Saturday 23 March 2024

Magazines of Yesteryear - PC Pro Issue 1 - November 1994

PC Pro is the only monthly general computing magazine left in the UK and as it nears its 30th birthday, I thought I would try and revisit the first issue. I was a mere month in to college life (focusing on A-level Geology - not even Russell Watson could warble about the long road from there to Software QA tester!) when this first hit the newsstands, and although I have no memory of Windows Magazine, seeing this on the shelves of Consett's biggest newsagent (back when such establishments were a thing) made it an instant purchase. This isn't that particular copy - time, house moves, and poorly organised hoarding skills have all contributed to that loss - and I did pay slightly more than £2.25 for this copy, but it's issue one of PC Pro! Aside from the missing Gateway 2000 insert, everything else is present and correct, even the cover CD, so what does the magazine promise?

No need to speak to your newsagent about the missing disc here.

POWER 486's, and to be fair, in late 1994 a DX2/66 was the sweet spot for desktop computing - the early Pentiums were not terribly good value yet as we shall see, even if there was one reviewed here for £1,199. A four speed CD drive, Texas Instruments multimedia notebook, and a discussion on 32-bit operating systems (how quaint, and I say this as a regular RISC OS user) round off the cover stars. Oh, and a competition to win a Pentium PC-TV! I'll explain that later for the younglings amongst you. 


Much like its contemporaries, PC Pro was the bane of Posties everywhere, starting off at just over 400 pages. Most of the editorial content was in the front two thirds, with the back taken up by the ads, although there were a fair few of those dotted around in general.

That's one hell of an advertisers list.

Launch editor Barry Plows kicks off proceedings with a look at the forthcoming year and the continued dominance of Microsoft and Intel. Aiding them would be the focus on Plug and Play. Such simplicity was long overdue, and the combination of hardware partners and Microsoft's new Windows 95 OS would bring some degree of PnP to the market. Oaks, acorns and all that.

Then...

And now. Some familiar names too.

The news section leads with coverage of that same topic, as well as what would define 'PC '95'. As you can see, they were an advancement on what the market was then offering and would make the Windows PC even more appealing to home users. 


HP was dropping Canon from their new colour laser offering, picking Konica for the laser printer engine in it's £5,850 Color Laserjet. There was also news of a 128-bit graphics card. With up to 8Mb of VRAM, 32Mb of DRAM and 2Mb of Mask DRAM, the Imagine-128 card was set to cost £650-ish. A professional card if ever there was one, it marked the continuation of a ramping up of specs for future graphical wonders. 

OS/2 version 3 was due out in October, beating Windows 95 by a decent length. Also known as Warp, it did see some traction in the UK. I'm sure Escom offered it as an option for their high-street range, and I was a semi-regular user over the following couple of years, much preferring it to Win 95, but Microsoft would prevail. 

It turned out there wasn't a Dr. in the house when Novell announced the discontinuation of DR-DOS. After struggling to gain even 10% market share, the forthcoming Win 95 would seal the fate of any DOS, and it didn't helped that Microsoft hadn't played fair the previous few years - demanding a licence fee from manufacturers even when their DOS wasn't supplied! They got told off for that, but it was too late for Novell, just as it would be for IBM and OS/2. 

Talk of an add-on CD-i card for PC's seemed to buoy fans of Philips' multimedia monster - not that anyone else cared. If you had a suitable PC for such a card, you already had access to better software than the CD-i could provide. The same would go for the Creative 3DO Blaster mentioned in the story too. 

A comment from the US about the seemingly lethargic advancements of the PowerPC consortium raises an eyebrow. Although it makes a good point about lacking a speed advantage over Intel's cheaper options, they did help keep the Mac afloat for a few more years. I say help, because Apple really tried its best to commit seppuku in the 90's. 

It was the disappointingly mediocre of times, it was the better than average of times.

