There are some truly fantastic games currently available on all the next gent systems, and each and every one of them is worthy of your hard-earned cash. Dead Space 2, Mario Sports Mix and Test Drive 2 Unlimited offer something for everyone and are all currently available to buy from www.ShopTo.net.

Simply spend £10 or more at ShopTo on any of their items that are currently in stock and you’ll get a £1 discount off your purchase. The discount price is available until 28-02-2011 and it is limited to the first 2000 customer orders, so don’t delay if you want to save yourself some cash.

Simply enter the following code: SHOPTOIP02 at checkout in order to receive your discount.

Darran, Stuart and Rick pose with their lovely award

Well this is a pleasant surprise. We’ve only gone and won the UK game’s industry most prestigious award!

For those who don’t know, the GMAs (or Game Media Awards) are given out every year. People within the industry nominate from a whole host of different categories ranging from Best Website to Best Magazine and 150 judges eventually pick the short list finalists. It’s a huge event that draws a large number of press and this year the number of attending people was so large the event had to be moved to London’s swanky Bloomsbury Ballroom (previous functions were held at Jongleurs).

So anyway, there we were sitting at a table, munching on burgers and hot dogs and conversing with the lovely ladies of Sega Europe while the awards were being announced. We weren’t expecting too much, simply because we’ve been nominated for the last 3 years in a row and it’s always gone to either Edge or sister mag GamesTM. Imagine our surprise then when the amusing Stuart Francis – not the crush a grape one – finally managed to get around to announcing the winner of best magazine and it turned out to be us!

All I really remember is choking on my beer, excitedly punching the air – the charming Pat Garrett would later refer to us as ‘going bonkers’ on his live blog update – and rushing up onto the stage with Stuart and our editor in chief Rick Porter. Only to be hit by glaring lights and be rendered virtually speechless, which to anyone who knows me, doesn’t usually happen. Instead of giving a stirring heartfelt speech I managed to witter out something along the lines of “I was convinced PC Zone were going to win this” and about 25 thank yous until I was politely directed off the stage.

So with hindsight here’s what I would have said.
“I’m absolutely delighted that Retro Gamer has won this award. Stuart, Stephen and myself have worked incredibly hard over the past year and done everything we can to make Retro Gamer as enjoyable as possible. If it wasn’t for our loyal readership, who are never afraid to point out where we might be going wrong, or our crack team of freelancers who deliver so many great exclusives we wouldn’t be anywhere near the magazine we actually are and it’s a real honour that our humble little magazine has finally been recognised.”

On second thoughts maybe my first response was better…

Ultimately though, while this award belongs to Stuart, Steve and myself, it’s also your award, because without you guys we’d just be creating an amazing magazine that no one actually read.

This is the Sun Titan. A massive red giant who will create a headache for your opponant.

I’ve been taking a break from conventional computer games recently and hammering the hell out of Magic the Gathering. In particular the latest core set.

At one stage the core set consisted of 100% reprinted cards and was released every other year. As a result it was a great introduction to the excellent card game that is Magic the Gathering, but it wasn’t off as much use to seasoned players, many of whom would already own the cards.

Wizards changed this with the release of Magic 2010, as it was the first core set to feature 50% of new cards that players had never seen before. While this was initially met with howls of scepticism – after all Magic is already a relatively expensive hobby and a near own brand new set wasn’t going to make the wallet stretch any further – key cards like Vampire Nocturnus and Baneslayer Angel soon ensured that many collectors bought into it.

So now we come to the latest release and we’re delighted to say that it’s the best core set for some time. This is due to several important factors. Firstly it’s excellent fun to draft. There are some great bombs in the form of big creatures and plenty of removal, ensuring that games rarely drag on and can be full of momentum shift between the two players. Another nice touch is how the 5 core colours continue to be perfectly tweaked and represented. Blue now has some excellent counterspells, red has been bolstered by some strong new burn (direct damage) while green has plenty of nice new meaty creatures to attack with. Black gets a great new discard spell, and while it loses Vampire Nocturnus, it does receive Captivating Vampire, which can begin stealing creatures if the conditions are right. White keeps Baneslayer Angel, arguably one of the best cards ever in print, and also gets the wonderful Serra Ascendant, which has finally made life gain decks actually viable.

