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 October 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…
A few months back (here), we came across a Pyracurse cover that looked like an airbrushed nightmare from a bad wax museum, and I mentioned it was probably my least favourite cover across my entire collection. Well, this month’s isn’t far behind! I assume it’s all about Fist II, sequel to the still fairly recent one-on-on fighting classic, The Way of the Exploding Fist, but it’s hard to tell. It’s certainly not drawing me in on that basis if it is though, nor on any kind of visual appeal basis either! Slapping a yin-yang symbol on an over-rendered fantasy warrior’s shoe as he’s punching a giant snake in some kind of over-airbrushed mystical swamp just doesn’t make it scream martial arts adventure, or Bruce Lee, or ninjas, or whatever else it would have been so easy to capitalise on at the time – not to mention be vaguely relevant! And it definitely isn’t saying “biggest gaming event this year” to me like the associated preview does (prepare to be disappointed…), although the free poster obviously did the trick because that’s missing from the middle pages! Competition to win a karate suit too – admittedly a bit niche, but again, at least it’s relevant. I just noticed the Shock Waves ad across the page from it too (pictured above). I can still smell that stuff! A handful of other competitions this month but nothing too exciting – win copies of Thalamus’ split-screen Commodore 64 shooter Sanxion, Piranha’s excellent graphical text adventure, Colour of Magic, Gremlin’s hopelessly addictive striker-sim, Footballer of the Year… Plenty going on in News though, so we’ll head straight there, for what looks very much like a Sega Master System – not sure about that artist’s rendition of Fantasy Zone underneath it though…
“Do all you pensioners out there remember the dedicated video games consoles?” As regular readers will know, C&VG have long-since stopped even acknowledging the existence of such things, although we have recently heard about this thing called a NES on the way from Nintendo, and now it seems like not only Sega but also Atari are getting in on this apparently outdated action too! We start with the latter, who are about to finally unleash the Atari 7800 on the UK, with its 128K of ROM, 128K of RAM, and whopping 256K of machine code capacity Astron cards, which will house top-notch new conversions of Xevious, Robotron and Joust by Christmas, as well as updates of stuff like Impossible Mission and Rescue on Fractalus, and also Pole Position 2, bundled with the £70 console. Following all that E.T.-related trouble in America, this has been kicking around for a couple of years now though, so you might want to save up a bit more for what’s expected to be a £100 Sega Master System instead, offering “ONE MILLION bytes in ONE cartridge. This is 250,000 times more than a VCS cartridge!” (Atari 2600 in old money). It will come with a mega 1048K Combo Mega Cartridge too, featuring Hang-On and Safari Hunt, and the likes of “real weird” Fantasy Zone, Choplifter, All Star Wrestling and World GP will also be available at around £12 each. No UK release date yet though, and it says the same is still the case for the NES too.
Elsewhere, we’ve got “first interactive motion pictures” that were recently unveiled at Chicago’s Consumer Electronics Show by Master Designer Software and their Cinemaware technology, emulating the “graphic look of a movie.” Not sure about any of that but no denying we’re seeing some of the 16-bit era’s most iconic titles here for the very first time, including Defender of the Crown, which is the very game that sold me on an Atari ST when I first saw it in action on there! If ever the announcement of a game demanded a full-colour screenshot, it’s the one for The Trap Door (or “Trapdoor”) on the ZX Spectrum, still more than holding its own with this in spite of all these fancy new consoles and 16-bit behemoths looming over the horizon! Unfortunately, this new Don Priestley (or “Priestly”) adaptation of the claymation kids’ TV series didn’t get one, so what I’d argue is probably the pinnacle of 8-bit computer visuals to this day ends up little more than a footnote here, but I’m pretty sure that will be fixed when the reviews come in! You could argue similar for what I guess is either the Commodore 64 or Atari 8-bit version of Trailblazer, also pictured here in black and white and really not selling the game at all, while the official Sigue Sigue Sputnik game – where you’ll be able to control the legendary Tony James no less – is surely going to be spectacular regardless, based on that beautiful pixel art rendition of the band (plus severed head) here, colour be damned!
