New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Y'know, other stuff, Sinclair related.
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Einar Saukas
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Einar Saukas »

richl wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 10:36 am @Einar Saukas - if there isn't already a category for DIGITAL would it not be a good idea to make one rather than having it categorised as PAPER? Even if there was a printed copy of this (which I'm sure XTM would be able to confirm) then I'm sure there have been (and will be) other mags and similar that are only available as PDF etc.... right?
Actually I have nothing to do with this. ZXDB doesn't even have categories for magazines. It's the SpectrumComputing site that inferred it's PAPER because it's stored as PDF.

Although I personally think this is an accurate classification. This magazine is produced as PDF but it's designed to mimic a real paper magazine. If you print it on paper yourself, you will get the same result as old magazines that were originally produced in a computer, then printed on paper for distribution.

Perhaps someone can suggest a better category than PAPER for magazines that look this way? As opposed to electronic magazines (DISK, TAPE, etc).
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by richl »

Sorry, I never really know who does what and tend to just see anything on SC as part of ZXDB directly and vice versa. I only tagged you because you'd mentioned it was now official earlier in the thread.

It should be a magazine but PAPER really is misleading as presumably that implies that it was printed when it wasn't. A scanned copy of CRASH magazine would be PAPER because that's the medium it was produced and distributed on but a digital-only title can't be classed in the same way. I know you could print it out but you could also easily convert it to a video format and watch it on a TV but that wouldn't make it a DVD or Blu-ray etc... ;)

Likwise, I wouldn't expect a database such as MobyGames to classify a digital-only game as DISC when no physical version was released even if it could be released on that format a later date.

Anyway, without me banging on too much, I just thought I'd mention it because it seemed (to me) to be an inaccurate way of describing it.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Einar Saukas »

richl wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:54 pmSorry, I never really know who does what and tend to just see anything on SC as part of ZXDB directly and vice versa.
There's no need to apologize! I was merely pointing out that ZXDB doesn't have information to distinguish if a certain magazine currently available as JPG or PDF was scanned, or originally produced this way.

But I see your point. The term PAPER is misleading. It would be better to adopt a broader term instead.

I know that SC currently classifies magazines in 4 categories:
  • DISK: Electronic magazine in disk format.
  • TAPE: Electronic magazine in tape format.
  • TEXT: Text only magazine in plain text (TXT) format.
  • PAPER: Non-electronic magazine in JPG, PNG (an image per page) or PDF (multiple pages) format, without distinguishing if scanned or produced digitally.
Is there a more generic term for a non-electronic magazine? Perhaps it could be simply called "MAG"?
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by XTM »

Alright, replying to various people in order of posting:

@Vampyre
'sup master gamer! That was just another joke of course simply because you kept mentioning the Dark/Demon Soul's Games. On the other hand, by now you should have learned how to down that 'alf a lager without problems, even zx1 could do it!
Sorry, no print version from me, if you want one you have to make it yourself. Or ask Mark R Jones how he did his. I'd assume he cut the each of the double-page files into two halves in some proggy like Photoshop, then rearranged them to the typical (for 12 pages) format "1 2 11 12", "3 4 9 10", "5 6 7 8" on 3 sheets printed on both sides, then stuck the whole thing together.

@MarkRJones1979
Cheers, hope you liked the text in the Joffa tribute too (as I was kinda unsure how people would react to this weird idea of talking to a ghost). My secret regarding the colours and texture on every page looking so real is simple - I scanned original pages from various of my own Crash issues, then used Photoshop to make clean space for my own text. The Clone Stamp, layer masks and the "adding noise" filter are extremely useful! Of course there was still tons of fiddling around with pixels here and there as I didn't always keep the original page layout ...

@Einar Saukas
A sequel with the next issue being "Crap Your Sinclair"? I'm afraid someone else will have to take up that task, as I don't hold much nostalgy for that mag, I grew up with Crash from age 13 (which helped my English loads) but only saw issues of the other 2 major mags every once in a while ... just couldn't get used to their style, Crash all the way for me.

@Morkin
Read the very first post of this topic again and you'll know who he is! Couldn't really have a cover for the only Crap Smash in this issue as that's the only game that actually exists, albeit not on the Speccy.

