Here we are 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 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 the older ones for some reason! Plenty of time to keep working on that though, so without any further delay, let’s jump into the December 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 start with a look at the cover, but first I should also highlight that these magazines were always published the month before the date on the cover, which doesn’t make a lot of difference except when things become visibly out of sync, such as when you’re expecting some Christmas stuff… Or, as we’ll find out next time, are totally sick of it! Anyway, no big deal, so let’s talk Commando, represented here by a take on the iconic World War II image of U.S. Marines and Navy raising the American flag over the island of Iwo Jima. Not sure about how fitting that is in retrospect but is probably no worse than a hand-drawn screenshot on an advert, as we’ll see later! For now, this is promoting a chance to win a genuine Commando arcade machine, which I’ve got to be honest, nowadays I’d sell a kidney to get hold of (for all that’s currently worth) but at the time I was still a few weeks away from being absolutely blown away when I played the Commodore 64 version for the very first time, so I’m not entirely surprised the entry form is still intact here! I’ll be interested to see the results over the next couple of months though – to have a chance of winning, you had to correctly guess how high it would climb in the charts. Other competitions this month include a chance to win an actual pinball table thanks to the folks behind the decent (and surprisingly saucy) video game version, Macadam Bumper, or a copy of Firebird’s new Thunderbirds game, or even better, free tickets to see The Goonies and a copy of that game! And I really can’t believe I seemingly didn’t enter a single one… Absolutely decimated this issue for stuff to stick on my bedroom wall though!

The News section is intact at least, and I’ve got to say, this is as good-looking as this feature has ever been, not least thanks to almost a two full-page hands-on with the game that’s been renamed Little Computer People since we briefly encountered it for the first time here last month! It’s by David Crane, the Pitfall and Ghostbusters guy over at Activision, and while maybe not as successful or well-remembered as either of those, it was certainly more influential, with you looking after a little guy living in his beautifully fitted-out and kitted-out house inside your computer. I’ll take this over any version of The Sims to this day all the same, and I’ll never forget the hours and hours I sank into it – genuinely one of the most fiendishly addictive games I ever played! Elsewhere, we’ve also come across another pioneering game, M.U.D. (Multi-User Dungeon), over the past couple of issues, but unfortunately British Telecom have hit problems getting it running over the phone lines via one of those science fiction modem things, so you’re going to have to wait, although from what I remember, it got very fragmented before most super-nerds could get at it very easily. Relatively. If you had a C64 with your modem! Another cool thing announced here that should be a bit more imminent is Electric Dreams’ Deus Ex Machina, which came with a proper audio soundtrack on a cassette that you play in sync with the game itself! The revolutionary didn’t stop there this month either because Surf Champ for the Spectrum, which we have seen advertised in these pages recently, is going to ship with a unique surfboard controller that sits on your rubber keyboard, apparently making it the “ultimate sports simulation” so we’ll look forward to a review of that soon! Speaking of ultimate, or Ultimate to be precise, their classics like Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore (referred to here as both “Knight Love” and “Knightslore”) will be arriving on Amstrad CPC and MSX in time for Christmas, so not all is lost if you open up one of them on Christmas morning instead of the Spectrum or C64 you really wanted!

Time for some reviews now, starting with Game of the Month, Tau Ceti. I’ve never got my head around this one for the Spectrum but it’s nines and tens across the board here, as you enter what looks like a very nice (but plague-ridden) 3D alien city in your very complicated spaceship to shut down a nuclear reactor in the middle of a load of rogue robots or something! I’m sure it’s a classic but it still doesn’t appeal, I’m afraid! I do like the look of Wizardry on the C64 though – Blitz Game award, another classic in the making, and it looks how I imagine the isometric stuff from the aforementioned Ultimate would have turned out had it appeared on here first, instead of on the Spectrum. 3D Grand Prix on the Amstrad CPC is exactly that, with a glorious cockpit view that seems to play well too, but I mention it here specifically because it’s the first time I remember seeing a zero for sound, and what an insult after the hundreds of Spectrum reviews we’ve had to this point! Unfortunately, the review for Fairlight on there has fallen foul to the Rock ‘n Wrestle advert over the page relocating to my bedroom wall, but I can see from what’s left of the scores that they didn’t seem as impressed as they should have been by this very forward-thinking isometric medieval adventure.

