind it’s a holiday for one, not that this is likely to be much of a problem for anyone entering! I don’t remember the Japanese TV show, Henshin Robos, ever making it to UK TV, but it says here it’s going to all the same, which is why you can also win some cool robot toys from that in another competition, or perhaps you’d be happier with a copy of Activision’s Master of the Lamps, or even Firebird’s Don’t Buy This compilation, where the games included really aren’t as bad as they like to make out! Nothing bad about winning thirty Atari games though, from Beach Head to Miner 2049er, and Zaxxon to, er, Strip Poker! That’s part of a special “Atari Safari” feature this month, so we’ll also come back to that and find out more a bit later!

I still don’t get the difference between Hot Gossip and Games News, which follows a couple of pages later, so I’ll just cover the lot all together and hopefully we’re good! First up, for a game with “stunning graphics and immense playability,” I’m amazed I don’t remember Donald Duck’s Playground on the C64, which, together with Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, is launching Walt Disney’s new partnership with US Gold. I think I’ll just stick to Ocean’s new deal with Konami to sell their games in the UK instead if that’s all the same though, because first up is Hyper Sports, and that’s going to end up being one of the all-time great home conversions! Across the page, there’s a big preview of the upcoming Summer Games II from Epyx, and that C64 screenshot benefits way more from being blurry than big Frank did, know what I mean ‘Arry? Speaking of Franks, or Frankies to be precise, there’s going to be an exclusive live version of Relax with every copy of Ocean’s upcoming Frankie Goes to Hollywood game, and there I was, totally sold already! In less glamorous licenses, Mastertronic is teaming up with KP Skips to create Clumsy Colin Action Biker, based on the advertising mascot for their crisps, and it’s going to be a fine bit of early budget gaming, but I’m going to close this month’s look at the gaming news with something that simply can’t be followed… Geoff Capes is getting his own strongman game from Martech, the folks behind Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge and Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge! And I’m sure that will be, er, fine too, if we ever get to a review of that in a future issue too!

And that sounds like a good place to jump to this issue’s reviews, starting with one of the most deserving Game of the Month awards to date, for The Way of the Exploding Fist on the Commodore 64! Summer Games II from earlier looked great and all, but to a martial arts-obsessed 13-year old in the mid-eighties, this was simply the best-looking game I’d ever laid eyes on… Which admittedly was pretty much a monthly experience in those days! Hell of an early one-on-one fighter too, although early or not, I’m not sure Bruce Lee was really the game to be comparing it to! I’m going to mention one of this month’s Blitz Game award recipients next, Dun Darach on the ZX Spectrum, which was not only the mind-blowing sequel to the groundbreaking animated graphic adventure Tir Na Nog from the previous year, but thankfully also seems to have survived sharing a double-page with whatever ended up on my bedroom wall opposite! I’ll quickly cover a few other highlights before we jump back to a bunch of sports games featured all together, including our cover game, which include the excellent Spectrum conversion of Tapper, the gorgeous but very challenging Wizardore on the BBC, a very good C64 take on the Spectrum classic Jet Set Willy II, and a very average Spectrum take on the C64 classic Falcon Patrol II!

If there’s one thing that C&VG always relished, it was being able to face-off a couple of similar games against each other, but this month they got to do it with three of them! Part of a “new trend” for boxing games apparently, with two of them sporting an over-the-shoulder view, not unlike Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! arcade game from a year or so earlier, which I’m sure is no coincidence! First up is cover game and Blitz Award recipient Frank Bruno’s Boxing on the Soectrum, C64 and CPC, and I still reckon this one’s a stunner to look at, with wire-frame Frank and so much character coming out of the opposite corner, as questionable as some of it might seem today to more sensitive modern eyes! Doesn’t score as highly for graphics as the next game, Rocky, though, but it certainly beats it to the punch on gameplay, and you definitely know what you’re getting with Frank, while you ain’t getting anything to do with a well-known fictional boxer in Rocky! No CPC version either, which is also the case for more traditional side-on viewed Knockout! that’s alright but probably neither the boxing game nor the graphical showcase you’ll find in the other two. If boxing’s not your thing, there’s a bunch of other very decent sports games to get involved in this month too, with Star League Baseball on C64 my own pick of the bunch, offering what would soon be deemed an old-fashioned take on the video game version, but it’s a fully-featured one all the same and a lot of fun. Sticking with American stuff, On-Field Football is a bit more forward thinking – imagine Madden on a C64 and you’ve got it! Back on this side of the pond, Bobby Charlton Soccer (not football?) on the BBC is also a bit old-fashioned in pretty much every respect, but you do get some voiced hints and tips on how to play from the man himself on the tape! Finally, On-Court Tennis for the C64 is a not very welcoming but pretty impressive tennis game if you give it some time, and has dynamic difficulty too, assuming you get over the initial spike!

Right, time for that Atari Safari from earlier! We covered the big competition already, so we’ll continue with a few more reviews that follow it for what I assume are on whatever flavour of Atari 8-bit computers were around at this time, as any references to any consoles of any kind still seem to be forbidden here! Most of this lot seem to be ancient though – Pole Position, Blue Max, Bruce Lee, Dropzone, Moon Patrol… Hell of a bunch of games all the same, and that’s not even half of them! I’ll get to some other type-in games listings in a sec but Annapurna is also included as part of this feature, and is also for “Atari” and seems to be a very impressive strategy adventure, as you manage an expedition up said mountain. From there, we’ve got the most stuffy old double-page article you could ever wish for, covering the history of Atari’s home computers, the new XE130 128K model, and an upcoming machine called the Atari ST, which, given this tucked-away, snooze-fest of an introduction, you’d never believe was about to be at the vanguard of the 16-bit revolution soon to take place, blowing our collective minds and changing gaming forever! Speaking of snooze-fests though, the Adventure section is over the page, so let’s quickly get that out of the way! Loads of reviews of obscure text adventures, with parody Bored of the Rings probably the only highlight, and ironically the least boring thing spread across these five pages of non-stop nerd-words.

