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 November 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…
Front covers have been a bit of a mixed bag over the past few issues, but we’ve got a real return to form on this 5th birthday issue with a very cool Aliens image. I guess it’s somehow derived from the recent James Cameron movie’s promotional or production imagery, with this almost photorealistic airbrushed rendering of a xenomorph, naturally in H.R. Giger’s trademark industrial-gothic style. As you’d expect, there’s a tie-in game to promote behind it too, developed by Electric Dreams, which gets a double-page preview inside the magazine and ended up being pretty good – a kind of top-down meets command-view perspective where you jump between six characters trying to keep on top of the alien menace and generally survive. And not forgetting features such as “to take a break from the action you can pause the game.” What insights!
There’s also a big preview of gorgeous medieval action-adventure Firelord, but I think I ‘ll save that for the review in the next issue or two. Something else that grabbed my attention on the front cover this month though was “Win a Vampire’s Head!” It’s just a Dracula mask, as well as a bunch of horror videos and books, and a copy of CRL’s new Dracula text adventure, which is interesting because it relates to something I mentioned in my recent (at the time of writing) deep-dive into Night Trap on Sega Mega-CD from a good few years later… I’ll come back to the game itself when we get to the Adventure section, but as laughable as it seems now, CRL were desperate to get 18-certificates slapped on a flurry of similarly-themed games around this period, with varying degrees of success – this only got a 15-certificate in the end, although they did eventually get there with Jack the Ripper and Wolfman. Regardless, though, we’re talking 8-bit games with a handful of very camp, very gaudy, very “digitised” images occasionally added to way too much text in a terrible gothic font! If only they’d had access to FMV!
Not much else of note to report on the competitions front, so we’ll jump to News, which is mostly all about a ton of new titles on the way this time, and mostly to the popular 8-bit home computers rather than the incoming 16-bits, or the likes of the Sega Master System or NES that have been blowing us away in recent News reports – I guess it’s almost Christmas, and all of that stuff is still well out of reach to most for various reasons. Anyway, let me run through some of the highlights, although despite there being four pages of this stuff, none of it is massively exciting! That lovely screenshot of my top ten game ever, Gauntlet, jumped out at me first, which I reckon is from the Amstrad CPC conversion, and, together with the others, is looking mighty fine so far based on their recent sneak peek during a visit to U.S. Gold. In fact, the ST version looks so fine it might even be worth buying the system for, but I was already sold last month by Defender of the Crown! Back to reality, two absolute stunners on the way for the ZX Spectrum, in the shape of side-scrolling massive dragon-sim, Thanatos, and Palace’s graphically “exquisite” The Sacred Armour of Antiriad, while Melbourne House are about to less-than-stun with their Inspector Gadget and Judge Dredd licenses!
There’s also a whole page on what’s in reality little more than ports of Crystal Castles, Montezuma’s Revenge and Marble Madness, which sounds like a good place to move on to Software Reviews instead! A few months back, in the August issue, C&VG was pessimistic to say the least about anyone wanting to gather around a screen to play a video game adaptation of this year’s cultural sensation, Trivial Pursuit… This issue’s Game of the Month! The Commodore 64 version featured here was such a surprise to me at the time too though – a brilliantly-presented, almost cinematic take on the family quiz boardgame by Domark, that I skipped in the News just now, but would soon have a Young Player’s Edition and a Baby Boomer Edition on the way too, just like the real thing. “Trivial Pursuit on computer is as much fun to play as the original – and the graphics and sound add a whole new dimension.” Couldn’t have said it better! Last month’s Game of the Month, Dan Dare, gets a C&VG Hit award for its C64 version, which never quite captured the essence of the comic like the Spectrum version did, but was still essential, just like the poor old Spectrum port of Capcom’s sublime vertically-scrolling shooter, 1942, which should definitely have got an award too! Travesty, but they do make up for it later…
I know I say this almost every month at the moment, but there’s way too many games being reviewed here to get into all of them, so I’m going to focus on the big-hitters rather than the likes of Nightmare Rally, Fungus, Conquestador, Go For Gold, Scrizam, Thingy and the Doodahs, and a dozen more titles we’ve never heard about since! I’m also a sucker for big, bold, mid-eighties magazine layouts too, so next up is Alleykat on C64, the legendary Andrew Braybrook’s racer-meets-shooter that never quite hit the heights of his Uridium but give it time and you’ll keep coming back just the same. Sticking on there, Asterix and the Magic Cauldron was all fur coat and no knickers but looked great, while Druid was a gloriously C64-looking Gauntlet-style fantasy thing that also didn’t quite reach those heady heights but is also still a great alternative today. I know I just said I was skipping average stuff, but I can’t skip the worst scoring game ever, El Toro on the Spectrum, albeit entirely a protest against bullfighting than a genuine score. The records will show zeros across the board regardless though, and actually “less then 0” for value!
Right, back to big-hitters, and there were few bigger (literally!) on the Spectrum than The Trap Door! There was never a more justified C&VG Hit award or ten for graphics score, and I’m pleased to report there’s a full-colour screenshot here too, unlike the tiny black and white thing in the News section last month! Miraculously, not a hint of colour clash either, and up there with Ghostbusters as one of the all-time classic video game licenses, totally authentic and totally fun, so take that Asterix! I always liked the look of Strike Force Cobra reviewed below it too, despite the much less glowing review, although it’s one of those I’ve still never played. Blimey, these reviews literally go on forever this month! There’s a double-page war games special next, and we’re talking the proper stuffy stuff with lots of icons on maps, with Theatre Europe the standout, alongside Austerlitz, Iwo Jima and Johnny Reb II.