By far the best addition to the set however is the gigantic new titans; huge powerful giants that completely swing the game when they come into play. Each titan costs six mana to cost and is a 6/6 creature. If this wasn’t enough they all have specific abilities related to their colours and a further ability that activates whenever they enter play or attack. Primeval Titan for example has trample and can fetch two lands a turn from your library, while Grave Titan has death touch and let’s you put two 2/2 zombies into play.

As a result these powerful mythic rares are becoming extremely desirable on the second hand market, with sales of the green Primeval Titan already reaching £40 for a single card.

With Scars of Mirrirdon due out very, very soon there’s never been a better time to investigate the world’s very best collectible card game. For more information head to www.magicthegathering.com

Joffa in typical off-the-wall mode

It’s with a heavy heart that we must announce that famed Spectrum coder, Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith passed away at 10.30 on Saturday 26 June at the age of 43.

Although Jonathan was something of a recluse – his last public appearance was at last year’s Byte Back event – he was a regular on certain forums like World of Spectrum where he was affectionately known as Frobrush.

Famed for his technical coding, he was behind some truly impressive Spectrum conversions including, Green Beret, Hyper Sports, Terra Cresta and Ping Pong. He was also a dab hand a creating brand new games, many of which featured his trademark slickness and still remain popular with Spectrum fans everywhere. Cobra, Daley Thompson’s Supertest and Firefly were all excellent examples of his 8-bit work, while the likes of Midnight Resistance, Red Heat and the highly underated Hudson Hawk represented his 16-bit work.

Famed for his off-the-wall humour he was a staunch member of the Spectrum community and was actually working on a new game called Saucer.

Farewell Joffa, you will be sadly missed.

If you’re a fan of retro games you should really consider checking out Microsoft’s new Game Room service. Available for both Xbox 360 and Windows, it’s a virtual arcade that not only allows you to collect classic games, but also lets you compete against friends in a friendly online environment.

A virtual arcade you can fill with all your favourite games

Anyway, for the last couple of weeks we’ve been running our own challenges on the Retro Gamer forum and we’d love it if you could join us. All you need to do is add your gamertag to our main Game Room list and look out for whatever game we’re currently playing. Then it’s just a case of getting the highest score you can and posting it for everyone to see. The winner will get heaps of deserved praise bestowed on them, the loser will be simply laughed at.

You can get more information by visiting http://www.retrogamer.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=18 We’ll see you all online

As many regular readers will know, one of my passions beside Strider is the excellent collectible card game Magic the Gathering. Anyway, the latest set, Rise of the Eldrazi was released a couple of weeks ago and now that I’ve been able to witness all aspects of the game I’ve decided to give you a little lowdown on it.

First off Rise of the Eldrazi is all about the Eldrazi, huge monsters that not only cost a fortune to cast, but have truly devastating abilities once they do come into play. While this means that games have slowed down greatly compared to the releases of Zendikar and WorldWake it does mean that the metagame has greatly changed, mainly thanks to the awesome new play mechanics that have been introduced.

The most exciting of these is Annihilator. It’s an aggressive combat mechanic that all Eldrazi possess and it really helps to cripple your opponent. Whenever a creature with Annihilator attacks the defending player must sacrifice a set amount of permanents as stipulated by the attacking card. Needless to say it makes the Eldrazi pretty much unstoppable once they’re on the battlefield, so you’ll really need to have your wits about you whenever you’re dealing with them.

The next mechanic, Totem Armor is an enchantment that is cast on your creatures and gives them a second chance of life in addition to any actual bonuses the actual enchantment offers. When a creature with Totem Armor is destroyed the creature is instead saved and the enchantment is deleted. Needless to say, this gives aggressive colours based around red and blacks no end of problems because all your creatures effectively have to be killed twice.

Another interesting new mechanic is Level Up. By paying a specific casting cost it’s possible to level up certain creatures. This cost can be played as often as you like (providing you have the mana to meet the demands) but can only be done in your own turn. When a creature hits a specific level it will sometimes (but not always) grow in power and toughness but also gain new abilities as well. It’s a great new addition for decks playing many small creatures, as it gives them as way of still being effective as the game continues.

The last, but easily the most interesting mechanic is Rebound. Whenever a card with Rebound is cast it is exiled (removed from play) instead of immediately going to the Graveyard (where are cast cards end up). Then, at the beginning of your next upkeep you’ll be given the opportunity to cast the card for free. It’s a great little concept, although instant spells (spells which can be cast at any moment) aren’t quite as effective the next turn around as your opponent will know to expect them.

