Magazine Menagerie Redux

The latest issues of two Amiga mags landed on my doorstep last week and both are worthy of comment.

Amiga Addict issue 5 continues the great work of previous editions and provides an informative and entertaining read for Amiga fans past and present. The highlight of this month was the focus on UFO: Enemy Unknown, a sci-fi strategy title that was released in 1994. Also called X-COM: UFO Defense in America, this became an instant classic upon release and still has a major following today. A recent crowd-funding drive by author David L Craddock for a "making of" book was extremely successful and it was great to see a bit more coverage in Amiga Addict. 

The piece on Vista Pro was also a great read. A 3D terrain generator, it was most famously known in the early 1990's for creating the Mars-scapes for Arthur C Clark's The Snows of Olympus. Not a package I could afford back then, nor the Amiga capable of getting the best out of it, Vista Pro disappeared a few years later. However, modern day users can get hold of Terragen 4 by Planetside Software. Whilst the full package costs $299 for a perpetual licence, you can pay a subscription fee (ranging from $12 p/m, $33 per quarter and $120 per annum for the Creative version) or download a free version with limited features but enough to get you into the package and maybe spend some cash. That's something I shall be looking at soon.

The greatest thing, however, about this issue was the cover disk! Yes, they have had a disk lineout on the front cover since issue 1 but this time, there is actually a demo cover disk image to go with it! No, not a physical disk, after all, not sure how many people would be able to use that, but a quick download of a three-disk set of ADF files and you get a demo of Bean verses The Animator. A fun shooter with a great soundtrack, the full game is due for release in July. It also supports lightguns to really take you back to the 90's! Hopefully, the publishers will be able to include more "cover disks" in future issues. 

The other magazine that landed was issue 150 of Amiga Future, which was also the first issue of my subscription. I bit the bullet and subbed for a year because I enjoyed the copy of issue 149 that I'd bought as a one off and they are having a drive to increase the page count of the magazine. To do that, they need additional subscribers. At present, they are 13 new subscribers away from adding four additional pages per month. 

Published bi-monthly, the latest issue had some cracking articles in it, including a good review of the Raspberry Pi 400, Amiga Forever 9 (you can read my thoughts about that here) and Apollo OS. There was, of course, the regular column by Trevor Dickinson and the usual high number of news articles. A good range of games reviews were also included and the overall package is very much worth the €7 cover price. There is also a cover CD available if you wish to pay more (the cover price per issue goes up to €9.90) and this caters for the multiple OS options Amiga currently supports - AmigaOS4, AROS, MorphOS and Classic. 

Amiga Addict and Amiga Future offer different takes on the existing Amiga market and that is a good thing for both them and the market in general. Much like the Amiga magazine scene of the early 1990's, where there were multiple titles appealing to a wide range of users, these two magazines compliment each other and should, in my humble opinion, be subscription options for every fan of the Amiga. As it stands at the moment, I would not hesitate to renew these subscriptions when the current ones run out. 

You can find out more about Amiga Addict here, and Amiga Future here.

Magazine Menagerie - Part Two - Amiga Future

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.