2059: Why I Care, and Why It’s Important to Fight

I grew up with computer and video games journalism all around me.

I mean that literally: while I was growing up, both my father and my brother wrote for a newsstand magazine initially called Page 6, then subsequently New Atari User once it merged with another publication called, unsurprisingly, Atari User. My father regularly wrote about flight simulators and making music with computers and MIDI instruments, and my then-teenage brother had a steady stream of incoming Atari ST games which he would play, explore and then write about in chunks of anywhere between 250 and 1,000 words according to how much discussion the game in question warranted. Pretty much our entire collection of Atari ST games was made up of review copies; I think I remember purchasing a grand total of about four or five games altogether during the 16-bit era.

I was both fascinated by and proud of the work my father and brother did at the time — so much so that, in that way that kids do, I tried to imitate them. I would fire up AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit — for some reason I always enjoyed using the 8-bit computers just that little bit more than the 16-bit ST — and write my own reviews of things that I’d played, trying my best to imitate the style and structure of my father’s and brother’s work. I would then print them out on our noisy Epson-compatible dot matrix printer and file them away in a blue binder that had come home from my father’s day job at some point — it once housed the IBM “Manager of Managers Programme” material, and I have no idea why I remember that — and pretend that I, too, was a published writer.

Some years later, I had the opportunity to follow in my family’s footsteps and provide my own contributions to New Atari User, and I took to this with great enthusiasm, reviewing games such as Psyclapse’s Defender-alike Anarchy and taking an in-depth look at Atari’s revolutionary but regrettably flawed forays into the handheld and home console markets, the Lynx and Jaguar. Meanwhile, by this point, my brother was getting ready to finish his school career and contemplate his future, whether that be heading off to university or jumping straight into a job.

He chose the latter option, finding himself working for Europress up in Macclesfield on a revolutionary new games magazine called Games-X. Games-X was remarkable for one main reason: rather than being monthly, as most magazines were at the time, it was published weekly. This meant that it had the opportunity to be a whole lot more timely with the things it was writing about, and essentially acted as a precursor to the immediacy of Internet writing we have today. It ran for a decent number of issues before it folded, too, and was a pleasure to read, combining a somewhat irreverent, humorous editorial voice with authoritative, knowledgeable content from staffers who knew their stuff about gaming.

I followed my brother’s career with great interest and pride as it developed through a series of further magazines on which he took increasing levels of responsibility — among them Mega Drive Advanced Gaming (whose speculative feature about what Sonic 2 might be like from well before any details were actually revealed to the world remains one of my favourite video game magazine articles of all time, alongside its Super Mario 5 counterpart in its sister publication Control) and the deliciously classy PC Player — before eventually hitting what can arguably be called “the big time” in the games magazine industry of the late ’90s by landing the role of Editor on PC Zone.

Such was my interest in the games press and pride in my brother’s career that when it came time for my Year 10 Work Experience placement at school, I chose to take the awkward route and refuse any of the convenient positions my school would have been able to arrange for me, instead opting to spend a couple of weeks down in London with my brother helping out in the PC Zone offices. I spent a lot of time making tea and being mothered by art editor Thea, but I also had the opportunity to write a full review of the non-3D accelerated version of Virtua Fighter and write the captions for some screenshots in a number of different articles.

I was sold. This was what I wanted to do, and I was good at it. In the subsequent years, I found myself freelancing both for PC Zone — both during and after the time my brother was in charge, and in all honesty, even when he was editor, he wouldn’t have allowed me to contribute if he didn’t have faith in my abilities, so this certainly wasn’t a nepotism situation — and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. Most of the time I found myself writing walkthroughs, which were things that no-one else really wanted to do, but which I enjoyed doing because it gave me an excuse to play through some favourite games in great detail while writing about them. (I liked it less when my preview copy of Turok 2 on N64 crashed on the last boss and I had to play the whole thing through again on a retail copy just to get a single screenshot, but thankfully this only happened once.) I even found myself writing a whole book on Carmageddon which was subsequently included in the Virgin Megastores special edition of the game one Christmas, and which can now be found as a .PDF e-book included with GOG.com’s rerelease of the game.

It would be a number of years before I’d have the opportunity to do some more work in the games press. I went to university, I trained as a teacher, I did some teaching work, I had a nervous breakdown, I did some other work. Eventually I found myself working alongside some friends I’d met on 1up.com — a site that my brother had taken charge of, initially as an extension of the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, but which subsequently became very much its own thing — on a site called Kombo. Kombo wasn’t a particularly big site, nor did it pay especially well, but during an extremely rough period of my life — shortly after my first wife had left me and I knew that I was going to end up having to move back home — it provided me with a connection to some other human beings as well as a trickle of income and a reason to get up in the morning. I proved myself to be pretty good at the whole news reporting thing, picking out interesting stories and presenting entertaining editorial spins on them where appropriate.