In addition to the above mechanics, Rise of Eldrazi also features colourless creatures, the Eldrazi. These gargantuans cost huge amounts of mana to cast and are extremely powerfully, easily becoming game changers when they hit the battlefield. Despite the high casting costs, many cards now creature Eldrazi Spawn, small weak creatures that can be used a blockers or sacrificed to create colourless mana. Needless to say, a smart deck builder can soon get around those seemingly high casting costs.

So what do these play mechanics mean then for the game in general? Well as noted the actual pace has greatly slowed down, meaning that draft games do take longer to play. The same can be said for normal constructed games, although key cards like Polymorph are already abusing the high costing Eldrazi casts by effectively cheating them into play without paying their actual casting costs.

Rise of the Eldrazi is a fantastic new addition to the core Magic franchise. While it definitely isn’t for fast-paced players, it does take the game into exciting new directions, something that has always been Magic’s core strength. It’s still too early to see what impact the new set will have on future tournaments – although polymorph decks featuring the Eldrazi and a new Planeswalker deck featuring Gideon Jura have been doing extremely well – but you can rest assured that its impact will be felt for many months to come.

For more information about Rise of the Eldrazi and Magic the Gathering in general please visit http://community.wizards.com/mtguk

I am a weak-willed man. Despite having had Monster Hunter Tri for several weeks now, the limited edition pack kept seductively calling to me. Whenever I was in Game or GameStation I would hear it call “Darran, Darran, buy me, play me, love me.”

I was always strong enough to resist it though, probably because my wife is normally wife me and she’d remind me that it’s pointless paying £60 for something when you already have a version that’s totally playable at home.

Of course, you can’t explain to your other half however that something is better because it comes in a cardboard box and has a free plastic monster head with it, as they’ll never believe you. It’s true though. I already own Monster Hunter Tri, and the Wii Speak device, and the free Classic Controller Pro that comes with it, but it still managed to ensnare me.

Now all I have to do is sneak it home and pray that the wife doesn’t notice it. Wish me luck!

I love cooking things in Monster Hunter almost as much as I love fighting monsters

Nintendo was kind enough to send us a DSiLL goody bag yesterday, so here’s a run down of what was in it and how the machine itself performs.

Nintendo's goody bag that turned up yesterday.

In addition to the new DSi we received a gigantic oversized cup, a huge calculator (being the child I aim I immediately spelled out boobless on it) and a ridiculously large gummy bear on a stick, which I didn’t give to the kids in fear that the sugar rush would make them hyperactive for the rest of the month. All in all it’s a nice package and typical of the lengths Nintendo will go to to show off a new product.

“But what of the machine itself?” we hear you ask. Well it’s large, amazingly large. In fact, it seems a little too large at first. We can’t imagine many kids going mad for this – although my nine-year old maannged to run the battery out playing Professor Layton) but it’s definately suitable for those who found the neat compact size of the DSi a little crampy.

The new stylus is like a ballpoint pen.

Dwarfing the original DSi, the most unintentionally amusing thing we noticed about the Japanese machine we were sent is that the box reads out DS iLL (it will be called XL over here). Aside from that the new screens make the machine perfect for 3D games (although 2D titles didn’t look quite so nice to us). A sharper, higher resolution screen would have been preferable, but titles still look impressive, with Professor Layton and Spirit Tracks looking particularly nice.

We would advice against importing a Japanese machine, mainly as the DSi games are region-locked and you’ll only be able to access the Japanese DSi Ware store. While some have been quite cynical over this new DS, we actually prefer it to the previous model, mainly as it feels nicer to hold and those larger screens are definately easier on the eyes.

Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. Sod it… Shoot them anyway

I’m not usually a fan of first-person shooters. They’re far too clichéd, full of idiots online and often like to push controversy for no other reason than to try and get a few extra sales.

So you’ll probably be wondering why I can’t get enough of 2K’s rather excellent Borderlands; which, by all definitions is just another FPS entering an already saturated market. Well that’s what I thought. Well actually I thought: “Right, so it’s a cel-shaded Fallout III, well done Gearbox”. My cynicism couldn’t have been more poorly placed however, as Borderlands has become one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences that I’ve had on my PS3.

