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 June 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 quick look at the cover first though, and what a cover it is, albeit one you’d expect to see in the October issue more than this month’s! Anyway, it’s like a Terrahawks-inspired live-action version of the witch from Cauldron, here to promote the sequel, Cauldron II, with a chance to win a commemorative trophy featuring a golden pumpkin mounted on a wooden base with a plaque engraved with your very own name! And all you have to do in return is draw or paint a scene inspired by the series… Which is why the entry form is still perfectly intact inside my copy of the mag! That said, I do have a framed scene from the first game hanging on the wall right above my head as I type this, so I’m a fan of the old Cauldron art even if I can’t draw for toffee! Quite the month for bizarre prizes, as elsewhere, you can win a copy of Datahits / The Softwhere? which was disco mixes of game tunes including Rambo, Ghostbusters, Crazy Comets and, er, Chariots of Fire on one side of the tape, and some database software to record your games library in on the other. And unsurprisingly, I didn’t enter that either, which also goes for this month’s other completions, where you could win a customised Spectrum Plus, painted on by the bloke who did the cover art for Jeff Minter’s Sheep in Space, and copies of some boring old text adventures and chess games.

Normally I come back to adverts at the end but as I was thumbing my way to this months News section, I noticed the huge double-page spread for what I think was my second bank account (after Midland Bank’s iconic Griffin Saver one), which eventually evolved into the one I’m still using today, so we’re going to make an unplanned and unusual stop-off there first! This was a gloriously 1986 ad for NatWest’s “On Line” account, with this fantastic pastel-geometry art-style that said the it was the future without knowing what the future was yet, with a weird but utterly compelling (and totally alien at the time!) mix of safe blues, old lady lilacs and soft yellows… No one can resist a slimline calculator in the mid-eighties either, or a regular magazine (which I only vaguely remember), or an actual bank card, and in case you’re still pining for some familiar, glorious neon, check out that statement folder (with pen included) subtly positioned bottom-right! I’m so happy to have come across this again!!!

Right, News, and just as my heart-rate was getting back to normal after all that bank-related excitement, there’s digitised “cheeky cockney sex-kitten” Sam Fox staring back at me! And it’s not news in the slightest, just an excuse for some teenage titillation, C64-style, which I’m sure was very welcome to me regardless when I first came across it… Er, yes, in actual news, there’s four pages of the stuff but it’s pretty slim pickings all the same after all the genuine excitement of the incoming 16-bit machines of late, then the NES making its first appearance last month. Loads of minor game announcements though, such as Activision’s new Murder on the Mississippi or a version of CRL’s Rocky Horror game for the poor, usually left-out Commodore 128, or if you fancy a version of Mike Oldfield’s dad-tastic Tubular Bells adapted for the regular Commodore 64 then that’s on the way too, but very little really jumping out here. I guess Mike Singleton’s sequel to the already-legendary Lords of Midnight, to be titled Doomdark’s Revenge, is the biggest deal – literally so too, with an “astonishing” (and it really was!) 6,144 locations and 48,000 views!

Game Reviews next, and as seems to be the case every month at the moment, the big-hitters are falling over each other for your pocket money at the moment! Actually, this month’s lineup of games reviewed might well be the strongest we’ve ever come across in this magazine to date, and while I think a couple of them are a bit over-egged, I’m not sure it’s ever going to get much better than this ever again either! Game of the Month is the aforementioned cover star Cauldron II – The Pumpkin Strikes Back on the Commodore 64, and speaking of over-egged… Well, apart from the statement about “at times borders on being frustrating” at least! Seriously though, as much as I love the original and have tried to love this brutal, bouncy platformer ever since, there’s no way it’s a ten for playability! I’m not sure quite a ten for graphics either, although it’s not far off in any other respect, but there’s at least half a dozen other games reviewed this month I’d give the award to over this. My pick of those is probably Quazatron, one of the ZX Spectrum’s all-time greats, mixing Paradroid with Marble Madness to incredible effect, and pulling off wild ambition even more so! Another Spectrum (and Amstrad CPC) classic rounds out what’s amazingly just the first page of this lot here, and it’s the sequel to isometric puzzle-shooter-thing Highway Encounter, Alien Highway. And it is more of the same but that’s perfectly welcome!

Those two got C&VG Hit awards, and they won’t be the last this month either, but I’m next is a title that unbelievably didn’t receive one… Maybe they were a bit too focussed on the C64 version, apparently reviewed alongside the far superior Spectrum port of Konami’s arcade classic, Green Beret. It even scored higher, and I just don’t get it – it’s one of the Spectrum’s finest conversions! One of its finest adventures here too (as well as on the C64 and CPC) in Heavy on the Magick, which really pioneered the move from text adventure to the D&D-style dungeon-crawler we still know today, as well as featuring some big cartoon graphics! Fairlight was a different but equally pioneering adventure in its own way, with this new “pick up objects, store them in pockets” system, and it scored very well on the CPC and C64 here, and would do again later on the Spectrum where I’d eventually get hold of it. And there’s still two games to go on what’s still the second page of reviews! Golf Construction Set on the C64 was another C&VG Hit, and was also a bit of a groundbreaker in the genre in its own right, as well as unique and just a nice idea, which the review for Bounces on the Spectrum also mentions this being, but I think that’s generous – it’s like futuristic squash on rubber bands and that’s perfectly reflected in the first of this month’s very average scores.

