the magazine of my youth

Games Well, this is quite something. Archive.org have an evolving programme of digitising out of print computer magazines which includes all of those 8-bit review titles from the UK in the 80s and 90s.  Jason Scott has posted a list to his blog and just even the names bring back memories especially of the groundbreaking Newsfield titles: Crash, Games Machine, Amtix and the magazine of my youth Zzap! 64.

What made these magazines different wasn't just the humour, but that each review contained a range of opinions with small caricatures of the journo giving a thumbs up or a whithered look which, along with a percentage rating and sometimes the screenshots gave a quick indication of whether this particular film tie-in or coin-op conversion was worth the ten pounds.  Usually not.

Of course such things should be obsolete, but in these days of emulation such magazines become invaluable again as a reminder of those games forgotten or for those of us couldn't afford such massive sums from our pocket money, games that were once out of our reach.  Most would probably consider passe but as Zzap etc frequently reminded us, sometimes gameplay more than makes up for deficiencies in other areas.

Hopefully future uploads will include Acorn User, Electron User and Input.  OCR should make the process of turning those pages of machine code into working programmes far.  Hours spent typing "00 ... AE ... 8A ... 0E ... E4 ..." only to discover the checksum portion was incorrect anyway.  I have theory that the reason kids have no patience these days is because they've never had to spend ten minutes waiting for game to load from cassette.