Old Magazine Chat

HeroQuest was the big deal here. This is was got me to convince my mum to buy this. I had an Amstrad, and I loved the HeroQuest board game. And if the CPU played the bad guy, then I didn't have to sait for friends/my dad to play with me! And the game came on the free tape on the front! Except of course it didn't, it was only a demo - silly me...


I won't post the entire contents page here - it's on my imgur page - you can work out how to get back - you're smart. But it's worth looking at the mag's line-up there.
The editor: Rod seemed to be a middle-aged man as far as I could tell (I think he was only about 30 at the time!) but this guy was editor of AA for ages, contributed to every other Future games mag after that, and is now in charge of all of Future's photography things. Legend.
The technical editor: Adam appears further up this page as the chap in charge of planet GameBoy. Also did a lot of the clever hardwarey bits for the various PC mags.
The staff writer: the guy in charge of Halo.

This is basically what I looked forward to every month. Free things. No internet, kids; only way to see demos and stuff, especially since I had a mental problem that stops me from realising I should purchase games based on positive review scores.
HeroQuest, as mentioned before, was the main drawer. I aced the demo, because it matched the board game layout, and I'd been through that about 800 times. I loved it, but couldn't convince my folks to get the full game. I guess it was a bit daft if I had the board game... and in retrospect... it doesn't bring the world to life.
Technician Ted was the free old game this month. I think Hewson, the publisher, went under or something - a lot of theirs featured. This is basically like Jet Set Willy, but set in a factory that makes silicon chips, and even more bafflingly unfairly difficult. [/url]Look at (and listen to) this nonsense. A not wonderful version of Strauss'' Radetzky March, interrupted by the whining noise Ted's jump makes. And then you hit something and lose a life. To complete this game, you had to reach certain rooms within a certain time. And of course, being a UK-based computer game of the mid-80s, they'd never give you any indication that you were screwed, should you fail. A few issues later, they published a cheat that stopped the timer, gave you infinite lives, and let you warp rooms with the game paused. Here I found out that you had to get to your first task within 3 minutes. Without the cheat, I never got to that room AT ALL.
Then there's the 3D Construction Kit demo game. This was the equivalent of Unity in 1991. This is one full-price Amstrad thing I did get for my birthday. It came with a gold VHS tape, narrated by comedian and now convicted paedophile Crhis Langham. But wow! 3D worlds! The possibilities were endless! Except they weren't; here's the Amstrad Version, in all of its 2fps glory. This is why I don't give a shit about 60fps and 4K.
Also there was a free machine code building tool which was technically a great thing to give away if you're interested in learning Amstrad Machine Code but (*falls asleep*)

Nearly everyone had access to a tape deck, but not everyone had a disk drive, so they gave tapes away, and included a utility to transfer. BTW, have you ever seen an Amstrad floppy disk? Some people might not have even seen a PC disk at this stage mind - it's the save icon - but Amstrad disks were weird rectangular jobs.

I won't show the whole letters page, but, if you want to draw comparison with social media today:


We've had to cancel the opinion column because people are arseholes to each other


You published a solution to a recent game, and despite you giving spoiler warnings, I looked anyway, and am blaming you for my lack of willpower

There were three separate letters sections - this main one, the technical section (not linked here as it's a bit dull, but again, on the Imgur) and another later on...

On the main news page: Germany making an Amstrad clone; someone starting a new Public Domain library (I don't have time to being to explain this here, unless anyone wants to know), GamesMaster the TV show is coming soon (also, I am very old), and Amstrad's failed console is now ridiculously cheap, as it's based on the old Amstrad hardware, but with a graphics chip that allows more colours. However, due to the limited userbase, developers just ported their old Amstrad tape/disk games to cartridge, and didn't bother upgrading the colours. Also, soon after the console's launch, Amstrad launched the "Plus" versions of the CPC, which included the graphics chip and cartridge slot. And for some reason no-one bought the GX4000...

Then the charts!

We were quite poor, so I didn't get many full-price games, and mostly ended up with budget ones. I did actually get the Turtles game eventually though! I'd seen the NES version at this point, and like all dipshit kids, thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. Of course, we now know better. And the CPC version is even worse. It is, however, possible to finish the fucking thing.
I didn't have Switchblade; however, I do wish I'd played that back in the day. It suffered from old computer issues - flick-screen scrolling etc., but it still looks pretty cool - it even had a mini opening cinematic, and was a quite early example of stylised graphics, with the reds and teals (this was also on the Plus, so this was a design choice as opposed to a limitation).
Somehow, I did end up with many of the budget games on that chart. MagicLand Dizzy was probably the pinnacle of the Dizzy formula, an actually-possible adventure game. Panic Dizzy, though, was a shit puzzle game with Dizzy's name slapped across.
Again, probably because of money reasons, I had the Quattro compilations - and they were both pretty good lists. Quattro Cartoon had random platformer Wizard Willy (I know, it looks basic as shit now), super cute adventure Little Puff (Spectrum version here - I don't think anyone can get the CPC one running on an emulator), the absolutely baffling and impenetrable Frankenstein Jr. (you'll notice the guy in the video plays it for about 12 seconds), and the still-a-bit mystifying Olli and Lissa 3. I've only ever found 2 games in this series, looking through the archives!
I also had Quattro Adventure, which had the original Dizzy (you get the idea by now), Ghost Hunters - which used a light-gun-style cursor AND a 2D platformer, meaning you could shoot yourself (head to 0:36 for maximum GHOST HUNTERS), Super Robin Hood - which looks far less Super than I remember - but is the reason I sometimes wish people Good Luck Robin Hood, and Vampire, which is just impossible. You can fall down that hole on the first screen, and then you're knackered. It was one of those games...
I also had Cavemania, which, despite the fact that the main character jumps like a bellend, I actually finished. Awesome music as well. And lastly, Continental Circus, which I bloody loved. It got a high review score, and was regarded as a pretty impressive reconstruction of the for some reason forgotten arcade game. I didn't complete this at the time, but this is one game I can put down to me not "gitting gud" as opposed to the usual 8-bit computer reasons of complete opacity.

