We’re back again for another of our regular monthly delves 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 April 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…

This will always be a special issue to me because, despite a couple of surprisingly understated references properly hidden away in a couple of recent issues, it properly heralded the coming of the 16-bit generation, marked by a very striking cover image vaguely representing The Pawn… “The ultimate adventure?” Questionable indeed, but I love the eighties fantasy airbrush-stylings here, and that heroic colour palette! Unquestionably the best graphics you’ve ever seen in a home computer game to this point though, but we’ll come back to those later. That said, if you’re interested in finding out more right now, I did do a deep-dive on The Pawn here a while back, where you can see most of the screenshots in the mag for real and a lot more besides! Back in the mag, Rock ‘n Wrestle’s impressively long-term promotion continues with a chance to win a “personal stereo” (a term we’ve sadly lost since) and copies of the game, which is still a favourite of mine! Elsewhere, you can also win one of fifty copies of Scooby Doo in the Castle of Mystery, although as you can see from my completed but unsubmitted entry form pictured above, I obviously had a feeling that game was too good to be true! Or no money for a stamp… Anyway, something I definitely predicted when we were looking at the February issue a couple of months back was that the imminent full-page Rambo advert I was talking about at the time was going to end up on my bedroom wall, and in the picture above, you can also see what’s left of the evidence!

We’ll also come back to more ads at the end, but for now I want to get into the News section, and this month there’s loads of it, even if on closer inspection, there’s actually not a huge amount going on apart from a handful of what would become notable titles being announced amidst a lot of forgettable noise… “The Sacred Armour of Antiriads” (their mistake not mine) is the first of them, which would turn out to be an incredible-looking, wildly ambitious and possibly too challenging proto-metroidvania, and then we’ve got a glimpse of the masterful fantasy adventure Heavy on the Magick, and a sequel to Cauldron, another looker that was too hard, although Cauldron II – The Pumpkin Strikes Back would turn out to be another level of that again! Nolan K Bushnell, a “42-year old bearded American” who also pioneered the entire industry with Pong then founded Atari is back with Petsters, his new interactive, programmable cuddly toys costing an eye-watering £40-90 that sound like a rubbish take on Big Trak, which might be why I genuinely can’t remember hearing about them ever again! And finally, tucked away in a mass of text on the third page of supposed gaming news this month, we’re told that the ZX Spectrum 128K has finally been launched at £179.99… “Gone is the Spectrum’s old “beep.” A new three voice sound generator chip dramatically improves the sound and music available.” And it certainly did, just never enough!

Oh yeah, Page 3 stunner Sam Fox is getting a strip poker game too, which may or may not have been the most important gaming news ever to a 13-year old in 1986! And it’s by the same folk who made Zoids – The Battle Begins, which happens to be this month’s Game of the Month, and sounds like a good place to jump to Software Reviews! I was probably a bit old for the Zoids toys by then but apart from that, I always thought this looked a bit crap despite the nines for graphics and sound, and tens for value and playability! It’s “one of the best games ever for the 64” according to this though, so what do I know, and it’s got some fantastic music by the master of his craft on there, Rob Hubbard, and seems like quite the strategic action adventure if weirdly coloured, blocky dinosaur robot things are your thing! The Amstrad CPC version of previous Game of the Month, Tau Ceti, follows on with a C&VG Hit award, which I guess is the recently introduced replacement for the Blitz award we got before, but that’s another game I’m nowhere near sophisticated enough to have ever fathomed its sci-fi action-strategy nonsense! 

Tellingly, I’m far more into The Young Ones, reviewed on the same page for the C64 and Spectrum, but receiving the total opposite to that for playability – an impressively rare, big fat zero! One for value though, so not all bad, and sixes for graphics and sound, and while the latter is about right, I get the sense from the review that the author was far too high-brow for the subject matter and should stick to nerdy strategy things on their nerdy no-mates platforms instead! More C&VG Hit awards went to not-quite-Commando top-down run and gunner Who Dares Wins II on the CPC, and a couple of nicely accessible flight sims in the form of Spitfire 40 on there and the Spectrum, and Fighter Pilot for Atari 8-bit, although the award was possibly a mistake in that case because the reviewer here doesn’t seem that keen at all! No question about Lucasfilm Games 3D steampunk masterpiece The Eidolon also receiving one though – this follow-up to the groundbreaking Rescue on Fractalus was one of the best-looking games on the C64 to that point, and everything else about it wasn’t far off either, although I just noticed the dragon guardian screenshot on the page (pictured above) seems to have gone a bit wrong!

