After a bit of a break away from the laptop, here is the first of three posts this week that will allow me to have a bit of a catch up on the growing backlog. These two, small publisher magazines were part of the heads up I received about Cool Sh*t Magazine back in the summer. Intrigued, I ordered the then latest issues of each and waited for their arrival.
We'll start off with Retro Format and this is an A4 stapled magazine coming in at 64 pages including the covers. Paper quality is good and has a nice glossy finish that also helps with the imagery and artwork inside. The cover itself highlights the formats covered, ranging from the venerable 8-bit MSX, CPC and C64, to the more modern (in relative terms) Amiga and Dreamcast. The Spectrum Next gets a mention too, and that's important as it's good to see new hardware come out that mimics older formats. What about the magazine's contents?
The primary feature of this issue is coverage of every Burnout title released, providing a good overview of the various titles in that much-beloved series and taking up six pages. After that, you can see there is a good mix of coverage for the NES, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, C64, CPC, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and the PC, with an arcade title thrown in for good measure. Fans of first person shooters will appreciate the attention given to E1M1 Magazine, with a review and an interview, whilst film fans get a piece on the Original Trilogy of the Star Wars Saga.
This is a well laid out magazine, with plenty of spacing and text just the right size to read easily and without eyestrain. The review scores seem quite fair (given for the couple of titles here I have played), although I do question if Quake Remastered is that good, but that's a discussion for another time. What is important is that the quality of the writing is high and there is passion behind the words, so maybe I will go easy on that Quake score...
Eight Bit is a smaller proposition, a stapled A5 booklet with 56 pages in total. This one is a bit more focussed in its content and that is no bad thing. After all, there were more eight-bit formats back in the 80's than you could shake a stick at and the tighter focus of each article actually permits greater coverage between the formats.
Issue 10 begins with the first part of a console/computer comparison, initially looking at several console titles (Pole Position, Road Rash and Operation Wolf to name but three) to see how they stack up compared to their computer counterparts. Part two will look at games from the computer perspective, and part three will feature the final showdown and results. A neat idea and something that I look forward to seeing the final results of.
Sports Games seems to be another on-going feature series, this issue with part three and looking at tennis games. A few of these I have actually played and, whilst the genre reached a pinnacle (for me anyway) with the Dreamcast's Virtua Tennis, there were some cracking examples of the genre back in the day.
Coding a Game in NextBASIC reaches parts two and three in this issue, and is something of mild interest given that I keep dabbling with coding, but for those of you with a Spectrum NEXT (or the extension in Visual Studio), these are a handy few pages.
The last four pages contain an article on the EUROPA Computer Club, a label I had never heard of before (being from Germany), as well as an interview with Arved Pohl, a programmer who worked with the company during its eight bit heydays. Very interesting and a lovely window into an area of home computing that I knew little about.
As with Retro Format, the layout is good and the production quality is high. The stock is a little thinner but to be honest, it fits the feel of the A5 booklet format better. Issue 11 has been published since I received my copy of number 10, and I shall order this one in the next few days, so that will perhaps tell you my feelings on this publication.
Indeed, these are two cracking magazines and if you're a fan of retro video gaming or computers, you should head on over to their website here and have a gander. In the freebies section, there are pdf's of issues one to six of Eight Bit, so that's definitely a good place to start. As for me, these join the quite numerous small scale independent magazines that continue to thrive in the computing/gaming arena. It's good to see such variety and long may it continue.
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