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.

Drake gets down and dirty.

Naughty Dog’s new game sets impossibly high standards for all other action adventures to match. A bold claim perhaps, but from the minute you start playing and find yourself hanging on for dear life to a train carriage that’s dangerously hanging off a cliff top you know that Uncharted 2 is something special.

The first thing that hits you is the fantastic sense of scale that Naughty Dog has managed to capture. As with the original Uncharted you really do feel that hero Nathan Drake is fighting against both the elements as well as the numerous bad guys that he’s constantly required to mow down.

The second thing that hits you is that no one, absolutely no one is able to craft cut scenes as well as Naughty Dog. Meticulously directed and featuring superb acting from the cast – they record their lines with each other and various props to make them as authentic as possible – they make efforts by all other developers look childish in the extreme.

Uncharted 2's visuals look absolutely glorious.

Tightly scripted and brilliantly paced they draw you into the onscreen action and are so mesmerising that even my non-gaming wife (she lost interest in my occupation after the N64) was transfixed by what was happening onscreen. Yes you can tell that new character Flynn is going to double cross our hero as soon as its gets a chance, but it doesn’t matter. Uncharted 2’s cut scenes, like its actual gameplay, may not feature innovative and startlingly good ideas, but what it is is polished to perfection.

Every dollar spent on Uncharted 2 is up there onscreen for all to see. From the truly glorious visuals, to the stunning cut scenes and dynamic set pieces, this is a game that’s been crafted with skill, an amazing amount of technical expertise and, dare we say it? even love. In fact, the most telling moment in Uncharted 2 is when you finish and immediately bemoan the wait for Uncharted 3, only to realise that you can simply play through Naughty Dog’s game immediately.

The hallmark of any great game is in its standout moments and Uncharted 2 has a plethora of them. While set pieces like the hind helicopter attack and the hotel collapse that you subsequently find yourself in set new standards for videogame action scenes, it’s the quite moments that can be just as impressive. The mind-blowing beauty as you take a rest in Borneo and see the jungle stretching out forever below you, the tranquil stroll through a Tibetan village that has you interacting with both the villagers and their wildlife and the unspoken bond that develops between you and Tensin, the guide that leads you on your quest in one of the later stages of the game.

Action scenes are brilliant. You'll be constantly surprised by what Naughty Dog throws at you.

In fact, the addition of Tensin is an absolute masterstroke and for this jaded reviewer, one of Uncharted 2’s cleverest moments. The guide doesn’t speak a word of English, and yet the two explorers are able to connect with each other thanks to wild gesticulations and slow, pronounced speech. It works brilliantly and gives you a real sense of achievement as you make your way through the dangerous, yet oh so beautiful caverns.

Balance is also something that Naughty Dog has achieved with amazing assuredness. The original Uncharted felt like a platform game and a shooting game and very rarely worked when the two elements were spliced together, but it’s a totally different story for Uncharted 2. Levels are fantastically designed allowing you to climb and scrabble around the huge open environments in order to seek out both weapons and the best routes for stealth attacks. That’s right we said the S word. Worry not though for while your introduction to the new gameplay mechanic feels rather stunted when you first encounter it, you soon realise that it’s there to simply enhance the exciting fire fights and not hinder you. Mess up an attack or get spotted and you simply move straight into a shoot out, there’s no restart, and if you’re good enough you can make the subsequent face-offs far easier for yourself. Again it’s the seamless way that every gameplay mechanic is integrated with each other that most impresses with Uncharted 2 and as the game continues those moments keep getting better and better and better.

Hopefully Uncharted 2 will go on to amaze punters as much as it has amazed critics and it really deserves to. For me Naughty Dog has not only created the finest action game since Capcom’s Resident Evil, but has also delivered the best game I’ve played all year. I’ll be incredibly surprised if anything else due next year, or even in 2010 comes close to the magnificence of Uncharted 2, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be playing them all to find out.

Uncharted 2 proves money things. It cements Naughty Dog as one of this generation’s finest developers, gives Sony a great chance of success over the Christmas period and proves that both Lara Croft and Indiana Jones have finally had their day. Oh and if you’re wondering why I’ve not mentioned the multiplayer it’s because I’m still too busy enjoying the single player experience.

Finally here’s a video of Uncharted 2’s opening moments

Video of Uncharted 2

The biggest problem with visiting retro events is that they always come to an end far too quickly.

The same thing happened with this year’s Retro Reunited, a truly impressive effort pulled off by first time retro organiser Gordon Sinclair (or SirClive as he’s known on the Retro Gamer forum). Thanks to able help from the likes of Chris “Retro Fusion” Wilkins and Matt “Byte Back” Corne, Gordon was able to pull off a truly spectacular event that not only raised many hundreds of pounds for the homeless charity Shelter, but sold over 300 tickets and saw avid retro gamers travelling from all over the country.

Housed at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield (enabling many a visitor to stay overnight and indulge in both alcohol and classic gaming conversation) the even itself took place in two huge halls and was wisely split up.

Retro Reunited Part 1

The main hall featured practically every key console and computer you could think of (as well as quite a few other more obscure machines) while the second hall housed Acorn World and the many interviews that took place over the two days.

