We’re 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 at all in video games! And 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 May 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 the cover first though, and as you can see at the top, this month it features Biggles, the fictional First World War pilot whose air-combat antics and various other heroic escapades would spawn dozens of books from the 1930s into the 1950s and beyond, although the likes of Dan Dare were way cooler to young boys by then and he started to lose his way a bit. He got a (very!) brief resurgence around the time we’re talking now though, mainly thanks to the ongoing popularity of the likes of Indiana Jones and Back to the Future, which finally got the Biggles: Adventures in Time movie into production… Then it flopped, and he was consigned to decades of airings on rubbish satellite channels, but not before he also got a game (which I actually bought), and he were are! Nice double-page preview inside the issue, and a competition to win a copy as well as the chance to attend the movie premiere too, all in return for completing a wordsearch puzzle, which is still there so I clearly wasn’t that fussed. Other competitions this month include chances to win a helicopter trip around central London care of recent Game of the Month Tau Ceti, a bunch of Gargoyle Games games to promote Heavy of the Magick (which you’ll see the superb advert for down the page here), and in return for designing a poster for Gremlin’s proper looker of a martial arts adventure, The Way of the Tiger, you could win a copy of it recreated by a professional artist!

There was also a competition to promote what I reckon is still one of the great baseball games, Hardball (more here) but that seems to have been located in The Player’s Guide to Elite pullout section, also included in the mag this month, but unfortunately I seem to have pulled it out. Sorry! We can head to News instead though, where, after the incoming 16-bit machines finally got some proper fanfare last month, we’re treated to a first look at what would become one of that generation’s most iconic sights – the Tutankhamen death-mask made in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. However, unless I’m totally missing it, there’s absolutely no mention of that here, or any context whatsoever, so for now, we’ll need to pretend we’re none the wiser! Plenty about a brand new “non-computer console” called the Nintendo Entertainment System though! Even though it would never really be that big a deal over here, it’s amazing to see the NES for what would have been the very first time for most of us in this issue, together with a glimpse of Duck Hunt and the Zapper Light Gun, R.O.B. the robot, and previews of stuff like “Super Mario Brothers” and Excitebike.

That said, hardly much excitement of any form in the summary: “I would recommend the Nintendo Entertainment System to the person who wants to move on from his old game machine (Atari, VCS, etc.). It is also well suited for the family wanting to play games. But why shy away from the complexities and questions involved in buying and maintaining a personal computer. This is a game system that does a good job. But doesn’t present anything new or innovative.” Blimey! No wonder it was never a big deal here! Paperboy was though, and elsewhere we learn that’s on the way from Elite, together with ports of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which we’ll come back to at the end. They’ve converted Commando to the Commodore 16 too, but unbelievably, there’s some serious competition for your pocket money on there this month with Anco (formerly Anirog) and their take on Winter Games, called Winter Events, which had six of said events, and still being a poor, hard-done-by VIC-20 owner at the time, I was jealous as hell this stupid thing was getting such a big-game resurgence! Lots of words covering not much else of note here otherwise – Quazatron coming for the Spectrum, and The Very Big Cave Adventure from CRL, and there’s The Comet Game from Firebird cashing in on everyone’s recent Halley’s Comet obsession, but I think we’re good to move on to reviews now.

I’ve just realised there’s a whole Commodore 16 reviews special on the way here too, but before we get to that, this month’s Game of the Month was Get Dexter! on the Amstrad CPC. Now, I might be wrong, but this could be the first platform exclusive on there to get that award (at the time of reviewing at least because I think it got an Atari ST port and possibly an MSX one under a different name a bit later). Whatever, great-looking, Ultimate-style isometric adventure, where you play a robot spy, and it scored tens for everything except sound, and according to the review, joins Sorcery, Tau Ceti and Spindizzy as an essential game for the system. And no arguments here! Right, C16 time, and it says somewhere it got discounted over Christmas, sold a few more units, and software houses have jumped back on the bandwagon! Unfortunately, two full pages of twelve very average games, including the likes of Pogo Pete, 3D Glooper and Mr Puniverse, as well as the aforementioned port of Commando. However, all is not lost because rather than wait for Winter Events to turn up, you can go for Winter Olympics instead, with another six events that add up to “one of the best games I’ve seen on there” so that’s where the cool C16 kids will no doubt be heading for their swan-song!

Quite the month for isometric adventures on the CPC because next we’ve got Batman (also reviewed on the Spectrum), and any other month this is Game of the Month too! It was the Jon Ritman (of Match Day fame) and Bernie Drummond one that preceeded their legendary Head Over Heels, and the way that CPC version looks is just something else! Played great either way though, with you on this cool 3D adventure to find bits of your Batcraft so you can go off and rescue Robin… Maybe lucky there wasn’t a score for story, but in wasn’t far off Get Dexter in every other respect. Unlike Turbo Esprit on the Spectrum, which, despite also getting a C&VG Hit award, scored pretty average, which is outrageous considering it wasn’t just the first free-roaming, 3D open-world game (I can remember the first time and the thing was a miracle!) but was like playing an episode of Miami Vice as well, and way more so than its own crappy game would be! And obviously, we also need to mention how it was a direct influence on Grand Theft Auto too. The last of the three C&VG Hit recipients on this historic double-page was the less historic Superbowl on the Spectrum and C64, but it was a very decent game of American Football all the same, and like Hardball earlier, if I ever do a top ten for those then it’s likely to feature!