For you see, while Borderlands appears to have all the trappings of a first-person shooter, it actually has more in common with the likes of Diable, Phantasy Star Online and World of Warcraft and I bloody love Diablo, Phantasy Star Online and World of Warcraft.

Critical hits are not only satisfying to pull off, they look nice too.

Initially though you may wonder what all the fuss is about for you’ll be wondering around the beautiful cel-shaded wasteland shooting a hell of a lot of rats and doing very little else. Take heart though as once you reach level five and start getting new attributes Borderlands really begins to open up. You meet numerous NPCs that give you quests and you’ll be immediately rewarded with an item and precious experience points once you complete them. Some will simply require you to shoot a set amount of enemies of harvest precious crystals, while others will require you to take out huge bosses that take a massive amount of punishment before they finally keel over and die. What makes Borderlands work however is the sheer organicness that surrounds quests. Complete one and a couple more crop up; finish those and you’ll get an even larger amount to play around with. It’s a great way of opening up Borderlands’ gigantic game world and you’ll always find yourself with something to do, and perhaps most importantly, plenty to shoot.

Enemies will often surround you, so make good use of second wind.

While enemies come thick and fast, Gearbox have given you plenty of ways to combat them. There are hundreds of gun combinations to mess around with, shields can be worn to give you some initially protection from enemy fire, while money is liberally scattered around the game world. Then there’s the Second Wind mode that enables you to revive yourself should you get killed. As the screen fades to black you can instantly bring yourself back to life by killing an opponent. This amazing idea becomes an essential strategy as you continually wound enemies so you can keep cheating death.

Get a vehicle and Borderlands really begins to open up

Arguably the greatest aspect of Borderlands however is its fantastic multiplayer co-op mode. Four players are able to team up with each other to complete quests and suddenly you’re playing the Dreamcast’s Phantasy Star Online again. The comaraderie that develops as you’re fighting huge rats or beating down behemoths like Sledge is immensely satisfying and a world away from most over first-person shooters.

Add in vehicles and a healthy level cap and Borderlands offers something for everybody. If you’re interested in playing with me and have access to a PS3 then my PSN name is Strideristhebest. Otherwise check out these great reviews at Nowgamer.net so you can see what all the fuss is about.

PC Version

Xbox Version

Readers of the magazine will see that there’s a special celebration of Crash magazine in today’s issue. I was lucky enough to travel up to Ludlow and visit co-founders Roger Kean and Oliver Frey and also Matthew Uffindell. I’m also fortunate enoug to work with two ex staff members of the magazine as well, Nick Roberts and Mark Kendrick. What follows is the full interview with Nick and Mark, which was sadly too long to fit in the actual issue.
I’ve also included a few YouTube videos of my visit. Enjoy.

Nick Roberts

Nick started off as a staff writer at Crash and moved up to deputy editor. He now works at Imagine Publishing.

How did you get your job on Crash?
I was just a reader picking up his monthly copy of the mag for 95p when I discovered in the mag that the Playing Tips writer, Hannah Smith, was leaving. Luckily I also lived in Ludlow, the home of Crash Micro Games Action, which was a big bonus. I don’t really know what possessed me, but I sent in a letter to Roger Kean, on Alphacom 32 thermal paper printed out from my Spectrum, asking if I could take over. I hadn’t really given my future career any thought at that time, I was only 15 in 1987, but as it turned out that piece of thermal paper set me off on a career that has lasted 22 years as Roger took me on as an after school reviewer.
I came in and played Spectrum games, and they paid me £5 a time! I think my first ever review was Finder’s Keepers, and I impressed Roger as I knew who had programmed it and what they had done before. As you can imagine, I soon gave up my paper round and dedicated all my free time to Crash. After about three months I got the Playing Tips job that I had written in for when Lloyd Mangram couldn’t be bothered to do it any more. I soon discovered why… typing in long POKEs listings was a bitch!

