Amiga Power
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Amigapowercover.png
The front cover of Amiga Power Issue 49.
Amiga Power (or AP for short) was a monthly magazine about Amiga computer games. It was published in the United Kingdom by Future Publishing, and ran for 65 issues, from May 1991 to November 1996.
It had a unique style and philosophy that set it apart from other Amiga game magazines of the time - indeed, the magazine itself took pride in demonstrating this, and some game publishers regarded it as a 'renegade' publication.
Although some people condemned it as being too self-indulgent, it amassed a loyal body of fans, some of whom still reminisce about the magazine and attempt to keep its spirit alive.
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Philosophy
Amiga Power had a number of principles which comprised its philosophy regarding games.
Like almost all Amiga magazines of the time, they marked games according to a percentage scale. However, Amiga Power firmly believed that the full range of this scale should be used when reviewing games. A completely average game on this scale would therefore be awarded 50%. (In fact, Amiga Power holds the record for some of the lowest scores ever given by an Amiga magazine - 2% for International Rugby Challenge. The magazine even claimed that half of the 2% was for the comedy value. In the last issue, Kick Off '96 was given 1%.)
Although this seems obvious, at the time, Amiga magazines tended to skew the percentage scale such that 'average' games saw marks of around 70%, and marks rarely dipped below 50% except for very poor games. Because most people - including game publishers - were used to percentages being skewed in this manner, AP gained an undeserved reputation for being harsh and unfair.
In fact, fairness was a central part of their philosophy. They despised cheating, and frequently berated their own readers for using cheats to gain advantages in games. (They also believed that this applied in reverse; that games should not be allowed to cheat the player, either.)
They also believed that above anything else, games should be fun to play, and that if this criterion could be met, other factors such as graphical quality, age or heritage were unimportant.
Style
Amiga Power developed and maintained a familiar style throughout its six-year run. The writers were very fond of in-jokes, obscure references and running gags, and popular phrases or literary devices would become absorbed into AP's culture (such as, for example, using CAPITAL LETTERS for dramatic emphasis). One oft-used jocular phrase was "...or can it? Or CAN it? OR CAN IT?" added after a sentence. The verb and subject of course varied according to original sentence, to preserve grammar, but the capitalisation pattern was always the same: first don't capitalise anything, then capitalise the verb, finally capitalise everything.
Reviews were written in a very personal manner, as though the reviewer were casually talking to the reader. In fact, writers would often embark on anecdotes of recent happenings in the AP office, or of their interactions with the other AP staff. This is probably where AP gains its reputation for self-indulgence, but it also created a sense of familiarity that many readers enjoyed.
There are a number of stylistic devices that are Amiga Power hallmarks.
Ed Comments
One of the most recognisable AP devices is the Ed Comment, which, although not invented by them nor indeed used exclusively by them, was employed extensively. Over time it evolved into a multi-purpose review device.
An Ed Comment is intended to be a comment from the editor, inserted into a body of text. The comment is italicised and bracketed, and the suffix - Ed is attached to the comment to show that it is from the editor. For example, the comment "This is a comment." would appear as (This is a comment. - Ed).
To include a comment from anyone else, the 'Ed' can be replaced with the name of that person; however, this was rarely done. In actuality, most Ed Comments were never from the editor at all, but merely presented as such.
In later issues, the Ed Comment also came to be used as a device for humorous or ironic censorship. To censor a word or phrase, it can be replaced by an Ed Comment, which usually provides a non-offensive alternative enclosed in quotes. For example, the word "bastards" could be replaced with ("Bus stops" - Ed).
As well as censoring violence and profanity, the Ed Comment also provided AP with a means of referring to rival magazines, by incorporating a rhyming pseudonym into the comment. For example, mentions of The One became ("Currant Bun" - Ed) and mentions of Amiga Action became ("Michael Jackson" - Ed).
Capital letters
Approximately halfway through the magazine's life, the practice of using capital letters for dramatic emphasis became increasingly common. An example of this would be a sentence such as "You must ELIMINATE DISSONANT ELEMENTS."
While capitalisation in text is usually interpreted as shouting (and indeed AP did shout on occasion), the tone of this style of emphasis is probably meant to be more booming and sinister, judging by the contexts in which it was used.
Capital letters were also sometimes separately used to represent the voice of Rich Pelley, who wrote the magazine's tips section for a long time and was apparently quite loud.
Concept reviews
A concept review is a review conducted in an abstract manner - basically, any review which deviates significantly from the usual practice of describing a game and analysing its strengths and weaknesses. Usually it takes the form of a work of fiction (often a screenplay) which indirectly reviews the game through allegory. Amiga Power featured concept reviews on a regular basis.