Loads of reviews this month, including quite a few more well-known names not exactly setting the world on fire next – Mugsy’s Revenge, Samantha Fox Strip Poker (not that review scores would have put any of its target audience off in the slightest!), Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror, and even the much-hyped in this magazine Max Headroom, all scoring very average all round. Soon back on track with budget epic Knight Tyme on the 128K Spectrum getting all nines and tens though, and possibly the highlight of the entire Magic Knight trilogy it concluded. A bunch more C&VG Hits too, starting with another budget classic, the Lunar Lander-inspired Thrust on the Commodore 64, then there’s a proper CPC action-adventure obscurity, Doomsday Blues, and Elite’s ports of Bomb Jack, also scoring very highly although I reckon they must only have been playing the Spectrum one for it to do that, regardless of what the screenshots are telling you! My old favourite London to Brighton steam train sim, Southern Belle, also got surprisingly stellar scores on the Spectrum, but less so back on the C64 with what I’d consider a top twenty-five favourite of all-time, Kane, a multi-stage cowboy classic that rightly scored big on value and playability but seven for graphics with those incredible horse animations? And right next to it, Rasputin got ten for graphics. I must admit I do like them though, even if that looks suspiciously like a Spectrum screenshot here! Right, there’s a bunch more but I’ll just mention the BBC also hanging on in there with the C16 and getting a C&VG Hit this month with Red Arrows, then over on the Amstrad CPC again, big scores for the fantastic Konami coin-op conversion Ping Pong, which I’d soon be loving on the Spectrum too!

Right, we’re going to head to The Software Chart now, where I’m amazed to tell you that Hardball from earlier is apparently number one! In a UK chart! Okay, it deserves to be, but it’s only showing in the main top thirty as a C64 game, while the Atari version is probably the best of them, and there’s a BBC version at number one in its individual top ten too, so I reckon that’s impacting on a relatively quiet month for sales. Great to see that still able to make an impact though! Rambo heads up the Amstrad top ten, Yie Ar Kung-Fu is back on top of the Commodore 64 chart, as well as number two both overall and on the BBC, while moody isometric adventure Movie is on top on the Spectrum. Mastertronic are riding surprisingly high back in the combined charts with Formula One Simulator at number three, although it is out on everything, while Rambo and FA Cup Football round out the top five. Actually, we’ve seen the rise of Mastertronic here over the past few months, and their budget titles are now making up almost a third of the whole chart! Not much new of note from them this month though, but as just alluded to, that does go for the whole chart. Need some of those big-hitters we’ve just seen reviewed to come through and shake things up a bit now!

There’s not really a huge amount else going on in the mag this month either, but as always, we’ve still got the Adventure section to look forward to… Actually, it’s only three entire pages of nerd-text this time before we get to reviews of a couple of really cool graphical text adventures, with the main event being Rebel Planet, an almost perfect scoring sci-fi romp loosely based on the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy book of the same name. Some really atmospheric visuals too! There’s also private eye thriller, Borrowed Time, which I always thought was a great-looking game as well, and in retrospect is a bit of a stepping stone between the traditional text adventure and the point-and-click ones, with this fixed set of commands on the screen to select and link to what you want to do. And before I bore us all to death, what I want to do now is move on to Arcade Action…


Konami’s Iron Horse leads the charge this month, which I always thought looked amazing on the strength of this feature alone, but when I finally got to play it, it wasn’t the Wild West epic I’d always hoped for – more like a floaty version of Green Beret on a weird train! Good music though! I have similar feelings about Jailbreak, also from Konami, although it was the ports that we’ll come across in a few months time that always piqued my interest more than this did, but its not very good either way, as you run and gun your way to taking down a load of escaped convicts. Good speech this time though! Last up this month is Spelunker, which I think is the arcade port of an old Atari 8-bit underground treasure-hunting platformer from 1983. It’s not mentioned here and I’m too lazy to confirm elsewhere but it’s really cool regardless, even if a little old-school by this point!

In the absence of any other features of note (admittedly in the absence of that long-since missing Elite Player’s Guide), and seemingly no more type-in games listings as standard nowadays, I think we’ll close as usual with a look at some of the new and notable adverts that are clearly propping up the rest of this month’s hundred or so pages. And there’s none more new and notable than the glorious double-page spread inside the front cover announcing Elite’s imminent conversions of the mighty Ghosts’n Goblins from earlier! I’ve mentioned previously for games like Bomb Jack and Commando that their adverts tend to be part work of art and part walkthrough, and this one is no different, albeit also part warning that the bits you can see here are probably going to be as much of the game as you’ll ever see! I’m sure we’ll get back to quite how brutal this thing is when we get to it being reviewed in the next couple of months. As familiar as I am with the original though, as well as the Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions in particular, until I just looked at this again I didn’t realise (or didn’t remember) there were BBC and Commodore 16 versions of this as well, so be sure to tune into my Weekly Spotlight features and I’ll see if I can put that right sometime soon!

Another game we saw a couple of times earlier was Winter Events on the Commodore 16, and although I can’t recall ever seeing a full-page advert for any exclusive on there previously, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this will definitely be the last time we’ll ever see one, so here you go! Nice bit of cheap air-brush styling on there too, as well as more Biggles across the page! I always say there’s a good chance all the stuff we don’t have space to cover here will appear again in future issues, and hopefully that’s the case with the advert on the back cover for superb submarine simulator Silent Service. Elsewhere there’s a look at Cheetah’s new 125 Joystick, which was no Quickshot II but wasn’t far off, and we’ve got another Marvel-lous Scott Adams text adventure, Questprobe Featuring Human Torch and The Thing, and a “glorious feast of medieval combat” on the way to the C64 in the shape of Knight Games… I’ll give it glorious screenshots in this ad too but unfortunately that’s where the glorious ended for this title! And that’s a good place for us to end for this issue too! I hope you enjoyed flicking through it with me though, and I also hope to see you again in a month or so when June 1986 rolls around again!

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