Old Skool Computer game magazine thread!!!111one

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Ok done. Discuss. My fave was Mean Machines before that fag Rignall split it into the Official Ninteno Magazine and Mean Machines Sega. It stopped being funny and all the games started getting 8-9/10 scores.

― Darramouss (Darramouss ftw), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:20 (nineteen years ago)

that pretty much sums it up, really.
i do remember new issues of Mean Machines were treated like the holy grail at my school, and everyone wanted a KICK MONKEY ASS! t-shirt, but obv, none of had a chequebook and everyone's mum thought they were vulgar, etc.

was CVG affiliated with Mean Machines in any way? I don't remember now. but i do remember the oldskool, pre-SNES and Megadrive CVG, when it was all C64, Spectrum and CPC games. and Crash! magazine. what a shit title.

― teh_kit (g-kit), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:38 (nineteen years ago)

also, the must-have item of 199x, the Mean Machines "How to Pwn @ SFII" vhs tape, which everyone nearly DIED in anticipation of, and obv, it was utter shit when we finally got our hands on it.

― teh_kit (g-kit), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:40 (nineteen years ago)

LOL! It all comes back. That video was such wank. CVG seemed tied in with MM I know they both had mean yob but the one in cvg was slightly nicer to people that wrote in. Ha Kick Monkey ass. The Guardian would be up in arms about that if it happened now.

― Darramouss (Darramouss ftw), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:46 (nineteen years ago)

in speccy days: it was all about the Your Sinclair and the Sinclair User. Such wit. I did delve occasionally into Sinclair Programs, when I could find it, for the type-ins.

Crash and C&VG were side purchases, if i had enough pocket money left.

in Amiga days: Amiga Format was king, a devastating beast of a magazine, sometimes with 2 disks on the cover and featured some cracking freebees. Every month waiting for this to come out was bliss.

I also read Zero, for the wit more than anything although they did a spate of free games on the cover, which was nice. Amiga Power sometimes, usually for the free disks.

There were a couple of others, ACE I kinda liked for some of its more high brow features and there was another similar one that i forget its name. The One was my mates favourite, I wasn't a big fan of the massive pages.

And there were the one hit wonders, magazines that seemed to have 4 pages printed and then a free disk. These lasted a few months and vanished.

I still read the old YS and Sinclair User scanned pages on World Of Spectrum from time to time.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:48 (nineteen years ago)

Your Sinclair: best mag ever. xpost!

― teh_kit (g-kit), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:49 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, Zero was great too; lots of YS writers on board, if i recall correctly. It was nice at the time to be able to keep reading stuff from the same writers as you upgraded your machine(s).

Amiga Format was ok, but i wasn't a huge fan. In my Amiga days it was mainly Zero and Amiga Power. Remember when it used to be ST/Amiga Format in one mag?

― teh_kit (g-kit), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:52 (nineteen years ago)

i used to cut pictures out of screenshots and stick them in my old maths book. i remember having almost a book full of Outrun screenshots when it came out in the arcades. god i was sad.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:53 (nineteen years ago)

oh shit yeah, it was old YS writers wasn't it. that explains why it was funnier than most others really.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:55 (nineteen years ago)

Ok grandads ;). Anyone remember SuperPlay? Was the best Snes mag ever they used to feature all the crazy Japanese stuff. It was like looking into an alien world.

― Darramouss (Darramouss ftw), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:55 (nineteen years ago)

and I still have a few INPUT mags lying around the house. Just in case i need to learn about dot matrix printers again.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 14:59 (nineteen years ago)

and how to write a financial manager program on the Spectrum.

It still amazes me today that there were some people out there that used the Spectrum for other things than games.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 15:01 (nineteen years ago)

i still have the complete ROM dissassembly book for the zx spectrum.

sorry i'm getting way too fucking carried away now.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 15:03 (nineteen years ago)

Lol it's ok man it's why we started this thread.

― Darramouss (Darramouss ftw), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 15:14 (nineteen years ago)

This is pretty neat:

http://cgw.filefront.com/

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 17:23 (nineteen years ago)

At one time I got Sinclair Programs every month, or bi-month, or whatever it was. You haven't lived until you've spent 2 hours typing in a ZX81 program only to lose it to Ram-Pack wobble on the last but one line.

― You've Had Your Chances (noodle vague), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 19:06 (nineteen years ago)

i still have about a foot's worth of amiga format diskettes taking up space in my flat.

first one i remember buying was a C&VG with a type-in of defender for the Sharps we had at school at the time. i think C&VG pre-dated the single format mags by a few months.

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 08:42 (nineteen years ago)

I had a huge collection of Crash, Your Sinclair, Amiga Format, Amiga Power & Arcade magazines which went in the recycling when we moved house. I still miss some of those magazines, particularly the Amiga Powers.