Examples of Amiga Power concept review themes include:
- A movie shown at half past ten on a Saturday night on ITV, and therefore excessively censored (Apocalypse)
- An episode of Have I Got News For You (Mission Impossible: 2025)
- A chat show hosted by Michael Aspel (Woody's World)
- A science-fiction scenario (possibly based on an episode of The Twilight Zone) in which the game's main character has to convince an interviewer that he's worthy enough to be given passage on a colony ship away from the doomed Earth (Quik)
Amiga Power regular features
Kangaroo Court
Through their long computer gaming experience, the AP reviewers had developed a number of pet hates about computer games. One of the more frequently mentioned ones, for example, was 'slippy-slidey ice worlds' - levels in platform games in which the friction between the player and the ground is artificially reduced, making progress haphazard.
To address these, AP began a regular feature called Kangaroo Court, which presents the so-called gameplay 'crime', followed by the 'case for the prosecution', which is a section illustrating why the crime is a bad thing.
Finally there is 'the penalty', which was usually an execution that evolved into something increasingly bizarre over several months.
In reflection of the nature of a real kangaroo court, there is no 'case for the defence'.
In The Style Of
An 'In The Style Of' is, as the name implies, a depiction of a game in the style of something else; most often another game. It started out as a Back Page feature, but was soon thrown open to readers as a kind of competition, and moved to the news section.
Readers could send in floppy disks containing their In The Style Of drawn in Deluxe Paint, and every month Amiga Power would select the one they liked best and feature it in the magazine. They would also award the picture a score out of ten, and send the contributor £20 worth of Amiga games for every point scored. As a running gag, they nearly always found a contrived excuse to halve the point score.
The Disseminator
This feature appeared toward the end of AP's life. It was simply a table of recent games, and the percentage scores that they received from Amiga Power and the two main competing Amiga games magazines of the time: The One Amiga and Amiga Action.
AP hoped that by doing this they could perhaps highlight "disturbing trends" in the scores awarded by other magazines.
The Disseminator also contained annotations on some of the games, such as which magazine covers they had featured on, or if they had even been released at all.
Just Who Do We Think We Are?
While other magazines used at most a modest box to introduce their reviewers, Amiga Power dedicated a full page to their staff, with photographs and short sections for each member. Sometimes a topical subject (for example, football) would be put to each of them to offer their opinions.
This page saw many variations and mutations over the months, becoming such things as 'Who Do We Think We're Going To Be?', or 'Who Drew We Think We Are?'. A few times it was turned into a story featuring the AP staff in various guises.
One peculiar aspect of Just Who Do We Think We Are? was that Jonathan Nash was never photographed. His picture was always a drawing, or a photograph of something else than the journalist in question. The reason for this was never explained.
Points of View
Points of View was a table summarising each AP reviewer's opinion of the main games reviewed that month, if they had played them. The reviewers had room to make a short comment and give their personal score from one to five stars.
Frequently they would have at least one 'guest' reviewer - usually a famous celebrity, political or historical figure.
Do the Write Thing
"Do the Write Thing" (an obvious pun on the movie Do the Right Thing) was Amiga Power's letters page. One distinguishing feature of the letters page was that the magazine gave the letters titles by taking excrepts of the letters' contents out of context, sometimes even breaking sentence boundaries.
The letters, and the magazine's replies to them, started out fairly common-style, but later became more and more bizarre. Readers even started writing in about things that had nothing to do with computer games, to the point that the magazine once had to specifically ask for letters asking about computer games.
Amiga Power was a magazine for games only, not for productivity use, and it frequently advertised this fact on the letters page. If a reader wrote in with a question about hardware or productivity software, the magazine staff replied either by flaunting their ignorance, insulting the reader, or supplying blatantly false information.
The Back Page
The back page was traditionally reserved for something fun and irreverent, or at least, less reverent than all the preceding pages. In the first half of the magazine's life it featured profiles of Amiga game characters, interviews with people in the Amiga games industry, In The Style Ofs and other random articles of interest.
Midway into AP's run, the Back Page tended toward articles that blurred the boundary between Amiga games and real life. For example, there were a series of 'Wish You Were Here' articles, which were written as holiday guides to famous Amiga game locations (such as the Rainbow Islands, or Sim City).
Toward the end, the Back Page became increasingly bizarre, sometimes lacking any apparent context or relevance whatsoever.
Notable examples of bizarre Back Pages include Hoi hup la! from issue #58, advertising a fictional fitness exercise treatment, and the Bexhill theatre from issue #60, advertising a fictional circus show, including such "famous" performers as Miss Kempley Toog, Disturbo, Hettie O'Jings and The Amazing Sweffo. Both of these advertisements were drawn to imitate real-life advertisements in 19th century Britain. Neither, of course, has anything to do with computer games.
Other Back Pages have dealt with T-shirt slogans, cows, and the mystery of the "Ed".
Next Month Strip
Nearly all games magazines, AP included, have a Next Month page, which offers a brief insight into the contents of next month's issue. However, for AP's first 30 issues or so, they had a thin strip on the back cover upon which they wrote a few lines on next month's issue, and included a very small screenshot of an upcoming game.
