Be Excellent To Each Other

The picture fades up from black to an aerial shot of a leafy city with light brown buildings all shot on glorious 16mm film. We sweep across the skyline of the city as we move towards one street, one building, and in an instant through an open window.

[cue jarring cut to studio based video tape]

The room is a slightly untidy office, about the size of a average kitchen. The camera passes a small radio cassette player of the type often sold in Argos for £20 which is playing stock indie music because we can't afford to licence anything real. Curiously there appears to be some kind of small fish tank in the office tucked away in a corner.

On the slightly tidier side of the office a bearded man types at a word processor. Meanwhile on the other, untidier, part of the office a small group of people are holding a meeting in a corner. The camera passes them and pans up towards the wall. A calendar appears in shot, the words "June 1992" can clearly be seen. Other items pass through view. We see a partial view of a framed certificate which is some kind of award for spotting things, a badge saying "I've got big tips", and a picture of a garden shed. Finally the camera settles on a television which is displaying images from a computer game. Curiously the flickering image is entirely purple.

The voices of the people in the meeting can be heard.

Woman: And so he went off to run a skate park.
Man: So you're in charge now.
Woman: We might now finally be able to axe Haylp.

The camera pans up to a sign on the wall where we see the word "Your" shortly followed by "Sinclair". Camera pulls out so we see "Your Sinclair" in it's entirety. Camera then does several jump cuts, closer and closer to the sign, to emphasise it.

Camera cuts to the meeting in the corner of the room. We can now clearly see Linda Barker, Jon Nash and Andy Ounsted having an editorial meeting. It is now obvious the fish tank in the corner in fact houses Bert The Stick Insect.

Linda: So Jon, what's this idea you have for something called BEEX Week?

Jon: Well I was on my way to get a hot chocolate and this swirly thing appeared outside the door of Commodore Format. Suddenly this….. thing.. [shudders] with an enormous head appeared and said he was "Davpaz from space year 2011" and would we, the staff of Your Sinclair, mind awfully if we edited something called BEEX week.

Andy: Have you been sniffing the freshly duplicated cover cassettes again?

Jon: So what will happen is that we'll be sent the best posts from Beex and we sort the good from the bad.

Linda: What's BEEX exactly?

Jon: I have no idea. Some kind of bulletin board. Anyway the man with the big head said the posts would be sent through space-time via a special portal called Crastersanus. They should appear somewhere in the office right about……

Linda: But how will we understand them? Won't they be full of terrible in jokes only three people will get? Shouldn't we be sorting out next months issue? We have a Popeye game to...

Jon:…….. now.

[with a flash of a special effect that cost £2.50 a pile of papers appears on a desk]

Linda walks over to them.

Linda: If we write this how do we get it back to them?

Jon: The big headed man said all we need to do is send the finished document via Citylink's next day service. If we send it first thing in the morning it should turn up the 15th of July 2011.

Linda: We'd better start reading then.

[picture fades to black, then fades up again]

The team looks tired and paper cups litter the office. It is now dark outside and the bearded man who edits what we now know is Amstrad Action has gone home. Linda is now sitting at an Apple Mac with a small black and white screen. She begins to type. The camera zooms in over her shoulder to the tiny black and white screen so what she types can be seen by the camera.


Greetings BEEX-chums from the year 1992. I hope the Speccy is still going strong and that YS still dominates the Spectrum magazine market. We've been given the groovy task of judging the best bits of BEEX this week so lets get on with it.

This week…… well, the week you are living in 19 years hence will be remembered for:

Hacking

Breadbins

I've Got Big Tips

Cibrushsille

Making old news, new news


Posts of the Week.

Peter St.John had a comment about a man called Mr Cameron and his press conference

A Sinister Agent gets to look but not touch

Kalmar gets to be our favourite Doctor (Jon Pertwee)

**BLIM!** Until 150 years ago, the Ampersand was regarded as the 27th letter of the alphabet**BLIM!**

Chinnyhill predicts Posh Spice's plans for her own sci-fi series

Curiosity isn't mentioning the races

Mimi makes toast

Stock AP joke #17 from Chinnyhill

**BLIM!** If you are vegetarian it's OK to put meat in your mouth as long as you don't swallow. That way the animal never dies.**BLIM!**

Mimi issues the biggest put down of the week

We had lots of Cibrushsille nominations but this one from new poster MerseyMai is tops

Picture of the week is from Kern and is a picture of a soldier from the past. Kind of like a reverse Terminator. Unusually Arnie is unavailable for comment in a boxout.