What was it like working on the magazine?
It was like being a member of an exclusive club, and very rock ‘n’ roll. There was a great bunch of people around at the time… Robin Candy, Mike Dunn, Ben Stone, Richard Eddy, Mark Kendrick, Julian Rignall… many of them are still big in publishing and videogames today. We were all working above Victoria Wine in Ludlow, playing the latest games, getting taken out to lunch by PR people, going off on trips that you would never normally get to do and ending up in The Bull after work for a few pints. Just don’t tell my mum… I was only 15 at the start remember! I have fond memories of the launch of Lotus Turbo Esprit where I got taken for a 200mph ride in a sports car up Ludlow by-pass. I remember visiting the Rank VIP cinema in London for a preview of a new sci-fi film called Robocop as we were writing about the game. We used to have a great time at the PCW Show too where we were made to feel like popstars as readers queued up for autographs! That’s a weird feeling, doesn’t happen much these days.

Was there any pressure from publishers when writing reviews?
Yeah, much the same as it is now, but I think in the 80s they were much more open about simply splashing some cash to gain a good review. Not that any of it every influenced Crash’s writers of course. I do remember a particularly bad game from a software company (mentioning no names, but the company name rhymed with Potion) where the PR guy simply said “You know it’s rubbish, I know it’s rubbish, do you fancy some new CDs?!” We refused.

What did working on Crash teach you?
I think the magazine, and the various editors I worked with, gave me a strong work ethic. It was the best work experience I could have wished for, learning from the best in the business about writing style and magazine production. We all worked hard to hit those deadlines, and I’m still doing the job to this day and loving it. I can’t imagine where I would be if it wasn’t for Crash and Newsfield Publications. I owe Roger a lot, and I thank him for the break.

How has the editorial process changed over the years?
In my opinion, things were a lot more focused then. We had PCW 8256 green-screen word processors that we wrote the magazine on, and that’s about all they could do – process words. As an old fogey 37 year old working in magazine production today I see the 18 year olds starting out and they have so many distractions to take them away from the games playing and writing. When they come in there’s email to check, then there’s their favourite website to look at, maybe check out the online news or write something for their blog. Then their mobile goes off and they have to return the text message. The internet is a wonderful tool for magazine publishers, but I hate to think how many man hours are lost each day that were spent doing the job back in the 80s and 90s.
You had to be extra careful about mistakes too. The Editor would obviously edit what you did on his Apricot computer, and then your review would be type-set – the words came back from Tortoiseshell Press on long strips of special paper – all in columns and in the right fonts. Then the magazine was pieced together by hand by arty types with a scalpel. These days right up to the moment you press Print on your pdf you can change words and pictures around. Of course the biggest change is that today one man with a Mac can make a magazine – back then it was a ten-strong team of people in various departments! Of course the Christmas parties were better when there was ten of you…

Is it true you’re Crash’s longest running writer?
Yes that’s right. I started on issue 47 and wrote for the magazine until issue 98 when the company went bust. 51 issues man and boy! I worked my way up to Assistant Editor by the end.

It must have been devastating when Crash closed 2 issues short of the big 100.
It was a shame not to get to 100, but to be honest the magazine was a shadow of its former self by then. 32 thin pages with a cassette glued to the front. Poor old Crash became the unloved older child of the company, while young whipper-snapper magazines were being launched to cover the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive. I just wish they had kept the name going, but evolved the magazine into a multiformat mag to take on C&VG, or something. It might still be around today. Mmmm… that’s an idea!

Mark Kendrick

Mark Kendrick was an art editor at Crash. He is now creative director at Imagine Publishing

So what did you do at Newsfield?
My first role was actually Designer, which was part of a team of staff who literally put the company’s magazines together. I was looking at job section in my local Birmingham newspaper one week after having a pretty awful week in my design job at the time which was as ‘Visualiser’ and ‘Finished artist’ doing packaging work for companies like Cadbury’s. I saw an recruitment advert in there for ‘graphic artist required for magazines’. I applied over the phone and arranged for an early evening interview ‘after I finished work’. I drove the 90 minute trip to Ludlow where in ‘Crash Towers’ I was interviewed by Oli Frey and the Production Director Dave Western on the top floor in the art studio area, where I showed my obligatory portfolio of work and some pieces of illustration I’d done too. They were looking to expand on their portfolio of mags and I was specifically interviewed to work within the studio on all magazines but with an emphasis on a new title which was in the pipeline called ‘LM magazine’. After a 40 minute chat I was offered the job there and then! I started four weeks later in September ’86, but… I was late on first day! My car broke down on ‘Clee Hill’ and I eventually got there about an hour late. Once there my first design work was actually on Zzap! 64 (still my all time favourite title to work on) on a ‘Jon Twiddy’ interview. From there I worked daily on Crash, Zzap!, Amtix, Einstein User and then worked with Art Director Gordon Druce and Oli on the launch of ‘LM’. It was a fantastic start to my career.