There are way to many games reviewed in this issue to go through them all individually, so I’ll just pick out a few highlights as we go, including the Spectrum version of Impossible Mission, which might have lost the speech and some of the visual impact of the C64 original, but I can tell you from a lot of experience that the ten for playability score here is fully deserved, as is the Blitz Game award, and while it’s not very often the version I’m still playing nowadays, it’s a masterpiece of gaming. Across the page, Gyroscope, also on the Spectrum, isn’t quite that but is also a Blitz Game, and again, I can confirm it’s an impressive and challenging literal spin on the Marble Madness isometric downhill formula. On the C64, Tony Crowther’s William Wobbler scores well but comes across as a bit too weird for its own good, but sci-fi strategy-adventure Hacker gets that balance just right, despite coming with absolutely no instructions or any general direction whatsoever! These reviews go on and on this month, and next we have my old favourite Rupert Bear, back again with Rupert and the Ice Palace on the C64, which I’m also looking forward to seeing reviewed on the Spectrum at some point, because back in the September issue, I mentioned how you should probably hold out for this game when its predecessor, Rupert and the Toymaker’s Party, got all sorts of positive coverage, but this version is sounding pretty average…

In part, that seems to be down to its frustrating challenge, but I thought it was a really nice platformer with great controls on the Spectrum at the time though! We’ll see, but I do agree that the Spectrum version of the first game, which is reviewed on the same page here, is a colour-clash nightmare! No such problems with Shadow of the Unicorn from Mikrogen, the Everyone’s a Wally (the greatest colour-clash nightmare!) and Pyjamarama people, which I always thought looked beautiful in the screenshot above, but never got to play because it needed their 60K memory expansion, which does at least solve the mystery of what that was all about when we came across it in the news section here last issue! Right, I need to get through a couple more C64 games then I think we can move on… Fight Night is a full-on cartoon of a boxing game, back to that old-fashioned side-on stance after Frank Bruno and various others we’ve seen recently, but you get to build your own boxer and train them here too! Scarabaeus is a very atmospheric 3D Egyptian maze thing with amazing depth that takes a while to get your head around but I can tell you is worth the investment and definitely worth the big score it gets here! And gorgeous, gorgeous Super Zaxxon finishes us off, which I agree with the reviewer doesn’t play quite as well as the port of the original, but it’s impressive, whether on the C64 or Atari 8-bit, also covered here. Blimey, I almost missed Elite on the Spectrum nestled alongside it… Nines and tens but should be all tens, and another masterpiece of a conversion on there!

Phew, finally time for The Software Charts, but as said earlier, I skipped past loads of games there, not helping their own cause by being largely forgotten nowadays anyway! Back with the charts, I was about to confirm the now-regular format of a multi-platform top thirty then top tens for the Spectrum, CPC and C64, but I just noticed the latter has been replaced by Atari 8-bit this month! Wonder how many of those games broke into the overall top thirty… The answer is none, but Rescue on Fractalus getting even just a bit of a spotlight makes its inclusion more than worthwhile! Honestly, there’s not a lot else of interest going on over there, so I assume we’ll get a regular C64 countdown next month. Actually, I also just noticed this is being compiled by Gallop, which might explain the slight change, as well as the “weeks in chart” column being completely blank for some reason, not helping my own now-regular format of highlighting the movers and shakers! Pretty sure Way of the Exploding Fist had the top spot last month too though, interestingly followed by Daley Thompson’s Supertest, which is a Spectrum exclusive so far and also top of that top ten, just to give an indication where the sales currently are. Summer Games II at number five is the C64’s top exclusive, while Finders Keepers at eight is our top budget game this month. On the CPC, Exploding Fist is on top there too, although that version isn’t listed in the multi-format chart but I assume the tens of copies that represents is included! Sorry, impossible to resist! I’m guessing a bit now but I think Fairlight, Blackwyche, Bored of the Rings, Wizardry and, er, Graham Gooch’s Test Cricket are potentially the main new entries this month, although apart from Fairlight, none are really bothering the top half of the list. And that’s about it. Not a massively dynamic month but will be interesting to see how some of the games reviewed this month are shaping up for Christmas next time.

I have another bedroom wall-related confession to make… The first page of this month’s full-colour, fully-screenshotted Arcade Action feature this month was on the other side of a Bruce Lee advert. Sorry! From what’s left of the screenshot at the bottom of that page though, I think the first game covered here is Gauntlet, which makes it even worse! I imagine they’re just telling you it’s one of the greatest games of all-time though! Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is far easier to get the gist of, and luckily the picture of its awesome isometric minecart chase stage is completely intact! I loved this on the Spectrum so I appreciate what’s left of their comments summing it up too – once you know what you’re doing there’s not much to play through its handful of stages over and over for. The classics then keep on coming, this time from Sega rather than Atari, and this time it’s Hang-On! We’re talking the ride-on version too, and I can almost hear their excitement as they describe wrenching it around corners beneath you. Not so sure about the “superb graphics of a Pole Position style race” though – I mean, I love Pole Position and all, but are they really comparing Hang-On’s graphics to that? Still can’t believe I’ve lost Gauntlet either but at least you get the additional bonus of a bit of the Winter Sports advert behind it instead! While I’m confessing, the contents page is also informing me I’ve lost the book of type-in games that came with the mag, which isn’t the first time but I did actually type these things in every month so never surprising! Anyway, for completeness, it included Mad Muncher on the BBC, Necromancer’s Realm on the Commodore 64,  Drop Drop on the Spectrum, and Truckie on the VIC-20; I can tell you about Truckie too because not only did I type it in but I also just dug it up! It’s a top-down racer where you’re in a truck trying to get as far as possible without crashing. It’s as basic as it is BASIC, plodding along and flickering like mad, but I’m sure I was over the moon when I got this running – everything you want from one of these, and a nice little lorry sprite too!  

