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 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, as well as trying to expand out of the other end of my collection too, although that’s still proving a lot more difficult than getting hold of the older ones for some reason! Plenty of time to keep working on it though, so without any further delay, let’s jump into the October 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…

Also as usual, we’ll take a look at the cover first though, and this month it’s dominated by a fancy fantasy illustration promoting a chance to win an entire Lord of the Rings treasure trove! I’ll come back to that in a sec, but until now, I’d never paid much attention to this image, which on closer inspection features what looks like a faceless Samurai on the back on an armoured dragon whose head is out of proportion with its body, and actually has nothing to do with Tolkein’s epic at all! It does have something to do with Melbourne House’s follow-up to their classic graphical text adventure The Hobbit though, which you can win a copy of as soon as it releases, together with a copy of the book(s), if you can draw the best Hobbit! Which excluded me from entering, as evidenced by the intact entry form, although what ended up being Lord of the Rings: Game One probably wasn’t worth the effort even if you could draw for toffee! Other competitions this month include the pioneering online adventure M.U.D. (but you’ll need a modem!), and a chance to win an, er, M.U.D. pack, or if your lifestyle isn’t quite that sci-fi yet, there’s also a chance to win a copy of Summer Games II and other Epyx goodies, and I know which I’d rather have!

Right, news, or “News” as it’s now known – that’s right, the weird Hot Gossip column introduced a while back is gone and we’ve just got more regular news instead, which is all that was anyway! Glad someone else finally noticed though… That said, when second best James Bond movie ever A View to a Kill’s tie-in coming to Amstrad computers is one of your top stories, I’m not sure we’re in for anything too groundbreaking this month! The arrival of Zorro and The Goonies on everything is good news though, even if that is tempered when you realise the next story isn’t about an incoming conversion of Commando after all, but a rip-off of the arcade game called Who Dares Wins. Oh well, maybe one day we’ll get a port of the real thing! In the meantime, Commodore 64 owners could also look out for a new game called Paradroid by Hewson Consultants, apparently the “successor of Gribbly’s Day Out” rather than one of the machine’s all-time greats as it would later become known! But if Gribbly 2 isn’t your thing, how about more Jeff Minter with Batalyx, one of his most bonkers offerings yet! Aarrrggghhh! Just realised that particular piece of news is under a Hot Gossip banner so it hasn’t gone at all but is now making an equally bizarre reappearance! Nothing bizarre about Macadam Bumper, a new pinball game coming to the Spectrum and CPC though, or Ocean picking up the Rambo license, or a Geoff Capes game on the way, which I’m sure we reported on before, or maybe it was Brian Jacks, but whatever, that’s all the news for this month.

Reviews next, starting with one of the many standout memories I have of reading C&VG over the years, which this time involves a very colourful double-page featuring not only the game of my favourite band at the time, but Game of the Month too, awarded to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, plus another game that would go on to be a real favourite a couple of years later, Spy vs Spy – The Island Caper, and Tour de France, and Beer Belly Bert’s Brew Wiz, which really deserved more recognition than it ever got, despite the decidedly average scores here! Nothing average about FGTH though, which had you plodding around a typical working-class housing estate completing tasks and mini-games to become a “real person.” Totally mad but a real pioneer too, as well as a real looker! Spy vs Spy scored almost as highly, and to this day – together with its predecessor and sequel – is one of the great couch multiplayer experiences, as you try to out-slapstick the opposing spy! I reckon Tour de France is one of the best interpretations of the bike race to this day as well. There’s way too much other stuff reviewed in this issue to get into everything, so I’m going to attempt to pick a few highlights, as tempting as it is to go all-out! I do want to give a special mention to a bunch of stuff away from the usual C64, Spectrum and CPC suspects though, which has become unusual in these heady times…

We’ve got Aabatron, April Showers and (fittingly perhaps) One Last Game on the BBC; and Hijack and Bio-Defence on Atari 8-bit; and even Robin Hood on Dragon 32, would you believe! Unfortunately, all mostly very average at best, but beggars can’t be choosers at this point, although if you’re one of the handful that had a QL, there’s a very high-scoring take on Pole Position on there, so make the most of that too! A couple of classic simulations on the Spectrum next, and unusual ones in their own way at that, with Dambusters having you reenact the mind-blowing World War II bomber attack of the same name, while Southern Belle takes you on a more sedate journey from London to Brighton in a steam train, and of everything here this month, this is my own personal highlight! Only one Blitz Game award this issue, awarded to Profanation on the Spectrum, a really cool Indiana Jones-ish puzzle platformer, but Codename Mat II across the page actually scores higher, with perfect scores for value and playability, and is as good a take on Star Raiders that ever existed outside of an Atari machine! I’ll finish with a quick mention of Kennedy Approach on C64, an air traffic control sim that I’ve always liked the look of but to this day haven’t played – look out for that getting fixed in an upcoming Weekly Spotlight feature very shortly. Says it’s got speech here too so can’t wait to hear that!