The big review test next and just have a look at those names! Amstrad, Apricot, Dan, Elonex, Evesham, Locland, Mitac, MJN, Panrix and Viglen - all UK brands that, at various points of the 90's offered reasonable, if not spectacular hardware. Then there were the international marques such as AST, Brother, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, IBM, NEC and Tulip. Prices ranged fro £1,249 (Mitac) to £2,305 (NEC), with most coming in between £1,400 to £1,800 ish. The round up requested 8Mb of RAM, 400Mb-ish of storage, a 15-inch monitor, a secondary cache and VESA Local Bus/PCI - integrated local bus was also permitted. Some included CD-ROM drives, and most were generally decent. Two awards were given: Panrix received one for Speed, offering a 4Mb hard drive cache, SCSI controller and Diamond Stealth graphics, all for £1,799, whilst Gateway took the Value nod, yours for £1,508. Either would have seen you well served. Honourable mentions went to Compaq, AST and IBM. 

Once company who didn't do well was Amstrad. Their 9486 suffered from slow speed, poor monitor and a terrible keyboard. That and a cost of £1,399.99 meant that it's two star score was really bad. It also served to show how far the 80's giant had fallen. Once the market leader in well-priced PC compatibles, it was now just another box shifter, costing more than some and offering less than most. 

Winner, winner, PC-TV dinner!

Competition time! Your chance to win the "The Ultimate Multimedia PC" - Peter Sissons not included. Win either an ICL Pentium or 486-based PC-TV plus the full Microsoft Office Professional and a bundle of five CD-ROMS. Ten runners up would bag the software alone, and the total giveaway was valued at £10k! Not a bad bunch of swag, and for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the PC-TV was a fad (come on, it really was) of trying to combine, as the name suggests, your PC and television in a multimedia menagerie. It wasn't a wholly bad concept, but never quite gelled. The questions, by the way, aren't too hard, and the second has possibly the best "wrong answer" of the lot - Microsoft Office is... an anagram of "The Devil's Work." Good call, PC Pro, good call.

ES(y)COM, ES(y)-go.

On to the Reviews section, and the varied selection kicks off with the ESCOM Pentium P60. At £1,199 ex VAT (£1,409 inc), it's cheap for a Pentium, but with two stars out of six, not recommended. Too many corners cut (4Mb of RAM, bad monitor and keyboard, and limited expansion) led Jon Honeyball to advise that if the price was all you can afford, get a more balanced 486 system. Apricot's XEN PC LS 560 is another Pentium 60 system but arrives at £2,619 ex (£3,077 inc). Here though, the extra money delivers a system worthy of five stars out of six and demonstrates the purpose of the next generation of Intel processors. You just have to pay for the privilege.

ELONEX! Ah-ha, Ah-ha! Elonex is gonna rock ya! (Apologies to KLF)

Elonex have a rather decent 486 workstation, whilst Dan Technology's Dantium (see what they did there) 90 lacks the oomph for such high end kit, eclipsed by the only slightly more expensive (but much faster Apricot XEN). ICL's middling MD 60V is another P60 system and defines average, scoring threes across the board, where as Texas Instruments Travelmate 4000M delivers a multimedia laptop (if you buy the docking station which includes the CD-ROM drive) for a grand total of £3,700 ex VAT (£4,344 inc). It's a 486 system with too little RAM but a respectable (for the period and the technology) three and a half hour battery life. 

I mean, it's lovely and all, but you wouldn't want to travel with it, mate.

Brother and Dell rock up with 486 portables at the upper end of the price scale (£2,339 and £2,899 ex respectively), neither of which would disgrace your lap (that doesn't sound right, does it?), and Hewlett Packard's latest A3 laser printer, the Laserjet 4V delivers cracking quality and value for under £2k ex. Adaptec's ReadySCSI Plug and Play SCSI Adaptor offers a glimpse of the PnP future (but really needs Chicago - aka Windows 95) to prove what it can really do, whilst Intel's 14.4 PCMCIA Fax/Modem receives reasonable praise for offering travellers an outside connection. The cover-featured Toshiba quad-speed CD-ROM drive proves a disappointment - it's expensive (£400-ish) and hogs the CPU too much.

Referring back to multimedia and PC-TV shenanigans, Miro's DC1 TV capture card offered superb quality video catpure (and a copy of Adobe's Premiere 1.1) for £799 inc - proving that such marvels could be had, but you needed to spend some serious cash first. There again, it was cheaper than many professional set ups so if you required the capability, it was a no-brainer. 

"When Ah were lad, we had reet proper databases."