While Jon Hare was sadly unable to attend, Jamie Woodhouse, Jon Ritman, Archer Maclean and Charles Cecil were just a few of the celebrities who were on hand, and all of them gave fantastic discussions on both their pasts and the current state of the industry.

Archer even brought his new game Wheelspin down, which immediately impressed everyone thanks to its slick gameplay and fantastic visuals.

For many though the main reason for going was to play classic retro games and Retro Reunited certainly didn’t disappoint. Split into many zones, there were a huge variety of machines and games on offer ranging from the humble C64 and Spectrum, to more exotic fare like the Famicom Twin, PC Engine and PCFX. Arcade machines were on offer as well, including Tony Temple’s Missile Command (on which he got the world record) and John Stoodley’s Pac-Man cab. There was even a Battlezone standup, which I’ve not played since I was a nipper.

Retro Reunited Part 2

If you’re a fan of Atari’s Jaguar, or just love Atari in general then you can’t afford to miss Jagfest UK 2009. Now in its ninth year, this year’s event promises to be the biggest yet, and as well as moving to a new location, will also feature plenty of new computers and consoles.

Organised by Kieren Hawken, this year’s even will be held at Luton’s Chiltern Hotel making it far more accessible than past events. Along with all the exciting Jaguar coverage there will also be other machines to play, the ability to buy and trade games and systems, and a variety of tournaments to take part in. Best of all though are two exciting exclusives that will be debuting at the event.

In addition to a brand new 3D project for the Jaguar CD you’ll also be able to see the offcial premiere of Donkey Kong as well as use the world’s only working VR headset. If that wasn’t enough you’ll even be able to get your hands on Madbodies, the new homebrew game from the creators of the excellent Jaguar port of Gorf.

The event runs from Friday the 18th to the 20th of September. Purchase your tickets now from here

We’re huge fans of shoot-’em-ups at Retro Gamer, so join us as we look at some of the best shooters to ever appear on Sega’s Saturn or any other system for that matter.

First up is Psikyo’s homage to Capcom’s 1942 series.

Greetings everybody. Just a heads up to tell you about the fun new retro channel I’ve created on Youtube. Basically it’s just me talking about my love of retro gaming and showing off videos to my favourite games. I’m also using it to revive classic magazine sections from gamesTM that I used to write including Clash of the Titans that pitted classic 8-bit coin-op conversions against each other.

Fans of the Dreamcast should also pay attention as I’ve committed myself to collecting all the available games for the Pal machine, so be sure to check in as I’ll constantly be receiving new games in the post and posting them up on Youtube.

It’s only been running for 9 days now but I’ve already reached nearly 150 subscribers, so be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already done so

Retro Gamer Hits Youtube

We’ve had a lot of interest in Road Runner since yesterday, with a lot of people wanting hints and tips. Well, we’re certainly some way off the current high score on Twin Galaxies, but we can give you a few pointers.

First off you need to play with analogue controls, as a digital pad will stop you from gaining the tongue bonus. Whenever Road Runner allows Wile Coyote to get near him, you’ll eventually gain 2,000 points after a limited amount of time. You’ll know if you’re doing this correctly because Wile’s arms will be outstretched. By using this hand tip we’ve been able to double our score for the first level.

Be warned though, controlling the analogue stick is quite tricky and it’s going to take a fair while before you fully master it. Another handy piece of advice is that you should never miss a seed. If you do your multiplier immediately resets to zero, undoing all your hard work. Loosing a life makes no difference to the multiplyer, so sometimes it’s best to simply cut your loses and let Wile get you.

You need a steady hand to get into the big leagues.

Regular readers of the forum will know that I have something of a soft spot for Magic the Gathering, so it should come as no surprise to learn that I’m quite enamoured with the game that’s just gone up on Xbox Live Arcade.

Available for 800 points, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a pretty good representation of the original game, and while certain elements have been dumbed down for this new iteration, it’s nevertheless well worth picking up.

The included cards are from the Magic 2010 core set that will be available in July.

The game itself is split into a variety of different sections. There’s a campaign that sees you facing off against increasingly stronger opponents, as well as the ability to play online, either solo or with another player. Best of all though is a selection of puzzles that give you one turn to win the game. It’s a brilliant little edition that was extremely popular in the long defunct magazine The Duelist.

The actual game itself is very solid and plays very well. Although the stack has been removed (something that will no doubt annoy hardcore fans) the core gameplay is still intact and it’s as good as it has ever been. Beat an opponent in the campaign mode and you’ll be rewarded with a card that can be added into your core deck. It’s a nice little touch that harks back to the old days of ante, but it does highlight one of the biggest issues that we have with the game.

Presentation is absolutely superb. It's always easy to work out exactly what's going on.

To keep everything on a fair and even level, Duels of the Planeswalkers deck editing capabilities are virtually non-existent. Wizards apparently want to ensure that people can play online and not have to worry about facing killer decks, so they have ensured that you can’t mix and match from all your available cards.

Deck building in one of Magic’s greatest strengths, so it’s a real pity that it’s been implemented so poorly here. On the other hand, Wizards is offering additional downloadable decks in the future, so future online play should hopefully have a solid following.

It’s obviously not a patch on the official online version of Magic that’s available on the PC, but this is nevertheless a fantastic introduction to the game, and for the measly price point, something that everyone should have in their collections.

The above clash was always going to end in tears. That's a 7/7 monster you're taking on.