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 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 July 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 before the get into all of that though. Now, over the course of several years of doing these Retro Rewind features so far, there have been a few occasions where I’ve said something like, “across my whole collection of these magazines, I think this cover is one of my favourites!” This month, however, I’m going to say the exact opposite. It’s promoting Pyracurse, an isometric archaeological mystery adventure set in 1930s South America, but rather than give us something a bit Indiana Jones via some wild, high-contrast ZX Spectrum-styled colour blocks, we’ve got this murky, over-dramatic airbrushed monstrosity, featuring a bunch of clammy, rubbery faces that wouldn’t look out of place in one of those really rubbish wax museums! Nice feature on it inside though, with a couple of pages of plot presented as a short-story, another one with a nicely-screenshotted preview, then a competition to win an “Explorer’s Kit” (whatever that is) using yet another page full of choose-your-own-adventure clues to locate the entrance to a tomb on a map at the bottom, like spot the ball for nerds.

Other competitions this month include the chance to win a place in C&VG’s Time Vault, a kind of wordy time capsule about what you were up to in 1986 in honour of the 900th anniversary of William the Conquerer’s Domesday Book. I think it was part of some BBC initiative using a BBC Micro, hence the tenuous link to video games. It did remind me that my brother and me ended up with a photo in the local Bedford newspaper because of this anniversary though, for no other reason than our surname is Norman! If I ever come across it again I’ll come back and plug it in here somewhere because I had such cool hair back then – think George Michael highlights on a kind of side-parted, combed-over quiffy-thing with a hint of mullet at the back, inspired by my Spandau Ballet namesake Steve Norman… Wonder if he also had his photo in a paper for the anniversary? In other non-game-related competitions, you can win a metallic Gola sports bag because such things were the height of cool at the time, while back on point, there are also copies of isometric wonder Spindizzy, Melbourne House’s new graphic adventure Redhawk, and BBC spy-oddity Project Thesius on offer, but considering I’ve just written two paragraphs on competitions, there’s actually not a lot to get excited about winning this time!

Games News is far more interesting, and that’s before you’ve even read a word of it, because not only is there a picture of my top three comic-book characters ever, Rogue Trooper, clearly here to announce his new game (which I love despite its brevity and did a deep-dive on here) but that big and colourful picture of Berk can only mean one thing… There’s a “new animated TV show called The Trap Door” and none other than “Don Priestly of Popye and Minder fame” (their spelling not mine) is doing the game. And as we all know now, we didn’t even know what big and colourful meant until we eventually saw that thing in action! What a great thing to see for the first time here though! Same for Denton Design’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (also given the deep-dive treatment here), and Hewson’s Firelord, which also gets a bit of concept art but – similar to Trap Door – that thing would end up looking absolutely gorgeous in the flesh, and there’ll be a very nice advert I can share with you over the course of the next few issues too! Just spotted another competition here to win a T-shirt by getting a high score on Commando or Green Beret (good luck with that), and there’s also a few nice screenshots for Knight Games, which didn’t turn out great but I’ve mentioned before how much I always liked the look of it. Also a first glimpse of game-changing golfer Leaderboard, which gets a nice preview too. I’ll finish this bit with news that the stunner of a fighter, The Way of the Exploding Fist, is getting a sequel, but best of all, there are conversions of Gauntlet on the way, and little did I know that the Spectrum one would be considered one of my top ten games of all time forty years later! It’s a way off yet though, so check out another deep-dive here for more on that in the meantime. 

Reviews next, and while not quite as big-hitting as last month’s, there are a couple of very special games here all the same, as well as a very underrated and, dare I say, pretty much forgotten one today in the shape of Game of the Month award winner The Planets on ZX Spectrum. As much as it looks great in a screenshot though, navigating the four sub-games of sorts here (flight sim-ish, exploration and a couple of puzzlers) using the tape counter on your cassette player is probably a step too far for “arcade addicts currently into Commando/Uridium”! I don’t know, weird choice for Game of the Month, especially when you’ve got the higher-scoring C&VG Hit (and Fist-beater!) International Karate on the Commodore 64 a couple of pages later. Okay, it would be surpassed by its sequel, IK+, a few years later (what fighting game wouldn’t?), but it’s still brilliant to play today on pretty much any of the platforms it would soon be landing on. As usual, I’ll skip a few of the less interesting games here because there are loads reviewed again this month and we’ll be here all day otherwise…

Mermaid (or Mermaid Madness) on the C64 was another C&VG Hit recipient, and yeah, it’s pleasant enough, but spending a tenner on a very average cutesy underwater maze adventure is a big ask in reality. I spent some money on the May issue’s cover star Biggles when it came to the Spectrum though, albeit a lot less than a tenner by the time I got to it! Anyway, the C64 version also covered here looks and sounds like something from a couple of years earlier on there, but it seems like it played well across its varied sections, which is arguably the total opposite for the other game sharing the same page! Until the aforementioned Trap Door came along, Popeye, also reviewed on the C64 in this case, was the most stunning game you’d ever seen on any 8-bit system! That was still the case when I borrowed a copy of the Spectrum version from a friend a year or two later as well, with these enormous, colourful and perfectly recreated sprites of all your favourite characters, but it really wasn’t much fun to play! Which is apparently even more so the case for Pentragram from Ultimate Play the Game, which gets properly slaughtered – “Ultimate are going down” no less! Unbelievable when you consider where Sabreman had come from previously, and how beloved Knight Lore especially is to this day, but I think they were just done with the series and this kind of game by then, despite isometric adventures still being all the rage elsewhere.