On the software side of things, Freehand 4 (£450 ex, £529 inc) took care of your graphics needs, Omnis 7 Version 3 could handle your database requirements for £3,995 ex(!), Sidekick for Windows had your personals organised for less than a ton, and Quickbooks 2 sorted your finances for £128 ex (£150 inc). This highlights something that many modern users won't notice - the total cost of ownership. If you were to buy a Windows or Linux PC these days, there'd be either software already installed or free open source options available for almost any requirement. The same can be said for Mac, Chromebooks and RISC OS machines. There are some (relatively) niche or professional software cases where you'd have to pay, either up front or a subscription service, but on the whole, buying today has you covered out of the box. A quick check of the likes of Evesham Micros shows that adding Works for Windows would add an extra £90 ex VAT onto your initial purchase price, so (relative) youngsters may need to understand that the hardware was only part of the buying process and additional packages could be very pricey, depending upon your use cases. 

32-bits? What has it ever done for us, eh?

The first of the features now and a piece on 32-bit operating systems. Truly one of the things hampering the PC (as opposed to the Mac and then still extant Acorn) was the kludge that was the DOS and Windows set up. Within a year of this issue's publication date, that would cease to be such an concern (hey, 95 wasn't that bad - it had its "features" but on the whole, a decent first/second/third attempt...). 

The final two features cast their light upon Parallel port expansion and digital video. The former is rather quaint, living as we do in a USB world these days (I know, but back then you had parallel, serial, SCSI, ADB, PS/2 and other more fanciful ports, so connectivity was a tad more "involved" than it is now, and that's before we get to the config!). The latter tries to convince readers that DV on your PC is a thing - in truth it was but it also meant much gold being exchanged. Even the initial numbers for the tech needed are impressive (this is before encoding, and times have changed), as a single frame of PAL video was 768 x 576 pixels at 24-bit colour, meaning 1.3Mb per frame. 66Mb per second, 4Gb per minute and 248Gb per hour! Without sound. Now, of course, encoding is your friend here, and the technology was advancing at a brisk rate. The future looked bright and as costs dropped, the capabilities on offer would improve rapidly. 

You could just stare at this background for ages!

Ah, Real World Computing, a selection of columns offering tips, news, advice, experiences and the like. Some of the names here are still writing for PC Pro (Messers Honeyball and Winder specifically, and I should have mentioned Mr Pountain, the current PC Pro's Editorial Fellow), although the titles of the columns have changed slightly - OS/2 being the most obvious to have departed. 

Ah, the innocent days of Wing Commander. Long before whatever Star Citizen is. 

It wasn't all serious stuff though, as the games section proves. There's news of Dark Forces (which has recently received the full on remaster treatment), Wing Commander Armada and Wing Commander 3. Tie Fighter rightly receives a glowing review, and there's updates on Win G (a 32-bit graphics/games shell for Chicago/Windows 4/Win 95), Harvester, DOOM II, and System Shock. A final piece on the nature of using a Pentium for gaming centres on Magic Carpet and how the new generation of Pentium processors who keep the PC well ahead of the next generation of games consoles - Sony's PSX (PlayStation), Nintendo's Project Reality (Ultra 64, later N64) and Panasonic's M2, the last of which never made it to the consumer market. 

The final piece of editorial content is Ctrl-Alt-Del, a humorous coda to the magazine, asking whether Windows was a virus (nope, as viruses tend to have a better update schedule that Windows, otherwise they accomplish the same things), news of receiving twenty copies of Sidekick mis-addressed to a completely different continent, and what might now be considered an off-key comment about the Rolling Stones now having an internet presence. Oh little did they know the lengths Microsoft would go to to promote the new Start button in Win 95...

The included cover CD is a wealth of mid-90's fun. The highlight is Astound for Windows, a multimedia presentation tool for those of you who were tired of Powerpoint's old schtick. An exclusive pop video from Drake (not that one), a demo of Universal Word (a multilingual word processor) and a demo of Star Crusader almost wrap up the goodies. We mustn't forget about the selection of Windows sounds and 20 True Type fonts, either! 

As always, it's now time for the adverts, and I pretty much covered this period with my Computer Shopper  issue 80 look back last July, but there are still some observations to make. 

Danger, Will Robinson!