What was it like working there?
I learned very quickly that this was unlike any working environment that I’d known or have experienced since. It was unique in that it was like we were creating something very special indeed at a great time of technological development. It was a wild time, when computer gaming was the new ‘rock n roll’ and the magazines and indeed the people who worked on them were like superstars. Roger and Oli were the ‘sages’ there, but on a daily basis the teams were largely self reliant to craft the magazines. There was no real ‘production workflow’ or anything like you get today. and the editorial staff such as Julian Rignall, Gaz Penn, Ciaran Brennan and so on worked incredibly hard and played hard too. As such, for designers it was a case of effectively ‘two weeks on/two weeks off’, where nothing really happened in the first week of a mag cycle at all, but by the last week everyone was literally working 24 hours a day. I lost count the number of times I popped out to get take away and bring it back to the office for the evening work. Everyone had their own knives and forks at their desks. Ludlow is a small provincial town, with a mix of incredibly young, but enthusiastic local and ‘imported’ talent, so the company developed it’s own social culture, which was part of what made the magazines and working on them so special. Just reading a copy of Crash or Zzap! you, even now, get a sense of ‘belonging’ to a unique group of people who were ‘living the dream’. As crazy as this may seem I’m really not overstating’ this, as I believe this injected the magazines with magic, which made them what they were. To illustrate the effect the mags had on people, we even used to get people going on holiday to Ludlow just to get a chance of seeing ‘King St’ offices and having their magazine signed by the team. They were crazy times indeed.

What did you learn from working with Oliver?
Perhaps the most important thing I learn from Oli was to have confidence in your own ‘style’. Oli’s illustration work is so distinctive and against a backdrop of so many other styles going on at the time, his work has continued to this day to be enduring. Overall though, from Oli I learned the visual aspects of magazine craft, and in particular how cover structure and the balance between type and art is essential making the difference between a cover that attracts and sells, and one that just presents the info. There is a big difference between the two. Oh, and the speed that confidence gives you. Oli could create an amazing piece of art overnight. I was staggered how that was possible. Especially given how basic his airbrush set up seemed. I applied his use of speed to layout and I prided myself how accurate and quick I could layout a magazine. I remember once I designed a whole issue of Zzap! 64 in two days. I didn’t sleep, but I did it. I think it was the ‘Creatures’ issue.
I also learned a lot from Roger. Roger’s skill in editorial magazine craft cannot be understated. Even now everyone who ever worked with him will quote him in relation to the golden rules of magazine craft. His attention to detail in flatplanning, editorial balance, feature elements and general use of ‘English’ in terms of subbing and proofing set the standard for me. Everyone who had the opportunity to work on the classic Newsfield magazines such as Crash and Zzap! worked on magazines that set the gold standard for mag craft. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have worked for two such talented people that without whom I doubt I’d be in the position I am now, and I’d argue the magazine industry wouldn’t be what it is today without them.