All this talk of Atari STs and I haven’t even got my hands on a ZX Spectrum at this point! Thankfully, the rest of this month’s type-in games listings include what surely must be just about one last hurrah for my VIC-20 with Daredevil by Martin Howse, which I typed in at the time, and I’ve dug it out again now, so let me treat you to an actual screenshot rather than a picture of a listing for a change, and I reckon deserves a quick overview too! There’s two screens of instructions (which you already know because you typed them in), one telling you how to play and one for controls (although I’m not sure F3 to accelerate and F1 to decelerate needed a screen of its own), and then you’re ready to jump! At the bottom of the screen there’s a single car between two ramps, and your bike’s at the top, ready for its run-up across several rows of road. On the way, you need to adjust your speed to make the jump, ideally so you land somewhere near the second ramp! Make the jump and you get another car added to the next one, and so on. Fail and you’re a hole in the ground, to quote the how to play page! It’s incredibly simple but there’s something very addictive about having one more go with the slight speed adjustment you ideally needed the last time. It’s a BASIC classic, and is accompanied by Labyrinth on the BBC, a Minotaur-based maze-game somehow involving balls of thread; on the Spectrum there was Apple Crazy, where you were a farmer catching apples in your basket; and over on the C64 there was Parachute, with you travelling down the abandoned mines of Planet X by, er, parachute. Excellent!

The Arcade Action section hasn’t been up to its usual spectacular standards of late, but while it’s been relegated to a single, black and white page this month (possibly due to all the colour ink being used up on the fantastic Hyper Sports advert opposite), we’re back to some quality at least with Capcom’s Commando! Looking back at the three crappy photos of it running on a CRT screen now though (not to mention some pretty unenthusiastic text), I’m pretty sure this page wasn’t screaming “all-time favourite run and gun game” at me at the time, but it always makes my day to return to where I’d have come across stuff like this for the very first time! I’ve said it before but apart from the boring Adventure bit, I read these magazines word for word, time and again, so I must have known but have certainly forgotten that Sega had bought the rights to Activision’s Pitfall and Pitfall II, and come up with Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns, which is a bit of both and some Indiana Jones on top… None of which makes this a particularly fun time, unfortunately – too cute, too frustrating, stick with the classic home versions! Last game here is Indoor Soccer, which is three-on-three, looks dreadful (regardless of an even more crappy photo of a CRT screen) but sounds like it will give you hours of play for your 10p because it’s so ridiculously easy! As is usually the case in most situations though, play Commando instead is good advice…

We came across Firebird’s Don’t Buy This budget compilation earlier, and next up we’ve got a feature on games you couldn’t buy even if you wanted to! It’s strange to read this today, when every game ever released anywhere on any of the systems we’re talking about is available to play in mere seconds, but that wasn’t always the case, and here we’ve got a mass of arcade ports (such as Popeye and Star Wars on the C64), superior versions of arcade ports (such as Moon Patrol and Crystal Castles), and home computer originals (such as Lucasfilm’s Behind Jaggi Lines – later known as Rescue on Fractalus – on Atari 8-bit) that we just never got in the UK. It doesn’t really get into why, unfortunately – I think a lot of them just hadn’t been part of local publishing deals yet, but turned up sooner or later all the same anyway. That reminds me, I’m hoping for a return of the software charts in here sometime soon too! Other features that do appear this month include an interview with eighties icon and world’s first computer-generated TV personality, Max Headroom, which is as insightful as you’d expect it to be but you’ve got to love him! There’s also a rundown of computer graphics packages for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC if light-pens and the like are your thing, and we’ve got maps of the beautiful-looking C64 adventure Entombed, and brutal ZX Spectrum platformer Technician Ted, then I think that’s about it for this month, so let’s finish off with a look at a few of the adverts that didn’t make it onto my bedroom wall this issue!

I guess it’s the time of year but there’s not a huge amount we’ve not seen previously this month, as cool as it is to see the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Jump Jet, and Herbert’s Dummy Run again, so I’ll take the opportunity to head back to another one I first mentioned in our June 1985 feature, for what was Firebird’s brand new Silver Range of £2.50 budget titles, which I promised I’d return to when I had the chance because I knew it was going to be appearing for years to come! Some really iconic games in this mass of screenshots too, with my old VIC-20 platforming favourite Mickey the Bricky still jumping out at me today, just like it did back then, and likewise the legendary Booty, The Wild Bunch, Short’s Fuse and fantastic strategy game Viking Raiders (which I last played in a Weekly Spotlight here not so long back as I write). Such an effective advert, albeit one that would have been more effective on me this month had there been more than one game I could actually buy on it! And speaking of adverts that would keep on appearing, Silica Shop is doing a proper job of selling that fancy new Atari ST, even if the £749 price tag is going to take some dropping before the very same advert eventually sucks me in several years down the line! Elsewhere, Ian Botham’s Test Match and Jack Charlton’s Match Fishing are vying for most boring advert for the most boring game ever award, although I would become quite fond of the latter a few years down the line! And on that bombshell, I think we’ll call it a day for this month, so I hope you’ve enjoyed flicking through this old magazine with me, and look out for the next one when September 1985 rolls around!

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