Sep. 5th, 2007

PC Zone

Sep. 5th, 2007 12:40 pm
davidn: (prince)
Recently, I've found myself missing something that isn't really a part of Britain, more something that represented an era of my life in it. It's PC Zone, a PC game magazine that my dad used to buy around 1993 to 1995. He didn't have any particular loyalty to any magazine, usually buying whatever looked interesting to him that month. But what was special about this one was that didn't feel so much an organized publication as a group of highly dangerous people locked in an office with a magazine being produced as a sort of side effect. I remember one of the readers on the letters page called it a "lads down the pub" way of writing that set it apart from all the others (and this was actually pretty literal in later issues, as they had a feature every month where they'd all spend a day playing six games of the month's chosen genre, retreat to the pub, record the conversation that ensued, and then go back and transcribe eight pages of it).

One of the articles that sticks in my mind the most was a review of a CD-ROM collection of articles published by Newsweek, who had called it Globocop in an attempt to be witty. PC Zone only reviewed it for its seventeen-second President game, then declared that "everyone involved in this project should be boiled alive like lobsters" and summed it up as "a bunch of old Newsweek magazines tarted up with what can only be described as blatant gobshite". It achieved a final score of 0%, along with the award "The most expensive beermat in the world". (Incidentally, the only game that I've ever seen manage to do worse than this was a space simulator that I think was called Mankind or something, that was so riddled with bugs that it was unreviewable and was marked "N/A%" in the summary box.)

Duncan MacDonald was one of the most significantly stylized of their reviewers. Usually he'd throw in comments about how his school band was once booed off stage in favour of the Wurzels or how much of a tip his flat is that week, often eschewing commonly accepted review format altogether and making up miniature plays to demonstrate his thoughts on a game to the reader when he got around to talking about it. The most extreme case of this was for a review of "Son of the Empire" from about 1995, where he declared that he didn't know how to review the game, and instead wrote a courtroom scene with an RPG enthusiast defending the game against people who thought they were too good for that sort of thing.

And there was Mr Cursor, who had a column at the back of the magazine. No one really knew who he was, but it was probably Duncan MacDonald again even though the writers of the magazine said it wasn't. This column could contain anything, from detailing the time when the rest of the office installed a fake version of DOS on one of the reviewers' computers to make it look like his hard drive had been destroyed, to his thoughts on Formula 1 and the new title songs for daytime TV programmes ("I want a new Neighbours theme that's even more appalling than the old one." "Strewth! I don't think I can pull that off, Bruce." "I'll do it myself then."). At one point a reader wrote in to complain that he never wrote about anything related to computers, so in defiant response he wrote yet another column about something else but presented it in a flowchart.

The most important thing that this magazine did was that it helped bring PC games out of the basement, as it were - it was the first PC game magazine to actively target adults (possibly the first anything-game magazine to do that, now that I think about it) and have a relaxed style that didn't exclude non-technical types. Unfortunately with the advent of the MMORPG era it looks like everyone has retreated firmly back into the basement again, but you have to admire the effort nonetheless.

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