At this point I’ve got a confession to make… We’re supposed to look at a Games Book next, and a bunch of type-in listings, but over the course of the past forty years it’s disappeared unfortunately, so I’ll just let you know it would have contained a betting game called Day at the Races for Atari 8-bit, then Moon Buggy and Manic Pacman on the Spectrum, and Asteroid Lander on CPC, and you can probably guess what all three of those involve. Love how blatant they are with these things now though! Anyway, shame I lost that and not the Adventure section instead, which, as usual, is pages and pages of nothing but nerd words, but what’s this? Looks like a saucy seventies seaside postcard – it’s a review of Terrormolinos, which is actually a really decent game, even if it’s no Super Gran, also reviewed across the page! The very welcome return of double-page, full-colour Arcade Action next, dominated by the kind of black magic I loved this feature for every month with Konami’s horizontally-scrolling shoot ‘em up classic, Nemesis! I love seeing first appearances of stuff like this again almost as much nowadays too! We’ve also got twitchy racer Top Gear, Sega’s cartoon beat ‘em up My Hero (or possibly Love Passion according to the text) and Jaleco’s excellent colour the platforms driving-platformer City Connection. What a time to be alive!

The charts are next, and no change from the new format introduced last issue, where we’ve got an all-formats top thirty followed by individual charts for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Deservedly topping the all-formats chart this month is Hyper Sports, Imagine’s conversion of the Konami arcade game on the C64 and Spectrum. Joystick destruction aside, I loved this on the Spectrum, and although I’ve not got to my own Spectrum countdown yet, it did alright for itself when I looked at my Top Ten Favourite Commodore 64 Arcade Conversions too! Not much change around the rest of the top of the chart, with Way of the Exploding Fist, Frank Bruno’s Boxing and Soft Aid still riding high, and crisp-related Clumsy Colin’s Action Biker on C64 just behind and also the highest of a few budget games now making an impact on the charts – Finders Keepers, BMX Racers, Kikstart and Vegas Jackpot all there too. In the platform charts, Way of the Exploding Fist is at number one on C64 and CPC, while Frank Bruno’s Boxing is the best-seller on the Spectrum this month, but once again, the word “Mastertronic” is really jumping out at me, and I’m sure not for the last time!

A quick look at some of this month’s other features now, starting with a fascinating piece about a new comic called Shatter, a Blade Runner kind of thing all created on a computer, which, believe it or not, seems to be a first! “All the drawing – even the really detailed stuff – is done using a Mouse – a sort of track-ball with a button.” It was all done on a Mac, and whether or not it really was a first, it seems to be quite the pioneer all the same! There’s also an interview with the bloke behind the Lord of the Rings game on the cover, so I won’t get too much into that again, but I was interested to hear about his problems interpreting The Fellowship of the Ring for a game because “not a lot happens” in there, which I guess is true in that context! Not much else going on aside from regular features like The Bug Hunters comic strip, which if I remember right was pretty long-running and is a meaty three pages of proper 2000AD-style sci-fi stuff, and there’s all the usual cheats and tips and advice, which I usually skip over, but some pokes for Airwolf on the C64 did grab my attention this time, especially the fly through walls one (POKE 5026,252 if you’re interested) which I reckon will increase enjoyment of one of the most brutally difficult games ever created no end!

We’ll finish off as always with adverts, and although the magazine opens with a spectacular double-page Summer Games II spread from Epyx, there’s only one advert I want to talk about this month, and that’s for Scooby Doo in the Castle Mystery! You can see the Summer Games one in the deep-dive I did on it here though, and I did separately get into this Scooby Doo thing in more detail as well because it certainly was a mystery, and possibly my greatest ever gaming disappointment (although ZX Spectrum Kung-Fu Master comes close)! You can read about it here, together with the game we finally got, but long story short, “the first ever computer cartoon” never arrived because they ran out of memory. Not surprising when you look at those gorgeous ZX Spectrum screenshots of what could have been though! Anyway, as said, look at my separate feature on that… Or keep your eyes peeled for what might be another attempt at the original, if my sources at the time of writing are correct! Elsewhere, there’s a lovely ad for Zoids, which you can see back up the page here, and there’s the upcoming cinematic sci-fi adventure Marsport, which I’m sure we’ll get to soon in a future issue, and Daley Thompson enjoying his Super-Test on the back cover, but actually not much else of note we haven’t see a dozen times before, so I think we can call it a day for this issue. I do hope you’ve enjoyed flicking through it with me as much as I have though, and I’ll see you for more of the same again when November 1985 gets here!

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