I came by a little snippet of games-magazine history this week – via an unlikely route that needn't concern us here – and I just thought I'd share it for the historical record.
Atari ST Review was a magazine published by EMAP in 1992 and 1993, when after just 12 issues it was suddenly sold to Europress, leading to this editorial column in a suspiciously large typeface:
But alert readers might have noticed (from the slightly off alignment of the red border) that the column actually took the form of a hastily-applied sticker. Because that wasn't the editor's original leader.
So, yeah. It was on this day in 1991 that the first ever proper issue of Amiga Power (A Magazine With Tatty Shoes, or something) hit Britons’ newsagents’ shelves.
>>SUB: PLEASE CHECK IMAGE
And while vast numbers of old games magazines are now available to read as lovely friendly PDFs or similar that you can load up onto your computer or electro-tablet and flick through page by page in a gratifying manner, AP inexplicably isn’t.
I was as pleased as a big fat walrus with a free bucket of haddock today to be able to contribute to the week-long one-off revival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the start of the majestic Digitiser.
Especially when I got a lovely new Panel 4 picture from Mr Biffo (instead of money). But I got a bit distracted in the column, and forgot to talk about the thing I meant to talk about, so I’m going to talk about it now.
Seriously, all those millions in development, all the hundreds of pounds people have spent buying the PS4 and the VR headset and the game and the upgrade – how hard could it be to have it detect when you'd gone seriously off track and have the navigator go "ARGH! SHIT! OW! BLOODY HELL, GET BACK ON THE ROAD YOU MORON!", so as to not completely ruin the whole thing?
How dull-witted do you have to be, how far have you missed the point by, to obsess over every last wheelnut in the name of "realism" and then sit the player beside a virtually-real companion who keeps calmly reading out directions even as the car he's in plummets down a mountainside on its roof? For God's sake.
There's nothing about Ramboat (Genera, free, iOS and Android) that isn't interesting. The game itself is a short, punchy and fun pure arcade shooter that most obviously channels Metal Slug and Irem's much-underrated In The Hunt. Indeed, it's basically a very clever adaptation of the latter game for one-thumb control, but presented with all the beautifully-detailed character of the former.
But this isn't the article I've been meaning to write for years about the fascinating and often incredibly elegant and even revolutionary ways that developers have rejigged every traditional game genre for touchscreen devices in order to avoid going down the horribly unsatisfactory route of the "virtual d-pad".
Because the other most intriguing aspect of modern gaming*, particularly on mobile formats, is the monetisation of it. And in the case of Ramboat, the opportunity for an experiment presented itself.
The process of simply buying the Xbox One took me either three days or eight weeks, depending on how you look at it, due to a combination of how retail works these days and the gibbering random madness that is GAME's pricing and corporate structure. But I'm not even going to get into that here.
Since the demise of the Nintendo DS, I've done almost all of my videogaming on smartphones and tablets. A confluence of circumstances made traditional console formats less attractive for a variety of reasons, but also saw me spend more money on gaming than I had done in years. iOS and Android games offer a huge range of incredibly good titles at mindbogglingly tiny prices, almost all of them capable of fitting into whatever free time you have available.
(And not just because they're short, snappy arcade twitch games like Super Hexagon or Impossible Road. Classics like Civilisation and Shadowrun have been revived brilliantly to suit the format, and traditional genres such as scrolling shooters have actually been improved by touchscreen controls, with the likes of Dodonpachi and Raiden rendered far more player-friendly without reducing their fearsome difficulty one iota. Pinball games and others can finally get the aspect ratio they've always wanted.)
More to the point, it almost never takes 47 days to download one.
Racing games are one of the few remaining mainstream genres where (with the exception of the Need For Speed series and a handful of others) the player plays as themselves, rather than as a predefined character in a story. As a result, personalities are rather thin on the ground – if anything, the cars are the stars.
But nobody wants to read 800 words about the Nissan Skyline (nobody who doesn’t urgently need drowning in a bucket, anyway), so instead let's focus our attention on something altogether more beautiful, in every possible way.
(I've been meaning to write this piece for months, but – not entirely unrelatedly – have been rather neglecting WoSland in favour of another site whose readers ARE in fact prepared to pay a very modest price for journalism. But what the heck, let's do it now.)
Today has seen the much-trailed worldwide release of Real Racing 3 for the iOS platforms. The controversial "free-to-play" game has a horrendous IAP structure which forces players to have to either wait for hours and hours (and hours) at paywalls between sessions or cough up a mindboggling fortune to play it continuously.
This, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.