Kombo, unfortunately, folded after a while, and eventually I found myself living back at home again. After a period of unsuccessfully looking for work that I wanted to do, I stumbled into an opportunity to write some freelance articles for GamePro, yet another publication which my brother had worked on but had subsequently moved on from. I wrote the articles, they turned out well, and eventually found myself with a regular position on the site’s staff, covering the news shift on UK time so the site would have plenty of content by the time its native North America woke up. Again, I made a point of picking out interesting stories that other sites weren’t necessarily covering, and this helped to make GamePro a distinctive publication rather than one of the many identikit blogs out there. My contributions were effective, too; on a number of occasions, I was responsible for some significant traffic spikes to the site thanks to the interesting articles I’d written — though ultimately, sadly, it was all for naught as the publication folded, with most of its online content lost and the rest devoured by its sister site PC World.

A few years later, I was contacted by Jaz Rignall, with whom I’d previously worked at GamePro. Jaz was working on a new project that was hush-hush at the time, but he wanted me on board. Said project turned out to be USgamer, a North American counterpart to the popular Eurogamer. My job would be both to cover the news shift on USgamer, much as I had done on GamePro, as well as “localising” Eurogamer articles and republishing them on USgamer to give them a wider audience. Initially, we were given almost total editorial freedom with USgamer, with each of the writers contributing articles in their own particular areas of expertise and interest, and this made for a site with a very distinctive editorial voice that reminded me of 1up.com back in the glory days. Unfortunately, however, this proved too good to be true, and in the interests of that ol’ bugbear of online publications, traffic, we all ended up having to rein it in a bit and taking a more structured approach to “content strategy”.

It was during my GamePro-USgamer years that I first became conscious of something I hadn’t seen before in the games press: an apparently growing level of hostility towards the audience. This was at its clearest when Mass Effect 3 was released and the player base objected to what they felt was a poor ending to the series as well as EA’s increasingly exploitative DLC strategy, which in this case even went as far as to excise a whole playable character from the game if you didn’t purchase a particular edition. Suddenly, the press turned on gamers as a whole, declaring them “entitled” and claiming that they didn’t have a right to complain at BioWare choosing to end their series in that way. There’s an element of truth in there, of course — a work of art is its creator’s responsibility, not its audience’s — but the wilfully aggressive manner in which this argument was presented just didn’t sit right with me at all.

Around the same time, we started to get a lot more in the way of sociopolitical commentary in gaming. My friend Jeff Grubb, with whom I’d previously worked on Kombo, found himself on the receiving end of an Internet dogpile after reporting on some off-colour comments that Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe had made, but without editorialising on them or condemning them as being “wrong”. Such was the ferocity of attacks he suffered from supposedly respected critics such as Brendan Keogh and Justin McElroy that he had to retreat from Twitter for a while, and I became genuinely concerned for his safety. Thankfully he was all right, and was eventually able to dismiss the whole situation — though when the GamerGate thing broke last year, he once again came under attack for not condemning the people hurling abuse at Zoe Quinn and instead just reporting on the facts.

I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this. This was not the games press which I had admired from afar and eventually from within as I was growing up. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I sure as hell didn’t like it.

Things came to a personal head for me when USgamer published a review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 in which the reviewer Dustin Quillen repeatedly referred to the game as “creepy” and “voyeuristic” and, in an earlier draft which was thankfully edited out, referred to people who might enjoy the game as “degenerates”. Both I and my colleague Cassandra Khaw took great exception to this, particularly as prior to this, we had both made USgamer a site that was inherently friendly to fans of Japanese games — an aspect of gaming which most modern gaming publications were, by this point, either ignoring completely or devoting a disproportionately small amount of their attention and effort towards. We made our feelings known, and, after a bit of arguing, this situation eventually resulted in the creation of my weekly JPgamer column for USgamer, a feature through which I made a number of very good friends, and which my audience seemed to appreciate very much indeed.

Things proceeded comfortably for some months from here, though I was conscious that the sociopolitical commentary surrounding gaming — particularly with regard to the treatment of women, spurred in part by Anita Sarkeesian’s high-profile Kickstarter campaign, and with regard to representation of people outside the heterosexual cissexual majority — was ramping up. This was particularly apparent on sites like Polygon, which appeared to have interpreted its original mission of “reinventing games journalism” as “posting as much inflammatory nonsense under the pretense of ‘progressiveness’ to blow things out of proportion as possible”, which, to be fair, is something Kotaku had been doing for years and still continues to this day.