I think I need to start skipping a few of these more average games reviewed this month now, although they’re still hard to spot for a while with the likes of gorgeous all-platform martial arts side-scroller, Way of the Tiger, winning yet another C&VG Hit award, and the same for one-on-one fighter Sai Combat on the Spectrum, and budget spell-caster The Sorceror on there, and Exploding Fist-alike Karate Combat on the old BBC, which isn’t just still hanging on in there, but a very cool port of Yie Ar Kung-Fu is another very decent choice on there in this issue. Weirdly though, both the jaw-dropping 3D space-combat classic Starstrike II on the Spectrum, and Durell’s classic “blood ‘n’ guts game” Saboteur on the CPC deliver those average scores I was looking for – can’t quite believe either of those! Other C&VG Hit awards went to graphical adventure R.M.S. Titanic on C64, graphical showcase sci-fi trader Psi 5 Trading Company also on there, and super-colourful (and super-underrated) sci-fi adventure Equinox on the Spectrum and CPC from Mikro-Gen, the Everyone’s a Wally folk. There are still a ton of other reviews in the rest of the issue too – TV tie-in V, The Comet Game, Iwo Jima, Steve Davis Snooker, Alter Ego… It goes on and on but what a month!

Expensive month too, assuming that pocket money I mentioned earlier allows you to buy anything that isn’t budget to begin with, but The Software Chart is next and has plenty of options on that front too! That said, maybe give the highest placed of Mastertronic’s seven amazing entries in the overall top thirty a miss – The Last V8 is a miserable affair, cool sound or not, although if anyone in forty years tells you about how hard they think Dark Souls is, point them at this! At the top of the overall charts is Superbowl from Ocean, which reviewed very well (and rightly so) last month but I’m surprised to see it here all the same, given that American football was even more of a specialist subject in the UK back then than it is today. Green Beret, Way of the Tiger, Bomb Jack and Ping Pong make up the top five on all systems, and from my experience of the ZX Spectrum versions alone, you’ve got a case for three of its top ten greatest arcade conversions right there in one go! The rest reads like some of 8-bit gaming’s greatest hits too – Uridium, Commando, Turbo Esprit, Winter Games, Spindizzy… Outstanding! In the individual platform charts, several of the these lead the way, with Spindizzy on CPC, Green Beret on the Spectrum and Superbowl on the C64, then we’ve not only got yet another appearance from the ailing BBC, propped up this time by its take on Commando, but those budget titles seem to have breathed some life back into the Atari 400/800 too, with The Last V8, One Man and His Droid and Action Biker, all from Mastertronic, making up the top three. Some great stuff like Fighter Pilot, Football Manager, Spy vs Spy 2 and Yie Ar Kung-Fu also still selling on there. At this point I do always wonder if this is the last time we’ll be seeing them here though!

One of those pretty incredible first times seeing something that we often also come across here now, as we move to the big, bright double-page wonders of Arcade Action, with a very first look at SNK’s seminal top-down run and gunner, Ikari Warriors, kicking off this month’s four new titles! This one’s always fascinated me because, for a long time after this, I only knew it from various (sometimes excellent) home conversions that arrived a bit later, and they played like Commando or something, but I was amazed to find that when I eventually had a go on the original, it was like a twin-stick shooter, with separate movement and directional controls plus fire and grenades, and get in or out of a tank on their own buttons. And alien as it then first seemed for something that had become so familiar elsewhere, once you find that rhythm, it’s the only way to play, and even more so the sequels we’ll no doubt eventually get to here as well. Anyway, they liked the Rambo look and feel, the drop-in co-op, and that you could nick a tank fairly regularly, but were snowflakes ahead of their time as usual over the seemingly unnecessary use of swastikas on them. The other three games become more obscure in turn, with Tekhan’s (later Tecmo’s) World Cup the only one I vaguely remember – very familiar top-down game of football though, and I believe where Sensible Soccer and Kick-Off might have both originated! I can’t remember either of the other games at all, with Mighty Guy from Nichibutsu apparently a crappy Commando knock-off that didn’t even get a screenshot (although it did get an Arcade Archives release on modern consoles more recently), and Toaplan’s (via Taito) Get Star, or Guardian as it was also known outside Japan… Which I’ve just realised was in one of the Toaplan collections for Evercade a few years ago, so when I say “can’t remember” it turns out I actually own this one! Which also means I was able to just have a quick go and can confirm it’s like a really bad sci-fi spin on Kung-Fu Master! Still, great to try something new, even if it wasn’t really!

