Be Excellent To Each Other

I just bought meself some maggies to read on the trains. However, I'm a bit miffed. Back in the day PC Gamer used to be a right little tubby thing and only cost me £4.99. Today's PC Gamer weights in at an unhealthy 125 pages and costs a shocking £6.00. What a load of shit! Additionally, Metal Hammer cost me £4.25 but had 130 pages, a poster AND an Iron Maiden badge!

Now, I understand the whole Quality vs. Quantity argument, but has PC Gamer really got such excellent staff these days theat they can justify what a rip-off this magazine is?

Now that the cost of a magazine ~ cost of a XBLA/WiiWare/VC game it's hard to justify the cost.

Especially when I already read far to much gubbins about computer games on the flipping internet.

I would love to 'get into' a good magazine again though. Though I doubt it would be about computer games now. I always think Wired could be it, but i never see it, and it never looks as interesting as it should be.

They'd likely blame inflation or something. Or the cost of the cover disc.

As someone who has been buying it since their very beginning, I too have noticed how thin it's gotten in recent years. There's a lot of good things added (Extra Life) but the reviews seem shorter, the previews samier (wow, Prototype/Left 4 Dead/Fallout 3, with sod all new info, again?) and none of the 'be able to read it for almost a month and still be finding new bits' of mags of yore.

And I absolutely hate the artwork for The Spy.

PC Zone was shocking this month. Drop in page count and literally no features. Just the regular previews and reviews. I fear it's not long for this world, which is sad as there's still a couple of good writers on it.

The number of editorial pages hasn't changed *that* much. However the number of ads have plummeted thanks to the interent. PCG also sells roughly 1/4 of its peak which obviously means higher fixed costs per copy. Plus it's still only 20% more than it was in 1994, which on an inflation basis ain't bad.

The truism I heard was 1 ad page can pay for 3 extra editorial pages so tbh I'm amazed they've done as well as they have.

Buy TPCG. It's a better mag anyway, £2 cheaper, doesn't have a disk to throw away and contains things written by the excellent Craig "CG" Grannell.



It was doomed as soon as TPCG appeared. PC Zone was kept on despite abysmal sales for both Future titles to provide the illusion of competition (an old old anti-antitrust investigation ploy). Now there's TPCG I'm surprised it's lasted this long, economies of scale speak for merging the two.

I wish they'd hurry up and kill PC Zone off because I'm too lazy to cancel my subscription. I've got piles of dvds that haven't even been near my pc and magazines that I've leafed through a couple of times.

Was PC Zone ever any good, though? I remember in the second issue of PCG, people were saying in the 'what did you think of the launch, then' bit 'please don't let it turn into another PC Zone'.

Is this because, outside Memorpergers and casual stuff, PC gaming is dying on its arse?

They'll just give you PC Gamer instead.



On it's day yes. It was different in a rapidly undifferenting game market.

Plus Mr Cursor was a legend.

A certain Charlie Brooker also started out on PC Zone.

It'll be sad to see it go as there really hasn't been much cross-fertilisation of the writers there since the Future buy-out, and on the whole I find it's better written than TPCG. The latter just comes across as a little clunky in places to me and it's generally a pleasant enough read but can be a little samey and plain at times. I guess with it being so new it's still trying to find its voice but nothing stands out like Walker and Gillen's stuff in Gamer or Log's stuff in Zone. I have high hopes for though. I really need to start writing about videogames more. Properly, rather than just wittering on forums.

I really don't think the majority of Zone readers would just migrate over to Gamer though. Not without a real push and Gamer (incorporating Zone) and a movement of some of the writers too.

Oh yeah and kudos for Craig for finally bigging up Pandora's Box in the retro section. I loved that game.

cmdr jameson, how is kill kill gaming coming along?

Good point. *Puts phoning the subscription department on my "should do, but probably won't" list.*



As has already been said, mid-late 90's it had Charlie Brooker, Mr Cursor/Duncan McDonald, Dave McCandless and probably other people I should remember and it was entertaining/funny. In my experience, it was the natural successor to YS/AP (although it didn't feature any ex-AP writers and was technically the successor to Zero, but I never read that).

The only interesting thing I remember Zone doing was their discussions of certain types of games.

And I mean mostly 'interesting' as a concept. To read, it was about as interesting as your pub conversations with your mates (which you all find hilarious, because you're all mates) would be to someone who doesn't know you.

Er, sort of. It looks like I might have been dropped after the current issue, due to wanting to cover retro games that are too obscure. (One might actually argue that I wasn't keen on covering stuff the editor was more interested in, however, because my most recent list for the next six issues included the likes of the decidedly non-obscure original Driver, Lemmings, Wolfenstein and Diablo II, along with more leftfield titles like Chip's Challenge, Fury of the Furries, North and South and IT Came from the Desert.) After finally getting hold of the editor after a month of trying, he said to me there "might" be some work for me around issue 11 or 12, which I guess might be the case, but that's also sometimes editor speak for "see ya!"

If that's the case, it's kind of a shame, really, since I enjoyed writing those redux pieces and increasingly tried to do something a bit different (as my Cannon Fodder piece in issue 8 no doubt proved).


It's still fucking excellent, and that's what I really wanted to do with the redux section: one 'blockbuster' for the coverlines, one really great game deserving of an extended article and more attention, and then a cult/obscure title for the single-pager.