[Camera pulls out from screen.]

Linda: Well what do you think? Guys?

Linda looks around to find Andy and Jon playing Chaos on the office Speccy. She sighs, prints the document, seals it in an envelope and addresses it to Davpaz, 2011.

Linda: I wonder if anyone will remember us in 2011…..

Everyone pauses to think about the poignancy of the moment. But before they can really get into it the office door bursts open and a man in black appears to the sound of bagpipes playing a terrifying drone. He is wearing sunglasses with "ATTITUDE" written across the lenses in Tip-Ex.

Man in black (with Scottish accent): We're all going down the pub to celebrate the end of the golden age and to challenge Amiga Format in a drinking contest. You lot coming?

The team make a beeline for their coats and rush out the door. The man in black raises his sunglasses, winks at the camera, lowers them again and shuts the door behind him.

The camera pulls back across the office while the picture fades to black and white before fading all together. The words "Our Work Here Is Done" appear on the screen.


Credits [accompanied by the music of Whistlin' RIck Wilson with Hold My Hand Very Tightly (Very Tightly)]

Starring

Mimi as Linda Barker
Mr Chris as Jon Nash
MaliA as Andy Ounsted
Doctor Glyndwr as Amstrad Action editor
Zaphod as Bert The Stick Insect
and special guest star, Zardoz as Man In Black


Contributors: Doctor Glyndwr, Davpaz, Chinnyhill, Plissken, Sinister Agent, Longines Symphonette, Kalmar, Grim...
Publisher: Grim..
Assistant Publishers: Kalmar, Davpaz, Craster.


No Part of BEEX Week may be reproduced without the express written permission of Larry Grayson. And he's dead so you're going to have some trouble with that.

BEEX Week and Your Sinclair skips through flower filled fields with Commodore Format, Amstrad Action, Amiga Format, PCW Plus, PC Answers, Mackerel Catcher Plus, PC Plus, Sega Power, Goat Toucher UK, Amiga Power, Vigorous Masturbator Shopper, Classic CD, Needlecraft, Cycling Plus, Photo Plus, Mountain Biking UK, PC Format, Rimming Format, Public Domain, ST Format, Going Horse Racing and Today's Serial Killer.

ABC: 59,059

BEEX Publishing: Your Guarantee Of Value.

Thought for the week: What is a smile but a frown turned upside down?

Incredible!

Wicked stuff.

Excellent stuff.

How did I post that? I only just got back!

Thanks Davpaz.

Simply cibrushsille!

Outstanding work, sir! If there were anyone here, they would have heard me laugh.

Fixed now. Cheers.

SEKRIT MOD POWARS.

You're welcome.

Very good. But I'm not leaving a tip.

I'm not reading something that long.

c64?

C64's are known as breadbins - its the 2nd link

EPIC FAIL!

That was bloody brilliant! Post of next week.

Its slightly odd to think that Beex is a scion of the mighty YS.

Not really when you think of how the forum was formed.

The founding posters here came from WoS. I found that site while looking for YS stuff. Others found their way the same way or via AP links.

As I pointed out a few years back, you can take it back to the birth of Future itself. If Amstrad Action hadn't been a success, Future would have gone bust and there would have been no further magazines.

You are all the children of Amstrad Action.

There, I said it.

My joining of WoS had no relation to 8-bit gaming in any way, shape, or form.

If I could take back one thing I did....

I bought Amstrad Action lots, so you're all my children!

Malc

I thought speccies were complete wank but I still joined WoS because it was all I knew.

Leave Roger Frames out of this.