Speaking of spectacular, Software Reviews next, where I’m not sure there’s ever been a more worthy Game of the Month than Dan Dare on the ZX Spectrum! Actually, apart from The Trap Door when it arrives soon, I reckon these are probably as good as graphics ever got on there, with barely a hint of the dreaded (but now beloved) colour clash, and fully deserving the ten out of ten score. Just check out that loading screen too (more on that in my countdown of them here)! And the platform-shooter gameplay was something else, totally nailing the whole Dan Dare vibe and elevating the video game license in general to a whole new level… Ocean take note! Also on the Spectrum, Elite are doing the business again with their arcade conversions, this time with Paperboy, which gets a C&VG Hit award and full marks for playability. It’s weird though, because this was the version I had but as much as I also loved it, I still looked enviously at the C64 one; today, however, I’m in full agreement with the review here – it’s definitely what I’d play first nowadays! I will get to some big hitters on other systems in a sec, I promise, but quick mention of Psi Chess, another C&VG Hit on the Spectrum, a (relatively!) fast-paced game of proper 3D chess with some great-looking Lewis pieces (or regular ones if you’re struggling with them) that still plays good today, so I can definitely concur with the tens for both playability and value this time!
Right, Commodore 64 time, and a second Game of the Month, would you believe! Well, I would believe in the case of Super Cycle, my favourite racer on the system and one of my favourite games on there or anywhere else full-stop. It just runs so well, feels fantastic to play, and has a load of variety in its relatively short but endlessly replayable set of courses. If only almost every other racer on the system had followed its lead! “Upmarket Uridium” indeed… Parallax, also on the C64, is hardly that, but is a very slick four-way cross between that and Asteroids that is certainly worthy of another C&VG Hit award. Surprised that Infiltrator on there didn’t get one though – a stunning-looking James Bond in a helicopter game with actual moving hands on the cockpit controls responding to what you’re doing on your joystick! As usual, way too much to cover individually here, but this month there really is a lot of average all over the place – Mindstone, Stainless Steel, Xarq, Mission Omega, Revolution, Beyond the Forbidden Forest, Mind Pursuit… Mikie on the BBC too but I’m pleased to see the occasional arcade conversion still showing up for it regardless!
The Amstrad CPC and Spectrum versions of last month’s Game of the Month, Cauldron II, get a C&VG Hit award, although I’ll forever question that perfect ten for playability score on both platforms, the same as I did on the Commodore 64 version before. I’ll also do the same for Miami Vice, out on everything and in no way eights and nines across the board – it’s up there with Kung-Fu Master on the Spectrum as one of my own most disappointing games of all time… Now there’s an idea for another countdown! I’ve never played it, but based on the scores it received here, it sounds like the Amstrad version of the superb International Karate could also qualify for that – five for sound is as good as it gets. It’s got a decent version of Mission Elevator (the Elevator Action rip-off) though, as well as Knight Games, Rescue on Fractalus, and Impossible Mission (or Mission Impossible as it’s written here). Nice budget game in the shape of 3D-maze-a-thon Molecule Man too, which is the most memorable game on a page of quickfire budget game reviews receiving generally budget scores, although having noted previously the lack of budget game coverage here – given their recent rise to prominence in the charts – it’s interesting to see them being covered regardless. Just picked a rubbish month to start doing it!
That sounds like a good place to jump to The Software Chart, compiled by Gallup, which returns again after several recent absences, albeit tucked away as a sidebar on that News page from earlier, next to the equally understated Trap Door screenshot you can now see in the picture above. No all-formats chart this time either, so I’ll quickly pick a few highlights from the individual system top tens we’ve got instead, starting with the C64, where golfing masterpiece Leaderboard is at number one, followed by its lacklustre ports of Dragon’s Lair and Green Beret. At least “Ghosts and Goblins” is still hanging around! Can’t quite believe I’m seeing the aforementioned disaster that is Kung-Fu Master at number two on the Spectrum though, where thankfully Jack the Nipper is fending it off at the top! Budget classic Thrust, together with Commando and Airwolf, head-up the BBC chart, the wonderful budget Western, Kane, is top on the CPC, then Thrust is once again doing the same on Atari 8-bit. Looks like those budget games aren’t going anywhere for a while, and I’m always grateful to see the BBC and Atari platforms still getting a look in! Same for type-in games listings, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about Iron Road because it looks like the first page was on the back of a poster I pulled out from the middle pages, and the contents page simply says “listing” so not much use either. Sorry!
Right, Adventure section next, and after three full pages of nothing but nerd-words, we’ve actually got a bunch of really decent games reviewed, starting with Phantasie on the C64 and that mysterious Apple machine that occasionally crops up here! That said, this thing was crying out for a mouse, and I think the Apple II had just started shipping with one as standard for the first time about a month previously, so maybe the best place to play it should you ever come across one. Anyway, it’s computer Dungeons & Dragons, built around a load of menus, some proto-point-and-clicking, and a relatively complex battle system, and is apparently “quite the best game of its type” that the reviewer had seen. Didn’t get the C&VG Hit award that Futurezoo on the Spectrum did though, although I’ve a feeling it might have been meant for it all the same because this sci-fi oddity, which does exactly what it says on the tin, gets a good slating for being text-only (at this late stage), done in the Quill adventure builder, and not done particularly well. Jewels of Darkness does better – a compilation of some old Level 9 adventures available on everything, including the classic Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest and Dungeon adventure, which were previously known as The Middle Earth Trilogy, presumably in those old Wild West days when nicking mega-licenses didn’t matter! And I love the “basic pictures, competently drawn, with rather unnatural colours” you get in the accompanying graphics, which, in total contrast to Futurezoo just now, would actually would have been a real novelty when they first came out.