As has often been the case in recent issues, there are way more reviews than I can feasibly cover here, so I’m just going to pick out a few more highlights before we move on, starting with Hardball, another real looker for the C64 (and maybe even more so on Atari 8-bit) that I reckon is still one of the best baseball games on any system to this day – see my Top Ten Favourite Baseball Games feature here for proof! Apart from apparently having no sound, the Atari version of International Karate scores big on the same page, then we’ve got Jeff Minter still running wild on the BBC with Colour Space, another of his bonkers psychedelic graphical synthesiser oddities, and there’s also a beautiful rendition of Ultimate’s classic Nightshade on there too, so all’s not quite lost on there yet! This really is the month for great graphics, with strategic 3D shooter, Twister, on the Spectrum (which also got a double-page pull-out poster this issue that seemingly didn’t end up on my bedroom wall), then the none-more-C64 fantasy adventure, Dragonskulle, also from Ultimate, and what might be the definitive version of brutal isometric 3-D spin ‘em up Spindizzy on the Amstrad CPC, which receives the ultimate accolade of shaping-up to take the title of the “state of the art” on the platform from Sorcery and Sorcery+!

The Software Chart is next, compiled as always by Gallup, and opposite an advert for what I reckon might be Marc Almond’s side-hustle… Come to think of it, he’d be way more flamboyant than that! Anyway, as usual, top thirty countdown for all formats, followed by top tens for the big three, as well as a surprise extra one for the BBC – second month in a row too, so really is making a comeback! Wonder if it’s responsible for its own top seller, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, also hitting the overall top spot again for the second month in a row? Well, it’s still in the other top tens, but nowhere near as high anymore, so, more cynically, it’s probably beleaguered Beeb owners enjoying one last hurrah combined with a general post-Christmas lull; remember, magazines were usually out a month before the date on the front, so this would have represented January sales by the time it was put together. More martial arts at number two, with Kung-Fu Master on the Commodore 64 also taking the top spot in that chart, then we’ve got the wonderful Rock ‘n Wrestle following close behind, at number two in that chart and number three overall, where it’s also on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The Spectrum version of Winter Games is likely the reason for that being at number four overall and topping its own top ten, while Mastertronic continue to assert their increasing domination of the top thirty, with Formula One Simulator at five, and a further nine titles elsewhere, although I think the slightly crappy Vegas Jackpot on the Spectrum is the only new entry this time. Despite what we’re about to look at, you don’t see many text adventures here anymore, so I’ll finish by mentioning The Lord of the Rings, Melbourne House’s lacklustre (and eventually unfinished) follow-up to the still-remarkable The Hobbit, which I really need to give the deep-dive treatment to soon…

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s time for this month’s headline act… The Adventure section! Okay, there’s still a thousand stuffy old nerd-words about nerd-stuff no one remembers before we get there, but this time we need to persevere because it’s The Pawn, and while I said this was an issue for great graphics just now, this is something else entirely! We’d truly never seen anything like this grand entrance of the 16-bit era before – it was pretty much photo-realistic for the time, full of jaw-dropping detail and unspeakable amounts of colour, all at the same time… And not a hint of colour clash anywhere! It was all kinds of pioneering in every other aspect of the genre too, with this futuristic (mouse-driven!) interface, natural language text parser, enormous number of locations, and a hell of a narrative on top, which absolutely deserved the tens across the board it received in the (Adventure-specific) review here, and if anything ever sold me on needing an Atari ST before I’d even got a ZX Spectrum, then here it was, at the precise moment I opened these very pages for the very first time! 