That compilation’s got Flying Shark on it as well, and I’ve just spent a very happy hour or so getting completely distracted by it! Moving on through the magazine again though, not only has the recent resurgence of the BBC Micro continued for another month in the charts, but now it seems to have brought another resurgence with it… Yes, for the first time in ages, we’ve got a type-in games listing to look at, care of the BBC B! It’s a ball-bouncing platformer called Bouncer, which doesn’t sound that unlike our Game of the Month from earlier, Cauldron II. Bet it’s more fun to play though! And it’s a pretty straightforward listing, all in regular BASIC, and spread over a couple of columns across four pages. A summer Sunday afternoon’s work! I know it sounds stupid but considering my limited nostalgia for the thing (albeit extremely powerful considering it mainly involves Elite and Chuckie Egg!), I was thrilled to see this appearing out of nowhere here! Nice advert for They Sold a Million II across the page from the unusually descriptive introduction for it too!

We’ll come back to ads again very shortly, I promise, but first a handful more features to cover, starting with the stuffy old regular Adventure section, which as usual is like a black hole for thousands of nerd-words but does have a decent bunch of reviews too, even if several of them share the same lifeless screenshot of a crude sailing boat that I don’t think applies to any of them, but I’ve just realised possibly does apply to Marie Celeste, which doesn’t have one itself, but apparently will accept entire sentences from you, and you don’t see that very often in an otherwise unassuming and very average graphical text adventure! The BBC is back once again, this time with Project Thesius, the second in what would end up a trilogy of James Bond-style traditional text adventures that were well written and a lot of fun. Sophisticated sleuth tie-in Perry Mason on the C64 and those mysterious Apple and IBM PC things also scored very high here, but very surprisingly to me at least, Ultima IV didn’t, although I think the reviewer was more impressed than the scores suggested, and seemed to have been tied to a creaking text adventure review format, where this classic old-school RPG was way more than that. Shame about the crappy black and white screenshots too…

As it’s on the next page, I’ll start a really quick roundup of a few other features this month with “A for Amiga” – a look at the graphics capabilities of the new 16-bit machine, mostly demonstrated by two dreadful black and white screenshots that don’t even look as good as the Ultima ones I shared above the previous paragraph! One of them is for Activision’s Borrowed Time, and early point-and-click that seems to been similarly misunderstood as “text / graphic adventure” with a bit of animation. Hardly a graphical showcase for this incoming revolution either way though. The awesome Bat Map I chose to use above this paragraph instead of any of the crap is though! I assume it’s the Amstrad CPC version shown but what a work of art regardless, just like Ocean’s recent Batman game it’s helping you out with. Four pages of it too, and a bunch of hints and tips, and a competition I missed earlier, and a developer interview with the legendary Jon Ritman! Really nice map of the not dissimilar, previously very high scoring but hugely underrated today Get Dexter on the CPC too – they really went to town on stuff like this!

I’m aware I’m going really long now, so let’s try and briefly look at “Rip-Off or Spin-Off” which was a fascinating look at the explosion of both home versions and home ports of arcade games, that begins around 1984 with the likes of Track & Field spawning the likes of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, and would then go on to spawn the mass of character licensing in videos games we see to this day. Then there’s stuff like Atari’s Marble Madness leading to Melbourne House’s Gyroscope leading to Hewson’s Quazatron (via Paradroid) from earlier, or Discs of Tron and Discs of Death, Punch Out! and Frank Bruno’s Boxing and Rocco, although no mention of the dozens of Pac- Man, Donkey Kong or Scramble rip-offs still doing the rounds. Good coverage of some really decent ports of older stuff like Spy Hunter, through to the brand new Bomb Jack and Paperboy too. Really good read now, and probably more so than back then! There’s still a bunch of other stuff, like a Nemesis (Gradius) Player’s Guide and a compare and contrast of development at Lucasfilm in California versus “behind the Iron Curtain” at Andromeda in Budapest, but I reckon it’s time for us to close as usual with a look at any new and notable adverts padding out most of this issue’s 115 pages!

You know what? I’m going with the back cover as my headline act this month, in part because I’ve just realised that most of the mass of adverts I just mentioned aren’t particularly new or notable this month, but mainly because when we were doing the same thing last month (when we had the opposite problem), I said “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.” So here you go! Elsewhere we do have some very cool ads for both Cauldron II and Batman, but they’ve had plenty of love already this month, so maybe they’ll get the same treatment another time. Similar for Starstrike II with its fancy 3D screenshots, and U.S. Gold’s eye-popping advert for the absolutely dreadful regurgitation of one of the worst sports games ever in World Cup Carnival! Otherwise, it’s mainly stuff we’ve seen before like Bomb Jack and Paperboy from Elite, or stuff you’ll probably never hear of again like Equinox and Rebel Planet, as genuinely attractive as the adverts for them also are. Right, I think that’s a good place to finish, so as always, I hope you’ve enjoyed our little journey through the June 1986 issue of C&VG together, and I also hope to see you again in a few weeks when July 1986 comes around!

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