I also just spotted Spiky Harold on the Commodore 64, an old budget platformer I had on the Spectrum that scores really well. Conversely, my best friend had Velocipede II, another budget title on the C64 where you rode a unicycle, but I don’t remember it being as unplayable or boring as it says it was here! I really don’t remember Deactivators either, but it gets a very big review and equally big scores, on Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum! It’s a kind of action-puzzler, strategy-maze affair, with you juggling a squad of three bomb disposal droids. Looks and sounds great, and where we had a less than zero score earlier, there’s a playability “off the C+VG scale” score here! It also says “destined to become a cult game” but I’m not sure it ever really got there – it’s alright… Which is more than I can say than for Streethawk, advertised across the page, and yes, it’s still one of my favourite adverts ever despite the stinky gameplay, but I mention it here because there’s now a bunch of screenshots on there to remind you four decade on what a disappointment it turned out to be!
Replace the word “Streethawk” with “Miami Vice” and the whole of the rest of that sentence also applies here, with that particular disappointment involving my second favourite TV show ever being advertised across the page from a type-in games listing, of all things, as late as November 1986. And it’s by Roy Turner, whose son made Avalon, Dragontorc and Quazatron, no less! I’m still a bit confused how much pedigree that actually is – my son’s a footballer but you won’t see me playing for Arsenal – but I love still seeing these things anyway, and it’s been ages since we had one for the Spectrum, although the murder-mystery presented here, Harriet’s Last Bath, is a text adventure, and as relatively polished as it seems to be, the problem with these is that you have to type in all of the text, so you next exactly what’s going on before you even try to make it work! Oh yeah, before I go on, we’d have normally had a look at this month’s software charts around now, but as has been the case a few times recently, there wasn’t one included again.
There’s always Arcade Action though, and this month it gives us what was a first glimpse at two absolutely iconic titles, as well as Campcom’s Speed Rumbler! Okay, I’m doing it a serious disservice there, but while it might be a bit of a lesser-known title for them, and it’s also a bit too difficult, it blends top-down driving and on-foot run and gun combat for possibly the first time, not unlike a certain Grand Theft Auto that was almost certainly influenced by it. And not just that – almost definitely the first time exploding barrels as we now know them appeared in a video game too! It’s no Rampage though, and it’s certainly no Bubble Bobble! Interestingly, however, as objectively perfect as I believe Bubble Bobble is today, I don’t really recall it making much of an impact on me here – maybe because “it’s along Mr Do! lines” and I really wasn’t into that game, but also because how can any single-screen platformer compete with the majesty of those huge screenshots filled with huge movie monsters tearing down entire cities with their bare claws? I’ve always loved this one, whether in the arcade or playing three-player when the home conversions came to both ZX Spectrum and then Atari ST with my brothers. Two incredible games, and as always, incredible to see them how I saw them for the very first time again here.
I seem to be going a bit long so we’ll jump to the Adventure section next, then look at calling it a day with a few new and notable adverts. As always, pages and pages of boring nerd words before we get to the good stuff though, and as mentioned at the beginning, the good stuff here is that Dracula graphical text adventure from CRL, being reviewed on one or all of the C64, Spectrum and CPC, although when I say “reviewed” they do state that none of the in-game graphics were completed in what was clearly an unfinished version of the game. Which explains why I don’t recognise that foxy goth lady in the very fancy screenshot they use, together with a giant photo of Christopher Lee. In fact, the final graphics were very garish and generally crap, and probably why it only scraped its 15-rating! Good game though, set over three parts on two cassettes based on Bram Stoker’s novel, and offering a very focussed but surprisingly expansive adventure. Which is what it also more or less says here! I’m not sure that Leather Goddesses of Phobos ever got the age rating it probably also wanted but this interplanetary sex romp (kind of!) scored really big too, despite the huge £24.99 price tag, and chugging along at a snail’s pace despite only coming on disk for C64 and Atari 800. I reckon it was overrated regardless.
Adverts to finish off with then, and Elite has made it an easy choice for me and what I’m going to feature this month, with a big double-header on the inside front cover for Scooby Doo and Space Harrier, both appearing for the first time… Kind of! Take a look at my deep-dive here for more, but Scooby Doo isn’t the Scooby Doo we originally thought we were getting a year or so ago, with that interactive cartoon-adventure previously advertised (here) that turned out to be way too good to be true, now a kind of Kung-Fu Master in a haunted house. Which I still love! And those ports of Space Harrier were nothing short of miraculous. We’ve already mentioned a couple of rubbish TV tie-ins from Ocean being advertised in this issue as well, but unfortunately there’s more, with Highlander being advertised for the first time, which is probably as low as Ocean would ever stoop with one of these, and that’s really saying something!
Also, a first look at Leader Board, the golf game that pretty much changed everything for that sport in video game form, and the same for Nosferatu, The Colour of Magic and Masters of the Universe, with both He-Man’s “Arcade Game” and “Super Adventure” on the way, both of which we’ll hopefully see reviewed soon! And even more first times for World Games, which there’s a later version of in my deep-dive here if you’d like to see that, and Martech’s Tarzan, and something decent from Ocean at last, with World War II isometric showpiece The Great Escape, which I’m sure the magazine will be fawning over in upcoming issues then forever more too! You can see a few more new bits and pieces, like Lightforce and Shockway Rider, scattered back up the page, but I’ve taken the liberty of featuring an extra picture here while I’ve still got the opportunity before I receive my beloved Spectrum +2 for Christmas 1986. Not the greatest advert ever to close with though! Anyway, that’s your lot for this month, but I do hope you enjoyed flicking through this issue with me, and that you’ll join me again in a few weeks when December 1986 comes around.
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