― treefell (treefell), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 11:51 (nineteen years ago)

Fond memories of the porn issue of St/Amiga Format. Double spread of screenshots of strip poker games, etc. For no reason. In what was essentially a kids mag.

― ledge (ledge), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:04 (nineteen years ago)

My huge collection is still cluttering up my parents' house. When/if they get round to recycling it I think I'll make sure the Zeros are retained.

― ledge (ledge), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:10 (nineteen years ago)

I think it was a magazine called Amiga Computing, perhaps, that gave away a save-disabled version of Real 3D. A marvellous piece of software to use.
See me waiting over an hour for a green shaded cylinder with 50% reflective surface to be rendered on screen.

The magazine went a bit graphics crazy after that but i remember pawing over the screenshots of '24-bit' colour rendered images. Thinking that I'd *never* in my lifetime have access to such a palette.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:11 (nineteen years ago)

omg you still have Zero's? fan bloody tastic!

Can you scan each and every page and publish on the interweb, k thnx.

and there was CU Amiga, got some great disks off that one.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:14 (nineteen years ago)

Ste, i did the same thing with VistaPro. sat there for 4 hours rendering some crappy hills with dodgy textures. nowadays i get that shit at 12x10, ubertextures and 120fps, while i'm shooting people in the face. ain't science great?

― teh_kit (g-kit), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:46 (nineteen years ago)

Can you scan each and every page and publish on the interweb, k thnx.

I'll see what I can do. SRSLY. Going back home in a few weeks, and digicam = scanning made easy.

― ledge (ledge), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 17:00 (nineteen years ago)

OMG that would be fucking amazing, Zero seems to be one of the few mags thats not been scanned on the internet. and one of the ones i want to read most

― Ste (Fuzzy), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 19:21 (nineteen years ago)

> Real 3D

i remember this. and spending a christmas afternoon rendering dodecahedra. i also remember being v disappointed in version 4 when that came out (too complex for my little brane).

(still use povray, which is very similar with the right frontend. http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/povrand/mixed/mixed100.png)

blimey. my first issue of c&vg here (oct 82):
http://www.iqueue.co.uk/computerandvideogames/pageturner.php?issue=12
(isn't the internet great?)

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs), Thursday, 26 October 2006 09:32 (nineteen years ago)

old skool comp mags = where competitions to win prizes were actually difficult and worth entering

― Ste (Fuzzy), Thursday, 26 October 2006 10:01 (nineteen years ago)

cant stop reading these at work now. must stop.

those were the days when at least 30 new games came out every month and filled a mag with flavour. Instead nowadays you just get the same 16 page feature on a game soon to be released in about a years time, while poxy little reviews of a couple of shite games fill two pages. the rest is either cheats section or reams of retro gaming info.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Friday, 27 October 2006 13:43 (nineteen years ago)

> those were the days when at least 30 new games came out every month and filled a mag with flavour.

because a game would only take one man-month to code!

surprised at the number of adverts in that c&vg i linked to above, a lot of which were quarter pages for bedroom coders' games. odd mix of exciting newness and community.

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs), Monday, 30 October 2006 15:11 (nineteen years ago)

How do I make those C&VG pages big enough to actually read?!?!?

― You've Had Your Chances (noodle vague), Monday, 30 October 2006 18:00 (nineteen years ago)

They were pretty readable for me at 125% size, although you have to move them around to read em. Probably easier to print them out but I'm not gonna do that.

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Monday, 30 October 2006 18:15 (nineteen years ago)

yes, good question. never did work that out. i got by because i was only really looking at the pictures, not the details. (actually, i can remember some of those adverts and page layouts). the actual transcribed reviews are listed on the left on the cover page but there are only 4 of them.

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs), Monday, 30 October 2006 18:20 (nineteen years ago)

That's a bit sucky, really.

― You've Had Your Chances (noodle vague), Monday, 30 October 2006 18:46 (nineteen years ago)

i think they've not scanned the hires ones in yet due to publishing permission restrictions, which they're working on it says in the forums

― Ste (Fuzzy), Monday, 30 October 2006 23:49 (nineteen years ago)

in a similar 1980s style-y:

have been reading history of llamasoft lately:
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/lshistory1.php

(Space Giraffe looks mental btw)

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs), Wednesday, 8 November 2006 14:35 (nineteen years ago)

teh_yak!

― teh_kit returns! (g-kit), Wednesday, 8 November 2006 15:03 (nineteen years ago)

seven years pass...

from a 1993 article in Computer Gaming World about "the new frontier of interactive entertainment":
http://i.imgur.com/vYN7Wmk.jpg

― brimstead, Wednesday, 26 March 2014 01:23 (twelve years ago)

sorry, huge image. it's a stupid web graph of computer/gaming/electronics companies.

― brimstead, Wednesday, 26 March 2014 01:26 (twelve years ago)

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