Now, I’ve commented a number of times with regard to my feelings about this, but I’ll reiterate them here: I have absolutely no objection with people using theoretical frameworks such as feminism to talk about games — they’re a mature art form and means of creative expression by now, and as such it is absolutely possible to analyse them in these terms. Where the problem comes is when only a single ideology — in this case modern, borderline radical “third wave” feminism — becomes completely dominant to the exclusion of all others, and where any attempt to question, challenge or refute the claims made by this ideology is met by ridicule at best, harassment and abuse at worst.

This problem only gets worse when writers with no background in artistic criticism try to jump on board the feminist bandwagon by throwing in terms like “problematic”, “sexist” and “misogynist” at every opportunity, often without backing up their assertions with evidence or explanations of why they feel [x] is problematic, sexist and/or misogynist. This is high-school English stuff; even at the age of 34, I remember my English teacher Ms Derbyshire encouraging us to “PEE all over our work” by making a Point, giving an Example and Explaining its context and relevance, but this simply doesn’t happen a lot of the time; “sexist” and “misogynist” in particular are used as catch-all terms to look “progressive”, but because of the amount of power these words have managed to attain over the last few years, we’ve reached a situation where mainstream journalists now seemingly feel that they don’t have to back them up with evidence, explanations or theoretical context.

Which — finally — brings us to yesterday’s Senran Kagura 2 article, why it’s unacceptable and why it’s worth criticising rather than ignoring. Diver’s Senran Kagura 2 piece was the perfect example of what I’ve just described: he refers to the game as “unapologetically sexist” without giving any evidence other than the fact that the girls have big breasts and some of the art is sexualised. Pro-tip: “sexualised” or “sexy” is not the same as “sexist”.

The reason Diver doesn’t give any evidence is that, despite appearances, Senran Kagura is not sexist. Senran Kagura as a series features an increasingly large cast of capable female protagonists who don’t need men to help them out, save them or tell them what to do. They’re comfortable with their bodies (for the most part — characters like Mirai are an exception, but this is used as one of the aspects of her overall character development) and many of them take ownership of their sexuality, with characters such as Katsuragi, Ryouna and Haruka being pretty up-front about their tastes and fetishes. Each game passes the Bechdel Test, as flawed and stupid as it is, with flying colours, and the overall story and lore of the Senran Kagura world is fleshed out to a surprisingly comprehensive degree, repeatedly refuting Diver’s shallow assertion that “it’s about breasts”.

Now, the reason why we shouldn’t stand for this, why we should criticise this and why we shouldn’t ignore it should be clear: passivity simply sends the message that it’s okay to carry on like this. Passivity is why things have gotten to the situation they are now; people haven’t been willing enough to stick up for themselves and demand better from the press that is supposed to be representing them. The perpetually offended outrage brigade already have the press on their side, whereas fans of games like Senran Kagura and its ilk only have each other to turn to. The “feminism as default” ideology adopted by most of the mainstream press these days means that there is absolutely no way that games such as Senran Kagura will ever get a fair shot at coverage and criticism because of an overwhelming unwillingness to engage with them on anything more than the most superficial level possible. And that’s unfair both to fans of the games, and to the people who make, publish and localise them for the fans.

Let me close with a few relevant quotes from the SPJ Code of Ethics, and how they relate in particular to the Senran Kagura piece but also to games journalism as a whole.

Journalists should:

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.

Diver’s piece breaks all of these principles. It is inaccurate, it does not verify its information, and it does not provide any sources. It outright boasts about its lack of context, misrepresents and oversimplifies the subject and, following its publication, Diver has proven that he is unwilling to “gather, update and correct information” regarding the game. It may not be a “news story” as such, but it should still be held accountable, and the audience should demand better.

Journalists should:

– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

[…]

– Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

[…]

– Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.

Diver’s piece has the potential to cause if not outright harm then certainly discomfort. Consider if someone who knew nothing about Senran Kagura read nothing but Diver’s post, then met another person who told them that they were a huge Senran Kagura fan. What impact would Diver’s piece have on the first person’s perception of the second? I’d like to think that the first person would have enough in the way of critical faculties to realise that the second person probably isn’t a sex offender, but as human beings we are inherently judgemental creatures, and there will be at least a hint of negative prejudice there.

Not only that, but Diver’s piece shows woeful insensitivity towards a variety of people, including victims of sex crimes. He also shows a complete lack of consideration for “cultural differences in approach and treatment” with regard to Japanese games, in the process pandering to “lurid curiosity” by giving woefully ill-informed impressions of a creative work he spent no more than an hour with in total.

And on top of that, there is no consideration for the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Consider an extreme case, if you will: a lonely, depressed individual who finds great comfort in video games and who draws strength and courage from the things they enjoy, particularly if they’re as rich in story and characterisation as Senran Kagura is. Now consider how that lonely, depressed individual might react to reading Diver’s piece, with its dismissal of the thing that is so important to them and its implication that enjoying it makes them a deviant at best and a criminal at worst. The potential consequences aren’t pretty — granted, as previously noted, this is an extreme example, but you need to take these things into account.

