04 Dec 1998 |

First Issue Review – Arcade

When I started playing computer games, back in the dark mid-80s, everything on the screen that you could shoot, jump on or dodge was made up of badly stuck together squares. Quite small and differently coloured squares, admittedly, but still easily-identifiable, ninety degree-cornered squares. And the screen was a twenty year old television. And the game was loaded from a knackered-out sixty minute TDK cassette (that’s right – blatant piracy).

At this time the computer games industry fell into two basic camps – Commodore 64 or Spectrum (the Amiga and Atari ST were still looming). Now as everyone knows, the Commodore was, in fact, the better machine: it had more colours (more than eight), it had far superior sound (it could play more than one note at a time) and it had more memory. However, the workings of retro-cool dictate that only the Spectrum, preferably rubber-keyed, becomes a kitsch, fashionable piece of ’80s hardware to own. The 64 can go in the bin.

But anyway, this is academic. The point I’m really trying to make is that all the games at this point in computer history were rhubarb. Graphics were all made from large coloured squares – some had eight colours, some a few more. This increased the geek-factor of a group of young men gathering together and getting animated and excited about the latest Speccy game – say, for example, Commando – because it wasn’t really very good. Nevertheless, hundreds of pages of consumer magazine were devoted to thrashing out the relative playability, hookability and lastability of everything on the market. To imagine people writing seriously and in earnest about these primitive games seems quite funny now (to me at least). I’d better watch what I say though, as there are three ex-Your Sinclair writers on the Arcade team.

But now, in the days of 32-bit, 64-channel sound and 3D graphics acceleration, computer games really are amazing. Gone are the days of furiously typing ‘Take sword and stab Frodo’ only to receive the staggeringly inane ‘I cannot use these things together’ as a reply. As Arcade says, video games now take their place alongside films, music and television as a form mass entertainment. This means that games now deserve to be critically and intelligently reviewed by those in the know (they always did, of course, it just seems more worthwhile now). Computer and video game magazines sell something in the region of one and a half million copies per issue (collectively) in the UK at the moment, covering all the main platforms.

Arcade comes along when the gaming industry still appears to be very much in ascendence and offers coverage across PCs, Playstation and Nintendo 64, as well as keeping up with all the latest developments in technology – and in this fast-paced industry it really is all about keeping up. It is arguable that covering all the gaming platforms available might lead to a dilution of its potential audience – if you’re a PC owner, why not just buy PC Gamer? Also, if you have a covermount CD, which format should it be in? This problem doesn’t seem to have troubled similar titles though. EMAP Active’s Computer & Video Games, for example, sold almost 80,000 copies per issue according to the latest ABCs.

More importantly, Arcade is a good, full magazine. Its 180 pages are filled with everything you’d expect, pretty much in the order you would expect, but that is not a problem because it looks good, reads well and… well, it’s got pictures of the new Star Wars game in it and that’s basically all that counts. This month’s feature article is an epic biography of a computer animated action-girl. Yes it’s every boy’s favourite chesty (no, not a nasty cough) adventurer friend, Lara Croft. It seems that Ms Croft wasn’t available for interview herself and so Arcade‘s Jonathan Smith spoke to her agent David Burton at programmers EIDOS. It turns out that Wimbledon-born Lara’s blood type is AB negative, she’s a Pisces and she has a fine pair of pistols.

Arcade has a big Coming Soon Preview section as well as the essential reviews pages which are divided into the three main gaming platforms. There are also some GameBoy, Mac and, as a nice touch, coin-op reviews in there as well. Even books and music get a look in towards the back of the magazine. The first issue also decides to tackle the biggest questions of all: PC or console? and Playstation or Nintendo 64? This is some scrap indeed. Not surprisingly the expert outcome on both these questions is that they’re both quite good really. Not very helpful, but then technology is subjective…. or something.

Anyway, this is a good games mag which, if the first issue is anything to go by, has a lot to it – and it’s only a quid (normally £2.70). I think there’s still room in this publishing sector for another video games title and there’s no reason why Future Publishing’s Arcade shouldn’t do well.