@richl
Thanks for the praise! I spent way too much time trying to get it look like that but at least it got noticed. Mister Lie F. (as well as a few other of the World of Chit Chat members I picked as reviewers/letter authors) hasn't yet responded to this thing at all so I doubt he read it (or ever will for that matter). I'm looking forward to Pavero's reaction on here as he had the whole section of Playing Tips to himself, and his tips on ACS (from Code Basterds) helped me a lot.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by cmal »

Great work!! Thanks for making this available.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

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XTM wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 11:21 pm Cheers, hope you liked the text in the Joffa tribute too (as I was kinda unsure how people would react to this weird idea of talking to a ghost).
i can't talk for others, of course, but i really liked it. but i love Monty Pythons, so of course i liked the interview. ;-)
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Morkin »

XTM wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 11:21 pm @Morkin
Read the very first post of this topic again and you'll know who he is! Couldn't really have a cover for the only Crap Smash in this issue as that's the only game that actually exists, albeit not on the Speccy.
Oh...Joffa..? Didn't recognise him... :lol:

Guess it's probably a pic I haven't seen before...
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

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Morkin wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2020 8:27 amOh...Joffa..? Didn't recognise him... :lol:

Guess it's probably a pic I haven't seen before...
Umm, no ... I'll say it again then: read the full first post of this topic.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Morkin »

Gah..! OK, maybe I hadn't woken up when I read that post - I get it now..! :lol:
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by pavero »

I think there is wonderful. There is for the first time in my life when I have two separate pages in some magazine. :-D
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by XTM »

pavero wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:08 pm I think there is wonderful. There is for the first time in my life when I have two separate pages in some magazine. :-D
Cheers pavero! Though I was a little surprised how you didn't publish even a single map in your Playing Tips section ;)
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by GreenCard »

I'm finally getting around to reading this now. Fantastic work, XTM! :D
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by pavero »

XTM wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:31 pm
pavero wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:08 pm I think there is wonderful. There is for the first time in my life when I have two separate pages in some magazine. :-D
Cheers pavero! Though I was a little surprised how you didn't publish even a single map in your Playing Tips section ;)
Surely it will be in the next issue. :-)
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by MarkRJones1970 »

XTM wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 11:21 pm Alright, replying to various people in order of posting:

@Vampyre

Sorry, no print version from me, if you want one you have to make it yourself. Or ask Mark R Jones how he did his. I'd assume he cut the each of the double-page files into two halves in some proggy like Photoshop, then rearranged them to the typical (for 12 pages) format "1 2 11 12", "3 4 9 10", "5 6 7 8" on 3 sheets printed on both sides, then stuck the whole thing together.
I just printed them out (on both sides of the page 1 at a time) and stapled the whole lot together.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Luzie »

I put together a PDF-File "in Booklet-Format": Could be printed on A3 Paper:

(I´ve done it with Adobe Reader from the original PDF-File in two steps:
1) Resized pages which seems to be A5 to A4 (with Options Size / Adjust and Page Size A4) in Adobe Reader)
printing into a new PDF-File.
2) "Printed as Book" as described here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/prin ... eader.html
into a new PDF-File called "Crap_2020-06_DIN_A3_Book.pdf" with PDFCreator).

Download here: https://www.magentacloud.de/lnk/s5CFAWAH

btw. [mention]XTM[/mention] Thanks a lot for mention in this issue. I just yesterday find time to read all through this fab issue of CRASH :D
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Lee Bee »

Only just discovered this thread. It's a couple of years old but I think this is incredible and I wanted to bump it, in case others hadn't seen it!
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Vampyre »

I honestly thought this would have been last year at the latest. Those years have flown by!
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

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If I ever were to do another one, I'd totally have to include the review for a fake game for you, @Vampyre : The First Of Us ;)
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by HEXdidnt »

@Lee Bee thanks for bumping - it probably would have taken me ages to find this otherwise.

@XTM great stuff - just from a quick flick-through, it brought back memories of reading the 'real' Crash magazine from back in the day. The layout and text flow are much more professional than anything from the Annuals, at least. Did you actually put the whole thing together in Photoshop?
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by XTM »

Thanks for the praise. I also have to thank Lee for bumping this I guess, it gets a "new lease of life" so to speak as plenty of members have joined after I posted this.

I guess I could give some background info ...

The reason it looks so authentic is that I sort of cheated - I scanned in select pages (Reviews, Forum, Playing Tips and so on) from my own Crash issues, then emptied the text boxes but also moved them around or changed their size (or even added new ones/removed some). The reason I did it this way was to keep the typical "signs" of an original 80s mag, like for example the lines that surround boxes or between the text columns, which I assume were hand-drawn by the layout team back in the day. All the while carefully trying not to do anything that would have made it look "modern" and thus ruined the illusion. Also, the graininess of the paper and making it look old, very important. I typed out the exact text from an original review on a new layer above the base text, then changed all the various text options (size, letter spacing, letter weight, font type and so on) until it matched the original as closely as possible and all words would be on the same positions as in the original below. Then I could write my own texts.

It was indeed all done in Photoshop. I know it's not proper layout software as people would use something like Indesign for that, but I simply do not have any software like that. In Photoshop you don't have a function to break up a word into a second line (like for example inter- face) so I had to do them all manually, which was indeed a bit of a faff.

