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 an interest in video games! As always, we’ll begin with a quick recap of where we’re 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 August 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 take a quick look at the cover first though, and this month, it’s all about Cyborg on the Commodore 64 by CRL, which honestly is a game I have no recollection of, but fortunately, we’ve got a two-page preview to help us out, alongside the lovely piece of airbrushed tech-futurism you can see at the top of the page here! Proper bit of mid-eighties sci-fi styling too, part-bodybuilder, part-machine and all impact, with smooth gradients and brushed-metallic sheens bursting out of a starburst red background, made all the more dangerous by that yellow border. As for the game, we’ve recently seen Ocean’s V tie-in, and this looks a lot like that, described as an action-adventure where the adventure part seems to involve not really knowing what’s going on, but what’s here hints at a nuclear-powered mandroid controlled by an early point-and-click interface on some kind of alien space station. Or something… At least I now know the reason I can’t remember it!

As usual, the cover also mentions a bunch of competitions, including one promoting a Spectrum game I can’t remember this time, Mantronix, where you can win a fancy new Aiwa personal stereo, complete with “a special remote control unit, feather touch controls, auto reverse and lots more special features” that sounds loads better than a stupid cyborg! There’s also a chance to win a free three-month subscription to Micronet and Prestel, providing a “viewdata system for home micro users – a totally new concept in home entertainment and information services” that will allow you to chat, make use of the “electronic mailbox service” and even download free software! Sounds even more sci-fi than the cyborg, but if you’ve got a modem and a C64, Spectrum or BBC then you’re already halfway there! The only other competition of note this month comes care of Global Software’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, based on “The Worst Vegetable Movie of All Time” which I assume is in the book you can win, The Golden Turkey awards, covering four-hundred of the worst films ever. I’ll stick with that Aiwa stereo if it’s all the same though.

Right, News, and there’s a lot of it but really not a lot to it! Time of year, I guess. Mike Singleton’s new game, Dark Sceptre, is almost here and these couple of mighty impressive screenshots make it look like Popeye meets Tir Na Nog – just hope it plays a bit better than that sounds! Some unfortunately blurred screenshots don’t provide U.S. Gold’s upcoming chopper combat-sim, Infiltrator, with the same impact, but I love how excited they were about being able to see the pilot’s hands in the cockpit view and how they actually move with the action! Less excitement about the upcoming Trivial Pursuit – this year was all about that board game but they seem pessimistic that people will want to play it around a screen. I think we’ll see them change their tune when it arrives before Christmas though… Then there’s a page of “Hot Gossip” and some hands-on time with the brand new Atari ST, and some conversions of some not exactly brand new old Atari games like Millipede and Joust, with the latter getting particular praise for being just like the original, if that’s what you’re dreaming of playing when the 16-bit machines get here! They’re loving Star Raiders on there too, but stick to the Atari 8-bit version if you want my advice, and wait for the ST’s version of Elite instead!  

A few standouts to look at in Software Reviews, although none of them are particularly this month’s headline acts and like with the News just now, we’re generally in a bit of a summer lull… Game of the Month goes three ways this time, the first of which is Bobby Bearing on the Spectrum, a kind of bouncier Marble Madness-type 3D thing that looks very impressive and plays alright but I’m not sure it’s the perfect ten for the latter it scores here. Similarly, next Game of the Month is Room 10 on the Amstrad CPC, and while it’s nice to see them getting something to celebrate for a change, this is little more than 3D Pong as far as I’m concerned, which is also nice I guess, just not really what I want in 1986. I’ll stick with my Spectrum thanks, and that’s where Game of the Month number three is, which is Hewson’s Pyracurse. I’m seeing a trend too, because this is another case of 3D done brilliantly, even if the gameplay doesn’t quite match the incredibly atmospheric “adventure movie” visuals for me. A couple of very cool C64 flight sims following closely behind, each receiving C&VG Hit awards, with Acro Jet giving you the speed you didn’t see much in these things on there, and Solo Flight II giving you the accessibility and some fantastic synthesised speech to boot, when such things were still a real selling point!

There are a bunch of games reviewed this month that we’ve seen before elsewhere, but the CPC version of Kung-Fu Master is one of the better ones (especially compared to the most disappointing game I’ve ever bought to this day over on the Spectrum), and it’s finally got Rock n’ Wrestle and budget masterpiece Kane as well, while the BBC still refuses to go away with nice takes on Bruce Lee and Spy Hunter. Bit of a Commodore 16 special too, with a page of budget release reviews that unfortunately sounds like another Don’t Buy This compilation – actually, a couple of them are from Firebird too, with shark-shooter, Shark, coming out the worst of the lot, the £1.99 price tag apparently its most redeeming feature, although that’s only worth four out of ten! Over on the Commodore 64, it’s finally got its own version of nerdy sci-fi classic Tau Ceti that appears to be the best of the lot, and rightly receives a C&VG Hit award, and so does Split Personalities on the Spectrum, the fantastic sliding puzzle game that’s effectively Spitting Image The Game (and far more so than the crappy official fighter on the Amiga!) that I played the hell out of a couple of years later.

