Welcome to the second of the trio of recently received publications. In today's post, I'll be looking at an Amiga magazine that's been going for absolutely yonks. Yes, now up to issue 149, this is the March/April 2021 edition of Amiga Future.
Published in both German and English editions, it is the latter that I paid about £7.90 (€7.00 for the magazine, €2.20 for postage, exchange rates decide the actual amount in GBP) for and it arrived bang on the date the pre-order email said it would.
The magazine is in the A4 format and of high quality. It is 56-pages in length and in full colour. For an extra €2.90, you can also get a cover mounted CD that includes games, demos and utilities for the various flavours of operating systems classed as Amiga - AmigaOS 4, AROS, Classic and MorphOS.
The layout is clean and straightforward, and there are plenty of advertisers - ten in fact, spread over 15 pages. The most stylish of these has to be the Vampire Accelerator add in the centre-fold. Images are sharp and, overall, I have no negatives to say about the physical quality of the magazine.
As you can see from the contents page, there's quite a bit in here, with a news section, a couple of well thought out and interesting interviews, numerous reviews (including a piece on the latest update to AmigaOS 4 and two articles on hardware, one of which (the MiSTer) has been on my "would like/can't justify" list for a while now. There is also a two page piece from Trevor Dickinson which is a nice way to get updates from the main source of commercial hardware in the OS 4 market.
There is a good mix of content here, and that makes this an accessible read for anyone new to the Amiga. Yes, you might get a bit tied up in some of the technical stuff but, on the whole, my passing familiarity with the current market was more than enough to get a lot out of this issue. Complete beginners shouldn't have much of a problem finding their feet either. In that sense, Amiga Future is very similar to Amiga Addict.
My personal favourites were the MiSTer review and attached interview, the comparison between the adventure game Dune and it's board game equivalent and Trevor's Soap Box. I did, however, read this issue from cover to cover and have had a bit of a gander at some of the advertisers websites, just to see what they offered.
I enjoyed reading Amiga Future and if you can, give it a try. There is much to recommend here. Will I be subscribing? Possibly. There are six issues a year and a subscription for that works out at just over £46 including postage (excluding the cover disc) for the year. In the meantime, it is easy to decide whether or not to buy on a per issue basis as the publishers post details of every new issue on Amigaworld.net and on their website, so it makes it very easy to check if there is something of interest before you buy an issue. Indeed, Amiga Future is a great companion publication to Amiga Addict and I hope both continue to be successful. You can buy Amiga Future from this website here.
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