Escom were making themselves well known (besides the overly cheap P60) with an ad whose colours suggest the "endangered toxic frog" aesthetic. This was before they tried to establish a retail wing using former Radio Rentals stores (even Stanley had one... briefly), but their time in the sun would be short. 

Obviously the ad-line doesn't refer to upgrades.

Colossus advertised a full range of desktops, starting at just £699 ex for a 25MHz 486 SX (which Crown pictured further below matched), marking the starting point for any reasonable PC spec. Memory was a pricey upgrade (£150 ex for 4Mb), and they included PC-DOS rather than MS' varient alongside Windows 3.1. Those "Portable" machines are certainly an option, but the additional costs for a TFT screen are eye-watering! There again, there is something truly magnificent about a gas plasma display. Not to use, you understand, just to bask in its retro-chic glow. 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Apricot's advert seems more appropriate to an opticians eye test, and even my basic accessibility testing skills are screaming "No!" to that colour ensemble. They were a smidge more expensive than the low end box-shifters but there is something about that low profile case that still appeals to this day. 

That's 'king cheap from Crown.

Speaking of low-end, Crown were a budget range, and their 486 SX33 is a very nicely priced offering... unless you wanted any real expansion options, but for a basic Windows machine, it did enough. 

'King cheaper, 'king no chance!

Let's just say IBM had budgets of all sizes covered.

Not doubting the quality, really doubting the value though.

For the same price, you could get a Compaq Contura i386SL laptop from P&P, but to be honest, the era of 386 machines were over. And for all I like the all-in-one design ethos, that Compaq 486 for £599 was far too limited. As I navigate my mid-40's, the thought of a 14-inch CRT makes me shudder. At least they were better than Amstrad's ability to bundle their machines with 10-inch displays!

You can get these Computers, By Post!

Computers By Post were a great source of big name brands, and although these weren't the cheapest of options out there, if you wanted a "name" then CBP were an obvious choice. 

What is it with RISC advertising? Acorn's in the late 80's were similarly drab.

Motorola must have heard in advance about the criticisms of it's PowerPC range of processors as they have a double page spread to show off how good they could be, or at least tempt people to try a machine powered by one - aka a Mac.

Finally, just because it's there, here's a reminder of the Olivetti Echos. Is it not a thing of beauty???

Swoon!

That's PC Pro issue one. A brilliant start to a magazine that is still going strong and which hopefully will celebrate its 30th birthday later this year. Long may it continue. As always with looking back at old computer magazines, it's partially a nostalgia trip but also a way of reminding myself (and by extension you, gentle reader), that the story of general computing in the UK is long, involved and fascinating. It has indeed been a long road, getting from there to here...

Saturday 16 March 2024

Space Battle by Jamie Lendino - Book Review

Jamie Lendino is back once again, and this time he's taking a look at Atari's primary competitor in the first console war - Mattel's Intellivision. And for UK readers, yes, it made it here too, just with all of the impact of a plummeting feather - the UK was far more interested in home microcomputers at the time, if they could afford one anyway... But I digress... 


The Intellivision was a fierce competitor to Atari's VCS, and one that, as so many other tech orientated companies did, over promised but also kind of delivered. It brought a powerful console spec (for the time), a range of games that could arguably be described in many instances as genre defining, and the a concept for expansions that, well, you'll find out in this 280-odd page paperback, as Mr Lendino lays focus on the machine, its story, and its software.


If you've read his previous tomes, you'll be familiar with the style of presentation. Each of the nine chapters covers a specific period of the machine's life - from the story of the company that released it to the modern day efforts at emulation, new game development and, yep, mention of that "homage". Cards on the table, I had a pre-order for the Amico through UK retailer Argos and, when things really started to turn sour, cancelled and got my money back. I wanted to believe it could be something different, but it turned out to be nothing much at all. Sigh. 


The book itself lacks colour aside from the cover, which is no great loss - imagery and screenshots are handled well anyway, and it is the writing that should concern us here. It's an easy read, yet packed with detail, including snippets from magazine articles and interviews providing contemporary thought on the console in its prime. 