Right, enough gushing about text adventures and we’ll move on to some Arcade Action instead! Three games covered this month, starting with something that literally sunk Entertainment Sciences as an arcade machine developer, Turbo Sub, but some years later would go on to be one of the most astonishing arcade conversions you’ve ever seen, and even more astonishingly, it’s an Atari Lynx exclusive! I also did a deep-dive on that version of Turbo Sub, together with a bit more on the arcade game, right here if you’re interested, but for now, the original is a 3D, more or less on-rails shoot ‘em up that I think stinks, although the reviewer here calles it a “great game in its own right” so you can make up your own mind, in the unlikely event you can get the stupid thing to emulate properly as you’ll never find one of the handful of cabinets that made it into the wild nowadays! A top-down, vertically-scrolling, Wild West run and gun classic next in Capcom’s Gun.Smoke, which honestly I’ll always consider a NES game even though the original is better in every way, in particular having your directional, combinational gunshots on three actual fire buttons. Finally, there’s Electrocoin’s somewhat obscure and not exactly exhilarating ZX-2000, a competent rally racer that’s unfortunately about to get its socks blown off by something spectacular from Sega!

We’ve been a bit bereft on extra features of late but there’s loads this month, starting with in-depth previews of two games based on two very different TV series about outer space! The first is The Planets, which I think was based on a Channel 4 series of the same name charting the progress of the Voyager space probe, which at this point had been sending back all the latest info on our Solar System for the past nine years. If I remember rightly, we’ll see a review of this in an upcoming issue where I think it turns out alright, but from this point onwards it looked a bit too complicated and a bit too boring for me, being able to pop down to Uranus or not! And here’s a bombshell for you, I always thought the TV series the second game was based on was boring as well! We used to have V on in the house every week when there was little choice to be had elsewhere, but it never did it for me. Good premise though – very eighties aliens coming to Earth as nice as you like but secretly only here to eat humanity or something, and as we’ll no doubt also see soon, I think this one did alright for itself too, playing out as either full-on strategy, all-out action, or a bit of both as you wish, and properly capturing the feel of the show.  

Among a bunch of other stuff, there’s also a proper nerd-fest with a feature on a live-action sci-fi roleplaying place in Ontario, and a guide to the Zoids universe – complete with lots of pictures of Mighty Zoidzilla and the like – but as we’re running long now, I’ll head back to where The Pawn was earlier, and where we’re going to see the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga go properly head-to-head for the very first time! There’s also a brief history of the two, with the concept for the Amiga going all the way back to 1983 when it was called Lorraine – I’m not joking! I don’t think I need to go into the details (as we all know the cool kids would choose the ST as the winner) but it’s fascinating to see these vast amounts of memory (512KB) being touted around when I was still messing around with 3.5K on my VIC-20, and getting around with a mouse on a “Macintosh-like window” or 3.5-inch disk drives, whatever that meant! Meanwhile, the Amiga was “one of the first home computers to have a voice synthesiser built-in” which can “talk from any text in a male or female voice” while the ST has something called MIDI that meant you could connect “musical devices.” And of course, games are about to get “more complicated and more realistic than ever before” and we’ll have word processing, graphics packages, utilities, modem links and all kinds of other things we don’t really understand yet, and it all sounds wonderful!

We’ll close as usual with a look at a few of the notable adverts that invariably now take up half the magazine but are very cool all the same! And also as usual, I’m torn about which one to feature here! Sam Fox and her strip poker obviously still appeals most to my eternally juvenile sensibilities, and I really wish I hadn’t destroyed that Rambo ad! There’s also a great double-page on the inside cover for Elite’s conversions of Bomb Jack and Paperboy, but I think that will be around for a while so we’ll try and look at it another time. Hopefully the same for Durell’s double-page with Combat Lynx, Turbo Esprit, Critical Mass and what I think is a first look at the mighty “martial arts action adventure” Saboteur. However, I don’t remember seeing Konami’s excellent port of Green Beret getting too much standalone advertising after what I think was also its first appearance this month, and those eighties colours are just outrageous, so we’ll go for that instead, with the added bonus of some screenshots from Elite and Heavy on the Magick (whose ad is also pictured back up the page) in the preview for the stuff we’ll be looking at here next month across the page. And you know what? As I just said, we’ve gone long this time, and we’ve seen a lot of what else is notable here previously, so that sounds like a good place to close the current issue. As always though, thank you for joining me on this little adventure back in time together, and I hope you’ll join me again in a few short weeks, when May 1986 rolls around!

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