How to get a bad review

[vanpeebles]

I was a YS fanboy, still have my big final copy, owned all these years. Always enjoyed your reviews

[Morkin]

Heh - I think all magazines had their review 'WTF? moments'.. I guess it's just that sometimes you'd get say 50% vs 90% from mag to mag, but 29% was such an outlier it's obviously going to get mentioned...

For me the reviews starting mattering a bit less by the very late 80s, as I was playing a bit less by then, and most of the games I was playing were either favourite games (e.g. Mr Gollop's), budget games or <ahem> copied games.

[Ralf]

There is a lot of cases where one magazine gives 80% and another one 30% to the same game. The one with higher score
gives a big two page review with lot of screenshots and enthusiasm and another one gives just a short mention.

My personal feeling is that they weren't always impartial

[Andre Leao]

10 out of 10 for Predator in SU...

[RWAC]

Still, 29% is stingy even for me.

You must have been in a really bad mood when you gave Kick Off 96 1% in Amiga Power!

St Dragon actually got a decent score in YS when it first came out.
Even accounting for a reviewer's individual tastes it seems unbelievable that the same magazine can give the full price and budget releases vastly different scores. And it wasn't just St Dragon, it happened with a lot of games.
In a lot of cases it seems that the full price release was given a hugely inflated score and the budget review gave a better indication of the game's quality.
I'd hate to think that there were financial incentives for giving higher scores but it's hard not to draw that conclusion.

[vanpeebles]

I think by the end, the tone was that, they had missed the early/mid days of the speccy when it was full of original quality content, rather than high end arcade games, butchered to fit onto the speccy (in most cases, not all). I was never a fan of the arcade game rush era really.

New releases of original software (then low on the ground) was preferred to re-releases of dodgy ports.

[Pobulous]

I didn't think this was a bad effort at all. I do agree about the edge of the playing area being very difficult to identify, but that happened in a lot of games on the Spectrum due to the use of plain black backgrounds in so many games.

In terms of speed it seems fine for a Spectrum game - better to be slow than have jerky movement.

[PeteProdge]

10 out of 10 for Predator in SU...

Crash:

89% Renegade
90% Target: Renegade
91% Renegade III

[akeley]

Complaining about old mag reviews is one of the favourite retro gaming pastimes I don't think they were in general that bad though, at least not when you look at the bigger picture. Being often controversial and divisive is an unavoidable and inherent element of reviewing process after all. It happens in all fields, even the "serious" ones such as literary or theatre reviews. Even esteemed critics can be a victim of their own biases and have moments of sheer unfairness.

The main problems in the videogaming world would be the aforementioned budget hatchet-jobs - completely unfair in so many cases. Also, getting somebody who hates, or is not very good at a partcular genre. Though I suppose a pro reviewer should try to remain objective even in such cases.

[Vampyre]

Crash:

89% Renegade
90% Target: Renegade
91% Renegade III

Aye, that was one of the ones that leapt out at me reading old Crashes recently. It was my favourite Speccy mag at the time, but it really did turn to sh*t the moment Nick Roberts appeared. (That may or may not have been a coincidence, I dunno.)

I've said it many times before that the decline of Crash began when they started giving Nick Roberts more exposure in the mag. The whole street-cred bollox is so cringe-worthy - and I thought that as an impressionable teenager in the 80's - nowadays I'm just glad I don't own the mags as I think I'd be tempted to burn-after-reading.

[akeley]

Who was Nick Roberts?

[Vampyre]

Who was Nick Roberts?

He was a reviewer in Crash (at least I think he started out as a reviewer) and then took over the Playing Tips section. Slowly, but surely, his personality seemed to permeate every aspect of the magazine. He came across as a narcissistic, self-agrandizing moron (to be fair, he was a teenager). Basically imagine what it would be like if a teenager took over a well-respected magazine and crapped their opinions over everything. Actually, you don't have to imagine it - just read Crash from when he joined.

It reached the zenith of utter crapness when there was an article called something like "Nick Roberts Cruciality Tips" (an article on how to be cool). It blows my mind that an editor would even commission something as bad as that was. Read it and weep at how a once-great magazine plummeted to new depths: https://archive.org/stream/crash-magazi ... 6/mode/1up

I lasted one more issue after that.

[akeley]

Lol. Sounds like the owners' spoilt nephew, who got kicked out of college for being a twerp, needed a job and couldn't be told to shut it...or some similar scenario.

I grew up behind Iron Curtain, and for few years before I finally scraped enough to get a ZX a handful of UK's mags which my mate owned was the closest I could get to the subject. I revered them and slowly learned English from. We had a few of Your Sinclairs and couple of ACEs (amazing mag). So maybe The Rev here is partially responsible for my broken lingo

Now I have all the scans of course and am slowly reading them, but I start with the games, from 1982, so it'll be a while till I get to witness the Nasty Nick's shenanigans.

[Audionautas]

Hi

Magazine ratings from back in the day are also a common subject inside today's Spanish Spectrum scene. Microhobby also overrated a lot of games, especially those from Spanish software companies (Dinamic, Topo Soft and Opera Soft mainly). Micromanía, being from the same publishing house (Hobby Press) did it too. Almost every Spanish videogame from these companies had a very good or excellent score assured. Dinamic and Topo Soft (software development arm of Spanish leading software distributor ERBE) invested a lot of money in advertising on those magazines, so the scores were obviously biased. In fact, many of those games (Game Over, Army Moves, Comando Tracer, Titanic, Chicago's 30, Coliseum...) were rated way lower by the British press when they were released there, sometimes fairly and sometimes somewhat unfair.