How have video game magazines changed from a design point of view over the years?
Where shall I start? Back when I started things were sooo different. For a start there were no computers that you could really relate as magazine design tools. The text was written by editorial on old Apricot word processors. The text files were bagged and popped down the road to a typesetters (Tortoiseshell Press) who ran out the strips of text. We had a ‘runner’ who regularly had to go and get the text for the mags from there which would turn up in big fat rolled bundles. Back then we used wax machines for applying glue to back of strips of text, which we cut up with a scalpel and stuck to artboards which had a page template marked on them by specially printed ‘bloo’ ink. This ink was invisible when exposed to a light camera that converted the page art to four colour film plates. This was called ‘reprographics’ and we had a six strong team of people who took my black and white art page layouts and applied my ‘invisible bloo’ colour and tint instructions.
Back then, when designing pages you had to imagine in your head how the page would look finished. There was no ‘preview’, no colour correction, no InDesign, no Photoshop and no Quark Xpress. It was all done by hand. This meant that the ‘barriers to entry’ was very high for anyone wanting to create a magazine. A magazine was really crafted by hand, and it was a highly skilled profession. It still is today, but things have changed. In the very late 80s/early 90s Apple computers running early versions of Quark Xpress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator meant that a single workstation could create a whole magazine there on screen. The impact was immense and immediate. The magazine industry changed within a year, and gone were the artboard days and reprographics departments. The design and creative industry went through a huge upheaval and there was a lot of fallout as technology made things easier but there were casualties and people like myself had a whole new skillset to learn very quickly. Luckily I did, and made the move to computer based design on issue 74 of Zzap! 64. I remember it clearly, as all of a sudden you could change colours of boxouts whenever you wanted. Typefaces became like clay as you could model anythign you wanted. Layouts allowed for text to ‘flow’ around pictures and the ability to merge pictures and text in a way never seen before. It was a revolution, and with it came new magazines, new ideas and more entrants into the market. It became much easier to make a magazine, and unfortunately Newsfield found it difficult to move quickly enough to capitalise on this. But in terms of magazine design, it was the best thing to happen in for hundreds of years. A designer could really let rip creatively. But this also led to a lot of hideous mag design too by those who, without some core disciplines in the basic arts which traditional paste-up layout, threw the kitchen sink on every page of layout because now they could and it was ‘free’ thanks to new tech. The early to mid 90s was a bad time for video games design. It took quite a while for the disciplines to come back in, which it did thankfully. I recall one of the first that set the standards for the ‘new vision’ was the original ‘Official PlayStation Magazine’ from Future. It was very clean, done in FF Meta font and was lovely. It was very clean indeed. This was one of the first that settled things down and brought magazine design back to about presenting content as opposed to ‘turning tricks’ such as ‘Ultimate Future Games’ did a couple of years before (although, I did really like this!). These days magazine design has come full circle. It’s about presenting well written, informative content in a way that uses restrained but distinctive typography and a template that hangs the content together in a cohesive structure that allows for creativity without compromising on the reason behind the magazine’s job, which is to excite, enthuse and inform. And in terms of videogames titles is exactly what Oli, Roger and Franco set out to do with Crash back in 1984. I hope they are proud of their legacy.

Why do you think the magazine is still held with such high esteem?
I think Crash is held in such high esteem as it was the right product, at the right time with the right tone. In under two years the huge lists of command lines required on the ZX80 just to get a sprite to move on screen was replaced by pocket money video gaming on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 that had story, music and full interaction with the player. It was a fast moving, exciting time. Crash came along to fuel the excitement and give a sense of community to a new massively expanding hobby of home computing and games playing to the ‘Star Wars’ generation just when home computing became accessible to all. Crash and Zzap! 64 were of the time and hugely successful, when there was no email, internet or 24 hour TV. The magazines and the people on those mags were central for readers to interact with, identify with and idolise. I look back at the mags now and I really think it would be tough for another ‘independent’ videogames magazine to top over 100,000 sales every month ever again. The will forever be the giants of single format games titles.

Tell us an interesting anecdote about your time at Crash
Tell you something that’s printable? That may be tough without consulting my lawyer. I’ve so many stories about my time at Newsfield and after that when the company became Europress Impact that maybe I should I write a book. or example, did you know I’m actually the longest serving team member on Zzap! 64?
If there’s one enduring thing that Crash, Zzap! and Newsfield gave me besides my career (which is seriously still in mags!) it’s that I met and married my wonderful wife on Crash. Claire started work as a staff writer on the mag, and I met her while one day berating Stuart Wynne (editor of Crash) one why his editorial work was sooo late. He was terrible at timekeeping and I’d always be working really late thanks to his slovenly ways. (Only joking Stu ). Anyway, Claire had just started and was scared to death of me after hearing this. So when I popped over to say hi, I got a very steely response indeed. Still, it didn’t put me off, as 18 months later we were married, still are to this day and now with a wonderful 19 month old daughter.
Personally I have so much to thank Oli and Roger for as they not only gave me my training in magazine publishing which I still appreciate to this day, and of which I have such wonderful memories of, but my life has been utterly shaped by the eight years I spent working and ‘living’ those magazines. These days I’m lucky enough that any chance I get I try to incorporate some of the style of Crash and Zzap! 64 into the magazines I now produce. Take a look at the early retro section of Gamestm to see my homage to Crash, or in RetroGamer, the ‘back to the 80s’ section uses a Zzap! 64 template and has brought back the ‘reviewer head’ drawings. So in a way Crash isn’t dead but alive and well in every mag I create in some way.