And what a prime it was. Although I never experienced an Intellivision first hand, I had heard of more than a few of its major software successes - Utopia, B-17 Bomber, Astrosmash to name but three. Many more are covered within these pages and each is shown the love, care and attention they deserve. It is apparent that, like the other formats the author has covered, there is a real sense of enjoyment in experiencing these games, a celebration of the best that home gaming could offer in the early 1980's.


There were some missteps along the journey of the Intellivision, mostly to do with the hardware - the keyboard expansion caused a great deal of pain, but there were also some triumphs. Synthesised speech was a new one for gamers at the time, and I had never heard of Playcable before, yet this early subscription-based download service was a game changer (literally) for those who used it.


It's a cliche, but if you want a single volume on the Intellivision, this has to be it. Engaging, informative and yet another damn good read from Mr Lendino, it offers a history of a console that, really, saw relatively little action outside of the US, yet still has an active group of users developing new titles for it. You can pick up a copy from Amazon here (note this is for the Kindle version, so remember to check right for other options).  

Saturday 9 March 2024

Magazines of Yesteryear - Personal Computer News - Vol 1 Issue 13 - June 3-June 9 1983

One of the great joys of rummaging through the history of computer magazines is that, on occasion, you'll come across one that you've never heard of before. Until an eBay listing for a CD-ROM filled with (I think) every issue, I'd never heard of PCN, and this was popular enough to be a weekly magazine between March 1983 and May 1985! There again, this was the time of twelvty gazillion (I exaggerate only slightly) micro formats on the UK market, so I guess that made sense, and at only 35p!


We'll get to the cover star in a moment, and delve into the news first. The big thing here was the forthcoming 1983 General Election. Computing was becoming a hot topic and all of the main parties had something to say about it. Whether those words would have swayed the voters of 1983 is impossible to say now (sarcasm alert), but the gist of the replies to PCN's questions are telling. The Conservative's is littered with numbers, of amounts spent or to be pledged, Labour's is all about ideas and concepts, whilst the SDP-Liberal Alliance's is rather evasive on key points. 

There's a pub based "Thatcher's Foot" joke here somewhere...

There is more about the election in the news which focusses on the hardware ITN would use for their coverage. Peter Sissons would operate a VT80 graphics computer with "amazing colour graphics" at a resolution of 1024 pixels, 256K of memory and using 16-bit words. A VAX 11/750 with 4Mb of memory and a total of 500Mb worth of Winchester disks ran everything, a second VAX did the number crunching, and there was a third on stand by. Peter Snow of the BBC would also be using a VAX with some slightly different hardware attached. 

How many???

In other news, Kodak was promising a 10Mb 5.25" floppy at no more than double the price of a typical disk, whilst both Telesoftware and Acorn's Teletext (ah, Mr Biffo in the 90's!) adaptors had been delayed until August. And of course there was the PCN chart - the top 20 computers under £1,000, and the top 10 over that amount. As you can see, the sheer number of sub-£400 machines is mind-blowing. It's not surprising that the market slumped from around mid-1983 to the dramatic Christmas of 1984. By the spring of 1985, only Sinclair, Amstrad and Commodore would have a reasonable business chance of standing on their own feet. Sinclair would later fall foul of Clive's fascination with the C5 electric vehicle, Amstrad were sitting pretty because Alan knew how to make money, and Commodore was an international giant. Of the rest, Atari would be a different company by then, and Acorn would be under the wings of Olivetti after the Electron mis-step/fiasco. 

A few more observations: even at this point, the Apple II was stupidly over-priced, and it would take a hell of a loan/wage to put one in the family home. As for the over £1,000 lot, the Osborne 1 was a outlier being (semi) portable and all, the IBM PC was a niche high-cost unit, and pretty much everything else (aside from the obvious exclusions) ran C/PM. In the real world, if you were lucky, you got a Spectrum, or maybe a Dragon. If you were rich, you got a BBC, and if you were blessed with the luck of the Spartans, you got a Jupiter Ace. Oops!


Moving on, we have a letters page, a Microwaves section (where readers submitted tips for a £5 reward), some book reviews (a goodly selection this issue), before we get to the first of the features: how to get a Tandy Color talking to a Dragon. A useful piece if you had one or the other considering their basic (and BASIC) similarities. Next is part two of a guide to making music, and other sounds, on your Oric, before we head to the graphics world and transferring programs from the Genie to the Colour Genie. 

