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)