Jumping around earlier seems to have sent me a little out of sync with my photos this month but at least I’m getting to include a few more than I normally would as a result… Still no pic of Samantha Fox Strip Poker though – sorry – which scores almost International Karate-high on the Amstrad CPC! Same for Bombo, an unashamed rip-off of Bomb Jack on the C64 but apparently plays loads better than Elite’s official conversion! Then we have a C&VG Hit award for no less than Monty on the Run on CPC, which doesn’t sound quite as good as elsewhere but is certainly the most colourful of the bunch. The £4.99 disk version of “Kickstart” on the C64 doesn’t score so highly, and the review certainly didn’t predict one of the all-time great budget games in its sequel, Kikstart 2, a year or so later. Atmospheric but stodgy old book tie-in Shogun reviews better on C64 but similarly average on CPC, same for its version of Winter Games finally arriving, which is probably the least of all versions of a top twenty all-time favourite of mine! Loads to choose from on the Amstrad CPC this month though, and I’ll close this section with another one on there, Ball Blazer, although sadly it’s another case of better on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum for this Rocket-League precursor.

We’re done with regular reviews but we’ve still got a few more specialist ones to cover, including two absolute classics in a five-page (and unsurprisingly extremely dry and text-heavy) special feature on war games. The first of those is Battle of Britain epic Their Finest Hour on the Spectrum, complete with the best 8-bit rendition of Winston Churchill you’ll ever see! This thing’s in-game days weren’t far off the real thing, but it was absolutely engrossing, as you took control of two squadrons of Spitfires against the imposing backdrop of this big map of southern England, and the tension of relentless German bomber attacks. I’m no connoisseur of these games but I can’t disagree with the review when it says “undoubtedly one of the best wargames I have ever played.” And that goes double for Silent Service when it comes to submarine simulators, even if Submarine Commander on the VIC-20 will always be my first love! I am going to disagree with the review this time though… Six for playability, are you insane!?!? You’re a one-man submarine crew on the hunt for Japanese shipping in the Pacific in World War II, and I challenge anyone not to fire it up right now and have a great time! I remember most of the rest here too, like the terrible Falklands 82 and the stuffy Desert Rats and Crusade in Europe, then the upcoming Tobruk and the fantastic Bismarck that also get a mention in a special news column, but you really can’t go wrong with those first two even today!

After the apparent resurgence of the BBC B and the Commodore 16 in the magazine over the past few months, we’ve now got BASIC games listings two months in a row as well, and I think this one for the ZX Spectrum is only the first part of this one! That said, this alone is four pages of some very challenging code to type in – all complex PRINT commands and DATA ones with masses of numbers to get right, which is an even bigger ask when the description for Herbert on the Slopes tells you it’s very clearly a rip-off of Horace Goes Skiing, which surely everyone who wants it has the proper version of by now anyway! Still, I’ll never complain about one more games listing before they dry up for good, and had my Spectrum arrived a few months earlier, I’d have been all over this all the same! And speaking of all over this…

The Software Chart is next, and over the course of the past few months, we’ve seen the arrival followed by the increasing dominance of budget games from Mastertronic in particular, which this month unbelievably now take up almost half of the all-formats top thirty! Formula 1 Simulator is the highest placed of them at number four, which I assume is more to do with its availability on absolutely everything than its questionable quality! Actually, thinking about it, none of these budget games ever seem to reviewed in this magazine… Like how they stopped acknowledging the existence of console games a few years back! Anyway, Elite are riding the highest this month, with their conversions of Bomb Jack topping the chart and Commando at number two, while Ocean’s alright TV tie-in V is at three. Green Beret (rounding out the top five overall) heads-up the Spectrum top ten, where you’re really spoilt for choice at the moment with that, and its brilliant take on Bomb Jack, Batman and Turbo Esprit all demanding several months’ worth of your pocket money! On the C64, budget classic Thrust (from Firebird this time) is number one, and although you’re a bit less spoilt for choice, you can’t go wrong with Uridium and Kane in that chart either. Less so The Last V8, still topping the chart for Atari 8-bit, which is still hanging on in there together with the BBC, where Commando is holding the fort. Or taking it down!

