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By Lloyd Mangram
March
1986
Issue 26
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The
March cover was, and still is, only the second CRASH
cover to feature a photograph as its main element (the
first was Issue Six's, a photo of several assembled
pieces of Oliver's artwork). Max Headroom had
become something of a cult on TV, and for the subsidiary
pictures Oliver drew on images from the specially-made
feature film about how Max came into being. The trouble
was that as Max was already a created image, Oliver
thought painting him ran the danger of making him less
than instantly recognisable, hence the photo.
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Good software was still catching up with us in March, though
Max Headroom had to wait another two months. There
were seven Smashes and a lot of near misses. It had to be
Mikro-Gen's month, two Smashes and Battle Of The Planets,
which got 77%. Three Weeks In Paradise was yet another
Wally Week extravaganza which showed that the formula had
not quite worn thin yet, while Sir Fred was a fairy
tale of damsels in distress and bold, rather well-animated,
knights off to their rescue.
 US
Gold provided cold comfort with the excellent conversion of
Winter Games - good enough to get over the multiload
problem; Ocean scored with the unusual M.O.V.I.E. -
forced perspective, icon control and a good detective story
from a new Yugoslavian programmer of an unpronounceable name
(later identified as Dusko Dimitrijevic); Mirrorsoft came
up with one of the best flight simulations ever in Spitfire
40; and Derek fairly revelled in the conclusion of Level
9's Silicon Dreams Trilogy, Worm In Paradise, and Melbourne
House's long-awaited Lord Of The Rings.
Among the near misses was Design Design's Forbidden Planet,
another ultrahigh-speed 3-D vector from their famous 'Basil'
and Simon Brattell, but despite its playability we wondered
whether it was different enough from Dark Star to warrant
being Smashed. They also had a different type of game out:
2112 was an arcade-adventure in similar style to Dun
Darach featuring a mechanoid dog called Poddy. Programmer
Graham Stafford took the name from Jeremy Spencer's pet dog,
which was often seen in the offices - it was nice to know
that some Newsfield personnel appeared in games!
Licensed tie-ins were by now established. Rambo was
a good example, Benny Hill's Madcap Chase by Don Priestley
for DK'Tronics a rather odd one, Zorro from US Gold
a somewhat poorer one, and hovering uneasily somewhere between
the brilliant and the banal there was Quicksilva's Fred Flintstone
tie-in Yabba Dabba Doo!.
On the Playing Tips pages, a new-look Robin Candy peered
out. After several complaints in print, the Newsfield art
department gave the playing tips a new page heading, and Robin's
very outdated photo-graphic was replaced by an Oliver Frey
drawing. Robin was pleased by the fact of a revamp, less thrilled
by the picture; he wanted no picture at all. The argument
became acrimonious, especially when Robin realised it was
likely to be used on the following month's Playing Tips Supplement
cover. In the end he agreed to the new heading with grave
misgivings. It was a shame - though few people inside the
company, and no readers, realised it at the time, the argument
had caused a serious rift between Robin on one side and Roger
Kean and Oliver Frey on the other. The rift was to grow wider
. . .
Till this time software houses had usually put out games
under their own name. I have already mentioned Electric Dreams
being one of the first attached labels (to Activision), and
now CRL - an often uneven producer of software and sometimes
a company in search of an identity - launched a new side label
called Nu Wave with I-D. I-D was to be the first
of a series of new 'conundrum' games for people fed up of
blasting and maze-walking. As Automata had found with Deus
Ex Machina, however, CRL was to discover that the money
really lay with blasting, and Nu Wave would disappear beneath
the old attack waves.
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