Here we are 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 at all in 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 March 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…

We’ll have a look at what’s on the cover first though, and this month we’ve got a lovely example of some very eighties sci-fi art, which looks a bit airbrushed with loads of 3D motion and gradients and glowing stuff, all leaping out of the depths of space to welcome the “How to Survive Uridium Combat Guide” inside! It’s straight from the horse’s mouth too, none other than the legendary Andrew Braybrook (who’s also a very nice man), with this big diagonal overlay showing the layouts of all the Dreadnoughts you need to take down to beat this incredible super-fast shooter that still screams Commodore 64 to this day, although my ZX Spectrum version wasn’t bad either! “NEVER try to fight them from the front” is very good advice when it comes to the defence forces, and there’s a lot more besides, although I’ll always stink at this whatever anyone says! Also a chance to win a copy of the game, together with the rest of Hewson’s awesome catalog for your choice of Spectrum, C64 or Amstrad CPC, in return for your own fiendish Dreadnought battlecruiser design, as if what’s there isn’t hard enough already!

Other competitions this month include a Spectrum 128 up for grabs care of Rainbow Software and their Art Studio graphics package, which I always thought looked really cool but would be totally wasted on me! And I’ve taken the liberty of dragging this section out a bit so I can also share the picture above showing the other big competition here, where you can win a Toshiba ghettoblaster, and that comes from CRL and their new Space Doubt game, which I’m sure was about shooting aliens and keeping your ship stocked up with food or something, so no idea where winning this iconic piece of 1986 fits into the plot! Big poster included for it too though, and for once that didn’t end up on my bedroom wall because it’s still right there in the middle pages! Anyway, the real reason I wanted to share this picture wasn’t really that at all, but the wonder that was the SpecDrum advertised across the page, which I’m unlikely to ever get an excuse to share again! As featured on Micro Live and Saturday Superstore (mmm, Sarah Greene), this £29.95 “Digital Drum System for the Spectrum” gives you eight digitally recorded real drum sounds that you can play real-time or program, and it’s “the most exciting peripheral ever developed” to boot!

Upon opening the News section this month, my eye was immediately drawn across the page to the mini-preview of Knight Games, coming to Amstrad and C64 almost imminently. I always thought this looked great, although the washed-out screenshots here don’t really do it justice, and at the time I probably saw it as some kind of follow-up to my recently released new favourite, Winter Games, which it wasn’t. Amazingly though, to this day, I’ve still never played the thing, so I can’t really tell you what it was either! The Amstrad’s also getting its own version of excellent sci-fi racer Elektra Glide, which we’ve previously seen on Atari 8-bit and C64, and there’s a teeny snippet on Return of the Fist, which would soon evolve into the upcoming sequel to that excellent fighter from a few months back, The Way of the Exploding Fist by Melbourne House, who’ve also got the very good-looking Mugsy’s Revenge coming soon to the Spectrum. U.S. Gold have apparently snapped-up Ultimate, and will immediately team-up with them on the release of Pentagram and DragonSkulls on Commodore 64, as well as Cyberrun on the Spectrum, none of which were particularly high-points of their catalog in my humble opinion, so hopefully there’s more to come…

We’ve got another return of the weird and sporadic Hot Gossip extension to the News section this issue, which mostly covers the new conversion of Kung-Fu Master on the C64, also from U.S. Gold. Thankfully not a sniff of the dreadful Spectrum port, which to this day remains the most disappointing game I’ve ever spent what little pocket money I used to get on! What’s really interesting here is a little side-piece on a game I honestly don’t remember called Brataccus though, on the way from a new company called Psygnosis, but as significant as that is in its own right, what got my attention was some very early chatter about the 16-bit machines it’s being developed for. We have come across them a couple of times individually in previous Retro Rewind features, albeit in a surprisingly understated way, given their near-future dominance of the market, but this is where we are currently, with what is the first game I recall being specifically built with them in mind… “Brataccus is probably the first bit of home grown games software – sorry, “interactive video” – for the [Atari] ST. It’s also available for the Apple Mac and Commodore Amiga. Software for machines a cut above your normal home micro. But with the ST’s price dropping who knows…” Watch this space, I reckon!