Still, if some of you guys have genuinely enjoyed my stuff, feel free to write to the mag and tell them. Reader feedback is pretty rare these days and my experience shows that mags do pay attention to it. Alternatively, wait for issue 10 and write in with a "where the fuck's Craig?" missive! (Then again, maybe whoever's writing for 10 will be Teh Beszt Evar Writa or something.)

Well that's pretty shitty. I don't consider anything there obscure except perhaps Fury of the Furries, which was awesome. Your 4 major titles there are all groundbreaking and spawned a billion imitators.

Whereas PC Attack managed to be full of REAL attitude about gaming after the pub, because they at least sounded like they knew what the inside of a pub looked like, and spoke/wrote like they'd just stumbled in from one.

And was even more confusing when they remade it for the gameboy but made the main character Pacman.

Mm. I knew something was up when the editor phoned me and said he didn't want to go with North and South and IT Came from the Desert, on the basis that he had to Google them. N&S, I can understand (although I would have thought it perfect fodder for the one-page cult classic), but IT was big at the time of release, is relevant in today's gaming landscape, and also happens to be legally downloadable from the Cinemaware website. Twinning it with the likes of Lemmings or Driver would mean the mag'd still get a coverline game, too.

And, yeah, Fury of the Furries was brill (which reminds me—I must dig out Pac in Time), and I lost many hours to it. I was pushing for that to get two pages, and pitched it alongside one of the Sim City titles and Wiz-Kid.

Still, who knows? Maybe come issue 12, I'll be happily scribing redux again, delving into the PC games of the past. If not, I'll (knock on wood) still be doing my thing for Retro Gamer, and I've got some fucking awesome stuff coming up for that title.

Seconding what Dudley said. I used to subscribe to Playstation Power. Started when it was good; had a great tone, Super Play writers etc. Then it decided to get all 'adult' (thankfully not in the way Play did). Then it gave up the ghost and went shit. I think it was just 'Power' by this point. Then the mag died and I thought that was it. They just started sending me something even worse. Playstation Max, I think it was.

I shudder at the thought of it.

I'm absolutely stunned that I hadn't realised it was Pac-in-Time before.

Oh bless him. If only they'd commissioned an article in a leading PC gaming magazine about the game...

I only bought pc zone once, it had Monkey Island 3 in the cover (i'm sure it was more than 10 years ago). And i thought it was great, to bad its so expensive i never bothered to buy it again.

Fury of the furries was excellent. Not as slick as Lost Vikings, but up there in the genre rankings

You've missed the point, sorry. The PC Attack lot sounded like normal blokes - who liked going to the pub, or sitting with a cup of tea to watch TV, or swearing, or a Die Hard marathon on Sky movies.

If they were a bunch of Nathan Barley types they did a ("flipping" -Ed.) good job of concealing it.

I don't have fond memories of PC Attack, they seemed to be trying too hard. If I remember rightly, it looked like it was put together by the same bloke that did the Batman show in the 60's. Unfortunately, the internet seems to have disowned it, so I can't remember how accurate my memory is being.

I don't have any to hand, but it was very bright and colourful with lots of speech balloons and a vaguely Designers' Republic future-as-we-thought-it-would-be-in-1995 look. Certainly it was entertaining, and not in a desperate, 'look at me, I'm one of the lads' sort of way.

It's been a long time, so maybe I just don't remember it too well, but from what I remember it was very much a case of 'look at me, I'm one of the lads'.
I may well have only got the first couple of issues, so it could well have got better, how long did it even last?

Much like just about every other videogaming magazine launched in the mid 1990s then. Wip3Ou3 has a lot to answer for.

PC Attack: 1995
Wipeout (the original, not even Wip3out): 1996

That was just the look of the time, I think...

PC Attack lasted about 8 or 9 issues before being 'relaunched' into a less bold style, and then lasted about the same again before dying. Shame.

I'm disappointed you bunch of cynics have such negative views of a mag that tried to be a bit boisterous but in a more mature way than the Playstation mags of the time.

Sorry, if it's any consolation, I didn't like any of the Playstation mags.

1995, if I'm putting my special pedantry hat on. It was the main launch title of the PlayStation in the UK. Possibly a fair point otherwise, but that was a time where most graphic designers were desperately aping that TDR style, and the designers of videogame magazines were no exception. But, as I'm not in my parent's attic with a digital camera right now, I can't really provide photographic proof of this, so I'm not going any further with this point. Certainly, the Sony pre-launch booklet sent out for the PS2 was a clear 'tribute' to the Designers Republic (copying their 'photo of cityscape with specific building/object shape cut out' technique* in every aspect down to the colour scheme). So much so that one of the TDR honchos remarked as such on the forum of their own website at the time, only for the designer of the PS2 booklet to chip in decrying those claims almost immediately. Top tip: If you're going to try and counter arguments of "you copied our style" with "no I didn't, I haven't even heard of you", try not to make it so abundantly clear you're a regular visitor to their website by replying to a post on their forum impossibly quickly.

(*As used for a series of TDR-designed dance compilation albums a few months previously. Possibly on the Warp label, though I may be mistaken)

Of course, I don't think I'd read more than one copy of PC Attack, so I can't say much about the writing therein, my remarks only make claim to the visual style employed for the magazine. And given the things I've done to my brain in the last thirteen years, anything I say should pretty much be appended with [citation needed].

*Looks at cover*
I used to have that issue.
95p? *cries a little*
1985?! *cries a lot*