Anyway, I have done something similar for a German retro community last year, this time it amounted to 42 pages (link here - well, it's all in German, but at least you can get an idea what it looks like) but it was MUCH less enjoyable than working on the Crap parody; over the course of more than two months, I had to wait for people to send me review texts and screenshots (many waited too long so I got super busy and stressed out near the deadline), ended up having to proofread for everyone as apparently no one is capable of spellchecking, I found mistakes in literally every single article I got sent. Very annoying, and thus, never again.
The Crap parody on the other hand I did all by myself in the time span of about a week and a half, and much time was spent trying to come up with witty text, which I enjoyed the most - I wanted to make it all sound like it was written by native speakers of English. See, even an "unfunny" German can do this (as everyone thinks we are apparently the least funny nation on Earth, but what do they know) ;)
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

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@XTM I am beyond impressed at how you put this together. Having worked 20+ years in magazines, it would be an absolute nightmare of mine to have to lay out text pages in Photoshop. I'd even take Illustrator in preference if InDesign wasn't available. Hell, MS Publisher would probably be less of a headache. The last Photoshop layout job I saw that impressed me this much was a tour brochure put together by an independent tour guide operating around Auckland, NZ. My jaw dropped when he told me how he'd done it.

How on Earth did you get the column separator lines so straight if you scanned original pages? That alone has been a bête noire for me: next to impossible to get anything dead straight on a scanner, and fixing the angle within Photoshop never gets it so perfect. Did you just redraw them? The time and effort put into this is the very definition of 'painstaking'... emphasis on 'pains', from my point of view.

But the end result is very effective - the scanned paper texture really does help to make it look authentic.

Re: spellchecking, it's often not much better if you're doing it professionally. I've worked with Editors who were functionally illiterate, let alone writers!
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Kweepa »

Wow, this was a really high quality parody! Very entertaining too, thanks.
I really want to see all those games made as CSSCGC entries.
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

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HEXdidnt wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 10:46 pm@XTM I am beyond impressed at how you put this together. Having worked 20+ years in magazines, it would be an absolute nightmare of mine to have to lay out text pages in Photoshop. I'd even take Illustrator in preference if InDesign wasn't available. Hell, MS Publisher would probably be less of a headache.

How on Earth did you get the column separator lines so straight if you scanned original pages? That alone has been a bête noire for me: next to impossible to get anything dead straight on a scanner, and fixing the angle within Photoshop never gets it so perfect. Did you just redraw them? The time and effort put into this is the very definition of 'painstaking'... emphasis on 'pains', from my point of view.
Well, it wasn't too bad since I wasn't really under any pressure (as in being "on the clock") and could take my time. In fact I've never done any of this professionally, it's all just self-taught by trial and error and to be honest I wouldn't even want to do it for a living, I can't stand sitting in an office all day.

The scans were fairly straight to begin with but I know what you mean, you'll always be a tiny bit off. Well, the solution is very easy: I created a rectange the vertical size of a column (or separator line) above the scan layer. Then I simply rotated the scan layer using the rotate function in free transform until it was perfectly aligned with the rectangle above. On some pages I also copied the separator lines with a slightly smoothed selection edge (I use German Photoshop so I don't know all the command names in English) and rotated or moved them as needed. Due to the smooth edge it would still be seamless.

Yes, some it was painstaking but I always waste time fiddling about with details anyway, even when drawing stuff in Photoshop - though it does suck a bit for digital drawing, Clip Studio Paint and Paint Tool Sai are my "weapons of choice" for that.
Kweepa wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:48 amWow, this was a really high quality parody! Very entertaining too, thanks.
I really want to see all those games made as CSSCGC entries.
Well, I think you can buy some of them from Scumsoft in Scunthorpe, though I'm not sure if they're still trading :mrgreen:
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by Lee Bee »

I've had a detailed look through this now and really think this is superb, both in content and execution! Great attention to detail.

As a designer, I agree that laying out text like this in Photoshop would be a nightmare. Then again I do know designers who work this way all the time! And it all needs to end up in Photoshop anyway so you can make it look like a real magazine :-)

This forum may be small but it sure has plenty of creative talent. Pete Prodge did something similar lately with his fake TV listing!
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Re: New "special" issue of CRASH (with tribute to Jonathan Smith)

Post by XTM »

What's the deal with that Fantasy World Dizzy mag, were you involved?

Yeah, I've seen that fake TV listing. I didn't respond with a post (mostly because it was about British TV programmes I don't know much about) but the "heart" icon shows that I pressed it. Hey @PeteProdge, is your Our Sinclair or whatever you were going to name it ever becoming a reality?
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