Sorry, that went on a bit, and the this bit in the gossip/previews section:

That last paragraph... yeah, what did happen to Activision, huh? Remember those guys?

Although AA's circulation went up, the Amstrad was on its last legs, and stuff was disappearing from high-street shelves. Therefore there was a larger demand for mail-order. A random sample of ads include:


This is pretty cool - printers were shitty in the olden days, and the Amstrad could only really send the basic character set of text; this thing added crazy foreign letters and suff.


Then there's a general ad for stuff like this...


...and this slightly more baffling one.

Wait - what was that in the middle of the page?

HeroQuest - as mentioned before on the tape. They quite liked it! The board game is not as blue. THE BEST THING ABOUT HEROQUEST


Turrican 2. 95%! Like most things, it hasn't aged terrifically well, and games tended to sacrifice smoothness for things that were "highly regarded". I don't know - is this playable today? It was impressive at the time. But, with today's eyes, it's not smooth enough, and the main sprite is too big - you hit something before you see it...


Gauntlet 3. Clearly not made by the people who made the arcade originals! Also, it's a Speccy port. You know a Spectrum Port, right? The Spectrum was more popular than the Amstrad, so games tended to be programmed for those primarily; however the Speccy could only show one colour in a block of the screen at one time. Therefore the Amstrad used to get a lot of games with monochrome graphics, and unnecessarily slower (due to the code being ported across, but not in the most efficient way). Again, they give it a good score, but it looks absolutely bloody unplayable to me.


Mega Phoenix. This is them "putting the boot in". It doesn't look like the worst, but...

Budget re-releases get monochrome pages.

On the first page, there's Anarchy, which was given away on a later covertape - quite a cool little puzzle game, and the music's awesome. Also some boring tennis game. And Impossamole, which I don't really know about, but I thought it would please our forumite Monty - we still remember you, buddy! It doesn't look wonderful - again, like a lot of later Amstrad games, it's technically more impressive, with the scrolling etc., but the penalty of slowdown means it doesn't look as much fun as earlier games with hindsight. Also, as they mention in the review, Multiload issues. Loading new levels into memory nowadays is quite a simple thing. With the limited RAM of the CPC, bigger games needed to do this, and if you had a tape game, that meant waiting a couple of minutes for the next bit of tape to load. You die and need to start again? Get rewinding that tape, so you can find the first level again.  


Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, however, gets a 94%. Hi-Tec software got the Hanna-Barbera license, and made a bunch of games based on your favourite (read: least favourite and identical) cartoon characters. I think I had the Ruff and Reddy game - remember those guys, kids? And later on, the Jetsons game got a 10% score. But this apparently is one of the greatest games of all time. Is it? Is it? Is it? Is it? It was so good, apparently, that they couldn't get the name right in the header:

Scoopy doopy do!

There was still a section for text adventures. I forgive this for this time, because gaming was in its infancy, and non-text adventures weren't nearly as good at telling their story. However, anyone in 2018 who tries to claim that there are "the real best games" might need to be locked away.
Anyway, this is the other section that has its own letters section. It does seem weird that so much correspondence happened within one month, but, hey, this was before e-mail.

Hold on a mi...

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT

Here's a sample page of the cheat section. And in those days, this means hacking the game. As you can see at the top of the page, you'd type in your own cheats in BASIC, save them, and load them just before the main game - essentially a manual gameshark code (in fact, that's what the MultiFace was). This seems like madness now - or possibly illegal.
Below that, a map for Switchblade - or Switcthblade, presumably as the map was sent in by Sylvester the Cat.

Well, that's about it; what this shows is that the PC/console invasion was inevitable, as the UK computer scene was basically impenetrable.On the back page, there was a phone-line competition thing, and you could win
THE
FUTURE

I actually did that - in fact, in a move contrary to every sitcom ever, my mum suggested I do so. I got through the multiple-choice automated bit, but then went quiet when I had to think of a celebrity I'd play my Super Famicom with, as a tie-breaker. No Super Famicom for me...