Other features this month include a lovely zone-by-zone guide and full-colour map of the mostly monochrome Highway Encounter. And we’ve got some film reviews, which I don’t normally condone in here, but this list of new releases “coming your way in the next few weeks” is wild – we’ve got Legend, The Goonies, Cocoon, Mad Max 3, Lifeforce (phwoar!), Jewel of the Nile, Red Sonja, The Black Cauldron and The Last Starfighter! There’s also a multi-page feature on what Kim Wilde, Nik Kershaw and members of Heaven 17 do on their home computers, which mostly seems like all the things you told your parents you’d be doing with them aside from playing games, although the manager of Scritti Politi does like a game of “Night Lore,” even if you’ll apparently be fed up with it after a couple of weeks… There’s also a very dry feature on other games you can play over a “telecommunication network” while you’re waiting for M.U.D. from earlier, and speaking of dry, I’ve got yet another confession about missing content to make – there was supposed to be a whole pull-out Adventure section book in this issue, but it looks like I pulled it out and chucked it in the bin, so I for once I can’t tell you I’m simply skipping that because it’s too boring! There really is almost as much filler as there are adverts this month, which I’ll get onto in a sec, but first, it turns out we’re not quite done with reviews, although considering there are two of my favourite games of all time here, in the form of Winter Games on the C64 and the Spectrum version of Hyper Sports, I can barely bring myself to describe it! At least there are no scores… Right, they’ve roped in British and former-Commonwealth Heptathlon record holder Judy Simpson to provide her expert insights on these, together with Summer Games II and Daley Thompson’s Supertest. “I thought it was okay.” “I prefer Summer Games II because of the athletics.” “I don’t think the instructions are very good and you don’t get enough time to choose things.” But most telling of all, “I think these pictures are fantastic.” No further comments, m’lud.

Good grief, after all these years, reading that again still annoys me! We’re about done though, and what better remedy than a look at the mass of adverts in this issue, starting with possibly my all-time favourite that doesn’t involve a Barbarian game! Couple of years to wait for those, I think, but in the meantime, we’re talking Commando, and that outrageous hand-drawn screenshot I mentioned at the start! It’s so big and bold and vibrant and violent, and when you look closely, it’s also pretty much a map of the entire game! I’m not sure we’ve mentioned it before so the next new and notable advert I want to mention might also be a first reference to the Sinclair Spectrum +, which has more games available for it than any other home computer, apparently, numbering about five thousand, but I don’t fancy your chances with that new Surf Champ controller on this fancy new keyboard! Last month, we had sweaty photos of actual athletes in various adverts, and this month we have actual Russ Abbot, in what looks like some kind of PR agency shot! It’s for The Adventures of Basildon Bond, and is one of those occasions I’m glad I don’t have room to share pictures of all these adverts I talk about! I will take the opportunity to share the one for Tomahawk on the Spectrum though – cool helicopter, which was, of course, all the rage around this time, and some great screenshots of its wire-frame stylings…

What’s left of Rock ‘n Wrestle and a bit of Dynamite Dan there too! Anyway, Tomahawk was actually the first game I ever had on my Spectrum when I got it a while later, but you’ll notice I used the word “had” rather than “owned!” At some point I’ll do a countdown of my top ten favourite ads, but I’ve already given away four of them here because I love the one for Lord of the Rings: Game One making its first appearance this month, and also back up the page here. And we had Night Shade a couple of months ago too, so there’s half the list already! If I ever do a countdown of adverts I hate though, then the double-page spread from Beyond Software will be at the business end – some great games on there, no doubt, but these orange things they started doing here and forever after are awful! Then we had Friday the 13th, also shown back up the page here, and also awful, even if I do have a soft spot for on the C64 version! And there’s Fairlight from earlier, Durell’s Critical Mass, the stunning I, Of The Mask (which the news section said will be reviewed next month), and another very influential game in Back to School, and wow, Saboteur on the way too! As said earlier, this mag is stuffed full of adverts in the run-up to Christmas, but they do tend to hang around, so we’ll save the rest for another time (including the ones I’ll have already cut out by then) and call it a day there. I do hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s little journey with me though, and I’ll see you again when January 1986 (and Christmas 1985) rolls around!  

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