The first review is for a word processor for the Dragon, the second an attempt at putting Forth on the Specturm - each to their own, I guess. The review of GPS (Graphics Processing System) for the Apple II is vaguely positive but notes that it hangs quite often although its graphics capabilities have aged well since it's long distant launch. 

Two out of three ain't bad.

Putting the stick in joystick. 

A joysticks round up next, pitting the Kempston Competition Pro against the Spectravision Quickshot (I owned both of these, though not at the same time), the standard Atari stick, and the BBC Joystick. There isn't an overall winner, although the BBC option does get some stick (not sorry at all) for being a pain to hold - which is literally the whole point of its existence. 

Ooohhhhh! Pretty! 

And now to the cover star: the Ajile, an IBM compatible from Canada (originally the Canadian Dynalogic Infotech Hyperion - yep, I prefer Ajile!). On the plus side, it's lighter than an Osborne, rocks an 8088, 256k of RAM, two (count 'em) 320k IBM format floppy drives and a seven inch 80 x 25 amber CRT. If it's graphics you're after, high res 640 x 250 is available. The downsides include the keyboard (feels tacky and cheap), a botched software package (it includes the Multiplan spreadsheet package, a comms package and a text processor that can't print...), and the price - this would have set you back £4,100 including VAT. Wowzer!

Games coverage includes Everest Ascent on the 48k Spectrum, a series of titles for the Colour Genie, Qix for the Atari 400/800, and Micro Maze for the Jupiter Ace. 

There's programming stuff too, with PCN ProgramCards (11 this issue), for you to cut out and keep - this month an action game called Cupid for the 48k Oric-1. Following this is a guide to user clubs around the country - and a varied lot they are too. Not just the aforementioned formats, there's also a Comal user's group. one for the Casio FX-500-P, and two (!) for the DEC PDP series. 

I feel the need, the need for telecoms speed!

The back of the issue is taken up with the Databasics section  - a guide to printers, monitors, disk drives, plotters, and modems (up to 1200 baud for the top of the range models). Three pages of classified ads leads the way to the Microshop small ads, before the final page offers us the usual light-hearted banter that many mags used to include. 

But what about the adverts? Oh boy! Buckle up, kids!

An ad for computer rental is the first to catch the eye - have an Apple IIe from £4.58 per week. The Apple III could be had from £12.98 pw, whereas the IBM PC was a princely £13.98! Fittingly for the age (and younger readers should Google it if they don't know), you could contact the company (OEM - nicely done) via telephone or Telex. What communication wonders we have lost!

A lost age where renting a computer could be cheaper than buying one. 

Next is a regular for PCN, the Software Centre (see end of post), offering games for everything from the BBC Micro to VIC 20 via Atari, the ZX81 and the Dragon 32. Many start from under a fiver, but could go as high as £30 and over, especially for Atari software. 



Hewlett Packard was flogging its HP-86 with PPP (Personal Productivity Pac), although no prices were mentioned (look back up this post, it's in the over £1k category), where as CAL were trying to convince potential buyers that its machine was better than an IBM, as well as being British (see end of post). 

Some mixed messaging there between desktops and portables. 

Epson had their QX-10 "Human compatible business micro" that thinks you should be impressed by the machine on your desk... if you had much of a desk left by the time that base unit was plonked on it. To be fair though, most business machines were similarly as huge. 


Akhter Instruments Ltd were going all in on the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, selling it for a low price of just £149.95. They had plenty of peripherals and tons of software too, so if that was to be your machine of choice, they had you covered. 


But what's this? Could it be? Yep, it is Silica Shop (whose adverts were ever present once the 16-bit generation kicked in). Their first page is a cornucopia of retro gaming goodies: the Mattel Aquarius for just £79, the Colecovision for a fair bit more (£147), where are the Vectrex was a bargain £149 - remember, it had its own display. Those Atari 400/800 prices don't look too bad either. 


Page two is less starry. Although that VCS price looks tempting, that's for second hand machines, and the Intellisvion seems to be forgotten even though it's quite the bargain at £98. There again, this was the time of the home micro in Britain so consoles were less of a thing. 


