Stuart Campbell is a (now freelance) journalist from Scotland.

He is most well known for his time spent as a reviewer at Amiga Power, an Amiga (no really) magazine published in the 90s.

Although the AP reviewers as a collective always gave a fresh angle on games reviewing (scripts, novelty look-up tables where cliches were simply written as a number to save space etc) Stuart was perhaps the most imaginative, honest and cynical reviewer ever.

The game situation for the Amiga grew increasingly bleak from 1993 to 1995, as the now underpowered system faced stiff competition from cheap hi-tech Japanese consoles and the steady development of the fast/powerful PC as the home computer of choice.

The run-of-the-mill magazines (The One, Amiga Action), who for a long time only had to print full page screenshots and pad these out with 2 paragraphs of marketing hype to persuade kids to buy 'SuperGenericArcadeConversion66', decided to help keep the Amiga afloat by giving every game a high percentage score.

However if every game, good or bad is guaranteed a score above 80%, it utterly devalues the whole scoring system. It led to scoring inflation.

Mr Campbell realised that there was no point in lying to the public. He told the truth.

Unfortunately as most of the decent Amiga developers had jumped ship to PlaystationVille, the scene was left with a pile of shareware quality games, or at best a rushed conversion from the PC.

This led to games getting slaughtered, because.. they were shit

It was not unheard of for a game to get less than 10%. Infact, Kick Off 3 got a humiliating 1%, the Worst Score Ever.

Some software companies thought this was a conspiracy against them. Amiga Technologies (the then name for the company in charge of the machine) complained that the low marks were damaging the software market.

The fact is that they couldn't really stop the slide, and producing crap games didn't help.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that Stuart Campbell is one of the greatest reviewers ever. Cutting without being pointlessly cruel for no reason. He refused to bump up marks to keep publishers sweet, so the consumers were not cheated.

He can be caught on Digitiser some weekends.

Visit his website 'World Of Stuart' at http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/estate/dh69/wos/

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