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 September 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 begin with a look at the cover, and I’m pretty amazed at the restraint 14-year old me showed by not cutting it out and sticking it on my bedroom wall! It’s a fantastic heavy-ink and airbrush image of 2000A.D.’s Rogue Trooper, and to this day that’s one of my top three favourite comic series (behind Nemesis the Warlock and Slaine, both of the same parish). He’s here to promote a game I still play through at least once a year too – one of those non-Christmas games now intrinsically associated with the festive period for me, having been given it for Christmas 1987. Whatever, I did a deep-dive on it here where I’ll have no doubt gone into verbose detail on that! For now though, we’ve got a fantastic double-page preview on his upcoming isometric romp across Nu-Earth that in reality probably takes longer to read than it does to finish the game! You can win a Rogue Trooper clock too, simply by suggesting what you think his top five favourite records are, and once again – especially given my other obsession with Smash Hits magazine around this time – I’m amazed to see the entry form still here because that would have been right up my street!

As always, there are a few other competitions also mentioned on the cover to lure you inside, the most notable of which is a chance to win a Virgin Challenge Grab Bag celebrating Richard Branson’s recent record breaking Blue Riband speedboat run across the Atlantic, including a copy of the associated game and also Now That’s What I Call Music 6, which is the last of those I ever got and as far as I’m concerned pretty much marks the end of eighties music as it’s so fondly remembered today… Or simply the death of pop music, take your pick! Elsewhere, you can win £200 of H. Samuel (yes, the high street jeweller!) vouchers care of Level 9’s Jewels of Darkness, which we’ll probably come to elsewhere at some point but I think was Lord of the Rings-related. And there’s also a Trivial Pursuit board game competition in honour of the year’s hottest craze and it’s upcoming video game spin-off, previewed here across two pages and set to be launched at the PCW (Personal Computer World) Show in London, which I actually went to the following month for the first of what would be several annual visits! 

As we go through these magazines, I often come across covers (like the one this month) or review pages that will forever be stuck in my memory, but it’s rare that happens with the News pages! Happened this month though, and not even because one of my top ten games ever, the Spectrum version of Gauntlet, is previewed here with the other home conversions, but it’s just the combination of some really great screenshots, and in particular, Electronic Arts’ Amiga version of Marble Madness of all things! Hard to believe nowadays but those four images were absolutely stunning at the time, and then there’s also great pics of Championship Wrestling and Express Raiders, all on the way soon. As well as Gauntlet, there’s a very understated first mention of another all-time favourite of mine, Super Cycle on the Commodore 64, and also the follow-up to my beloved Winter Games on there, World Games, although as I said in my deep-dive here, unfortunately that turned out a bit underwhelming to my little group of Winter Games connoisseurs at least in comparison.

Also news of Palace’s follow-up to Cauldron II, although in all the excitement of the two black and white screenshots, it never gets named! I think I can finally put this mystery to rest though, and say it’s The Sacred Armour of Antiriad. In other news, the legendary Andrew Braybrook (of Uridium and Paradroid fame) is returning with space-racer-thing Alleykat, and there’s a decent preview of Fist II: The Legend Continues, although that ended up being even more underwhelming than World Games! Loads of other stuff on the way for Christmas too, but I’ll finish this bit with news that Elite are launching a £2.99 budget range to get in on a piece of that hot action, and by what I’m sure is total coincidence, I think the advert across the page that you can see above gives a few examples of the hundred or so back-catalogue titles they’ve picked up for it! Some good stuff there too if you missed out on the likes of 3D Death Chase and School Daze first time around.

Returning to what’s already out around now, we’ll have a look at Software Reviews next, starting with Game of the Month, Jack the Nipper. Which is a travesty, given what’s coming in a couple of pages… Anyway, it’s a fine game, reviewed here on the Amstrad CPC but also available on ZX Spectrum and MSX, and has you playing a toddler being as naughty as possible by collecting items and doing a bit of platforming in an impressively cartoon-like, kind of 2.5D world. It’s just not Ghosts ‘n Goblins on the Commodore 64!!! One of its finest arcade conversions, in my opinion (more here) only surpassed on there by Commando, and the Spectrum version isn’t far behind either. Authentically difficult and utterly atmospheric, and deserved more than a C&VG Hit award! Quick disclaimer before we go on – there’s way more reviewed this month than I can possibly cover here, and most of it’s very average, so I’m just going to pick out a few highlights from the rest if that’s okay.

You won’t be surprised to hear I don’t rate the C64 port of Dragon’s Lair quite as highly as the last game so can agree with the review here a bit more, but full marks for effort – might not have the laser disc production but it’s all there in spirit and is probably more fun to play to boot! Last month here, I featured an advert for Knight Games, also on the C64, simply because it was full of screenshots that I always thought looked great, even if the finished product never really lived up to them. I was surprised to see it got a C&VG Hit award too when I came across it here though – it’s a bit like the aforementioned “Games” games from Epyx but you’re competing in medieval events in a suit of armour. There’s really not a lot to it beyond sights, sounds and a bit of novelty though, and I think they were being pretty generous. Unlike the review of Bombjack on the Commodore 16 next to it – “sad to see this sort of rubbish being churned out on the C16” although its scores of mostly threes across the board trounced all over its version of budget classic Booty… Three for graphics, one for value (at just £1.99), zero for sound and two for playability must be close to the worst review we’ve ever seen here!