This enabled them to have a running joke for several months regarding the game Hired Guns. For several months, the game failed to arrive for review, as the publishers kept moving the release date forward. In response, Amiga Power put the same screenshot of the game on their Next Month Strip every month for about six months, with repeated humble reassurances to the reader that they might, possibly, have it by next month.
When the game did finally arrive, they used the screenshot again on that issue, to illustrate their relief at having finally been able to review the game.
The next month, the screenshot was still there, because AP claimed it was stuck and they couldn't get rid of it.
Amiga Power irregular features
APATTOH
APATTOH, meaning Amiga Power All Time Top One Hundred, was a yearly rather than a monthly feature. It originally started in AP issue #0 (a preview of Amiga Power given as an addition to an issue of Amiga Format), and later appeared approximately in every issue whose number was divisible by 12, plus 1.
APATTOH, true to the Amiga Power philosophy, ranked games depending on how the staff liked them, not on how well they were selling or how much advertising money the magazine got from them. This meant that games which were massively hyped at the time when they came out could end up very low in the list. A notable example is Frontier, which every other magazine touted as the greatest space flight game ever, but Amiga Power ranked #100 in their top 100 list.
There were two games which held a pretty much steadfast #1 spot in the list. The first was Rainbow Islands, which the magazine thought was the best platform game on the Amiga (although not as good as the original coin-op). The second was Sensible Soccer, which the magazine similarly thought was the best sports game. Cannon Fodder also ranked well (#2) but its sequel Cannon Fodder II did much worse (#100).
Whatever happened to...
Usually a two-page feature printed on black pages, which discussed something that was in one state in the past and is now in a different one. The subject would vary, but it was not always about computer games.
A notorious example is Whatever Happened To... Game Reviews?, in which AP suggested that there might be a correlation between company incentives to a reviewer and the score that they give to a game. They worked out, if this was the case, that 73% was the lowest mark a reviewer could give to a game without falling out of favour with the game's publishers.
Diary of a game
There were two instances where a series of consecutive issues of AP had a feature called Diary of a game, where the development of a new game in progress was monitored in the form of a diary, written by the game's programmers. The games were:
- Spodland: The winner of AP's earlier "Design a game" competition, where readers were asked to send in concept ideas for a new game, with the winning idea actually getting implemented as a real game by a programming group called The Hidden. The game reached a semi-playable prototype stage, but was never finished and never released.
- Cannon Fodder: Developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin, this became the best-rated (although not best-ranked) game ever reviewed in AP and was a huge success.
F-Max
In its later years, Amiga Power started advertising a refreshment beverage called F-Max, the slightly sparkling fish drink, with the slogan an ocean of refreshment. The advertisement didn't say what F-Max actually tasted like, but the obvious implication was that it tasted like fish.
There were two things that felt "wrong" about the advertisements to the casual observer: Firstly, none of the advertisements had any photographs of the F-Max drink. They were all computer-generated 2D images that didn't even bother trying to look real. Second, no other magazine anywhere advertised the drink.
All this led to believe F-Max was some sort of in-joke invented by Amiga Power. The truth, however, still remains a mystery.
See also
External links
- AP2 (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/) - An Amiga Power tribute site created by AP writers Jonathan Nash and Stuart Campbell, with a wealth of behind-the-scenes information about the magazine.
- alt.fan.amiga-power (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.fan.amiga-power) - A Usenet group for Amiga Power fans, though it's rarely used.
- World of Stuart (http://www.worldofstuart.co.uk/) - Stuart Campbell's website, which includes a selection of Amiga Power articles and a forum that is used.
- House of Nash (http://theweekly.co.uk/house_of_nash/) - J Nash's website, which includes a selection of Amiga Power articles, which he's now taken down, but may put back up in the future.
- Digiworld (http://theweekly.co.uk/digiworld/) - Short lived attempt at Digitiser on the Internet, with Stuart, J Nash and C-Monster.
- Need to Know (http://www.ntk.net) - The fortnightly tech update for the UK, co-written by AP Production Editor, Dave Green.
- Games Press (http://www.gamespress.com/) - Your one-stop PR resource for the games industry run by AP's Gentlemanly Editor, Jonathan Davies.
- The Weekly (http://theweekly.co.uk/) - Created by Mr Nash and AP contributer Mr Millington, now ceased, though a return is promised.
- Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (http://www.mil-millington.com/) - By Reader Millington.
- Kieron Gillen's workblog (http://gillen.blogspot.com/) - By AP's Walking Tips Machine, C-Monster, which now continues at a new home (http://www.kierongillen.com)
- "It's a skull" (http://www.macalester.edu/~nfagerlund/tlb/skull.mp3) - MP3 version of a famous OctaMED music file sent to the magazine by a reader1
Notes
- Note 1: Because of technical differences between the music file formats, the MP3 version of the chorus goes "It's a skull, it's a skull, it's a sku- it's a sku- it's a skull" when the original OctaMED version goes "It's a skull, it's a skull, it's a it's a it's a skull".