The Software Chart (compiled by Gallup) is weirdly understated this month – a bunch of white on black top tens bolted onto the side of a rogue News page that I must admit I missed when we were covering that earlier but isn’t telling us much else so we’re good. I also need to apologise for the missing bit of page in the photo above – I’d already got Cassette 50 by this point so it’s whatever is gone was on the next page, which I reckon was a set of POKEs (cheat codes) for something or other I was playing at the time, but no idea what! Anyway, back to the charts, and on Atari 8-bit, The Last V8 is at the top for a second month, despite still being one of the most frustratingly difficult games ever created! On the Amstrad CPC, it’s Winter Games at number one, while its gorgeous isometric Batman game is at number two – that also tops the Spectrum chart, with the dreadful World Cup Carnival following behind. Budget classic Thrust is the C64’s best-seller, then the wonderful one-on-one fighter, International Karate, is number two, while on the BBC, its scaled-back but still excellent port of Commando is number one there.

It’s a shame we didn’t get an overall chart this time because seeing the rise of the budget games recently has been fascinating, and judging by these individual top tens, we’d have seen the words “Firebird” and “Mastertronic” dominating once again! Anyway, last month we covered part one of what’s become an increasingly rare appearance of a type-in games listing, in ambitious fantasy-adventure Tallyron II on the ZX Spectrum, and it was an absolute beast of DATA commands full of numbers to get wrong, but it turns out it wasn’t a patch on part two! This is another seven pages of as complex a game written in BASIC as you’ll ever come across, full of IF – THEN – DRAW commands that go on and on through most of them! However, if that all sounds like too much trouble, you can also send in a cheque or postal order for £2.50 and get it on tape instead! You can see the coupon for that here, as well as a snippet of the last bit of code, but the picture’s mainly here to tease you with half the beautifully put-together two-page map of Cauldron II either side of it! These things were normal at the time but it’s amazing to see them now, and how much time and effort clearly went into creating them!

If you thought that games listing sounded like hard work, just wait until you see the Adventure section! Eight pages of nothing but nerd-words that I’m going to make no excuse for skipping entirely, except to say they really didn’t get Sierra’s pioneering point-and-click adventure, Kings Quest II on the Atari ST – sevens for vocab and atmosphere, fives for “personal” and value, and seen as “very suitable for the 8-11 age range.” Idiots! We’ll jump straight to Arcade Action now, which only has a couple of games this month, starting with a preview to “the sequel to Atari’s revolutionary Gauntlet!” That sounds fine, except they’re talking about Quartet, which admittedly also lets four people play at once, but it’s a run and gun space platformer, and certainly not Gauntlet II! It is alright though, especially if you can get a couple of friends onboard, with a load of cartoony variety, some cool bosses and power-ups, and it gets really frantic really quick! The other game is a proper obscurity, Super Cross II from Shoji, and it’s kind of a souped-up version of Nintendo’s side-on scrambler Excitebike, but as the article points out, we’re now in a world where Sega’s Hang-On already exists, and some of the most spectacular and pretty much greatest arcade racers ever created are already in their back pockets, so I think it’s another case of filling space in an otherwise quiet month!

Right, filling space is something I don’t really want to do here, so before we close as usual with a look at a few interesting adverts, I want to mention the special Super Computers feature included this month, and I specifically want to call out the page covering Deluxe Paint on the Amiga because, while the iconic Tutankhamun’s mask image they could have used instead is more my thing than a white ape, in the unlikely event you still needed selling on a 16-bit computer by now, then this was all you needed to convince you! I really can’t overstate how blown away I was seeing this for the first time – you can just scroll back up this page to see where we still were at this point, and then this came along! Not that I’d ever be able to create anything remotely like it… Honestly, the rest of the feature is a bit boring, with far too many words on a bunch of games like The Pawn and Pinball Construction Set that were impressive but too niche to ever be system sellers, and really weren’t helped by a bunch of black and white screenshots, when the one thing that might have dragged you in was all that impossible colour and fidelity!

Not to worry. We’ll get there eventually! Which also goes for the end of this feature, so let’s see what new and notable adverts are padding out the just about one-hundred pages making up this issue. Slightly meagre pickings on this front too though, with lots we’ve seen before, like Elite’s conversions of Paperboy and Ghosts ‘n Goblins, or Ocean’s Super Bowl, Rambo, Batman and V, all taking up the most prominent spaces. That Ace one you can see further back up the page is nice though. Then there’s a very generic fantasy image on a very wordy advert for that stunning Mike Singleton game we started with in the News, and like I said with Popeye’s advert last month, if ever there was a game that could sell itself on screenshots alone, here it is, but not a trace of any! There’s plenty of them on the one I’ve decided to feature here though, which is for Knight Games on the Commodore 64 – joined across the page by another generic, screenshot-free advert for colourful Spectrum and CPC weapon-fighter, Sai Combat. Back with Knight Games, it’s another title that’s never really stood the test of time, but I seem to have been mentioning how much I always liked the look of it here for months now, as it’s been announced and promoted (although I don’t think reviewed yet), so as it’s a quiet month I’ll share the advert at last, which shows you exactly what I’ve been going on about! I guess business will start to pick up over the next few months as we start building towards Christmas, but we’ll leave it there this time. I hope you’ve enjoyed this though, and I’ll hopefully see you for more of the same when September 1986 comes around in a few weeks!

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