Retro Rewind: February 1986 in Computer & Video Games

Back once again for another of our regular monthly dives 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 the history of video games! As always, we’ll begin with 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 February 1986 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…

Quick confession first, as we get into what’s on the cover, because I’m missing the free 32-page book of type-in games promised there, which I’d have probably removed to actually type in whatever was in there. However, the preview of Quiksilva’s Max Headroom game, also shown on the front, is still here, complete with a competition to win your choice of VHS or Betamax videos of the 1985 movie! Other competitions this month include a wordsearch to complete for a chance to win a copy of Gyroscope, a Star Wars-themed one to win a copy of Lucasfilm’s new Koronis Rift, or if you prefer, you could complete a maze puzzle to try and get hold of a 14-inch colour TV care of Bladerunner, which as I type I genuinely don’t remember, so hopefully we’ll come across it again elsewhere later! An unusual competition next, which follows a big double-page ad for Mirrorsoft’s Fleet Street Editor, an early desktop publisher for the BBC. Serious bit of kit, and serious competition too, involving sending in copies of your own independent, school or club fanzine. If that’s too much hassle, Ocean’s Super Bowl is also up for grabs, or if that’s too American, Rothman’s Football Quick Quiz, which I’ve also never heard of but possibly more understandably so! Finally, if you’re feeling artistic, paint a poster for your favourite film and you might just win a JVC Camcorder, which was a hell of a prize back in 1986, and that’s from of Electric Dreams to promote their new Back to the Future game.

We did love our competitions back then, although judging by all the intact entry coupons in here, I obviously wasn’t that fussed about any of them at the time! We’re going to jump to News next, where the first story involves an upcoming “stylish shoot-out” from the man behind Paradroid, Andrew Braybrook, which of course was called Uridium! I know I’ve said it before, but seeing stuff like that making such a relatively low-key very first appearance here is one of my favourite things about doing this feature! There are also sneak peeks at Gremlins’s upcoming Way of the Tiger, which I’d become quite fond of on the Spectrum a year or so down the line, and Russ Abbot is getting another game in Basildon Bond, which is indicative of how light on actual news we are this month! Indeed, the majority of this double page is taken up by a £1 off coupon for System 3’s 3D run ‘n gunner, Twister, and way too many words about some £40 trivia game for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers. One thing we are not short of this month is reviews though, so I’m going to jump straight to them instead…

I still find it amazing that in a month when we got both the Commodore 64 version of Commando and the ZX Spectrum version of International Karate, the Game of the Month award goes to Knightlore knock-off Sweevo’s World, “funniest cartoon adventure you’ll ever take part in” or not! Commando actually goes head-to-head against the similarly-themed top-down run ‘n gun Rambo, also on the C64, which I will agree is a lot of fun (albeit beatable in around five minutes once you know where you’re going), but very little on there could compete with what would remain its finest arcade conversion to this day in my opinion, as well as having the finest piece of music to ever grace a video game! International Karate might have been superceded by its successor but is still one of the great 8-bit one-on-one fighters too, and that screenshot here would stick with me until the day I finally got it! Excellent vector-based helicopter sim, Tomahawk, which, like Commando and IK, received a Blitz Game award, would also become notable to me a bit later as the first game on a C90 cassette full of them I received from my best friend for the following Christmas when I also got my Spectrum… Actually, if I remember right it was the only game on there that worked, which probably served me right! Transformers on both C64 and Spectrum rounds out the headline acts in this issue, but despite what a big deal that license was around this time, it was so average it didn’t even get a screenshot! 

