One of the few magazines that didn't
mess around when it came to giving shit games a complete
panning. They'd give terrible games incredibly low scores (
natch) and constantly say (pretty much) every other
Amiga magazine was a tool of the
software industry. Which was (
a bare-faced lie - Libel Ed). Sorry, but I couldn't resist.
The features were where the magazine really shone. They often had little (or nothing) to do with games, Amigas or computing in general, and spanned such topics as Anime, Cyberpunk, high-calorie sandwich receipes, comparisons of computer games and their real-life equivalents (F1 Grand Prix and being pushed around a car park in a shopping
trolley, for example) and scripts for sitcoms based on the Valhalla series of adventures.
The most famous item was one about how software companies were buying good marks for crap games from unscrupulous
magazines. In it was a chart of pay-offs which included crates of beer, industry dinners and holidays as payoffs to influence writers of varying stubborness.. Infamous for The Number Of The Beast, which a reviewer would resort to when he wanted to dissuade gamers from buying it,
but also to placate the games company for fear of losing his crates of beer and holidays. And that number?
73%
Became more and more feature-dependant as their supply of review games dried up (jointly caused by both the death of the Amiga as a home computer and various software
companies' tendency not to send review-copies to magazines who gave them bad reviews). But that's another story. And here it is.
Team 17, probably most famous for the Worms series (Worms/2/Armageddon et al), released a mediocre ten-pin bowling game called Kingpin. AP said it was mediocre (including the infamous review-tag "Strike! This game from your shopping list", later commented upon as the funniest thing the reviewer (Reader Millington?) ever wrote for the magazine). Team 17 throws a bit of a benny and refuses to send AP any more games.
Also of note is the time that an executive of a leading software company of the day (it may have been the aforementioned Team 17, come to think of it) phoned Jonathan Nash (then-editor) and accused him and his "evil" magazine of single-handedly wanting to destroy the Amiga. The exec's argument? AP gave bad games low scores, so people wouldn't buy them. Fault his logic, I dare you.
This conversation may explain why all of the other Amiga magazines gave such obviously shite games (Rise Of The Robots, ATR, etc) ludicrously high scores. This fact was often parodied in The Disseminator, the regular news feature that compared AP's review scores to those of other magazines, often with much mocking and pointing.
But anyway. One of their slogans (The Magazine With Attitude) was often brutally and cruelly parodied by readers of the latter-day AP, who called it The (Pamphlet/Brochure/etc) With Attitude as a result of both
the reduction in size and simultaneous price-hike. Despite both of these factors the quality was retained all the way to the bitter end, when in the final issue (almost) every writer was killed off by The Four Cyclists Of The Apocalypse, who had presumably been called away from their busy schedule of peripheral-reviewing.
Its not-successor, AP2, was a website that basically continued where AP left off, although the AP in the title most certainly didn't stand for Amiga Power. Or is that what they want you to think? Or is that what I want you to think? Etc.
AP2 was available at
http://dspace.dial.pipex.co.uk/AP2
IIRC, but it appears to have disappeared now. Last I remember it was the defendant in a lawsuit against another magazine who lumped the entire thing on their CD without the writers' permission. This is generally considered A Bad Thing.
And incidentally - the writers would mercilessly slaughter the person who didn't use correct grammar for the node title.
Well, not 'slaughter'. Perhaps 'make a cutting remark and award 2/10 to'.
The Oolong Man has correctly informed me of the URL for AP2. I take my hat off, and bid him good day.
http://dspace.dial.pipex.co.uk/ap2