Nice to see a few games still arriving this late in the C16’s life though, including its own superb take on Winter Games, in the shape of Winter Events, getting a perfect ten for playability, and budget side-scrolling shooter Trizons getting a C&VG Hit award. Nice budget release for the BBC too with its awesome version of the awesome Lunar Lander-inspired Thrust! Really cool C&VG Hit-worthy budget releases on the CPC too, with action-puzzler Harvey Headbanger and one of my favourite Gauntlet-a-likes, Storm, while the Spectrum got another classic in Snodgits, which is like a huge-sprite cartoon version of the old Ultimate isometric adventures where you play a madcap butler. There are C&VG Hits everywhere this month but I seem to be going on forever, so I’m just going to list them for completeness – proto-point-and-click-ish Hijack on the Spectrum; the CPC versions of budget masterpieces Spellbound and Knight Tyme; shoot ‘em up (which they’re still maintaining here is a dead genre) Mission A.D. and weird platformer ARAC on C64; Galaga-inspired Galaforce on the BBC and Electron; and Wally-meets-Sabre Wulf oddity Toadrunner, which was on the CPC and the Spectrum.

What a month, and I easily skipped the same number of games again (sorry Summer Santa)! Right, I’m also going to mostly skip over a type-in BASIC listing for Bruce Lee Jnr on the CPC, which seems to involve killing bats in a mine rather than having any relation to the Bruce Lee game available on other platforms. Always nice to see such things still hanging around as we get into the business end of 1986 though! We’ll head for the Adventure section next, and as usual, several hundred nerd-words to ignore before a few decent games get reviewed, with the headline act being graphical text adventure The Boggit on C64, Spectrum and CPC. This was a prequel to Bored of the Rings, and this time is an even more irreverent parody of The Hobbit, and not just the book but I reckon the old Melbourne House game too, right down to the none-more-Spectrum art style (including magenta mountain ranges)! As the review alludes to, the vocabulary wasn’t the most sophisticated at this point, but everything else was all you could want of a modern text adventure. There’s a bunch more games reviewed here too, with Infocom’s perhaps overly ambitious and complex interactive fiction game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, the undoubted highlight on Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 128 (would you believe!). Also of note is that over half of the rest of the games here are budget text and graphical-text adventures, and while they might not be the first of them released at a budget price, it’s definitely the first time we’ve seen so many all at once.

It would have been really interesting to see how the increasing popularity of budget releases was reflected in the software charts, but for the second month in a row, not a trace! I hope they make a return at some point because that really made for a fascinating time capsule… And yeah, I know, I could look forward a few issues and confirm one way or the other right now, but where’s the fun in that? For now, we’ll jump to a feature that never lets us down, Arcade Action! Three games this month, starting with Atari’s, er, Sprint III??? I mentioned Gauntlet being a favourite of mine earlier – and we’re talking top ten ever – then very, very close behind is the original Super Sprint, which was followed-up in the arcades by Championship Sprint, then eventually by the combat-themed Badlands. But Sprint III, or Super Sprint III – as the text also refers to it – was new on me! I know my Super Sprint though, and those tracks in these screenshots are all but burnt into my retinas, so, together with the timing, I’m pretty sure this is the original game after all! Top-down racer, three players at once, masterpiece! Next up is Data East’s Clash Road, a Tour de France meets Road Rash kind of side-on cycling game, not unlike another cool old budget title on the Spectrum we’ll no doubt come across in one of these features soon, Milk Race. You race, you punch thugs, you assault female joggers… “An average game.” Nothing average about Atari’s Road Runner though, not just looking like the cartoon but playing just like it too! It scrolls right to left and you (as Road Runner) need to pick up piles of seed as you go while avoiding Wile E. Coyote and his devious schemes. Great game and as authentic as a tie-in gets!

I went pretty long with the reviews earlier, so if it’s alright with you I’ll skip the interview with Five Star and a couple of other extra-curricular features, and finish off as we normally do with a look at any new and notable adverts padding out the rest of this month’s hundred-plus pages. And for once, I have no hesitation in the one I want to bring to your attention first, Shao-Lin’s Road! I was pretty close to getting my Spectrum at this point, but if I ever still needed selling on one, then seeing this advert for the yet another member of my top ten favourite games ever list would have got me! You can catch my full history in a deep-dive here, but I loved this game in the arcades, and the prospect of having it at home was just mouth-watering! This advert’s going to hang around for while now, and in the next few months, its tagline here, “The smash hit follow up to Yie Ar Kung-Fu” is going to get really confusing when it’s appearing alongside Yie Ar Kung-Fu II, but for now, I simply can’t wait (and I wouldn’t be disappointed either)! Quick aside, I mentioned Spitting Image-infused sliding-puzzler Split Personalities last month, and you can see some completed puzzles in the ad across the page in the picture above.  

 I know I just said I was going long but I reckon I can still squeeze in one more picture for you because how can I resist the airbrushed beauty of Firebird’s Druid (together with proof that people did actually win all those competitions I mention every time)! There are also cool new ads for Trivial Pursuit, which you can see further back up the page, Elevator Action knock-off Mission Elevator, Dynamite Dan II, Imagine’s Galvan, The Way of the Exploding Fist sequel from earlier, Fist II, and also one of the most disappointing games ever released spread across the back cover, Ocean’s Miami Vice… Speaking of disappointing, their dreadful Street Hawk makes a reappearance this month too! Both beautiful adverts though, with the latter covered several times in these features before, and the former is sure to be back again in a future issue, so I’ll hopefully be able to share it in all its pastel suit-wearing (but no socks) glory when we see it again! And with that, I think I’ll close this month’s issue in the hope that you’ve enjoyed another journey back through time, and will join me again in a few weeks when October 1986 rolls around!

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