The C64 had a few other very average big license tie-ins this month in the Atari 2600-like Superman, bland action-platformer Zorro, and Ghostbusters-inspired Blade Runner from earlier (when it was written “Bladerunner” just so you know it’s not me being inconsistent), but for something decent at an almost-budget price, you want the gorgeous maze-puzzler that is Thunderbirds on the Spectrum, scoring nines across the board but is undeservedly more or less forgotten today! Not the case for Ultimate’s isometric cowboy ‘em up Gunfright though, which heads up an otherwise C64-dominated grouping of Wild West-inspired games including Ultimate’s far less interesting Outlaws, good-looking but weird graphical adventure Wild West, and Law of the West, which also looks great but they forgot to print half the review so we’ll never know any more than that… Sticking with Ultimate, the C64 did get decent conversions of Sabre Wulf and Underwurlde this month though, but for a real statement piece on there you want Revs, a stunning cockpit-view F1 racer, although Elektra Glide (also on Atari 8-bit) is another ten for graphics option if you like your racing a bit more sci-fi. Back on the Spectrum, your best option for a graphical showstopper is going to be Wally’s latest adventure, Three Weeks in Paradise, although the music will quickly drive you nuts!

Conversely, The Last V8 (possibly the second C64 game I ever “played”) is going to offer another iconic piece of music from the aforementioned Commando’s Rob Hubbard, as well as some of the system’s most iconic speech, but honestly, the five for playability score it gets here is generous in the extreme – it’s ridiculously hard to the point of each game lasting mere seconds! Once again, there are way more games reviewed this month than I can possibly get into here, but I’ll quickly mention a couple we’ve come across in recent Retro Rewinds, including Geoff Capes Strongman, which is like Decathlon but with trucks to pull, and is notable as not only one of the few Amstrad games being reviewed this month, but is also available on the Spectrum, C64, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Electron and BBC B, which is really unusual at this point in time! As are two other games being reviewed on the BBC elsewhere, including the superb jump-jet sim Strike Force Harrier (or “Harrier Strike Force” as it’s titled here), and the very fun exploration-platformer Citadel. Two other games I want to mention before we move on include Surf Champ, which we previously saw covered in the News section a couple of months ago, when it was announced as coming with a surfboard-shaped controller that sat on your Spectrum’s rubber keyboard, and it actually worked with a bit of practice, then finally slasher-movie tie-in Friday the 13^th, which has a quirky charm on C64 but is utterly dreadful on the Spectrum, and to my shame I’ve finished it on both machines!

I really could go on forever with these reviews but I won’t so we’ll cross to Arcade Action now, and almost as always, I’m just blown away seeing Buggy Boy on one side of its double-page spread and Choplifter on the other, although this time I’m not sure it’s for the first time; I reckon we’ve seen Buggy Boy before in its original three-screen variant, which is mentioned here, but I think the screenshot shows Buggy Boy Junior, the single-screen version that would have arrived around this time in 1986. Hell of a game all the same, as is Sega’s legendary side-scrolling shooter-rescuer Choplifter, but I’ve never been so much of a fan of SNK’s roll(?) ‘n gunner Tank, also covered, and I don’t think I remember Data East’s robot-fighter, Metal Clash, at all, even if it was a “welcome change from the present craze of martial arts simulations!” Don’t worry though, C&VG, because I’m sure they’re just a passing fad (like you said shoot ‘em ups were a couple of years back)!

Right, time for this month’s The Software Chart(s), where as is usual now, we’ve got the all-formats top thirty compiled by Gallup, then individual top tens for the big-three systems. A ton of new entries to spice things up this month too, which I guess would have been based on Christmas sales, given that these magazines were always published a month before the date on the cover… Commando deservedly taking the top spot overall too (with not a hint of stupid Sweevo’s World anywhere!) but interestingly, it’s only number two on both Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, and nowhere to be seen on Amstrad, which I think reflects it not actually being around on there for a couple of months yet despite the all-formats listing here. Elite is still hanging around at number two in the main chart, no doubt thanks to its most recent appearance on the Spectrum, where it takes the top spot, then at number three there’s the incredible value of the They Sold a Million compilation, which is also the Amstrad CPC’s top-seller. The fantastic conversions of Yie Ar Kung-Fu are the next-highest new entry at five, followed by the wonderful Winter Games, which also heads-up the C64 chart. Mastertronic continue to make an increasing impact too, with Formula One Simulator on the C64 making it all the way to number six in the top thirty, and they’ve also got Finders Keepers, BMX Racers, Action Biker, Rockman, Vegas Jackpot and The Last V8 from earlier in there. Budget games were the best!