Regarding British magazines, in the 80s and early 90s I only had the chance to purchase one Crash issue (The Great Giana Sisters one), one SU issue (the Solar Jetman one), and three Computer and Videogames issues (101, 102 and 103). I never had the chance to buy Your Sinclair though. From the beginning I loved Crash. I read and re-read that only issue I had and loved the magazine the way it was. It had its own personality, it was young, fun, and a little bit politically incorrect maybe? C&VG seemed to me like a good multisystem magazine, but I didn't like Sinclair User at all. Probably it was because the issue I bought was very late in the Spectrum's life, so it was the typical thin and insubstantial issue from the early 90s with nothing memorable (the unreleased Solar Jetman game aside).

Looking back, every magazine had their hit and misses. For example, several games that today are considered classics by a big part of the Spectrum community were not Crash Smashes: titles such as Nebulus, Turbo Esprit (they fixed it in a 1988 re-review), Rex, Deflektor, Renegade, Ikari Warriors, Green Beret, Arkanoid (59%!!!), just to name a few. On the contrary, Sinclair User gave away Classic awards and scores of 5/5 or 9/10 in a regular basis, that were simply a joke. The same goes for Your Sinclair Megagames. In the early 90s when the Spectrum market was shrinking and less and less games were released every month, magazines gave away awards and high scores to some so-so games that three or four years earlier they wouldn't have scored the same way. The show had to go on.

After reading reviews for years, and despite its flaws and misses, I think Crash was the most reliable of the three main British Spectrum magazines (at least up to 1988 or so). IMHO it was the one that failed the least reviewing games. Anyway, magazines were part of the videogame-industry symbiotic system (software companies - distributors - retail - press - gamers), and all of those players were totally interdependent.

Just my two cents

All the best!

[Vampyre]

I lasted one more issue after that.

I think my last one was the first one in which the phrase "DJ Nicko" appeared

Oh god, that was awful too! Just what were the editorial team at Crash thinking? You can almost pin-point when Crash went a bit crap to just after Issue 50. I compare it to a dad trying to be cool in front of his kids and simply making a prick of himself.

I do wonder if Nick's ever found here or WoS, or has re-read those old Crashes and hides his face in a cushion. I don't really hold it against him - we were all awkward, stupid teenagers at some point. The difference was he had an audience of 100,000 to look a complete tit at.

[vanpeebles]

I liked proper Crash when it was a proper thick magazine and Sinclair User when it had the photographic covers. Once SU went down the spotty wayne, kami bear type stuff, it was just toilet paper, the same for the later Crashes. It was a fraction of what they used to be, the content was awful.

[Vampyre]

Once SU went down the spotty wayne, kami bear type stuff

I think SU wins the magazine-descending-into-utter-crapness award...

[Morkin]

Once SU went down the spotty wayne, kami bear type stuff

I think SU wins the magazine-descending-into-utter-crapness award...

Haha yeah - Kamikaze Bear, the Scrappy Doo of 80s computer mags...

[5MinuteRetro]

It reached the zenith of utter crapness when there was an article called something like "Nick Roberts Cruciality Tips" (an article on how to be cool). It blows my mind that an editor would even commission something as bad as that was. Read it and weep at how a once-great magazine plummeted to new depths: https://archive.org/stream/crash-magazi ... 6/mode/1up

Good lord -- that really is terrible. But he was young, it was the 1980s and a lot of it is clearly tongue in cheek, so perhaps it was acceptable? I probably stopped reading crash around 1988, when I'd turned 18, and for a good few months before I'd been feeling that I'd outgrown it. I guess everything has its time but I can't imagine having stuck with Crash for as long as I did if the content had turned to this earlier in its life.

[SteveSmith]

It reached the zenith of utter crapness when there was an article called something like "Nick Roberts Cruciality Tips" (an article on how to be cool). It blows my mind that an editor would even commission something as bad as that was. Read it and weep at how a once-great magazine plummeted to new depths: https://archive.org/stream/crash-magazi ... 6/mode/1up

IMHO (and I would have been ~13 when this came out) I would have read it and thought nothing of it, but only because it's not that funny. If they'd managed to make some of the lines funnier, I'd have probably enjoyed it. (But then I did read SU...)

[RWAC]

The best part of Crash was Derek Brewster's Adventure Trail.
Interestingly his games always reviewed well in Crash:

Codename M.a.t. 93%
Kentilla 10/10

When he left Crash, the quality of his games seemed to decline.

[bluespikey]

Who was Nick Roberts?

If Lloyd Mangram was Scooby then Nick Roberts was Scrappy.

[Morkin]

I did wonder whether mag writers got a sort of "review ennui" after a while, having a lot of games to review.

Also wondered how much of a game reviewers actually played - reading some of the earlier reviews in Crash it indicated that they'd get a fair way into games they liked.

[bluespikey]

I've said it many times before that the decline of Crash began when they started giving Nick Roberts more exposure in the mag. The whole street-cred bollox is so cringe-worthy - and I thought that as an impressionable teenager in the 80's - nowadays I'm just glad I don't own the mags as I think I'd be tempted to burn-after-reading.

Actually thinking about it, did Nick Roberts exist?

Crash always had the character of LLoyd Mangram, who was actually made up. Now he was a fairly staid older male, he would be played by Tom Hanks in a film.

Then Nick Roberts appeared about the same time as Newsfield was desperately trying to expand into other markets, like LM magazine and Fear. Nick Roberts also appeared all over the mag in the same way as Lloyd Mangram with no specific role other than existing, even being painted on the cover.

So was Nick Roberts an invented 'Crucial' character at the end of the 80s/ early 90s to have a bit of 'street cred' that Lloyd didn't? I can't imagine Lloyd wearing a baggy TShirt and back-to-front baseball cap.

[Vampyre]

Nick Roberts definitely existed. He's on Facebook and was editor of Games TM IIRC.