One last ad (and a tangent) is for a Sales Executive. Based around London and the Home Counties, this position offered a £9k basic wage, £16 on target, and a company car. Convert that to today's money, that's about £29-52k now. There again, average house prices were around £24k and interest rates were around 9.8%. Makes you think...

Anyway, that's a PCN issue from 1983. Like most, if not all things past, a different country, but interesting to see how things were before DOS slowly took over the world. The question is now, which year do we go to next?

Software Centre


CAL



Sunday 3 March 2024

The History of the Adventure Video Game by Christopher Carton - Book Review

This is a bit of a belated review as I didn't get round to reading Mr Carton's fourth book until after Christmas, which is quite bad considering I bought it on back in September! Sorry! Anyway, I've had the time to give this a considered read and, with maybe one minor niggle, this is a very good book on a video games genre that, having peaked in the early 1990's, is now experiencing very much of a renaissance. 

This 150 page hardback is up to the usual high standards for a White Owl publication. Stock quality is good and the plethora of screenshots within pop off the page. The text itself is quite large, making it an easy to read tome with no chance of eye strain even for my tired old peepers - and yes, I mentioned this last week too! Separate reading glasses are inbound as I type. 

There are six chapters in total, starting with the very beginning of the adventure game genre and text adventures. Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, and The Hobbit are specifically mentioned, although there are countless more of their kind. My personal enmity is reserved for The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy which had me stumped on the CPC back in the day, although a recent couple of RISC OS text adventures (Gateway to Karos and The Mirror of Khoronz - http://www.boulsworth.co.uk/intfict/) did keep me entertained in the run up to the festive period.

The second chapter moves on to the beginning of the graphical adventure and the works of Ken and Roberta Williams. Yep, Sierra On-Line were the name in adventure throughout the 1980's and early 90's. As well as their early titles, each of the main series (King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest) are covered along with Leisure Suit Larry, Gabriel Knight (a personal favourite) and the later CD-ROM adventures such as fantastic Phantasmagoria. 

Next up is LucasArts, from their take on Labyrinth to their final effort, The Dig. Between those two titles are some of the most revered examples of the genre, and this chapter highlights the love and affection the author has for adventure games. It can be difficult to write about specific releases when they've already been covered to death, but Mr Carton manages to bring a freshness to the descriptions of these gaming legends.  

That's got to be a caption competition opportunity.

Chapter four is all about influential classics and goes through a whole menagerie of them. From The 7th Guest to Putt Putt, Broken Sword to Discworld, Simon the Sorcerer to Myst, this collection highlights the different styles and approaches to the adventure game as it developed throughout the 90's and beyond. That some series are still in active development is testament to the appeal of the adventure game, and if I could justify the expense (and accept Meta's data collection policies, which is a big deal), I'd be playing The 7th Guest in VR now. Modern day examples such as the Life is Strange series also get a mention. 

Telltale Games is the subject of the fifth chapter, with their (mostly) licensed output, becoming a near standard in the genre as the noughties became the teens. Prolific doesn't begin to cover how many games they released, and there are some gems in there too. 

The final chapter details the return of the classic adventure game, with the likes of Thimbleweed Park, Broken Age and Return to Monkey Island featuring, again demonstrating the ever present love of the genre by its fans and the support they give to new releases. It is also a fine way to end the book. 

However, I mentioned a niggle in the opening paragraph, and although absolutely nowhere near enough to even consider not recommending this book, it should be noted. 

It would have been nice to have a bit more coverage on the indie scene. These efforts have brought weird and wonderful titles to adventure game aficionados. The Mystery of Woolley Mountain, Lamplight City, Lucy Dreaming - just three releases from outside of the mainstream market that thrive on the likes of Steam et al (and which I have reviewed for Fusion magazine, as well as the more recently released The Will Of Arthur Flabbington). I know this book isn't a comprehensive guide to the field of adventure games, but some of the best games of their type in the last few years have come from that arena. That being said, to give full due the indie adventure scene would probably need separate book all of its own. 

Still, this doesn't take away from my opinion that if you want a general overview of adventure games, then this one from Christopher Carton has you covered. Easily readable and handsomely bedecked with pictures galore, it's another fine addition to the bookshelf. You can pick up a copy from the usual online/physical book retailers, as well as direct from the publisher here. You can also follow the author on Twitter/X - search for @chriscarton89.