Oh good, time for the Adventure section, which, having obviously seen a bit of competition for the nerd-love this month with that war stuff, has gone all wands blazing with no less than eight pages of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words and no pictures, at least until you get to the reviews, which include an unusual bonus C&VG Hit award this month for The Very Big Cave Adventure on the C64! Wish they’d update the stupid review system here though, or at least make it consistent with itself each month, even if not with the rest of the magazine! Anyway, scores big on all of Vocab, Atmosphere, Personal and Value, and that tells you more than the review text, which is like a rambling in-joke throughout, although that kind of goes for the game too! It’s an ambitious, chaotic and genuinely funny graphical text adventure, and although that genre’s days are starting to be numbered now, we’re still really spoilt with stuff like this and the recent Bored of the Rings, as well as The Price of Magick (which also gets a two-page preview here) and the stunning The Pawn, also about to make its mark with the arrival of the 16-bit machines. Before we move on again, I was pleased to see Terrors of Trantoss getting a proper screenshot after they screwed up several of them in last month’s issue where it was reviewed – I was always fond of that one!

Arcade Action now, and in yet another very first look at what would become an all-time favourite of mine, it’s Wonder Boy! “Reminds me of Super Mario Brothers but not as complicated” is partially correct but I can’t agree more that if “you want a break from wargaming, you can’t go wrong” with it! Another aside, and I deliberately passed over it earlier, but C&VG still have this weird thing about war games, which first came up a couple of years ago when they announced that shoot ‘em ups were dead and they were all anyone was going to be interested in going forwards. And I’m not even exaggerating! As exactly the “anyone” they were probably referring to, I can honestly say that wasn’t the case then and certainly isn’t now (by which I mean July 1986, obviously) but they won’t let it go! Whatever, Wonder Boy (deep-dive here), vibrant and glorious, and the greatest side-scrolling platformer to hit the arcades since Pac-Land, in my humble opinion, and I’m struggling to think of anything that bettered it since… New Zealand Story, maybe, at a stretch, albeit not quite the same. Doesn’t matter, amazing to see it here! We’ve also got Empire City: 1931 from Taito, an excellent Mob-themed gallery shooter that doesn’t have a huge amount to it and is by no means amy Operation Wolf, but is a very cinematic take on the likes of Bank Panic and Shootout if you fancied a change from the Wild West. The last of the three games covered here is Trojan, which I don’t remember at all but is by Capcom and seems a lot like a spiritual follow-up to Ghosts ‘n Goblins – reviews very well here too, but weird it hasn’t really stood the test of time like that did, although very shortly it’s going to get swamped by Out Run, Bubble Bobble, Arkanoid and loads more, so maybe that was its biggest problem.

Right, we’ve gone way too long as usual, so although there are a few more features I could cover in this issue, at this point you probably don’t care about play-by-mail games (although I did at the time!) or visits to planetariums, so I’m going to have a quick look at Jim’s Joystick Jury before we finish off with a few of the adverts filling out the rest of the magazine’s hundred-plus pages. This is a double-page feature reviewing the latest and greatest joysticks, at least one of which I’m still packing to this day… “Comfortable for long-term use” indeed! I’ll come back to that as we go through some of the nine joysticks reviewed, each of which is rated for its accuracy, its ergonomic design, its strength and then an overall score. And each one is put through its paces on Uridium and Winter Games, which sounds like quite the workout to me! The Kempston Pro 5000 is first, a long-time gamer’s choice scoring eights across the board, which also goes for Quickshot 7 “The Joycard” but honestly the mind boggles on that front as far as I’m concerned. Weird little flat thing that doesn’t even get tried on Winter Games, and probably for good reason. Or you could argue it was the modern controller before it existed, which goes double for the Euromax Wizcard, the top-rated “joystick” here despite it also being crap for Winter Games! I won’t get into all the rest but both the Cheetah 125 and the Quickshot 2 score very average, considering how highly they’re still thought of today, with the latter being the one still sitting in front of me right now, so that’s my winner whatever the score!

Let’s close with some adverts then, and as has become tradition in these features, I’ve spent ages deliberating over the one I pick to feature with a photo here, although as always, I’ve tried to spread a few out along the way, and they were rarely one and done, so hopefully we can return to anything interesting I missed in a future feature. Not that there’s a lot we haven’t seen before this month – the only other thing really jumping out is the single-page advert from Epyx for both Summer Games and Summer Games II on the C64 (which you can see back up the page), with the latter featuring three amazing screenshots that on closer inspection are actually illustrations and not screenshots at all! And if there was ever a game that could sell itself on actual screenshots over fakes… Yes, maybe it’s just a case of too early here, but as I think I mentioned in my deep-dive – and I’m sure we’ll return to in a future issue – it’s not the last time! Anyway, what I’ve decided to feature here instead is the inside-back cover advert for Popeye that we saw reviewed earlier. It’s not the greatest advert by any means, and again, if you were going to use a screenshot on an advert for any game it’s probably this one, but it’s so bold and so Popeye, and I can’t resist! It’s also got a nice preview of what we’ve got to look forward to next month across the page, including one of the most iconic images of the 16-bit era, so that sounds like a good place to finish for now! I hope you enjoyed our little journey back to July 1986 though, and I also hope to see you again when August comes around!

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