The boring old Adventure section is bigger than ever this month, meaning this issue is probably second only to War and Peace for the most words ever gathered in one place! There is some cool stuff tucked away in there though, including a review of the excellent Seas of Blood, a graphical text adventure for the Spectrum, C64 and CPC that was the first release on the Fighting Fantasy Software label from Adventure International, based on the choose-your-own adventure book series of the same name by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. There’s also a big feature on a couple of new adventure creation tools for the Amstrad CPC, Genesis from CRL and The Graphic Adventure Creator from Incentive Software, which easily won out in the comparison of the two for the simple reason the first one was harder to use than creating a game the old-fashioned way! There’s a cool double-page map of Robot Messiah and that Max Headroom preview from earlier as well, but not a lot else going on this month in terms of other features, so let’s finish off as usual with a look at all the adverts padding out this issue’s relatively slim ninety-eight pages…

As regular readers will know, I normally agonise over the advert that gets the picture above, but generally I go for the most vibrant, biggest-hitting, most impactful game I can come up with. And as always, there are plenty of contenders this month too, with first appearances from stuff like Saboteur and Mikie, or icons like Turbo Esprit and Kung-Fu Master, but no, I’ve gone for something not so much new as now spanning a full page that’s almost as dreadful as the Spectrum version of the latter instead, supported by a mass of tiny black and white text that would put the Adventure section to shame… Free calculator watch “worth over £10” though, which can only mean one thing – it’s Cassette 50!!! Yes, fifty terrible games, but to a VIC-20 owner at this point, totally irresistible, and that was before you even thought about that watch, which, unsurprisingly, was equally terrible! A similar lifeline was also on offer to ZX81, BBC A/B, Electron, Atari, Oric Atmos, Oric 1, Dragon 32 and Apple users, but I think my favourite bit about this advert is how the Spectrum blurb begins… “Incredibly frustrating! – that’s the verdict on Cassette 50’s Frogger!” Although I was unable to share any type-in games this month, from my experience of the VIC version, that was the kind of quality we’re talking here, but in its defence, Balloon Dodgers and the version of Star Trek on there were pretty good. Actually, I reckon it might be time for me to do a whole feature on that collection, so watch this space!

Getting carried away with Cassette 50 there has presented the opportunity to close with that Saboteur advert after all! That said, as I regularly point out here, it’s very rare for any advert to be one and done, so if we don’t have space one month there’s always a good chance we can come back to it again later, so we’ll maybe aim for Turbo Esprit next time too. I did also want to mention Rock ‘n Wrestle, which is another good example of adverts reappearing, because the first time we came across it, the main illustration had fallen victim to my circa-1985 bedroom wall! Anyway, you can see it a bit further up this page, but there were actually mini-adverts for that from Melbourne House throughout the entire magazine, introducing all the characters one-by-one, such as Missouri Breaker, whose “Mad Charge will send you for a bum steer,” or Molotov Mick, whose “Headbutts will really grab you. No butts about it!” Elsewhere, there’s another wall-worthy advert featuring a variant of last month’s cover image for Back to the Future, and there’s new single-page variants of Commando and Winter Games, as well as a double-page from Ocean with a multi-ad for the still-disappointing Knight Rider and Street Hawk, and Transformers and Rambo that we saw reviewed earlier, and I wanted to highlight the latter in particular because the full-page version that will probably appear in the coming months definitely ended-up on my bedroom wall, so there’s a chance we’ll never see it in all its glory later! And that sounds like as good a place as any to close this issue, which I hope you enjoyed flicking through with me, and I also hope to see you (if not the Rambo advert!) when March 1986 comes around!

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