There are also reviews of the unlikely but surprisingly fun Hunchback – The Adventure, finally out on everything after seemingly having been advertised forever, and the excellent Atari XL/XE and C64 Lapis Philosophorum, with some of the best pre-16-bit graphical text adventure visuals to date. Right, I think we’ll move on to the far more exotic Arcade Action now. A couple of big-hitters this month too, starting with Tecmo’s legendary fantasy platformer, Rygar – apparently a “Karate and Kung-Fu type game” that’s been “done to death!” Whatever, it’s a brutally joyful experience to this day. “And the best thing of all is there’s no soppy girl to rescue.” Weirdos. Next up is the mighty side-scrolling shoot ‘em up Salamander, Konami’s sequel to the equally mighty Nemesis, which “plays like a Defender / Scramble hybrid.” Thank goodness for the outrageous screenshots they used to share on this page, consistently blowing you away every month with graphics like you’d never seen before, because if you were relying on this rubbish to convince you to play, you’d still be playing those games! Which, admittedly, I still am… Last up in this section is one of Taito’s lesser-known titles, Great Gurianos, which I think was also called Gladiator, at least until it got home conversions a few years later – the Spectrum port famously couldn’t be beaten because they ran out of memory, so just made it literally impossible instead! Either way though, it’s a crap knights in a castle game that’s part sword-fighting and part blocking lethal flying objects with your shield, and one of my least favourite games of the dozens on Taito Legends for PlayStation 2.
Time for a quick look at a few other features making up this month’s 127 pages, and I’ll start with the less-smutty-than-you-wished Leather Goddesses of Phobos developer interview, which actually turned out to be a bit of a cult classic (in part thanks to its scratch ‘n sniff features), coming from one of the guys behind the pioneering Zork text adventures, as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adaptation. All the same, no doubt not what 14-year old me was hoping for! Which is the total opposite of even more mouth-watering pictures of Defender of the Crown from earlier, which they consistently call “Defender of the Throne” here – even in the caption under the box art which prominently displays the correct name. This time it’s part of the regular Letter From America feature, showing what’s currently hot over there, and also includes Smoothtalker, which “integrates real-time voice into a micro computer” using “advanced logarithms” that eliminate the need for dedicated chips to produce voice. Says it’s totally natural sounding too, male or female, and you can have it recite your spreadsheet data. Get that on the box! Not much else we haven’t already heard in the News here though, so I’ll finish this bit with a fantastic feature on this autumn’s upcoming films at the cinema, and what a time to be alive! We’ve got Labyrinth, Aliens, Highlander, Big Trouble in Little China, Howard the Duck, Transformers and D.A.R.Y.L. to look forward to, and I’m guessing this was the first time I’d ever heard about any of them. If only I’d looked old enough for some…
We’ll finish as always with a look at the new and notable adverts padding-out an ever-increasing proportion of the magazine, which was also the case for my bedroom wall, although apart from that poster from earlier, this month’s issue seems remarkably intact for a change. I did only have a very tiny bedroom though! I know we’ve covered Elite’s now long-running Paperboy advert here before, but I can’t resist making it the picture I’ll feature above this month again, given it’s now sharing the stage with one of my all-time favourites, 1942! Almost no detail yet but enough for me to absolutely lap this up at the time, having recently become instantly smitten with the arcade original. I always mention that these adverts tended to run across several issues, so hopefully I can come back to the new 128K Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2 advert before too long – and ideally before we get to Christmas, when I’d be receiving one! For now though, the double-page spread showing the whole machine, with proper keyboard and built-in cassette deck, was more than enough to keep my mouth watering! First look at Game of the Month Dan Dare’s advert too, which you can see back up the page here, and the year’s cultural sensation, Trivial Pursuit, then early 3D fighter Thai Boxing, Pub Games, Rogue Trooper, as well as Super Cycle and Infiltrator from earlier. A couple of decent and accessible flight-sims in Strike Force Harrier and Aces of Aces too, preceding what’s about to become one of the 16-bit era’s defining genres. The less said about Ocean’s It’s a Knockout the better in retrospect though! And that’s about it for another month, but I hope you’ve enjoyed looking through this issue with me, and I also hope you’ll join me again in a few weeks when November 1986 comes around.
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