Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm thinking of doing a series of interviews on writers/editors who helped shape games journalism (y'know, back when it was good).

Does anyone have a favourite writer they'd like to nominate? Naturally, they need to have written for a major publication and have contributed something unique or influential to the medium.

Stewart Cumball

Didn't Rich Pelley do quite well for himself? He would be quite good.. I guess.

You would do well to ask this on YakYak in their Bleatings forum, and you'll probably find half the nominees have membership there as well. Gary Liddon would be a good one to contact for a chat for starters, though other than being very readable I'm not sure what his uniqueness or influence would be, I was only little.

On that subject the period where Yak started getting published in columns might have been a defining moment where devs became journos, of a sort. I can't think of anyone before him so if confirmed you might get a few paragraphs out of that.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to remove writing credits and bland everybody into advertising sucking scumballing cunts. They've been quite influential.

Mr EDGE

Gillen, but in a bad way.

Me. I like to think my one and only short piece for the inaugural UGVM magazine was the "Great American Novel" of our time.

The Shed Crew.

Jonarob.

Snappy Gamer is sorely missed.

Yob

I'm not sure Jonathan Nash shaped it at all but by golly his reviews have always been wonderful. Actually I don't think any of the best reviewers really shaped it at all because they were always ignored in favour of being lapdogs of the industry. Ha!

Who gave Driver 3 the best review? You should include them as an example of an advertising sucking scumballing cunt.

Actually, there's an idea. Why don't you do a Hall of Shame for the worst examples of paid journalese?

Rise of the Robots in Amiga Action would go in there.

What else?

Everything from every official magazine, ever. And most of the unofficial ones, too.

There are diamonds in the shit, but a lot of shit and very few diamonds.

Sinclair User.

Just a random example. YS awarded the awful Count Duckula 2 just 9%, SU gave it a cheery 64% and summed up with "If you like silent, slow, basic, dated, unresponsive, annoying games, get it!"

or if we translate that to normal person speak.

"If you like rubbish games then get it".

So basically SU know the game is shite but they still give it 64%. 64% for the game voted the worst of all time in the big YS games reader survey in the final issue. Here's what The Nash had to say - http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue84/Pages/YourSinclair8400014.jpg

AA gave the identical CPC port 3%. They were pondering giving it 0% but they thought it would look like a comedy mark and they were serious.

The pricks at Crash that gave Renegade 3 a smash can fuck off for the Lord.

Also some guy at Giant Bomb (I think) that gave Droplitz 95% despite it being awesomely broken.

Nash's 'review' of Super Stardust.

Two typos (that I saw) in that War Machine review. Tut tut.

To be fair, YS are far from blameless in that regard, particularly during the Matt Bielby era, where turds like NARC, Delta Charge! and STUN Runner got completely panned yet scored in the 50s and 60s.
I think the worst one I ever saw in YS was the issue that Elite just so happened to have given them Batty to put on the covertape. I'm sure it was a complete coincidence and everything, but in that very same issue, Battleships (a faithful, but pretty underwhelming conversion, and certainly no full-price game) was given the front cover and a Megagame. The publisher? Elite.

Oh, and back on the original topic, the ones that immediately jump to mind are Duncan MacDonald, Snouty and Marcus Berkmann, because they helped shape YS when it was at its most influential.

You missed one in the Count Duckula review. Seems the subs were on holiday.

In the early days, Crash was the most honest mag. YS was no great shakes, but SU was consistently bad.

In later years YS were usually spot on with their reviewing as were AA while I think of it. Their awarding of 0% to Fruit Machine Simulator 2 was worthy of himself.

Although I always thought YS went abit soft on Nigel Mansells Grand Prix and Dalek Attack after the mag had campaigned to get the games released. Can't really blame them though, you can't run a campaign to get a game released and then totally slate it. Neither were shockingly bad, but were probably overmarked by about 20%.

I only ever played the Speccy version of FMS2 - what was so bad about the Amstrad version?

Nothing. The reviewer, Adam Peters from memory, objected to the game because he said it was pointless. You play a fruit machine for reward, but with a fruit machine game there is nothing. You just sit there while it randomly decides to let you win or not.

As I say, the logic and scoring was worthy of himself.

I liked Zy Nicholson. A lot.

He's great. Really added a lot to Super Play during its Golden Age. Shame he disappeared from the magazine midway through its run, really.

Ah, ok. I wondered if it might have been the extra pointlessness of the feature trail. Rather than progressing through it till you failed or reached the end, it would just stop you when it felt like it, so you rarely saw the end feature and I think it all the time I played it, I never saw the jackpot.

Indeed. Prime Super Play was 'games journos as actual people' incarnate. Loved their little intro bits each month.

Didn't realise Zy ducked out as early as he apparently did, though. Guess he must have freelanced on RPG reviews enough for me not to notice.

Thanks for the suggestions chaps, appreciate it. If you're wondering about the belated reply, it's because I've been bed-ridden, incontinent and horribly ill for about a week (some nondescript tummy bug, apparently). I seriously lost around 6kg in a 48 hour period.

But anyway, thanks again. I'll check out the YakYak forums as GovernmentYard suggested.