[This piece was originally titled "Why Piracy Is Good" when I wrote it in August of 2004. I figured I'd make it gratuitously offensive clickbait this time, just for teh funz. If you don't understand the new title, start here.]
It's weird how the simplest games can have the longest stories. Today we're going to talk (well, I'm going to, anyway) about a couple of games (well, four games, but we'll get to that) that are about as Zen-basic as it's possible for electronic entertainment to be.
They're a pair of games which could be played by the one-armed dishwasher from Robin's Nest (one for the mums and dads, there), a duo that require all the brainpower of a starving dog pondering the best course of action to take with a pound of sausages that's just fallen out of an old lady's shopping bag right under his nose.
And yet, by the time we're done we'll have covered inspiration, plagiarism, moral flexibility, flagrant copyright infringement, public-spiritedness, cultural history, corporate pragmatism, collective short-sightedness and the proudest moment in your correspondent's career to date. Which is a lot of stuff, so let's get on or we'll be here all day.
"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)
Tinto Chiel on Off-topic: ““…..aided and abetted by the UK high heid yins”, a fact sadly never reflected in the MSM. Mrs Tinto has…” Dec 8, 22:33
sarah on Off-topic: “Well, you’re not wrong about world events, the most awful things going on, aided and abetted by the UK high…” Dec 8, 21:53
James Cheyne on The Long Walk To Freedom: “The final analyses of the dissolution of the parliament of Great Britain time and again so the parliament of England…” Dec 8, 21:31
James Cheyne on The Long Walk To Freedom: “The parliament of England after acting as the parliament of England to make treaties and contractual agreements legally cannot re-…” Dec 8, 21:07
James Cheyne on The Long Walk To Freedom: “So what did I omit in my ramblings and thoughts to you all while I swither over the treaty of…” Dec 8, 20:45
Tinto Chiel on Off-topic: “Hi, Sarah: oh, no, just girding my loins (ooh, matron!) for The Last Battle. I’ve only looked in two or…” Dec 8, 19:59
Aidan on The Long Walk To Freedom: “I’ve no idea to be honest Hatey, but as long as they are FIGHTING that is good enough for me.…” Dec 8, 19:58
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““… you’ve taken that too far.” I fear you might be right… I feel dirty now. Not least because I…” Dec 8, 19:56
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Hmmm, Northy, you’ve taken that too far. Cos I don’t want to believe you enjoyed having high pressure air blasted…” Dec 8, 19:34
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““…an increasingly big and increasingly vocal minority…” Indeed, aye. I was having a bite of lunch a couple of years…” Dec 8, 19:31
sarah on Off-topic: “Hi, Tinto. Nice to hear from you. I trust that all is well with you and you are keeping your…” Dec 8, 19:29
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Ah ken that ane. It’s ane of the Apocrypha. But dinna let oan tae Confused.” Dec 8, 19:26
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: “I was played like a church organ once…I rather enjoyed the experience.” Dec 8, 19:10
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: “@Aidan Has it occurred to you that the Liberate Scotland boys are almost certainly FIGHTING among themselves?” Dec 8, 19:09
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““Labour had been in power in Scotland mostly for the previous 70 years and the destruction and carnage they presided…” Dec 8, 19:06
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Did you know that cat is just tac spelled backwards?” Dec 8, 18:55
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““And how much I hate them. For failing us all entirely.” Quite a reek of smouldering breeks from that post,…” Dec 8, 18:53
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: “I would rather be a deluded eejit than a colonialist… and, thankfully, I am. Phew! And, yes. I WILL be…” Dec 8, 18:51
stuckdoonhame on The Long Walk To Freedom: “And true to type, Misreporting Scotland has just treated us to a pile of wibbling drivel about the outcome and…” Dec 8, 18:44
Aidan on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Quite right! Both votes SNP, that’ll show the yoons! Or you could be one of the ten people voting for…” Dec 8, 18:41
Nae Need! on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Indeed, Northcode. And for once, I’d prefer (hold me back, hold me back) NOT to go on a huge rant…” Dec 8, 18:17
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: “@ Northcode says: 8 December, 2025 at 5:50 pm “ALL colonialists are bad” Oh aye. That’s why you go to…” Dec 8, 18:13
twathater on The Long Walk To Freedom: “HaHaHaHa another wee yoonionist shittin his breeks , now lads we are all good Jockos lets get together and vote…” Dec 8, 18:07
Nae Need on The Long Walk To Freedom: “No. But by fuck the wriggling on the line puts ALL worms to shame. Talking of worms . . ;-)…” Dec 8, 18:04
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““it’s time the Scots stopped whining” Finally. Please tell us you’ll be leading from the front, although your “released from…” Dec 8, 17:58
