Computer Gaming World Issue 18

Features:

• Floppy Immortality: Staying Alive in Wizardry (Steve Estvanik shows how you can restore dead characters with an extra blank floppy and some disk swapping jiggery-pokery)
  
• GameSIG Adventure Game Conference (Scorpia lurked in CompuServe's Games Special Interest Group to gab with the likes of Lord British, Scott Adams, and Michael Berlyn)
  
• Cosmic Balance Contest (Just like the last one, design an unbeatable starship and submit it)
  
• CGW Baseball League (With enough reader support, there might be a computer baseball league going 'round)
  
• The Computer As Opponent (Veteran designer Charlie Merrow explains what most players are looking for in a competent AI challenger)
  
• SunDog: A Review (12 star systems, 18 planets, 50 cities...Ken Ryall thinks you'll be playing this one for a while...)
  
• The CGW Computer Game Conference (Dan Bunten, Mike Cullum, Sid Meier, Chris Crawford, Roe Adams, Robert Woodhead, and Richard Garriot answered a number of round table discussion questions at this year's CGC. Here's a transcript of who said what.)
  
• Strategy Game Tips (A new column featuring user-submitted tips for the following games):
  • War in Russia
    
  • Eastern Front - Blitzkrieg
    
  • Carrier Force - Midway
    
  • Operation Whirlwind
    
  • Paris In Danger
    
  • Knights of the Desert
    
  • Objective: Kursk
    

  [*]Road to Moscow: A Review (Bill Wise tackles the single most difficult German campaign of WWII: Hitler's ill-timed and ill-advised invasion of Russia)

Departments:

• Inside the Industry (Dana Lombardy publishes the results of the June '84 survey)
  
• Taking a Peek
  • The Activision Decathlon (C64)
    
  • Computer Diplomacy (IBM PC)
    
  • Dreadnoughts (Apple II)
    
  • Gulf Strike (Atari)
    
  • Quest of the Space Beagle (Atari)
    
  • Championship Lode Runner (Apple/Atari/C64)
    
  • Black Stallion Western Adventure (Unlisted)
    
  • Kickman (C64)
    
  • Satan's Hollow (C64)
    
  • Mr. Robot (Apple)
    
  • Factactics Trivia Game (Apple/Atari/C64/IBM PC)
    
  • Archon II - Adept (Atari/C64)
    
  • Realm of Impossibility (Atari)
    
  • Skyfox (Apple II)
    
  • El-ixer (Apple/IBM PC)
    
  • Brain Ticklers (Apple II)
    
  • The Institute (Apple/Atari/C64)
    
  • Sieg In Afrika (Apple II/C64)
    
  • The New York Times Crossword Puzzles (Apple II/AppleIII/IBM PC)
    
  • Computer Crosswords (Apple II/Apple III/IBM PC)
    
  • Star Maze (C64/Atari)
    
  • Around the World (Atari)
    

  [*]Scorpion's Tale (Infocom's murder mystery Deadline is the subject of Scorpia's column this month)

  [*]Dispatches (Dan Bunten replies to a number of design questions raised in a recent CGW review of his Seven Cities of Gold)

  [*]Tele-Gaming (It's Diplomacy by electronic mail in this month's column by Patricia Fitzgibbons)

  [*]Atari Playfield (Nonsense games. What are they? Why are they made? Can I get some for my Atari? David Stone provides answers):

  • Spare Change Arcade
    
  • Gumball
    
  • Drol
    
  • Quest For Tires
    

  [*]The Learning Game (Bob Proctor examines the historical business/economics sim Rails West from SSI)

  [*]Commodore Key (You want war games? Roy Wagner's got your C64 war games right here, buddy!)

  [*]Micro-Reviews

  • Seastalker (Many)
    
  • Lordlings of Yore (Apple II)
    

  [*]Reader Input Device

  [*]Game Ratings

Notable Stuff:

• The reference to Psalm 9:1-2 appears on the masthead.
  
• "Strategy Game Tips", a new column devoted to reader-submitted hints, tips and strategy, debuts this issue.
  
• Tim Finkas misspells Michael Berlyn's name as "Micheal" in his artwork for the GameSIG article.
  
• Sid Meier's name is misspelled as 'Sid Meir' in the round table discussion from CGC too.
  
• Lord British named a number of the NPCs in Ultima IV after suggestions provided by SIG members who tuned in to hear his talk.
  
• Michael Berlyn in his interview states that Infocom will never incorporate graphics into its text adventure titles. Four short years later, Zork Zero arrives on store shelves.
  
• The Infocom game which is "...breaking every rule ever written about adventuring" according to Michael Berlyn is almost certainly 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging.
  
• It's awesome to see where different developers and designers were focusing their energies and where they thought things were going in the CGC discussion. Great historical reading here.
  
• Page 39 has a humourous info box listing "Articles We Will Never Print in CGW". Included are such gems as, "The TI-99A Success Story", "Interfacing the Original PCjr Keyboard to Your IBM PC", and "A Cray Emulator for Your C-64".