Julian "Jaz" Rignall

Right. The 500 didn’t come out til mid 87 and took a while to get going, but soon surpassed the ST as the consumer’s choice (and rightly so). The Amiga just had so much more going for it.

No. The 1000 was available first in minuscule numbers in the latter stages of the year with a very wobbly OS and a crazy price tag of today’s equivalent of like four grand plus (hence parental resistance). The far cheaper 500 came out the following year.

40 years ago, Commodore's Amiga launch was touted but was still many months away, Activision bought text adventure specialists Infocom, BT bought Odin and did nothing with them, and good old British go-slow nanny state modem approval BS was causing problems for manufacturers.

40 years ago, Imagine was Ocean's arcade conversion label - and it was making full use of the large-scale deal they'd signed with Konami. This ad showcases no fewer than five ports of classic era coin-ops. Hyper Sports and Ping Pong were both especially good.

40 years ago, Quicksilva was advertising Max Headroom, a game based on the prescient TV show starring Matt Frewer as both a reporter and the eponymous Max, a computer recreation of his personality stuck inside a machine. Game wasn't great. TV show was seriously cool, however.

40 years ago I was playing Accolade's Hardball, a remarkable C64 title that not only set the standard for sports sims going forward but also established the template for modern baseball games. Their television-style presentation and detailed strategic gameplay started here.

40 years ago, Ocean was advertising Street Hawk, the hugely delayed game-of-the-failed-TV-series. It had already been marketed for well over a year at this point, but it finally arrived on Speccy and Amstrad. It was pretty damn bad, but at least we were spared the C64 version.

35 years ago I was enjoying R-Type on SMS. The devs made the right sacrifices (slower speed and sometimes flickery graphics) to ensure that despite its flaws, it was a surprisingly accurate and - more importantly - fun recreation of Irem's legendary coin-op. An SMS classic!

WTF lol. J/k? Amirite?

Yes, but there was a track record to maintain. This was the company that made mini TVs with CRTs rather than LCD screens, and was eyeing up those gonna-be-huge 3” disc drives rather than those 3 1/4 ones that surely nobody would use.

40 years ago, Sinclair turned its back on microdrives and decided to go with proper disc drives for its 128. A decision that was sadly too little too late. Meanwhile Commodore managed to lose $50m over Xmas while ol' barrow boy Sugar was coining it in thanks to the Amstrad 8256.

35 years ago, the C64 still had a bit of life left in it, as evidenced by games like Last Ninja 3. Its audiovisuals and general presentation were terrific, although its gameplay was a bit Marmite-y. I was never a big fan of the series TBH, but totally get why some really love it.

Well, there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with the game, but it wasn’t as good as its predecessor, so that seems fair to me in retrospect.

35 years ago, I was playing Nemo, a very cute and fun hidden gem of a platformer that I rarely saw in the wild. It was definitely released, but was very hard to find in arcades. I was also playing Robocop II, which was fine but like the movie, wasn't a patch on its predecessor.

Yeah. They definitely knew what they were doing licensing wise, just a bit shit with their quality control.

Precisely five years earlier, Ocean was doing the same thing with these mid-80s properties. However, while in 1991 Ocean's standards were generally fairly reasonable, in 1986, they peddled some serious crapola. Some versions of these games were absolute tripe.

35 years ago, Ocean owned the rights to some of the coolest IPs of the era. NARC and Chase HQ were a terrific pair of coin-ops, and Total Recall and Robocop were both seriously great blockbusters. The quality of the actual games was mixed, but those IPs were top class!

No. But to put it in perspective, that did come from the then reigning National Arcade Champ. 😁

This review of me book made my day.

[An unmarked envelope full of used notes is on its way, Al. 😀]

Here's that Duck Tales review. Eggsellent game. You'd be quackers to miss it. Etc, etc, etc.

35 years ago, Mean Machines featured NES Duck Tales on its cover. We rated the game 90%. Other top reviews: SMS California Games 93% and Pac-Mania 90%, Game Boy Contra 91%, NES Gauntlet II 90%, and Mega Drive Gynoug 88%. Bit of a quiet post-Xmas month, but some goodies to be had!

40 years ago, the Spectrum 128 arrived but with the market already swamped with 48k systems and at today's equivalent of £544, it wasn't seen as a great upgrade. Meanwhile Commodore was fending off bankruptcy questions. Sure. Everything was fine. Nothing to see. Move along.😄

Put it this way, PGA Tour Golf III is the one I ended up playing the most. Many, many late-night four-player battles on that. Just a brilliant set of varied courses and by that point, perfectly tuned gameplay.

He wasn’t wrong. 😁

I don't think it was an actual arcade game. At least, I never saw or heard of it as a coin-op.

35 years ago, US Gold was peddling its back catalog of games either as budget titles or - as in this case - compilations. This one is the very definition of "mixed bag." All popular period arcade games, but depending on system, their quality ranged from mediocre to pretty decent.

Mebbe he should sell his immigrant players then.

I don’t think I ever played it. It came out quite a long time after the Mega Drive version, which I’d already played to bits.

35 years ago, I was seriously surprised by PGA Tour Golf. I hadn't played a golf game this fun since Access' Leaderboard many years before - and this one was even better. Subsequent iterations improved on the formula, making them absolute multiplayer classics in my book!

Here's our Mercenary review from this issue. Playing this first proper open-world game was a truly incredible, milestone experience as I'm sure those who also played it at the time will agree. Gaming evolved a quantum leap overnight. An astonishing achievement for a 64k system.