Time for Software Reviews now, and we’ll start with Game of the Month, Movie, which I wouldn’t exactly call underrated but it does now live in the shadow of stuff like The Great Escape that followed shortly afterwards. Nice job of the private investigator taking down a mob boss thing though, and crams a lot of film-noir atmosphere into its isometric 3D stylings, but from my own memories, it just never really grabbed me like Great Escape or Fairlight or Batman or similar did at the time. Shame because I think “brilliant game” is probably about right, given the chance! Not sure how Uridium didn’t grab that Game of the Month award regardless though, especially as it’s scoring tens across the board, which I think might have happened once previously for some BBC B obscurity (but bizarrely not Elite) or something! They picked the absolute worst screenshot for this masterpiece of a horizontally-scrolling back and forth shoot ‘em up though! “Simply the best 64 game we’ve seen since Fist” was exactly right, and still isn’t far off even today.

Speaking of dreadful screenshots, I’m not sure a black and white screenshot from the inferior Spectrum version of Winter Games is exactly showcasing it in the best light, but here it is going head-to-head with Winter Sports, which did have the benefit of more to do, including straight-up skiing events, but nothing else ever came close to the polished majesty of that beautiful game, especially its C64 version! The seminal Back to School on the Spectrum (follow-up to the even more so Skooldaze) amazingly scores lower than both toy tie-in Zoids and budget-looker Rasputin, also reviewed nearby on there, and none of which are anywhere near as just above average as suggested. Someone having a bad day, I guess – maybe they’d just done the terrible Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror on the BBC too, although it’s nice to see it hanging on in there, especially with the classic Repton 2 covered this month as well (and you can see my deep-dive on its third iteration on there here). Then we have C&VG Hit awards for sprawling sci-fi adventure Strangeloop on CPC, one of the all-time great wrestling games, Rock ‘n Wrestle, on C64, and that Space Doubt on there from earlier, which wasn’t the game I had in mind but the comment about the relevance of ghettoblasters still stands! I’m not into Back to the Future but that finally does alright for itself after months of hype too, and I know I’m going long but I also want to mention Master of Magic, an outstanding dungeon-crawling budget adventure for the C64 from Mastertronic, which I’d argue is one of the all-time great budget titles on any system! 

There were a bunch of games I unfortunately had to skip in the interests of your time, including Battle of the Planets, which is another one I’ve strangely never played despite still being a big fan of the cartoon (or anime, sorry!) but none of them seemed to be setting the world on fire, so we’ll have a look at The Software Chart compiled by Gallup instead. And in the all-formats Top 30 this month, Yie Ar Kung-Fu is in the top spot, which seems to result from a combination of being at number four in both the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC individual charts, and also number one on the BBC’s, which I didn’t think I’d ever see coming in these pages again, and even more so the Commodore 16 Top 8 sitting next to it. Amazing! Apart from Kung-Fu Kid, it’s all budget stuff on there from Mastertronic, with Tutti Frutti in top spot. It’s been interesting to see the emergence of Mastertronic recently, and they’re now all over the other charts too, including all-format, where we’ve got Formula One Simulator, BMX Racers, Rockman and Action Biker all in the top ten, closely followed by Finders Keepers, Tutti Frutti, Spellbound, Kung-Fu Kid, Caves of Doom and One Man and His Droid! Their Formula One (or Formula 1 depending on which chart you look at) also tops the CPC Top 10, while on the Spectrum it’s Winter Games, and Bounder on the C64. There is a bit of post-Christmas lull going on (because in reality this would have reflected January sales) but it’s a right old unpredictable mix this time!