[someone might get that]

Oh no, even death can't stop him.

http://roger-frames.blogspot.com/

Every issue as a PDF.

http://cpcoxygen.fxwebdevelopment.com/amstrad_action/aa_pdf/

But what edition had what cover? Aha!

http://users.durge.org/~nich/cpcmags/aa/index.html

Oooh that's quality Chinny, was never an Amstrad Action reader but I do like looking through these old magazines, love the GX4000 review with its ALMOST UNLIMITED 128KB of memory on the cartridges.

Nice BEEX week post too

Respect to a publication for lasting so long. Feels a bit melancholy reading the much later issues, seeing the once-behemoth wound down by the movement of time and technology into something almost fanzine-y. Like what happened to YS, really. And AP, almost, but without the technical features. Wouldn't get it nowadays, of course: you'd get the flatlining ABC circulation figures, but no prolonged dwindling away along with a hardware format's commercial lifespan...


It's very good indeed, yes.

To be honest it was little more than a pamphlet with a tape stuck on the front by the end. With CPC games having long since vanished from the shops AA became a major source of new software for CPC owners. And they gave away some corkers. Elite, Blues Brothers, North and South, Fantasy World Dizzy, Crazy Cars 3 etc. IIRC some of those hadn't even been on budget!

I'm wondering how much providing software on the tape affected sales of the software covered in magazine at the tail-end of AA's life: read in Retro Gamer a few months back that Fluff by Radical Software only sold 100 copies, despite being featured on a AA cover.

Shame that AP didn't manage to get that many decent games on the cover disk before the end. Then again, it didn't have long to live by the time it began to cover-mount commercial software again, and dragging out the magazine's life would have been unnecessarily cruel and counterproductive.

Probably not much as by 1993 it was end days regarding getting software in actual shops for any of the 8 bits. Most of the large chains were dumping off stock. I remember Street Fighter 2 on the Speccy being rushed onto budget a mere 6 months after the full price release.

AA just realised that (a) they could now buy in top notch software cheaply for the tape but (b) actually having software could be a USP for the mag. The only way to get stuff was either on their tape or via their advertisers.

In terms of overall software sales, the introduction of tapes across all formats did cause software sales to decline. But that happened much earlier and I don't think impacted Fluff.

Remember that Fluff was mail order only and released in May 1994. The only advertising it had was in Amstrad Action and it required a Plus machine to run. So it was aimed at a small sector of what was a small market (we can guess the circulation was about 10,000 or less at this stage). The game only ran on machines less than 10% of people would have.* So 100 copies probably isn't bad going. If it ran on a normal CPC then 100 would have been a poor figure. If there were more than 1000 Plus users reading AA I would be surprised.

By this stage most of the gamers had left the scene. The majority of users did play some games but were tied into their CPC's because it had great serious software and PC's were not yet affordable (still being around the grand mark).

In short if he was producing the game for anything other than the hell of it, then it was foolish. It was never going to sell hundreds or thousands of copies.


* It also looks like it was disc only. So effectively 6128+ owners only. So now you are into the territory of a really small subset of CPC owners.

Ditto. I joined because Myp said you had a Halo night, and I was bored of just playing with Bobby every night.

I joined WoS because the Biffo forum closed down.

I've never owned or played on an Amiga or Spectrum, and never read one of the magazines associated with that tool.

But would WoS have existed without a certain Scotsman boarding a train to Bath?

[strokes chin]

Ah the memories.

Which came first? The 'tude or the flat top?

I hope Malc is going to do a trailer for this weeks Bits and Bobs tomorrow.

hah!

I'm not writing it til Thursday evening, there better not be anything good on TV or it will be quite brief...

Malc

Have you seen the posting this week? Seriously, not a problem.

Sorry man. I've been busy

Is that because it's been crap, so not much to post, or because there are thousands of posts to choose from?

(only a few have been submitted mind, so if you've got a fave, don't forget to do that thing)

Malc

I can do a trailer.


In a world were MaliA's gaydar is up the spout, and people have still not played North and South, there is only one hope.

A man, yet to be born, who will lay the facts bare.

A man who indeed knows that Simon Anstell likes cock and that Carol Decker doesn't hack peoples phones.

That man is Mr Chris BEEX Week.

BEEX WEEK: 7-22-11