Oh no! It’s already the stuffy old Adventure section again, although this month we do have a Review Special to look forward to, and the headline act there is Melbourne House’s Lord of the Rings on the Spectrum, although I’m not sure the platform it’s on is ever actually mentioned in the typical mass of words that comes with anything in this bit, but just look at those screenshots in case you’re in any doubt! I did notice they said the graphics weren’t up to the standards of its relatively ancient predecessor, The Hobbit, and that’s an understatement, as well as no doubt a lot of the reason why no one ever remembers this while the first game is legendary… Amazing how much atmosphere a few garish stills can generate when done right! This one also only followed the first of the three books in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, and while I’m open to being proven wrong in future issues, I don’t think we ever got any more. Which is a shame because despite the rubbish graphics, this was decent and did some interesting things with the genre. I’m not going to get into the other games reviewed but this really annoys me… There’s a special scoring system for this section, involving Vocabulary, Atmosphere and Personal, and yeah, it’s ridiculous, but of the other games reviewed in this Reviews Special, only three use it, while five or six more use a “Personal Rating” only, and a further two have no scores at all. Ridiculous or not, just be consistent!

What’s always consistent is how mind-blowing the Arcade Action section was every month, and I’m not sure it ever got more mind-blowing than our very first glimpses at Sega’s “venture into hydraulics” with the legendary Space Harrier, the star of the recent Amusement Trades Exhibition International show! “You play a dragon-buster whose sole purpose in life is to run and fly through as many object strewn screens as possible, defeating a fabulously colourful dragon at the end of each section.” Near enough! Wow, still blows me away that we were seeing stuff like this for the first time! Interestingly though, they seem more taken by Bally Sente’s Strike Avenger, which also came in a fancy climb-on cabinet, and was some kind of submarine shooter thing according to this, although I don’t know it at all, and they only really talk about the cockpit you get in to play it! Elsewhere, some game called Super Mario Bros. by some Japanese outfit called Nintendo “should be a great success” and there’s also a mention of Turbo Sub, which I only mention again here because as I write, I’ve just done a deep-dive on the Atari Lynx port-meets-reimagining (here), where it isn’t only just a fantastic on-rails shooter in its own right, but might be the best example of a conversion done better than an arcade original ever! Anyway, that more or less disappeared after this and was pretty much the end of Entertainment Sciences who made it. Oh yeah, there’s also a nice feature on Timber, Bally/Midway’s really hidden gem of an arcade-lumberjacker!

At less than a hundred pages, this issue was a relatively slimline one, and as such didn’t have that much else going on. Well, apart from the Book of Games, which, unlike the Space Doubt poster, didn’t survive being removed from the magazine’s original middle pages! I’m sure I had a good time typing-in whatever BASIC classics were included in it though! There is what’s almost an advertorial for Elite (the company not the game), with a £2 money-off voucher for their upcoming Bomb Jack conversion for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, as well as a nice teaser for the Ghosts ‘n Goblins port that’s also on the way, and a less nice tease rather than teaser for the greatest game we never got, Scooby Doo in the Castle of Mystery “which will be released in April.” Yeah right! I’m not getting started again on that though (but you can read more here), so let’s jump to a look at new and notable adverts that increasingly make up the bulk of however many pages we get each month, and we’ll stick with Bomb Jack, which you can see above and I reckon is one of the all-time great video game adverts. Elite really nailed capturing not just the essence of their games around this time, but also what was virtually a walkthrough, as can be see for this one above!

I skipped over Battle of the Planets earlier but somehow the advert survived my bedroom wall (for this month at least), but maybe more notable is what you can see across the page in the picture above, which is Durell’s frankly miraculous Turbo Esprit! We already came across Back to School and Skooldaze earlier, and together with this, you have the very genesis of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, all wrapped up in this very issue! Good advert too – fancy car, wild screenshots… I was 100% sold! Uridium is also making another appearance, where we can see exactly where that cover image this month came from, while Elektra Glide is entirely making in-game action its focus in a new version of its ad from English Software, and there’s Max Headroom too, which also ended-up on my bedroom wall at some point in a later issue! Ocean are back with more Hunchback, this time Hunchback The Adventure, although there’s always room for the creaking originals they’ve now been relentlessly touting for years as well, then it’s mostly other stuff we’ve seen before, as cool as the adverts for stuff like Zoids, Gunfright and Super Bowl are! I’ve tried to cram in a few other examples as we’ve gone here, including the delicious advert for V, also from Ocean, but as always, these things rarely appear only once, so hopefully we can cover anything we’ve missed another time. And that sounds like a good place to call it a day this time, so I hope you’ve enjoyed our look at the magazine together, and I also hope to see you again in a few weeks when April 1986 comes around!

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