The final thing I want to address is why we should give pieces like Diver’s any attention in the first place instead of just ignoring them: the argument runs that giving them attention just “gives them what they want”, and falls into the trap of clicking on clickbait.

Well, aside from the fact that not criticising these severe lapses in judgement sends the implicit message that It’s Okay To Keep Doing That, we live in an age where it is almost painfully easy to completely nullify clickbait through the use of archive sites and adblockers. In doing so, we are able to acknowledge, discuss and criticise bad and potentially harmful examples of writing without providing any benefit to the outlet on which they are published. Some may see that as a low blow, but it’s the Internet equivalent of “voting with your wallet”, and it’s important to do so.

Why? Because as is so often said that it’s become a running joke now, games journalism is broken. Completely broken. Until we get that message across, sites like Vice are going to continue doing a disservice to significant proportions of their audience — and that, to me, is completely unacceptable. So let’s do something about it.

TL;DR: I used to love games journalism, now I hate it, because it hates me for the things I love.

1544: Sick Notes

As I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past, I keep a few copies of defunct UK games magazine PC Zone around as a reminder of some early forays into writing about games professionally. These ’90s issues of the dead magazine feature nothing more exciting than a few walkthroughs by me, but it’s the rest of them I find so fascinating to read with modern eyes.

What particularly caught my attention recently was a section called “Sick Notes”. This was one of the many different things the magazine did with its last page before the back cover — over time, this included a regular column by “Mr Cursor”, a look back on the month’s gaming and what one of the editorial staff had been up to, and numerous other things.

Sick Notes was the brainchild of Charlie Brooker — yes, that Charlie Brooker — and was intended as a complement to the magazine’s other letters pages. PC Zone at this point had several different “reader input” pages, including a traditional “letters to the editor” page, a “Watch Dogs” letters page where readers could write and complain about service they’d received from hardware and software manufacturers, and a “Troubleshooter” letters page where they could ask technical queries about PC problems.

Sick Notes, meanwhile, was marketed as “The Place to Write for Abuse” so you knew what you were getting when you wrote in — and you had to write specifically to Sick Notes. It certainly lived up to its name. Here’s one memorable example that won the monthly £50 “Loser of the Month” prize, with Brooker’s response in bold beneath.

I see that in issue 67 of your “magazine” you asked us to send in a game idea. How’s this then: You start off in a primary school where all goes well and you please the teachers. You then progress to secondary education and achieve above average results and so decide to sit A-levels in your local college and finally, after four years in university, end up with an honours degree in English language and English literature.

AND THEN YOU END UP WRITING YOUR PATHETIC [swearword] PIECE OF [swearword] PAGE-FILLING SO-CALLED COLUMN.

Mark Richardson

There was a boy called Mark Richardson at my school. Everyone called him ‘skids’ because once, in the PE changing rooms, somebody noticed that he had huge brown skidmarks in his underpants. Not that this inability to tackle basic personal hygiene was restricted just to poor wiping skills. He smelled bad pretty much all the time. He was a mess. His face was permanently coated with a faintly shiny film of sweat and grime, his hair so caked in grease it recalled television footage of unfortunate seabirds in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil slick. His clothing was dirty. To use the Whizzer and Chips terminology of the day, it ‘ponged’.

But the worst thing about Skids was the way he picked his nose. He was always at it, plugging a finger in as far as he could, corkscrewing it around inside the nasal cavity, unhooking entire strata of half-dried mucus, drawing out measureless strings of oleaginous grey-green slime. Then he’d take them to his mouth, puckering his lips as if sampling some exotic delicacy. Skids devoured snot. He relished it. Guzzled it. Chewed it up and swallowed it whole, then painted his finger clean with his pink, stubby tongue. Made you sick just to watch him do that.

Anyway, sorry, what were you saying?

This was pretty much par for the course back around the time of PC Zone issue 70 (December 1998) but looking back on it now it’s hard to believe that this existed. And don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a whole big “This Is Not Okay” social justice rant here; quite the opposite, in fact. I find it a bit sad that people who write for a living — usually for websites rather than magazines these days, though print is still hanging on in there — don’t really have the freedom to express this side of themselves any more; the means for some much-needed stress relief, and for the readers to try their luck against one of the most notoriously acerbic wits in the business.

I mean, sure, these days we have the people who have made a name for themselves with strong opinion pieces — people like Ben Kuchera and Jim Sterling spring to mind immediately, and there are others, too — but it’s not the same thing at all. Brooker didn’t just blindly insult people in Sick Notes — though he always did so with carefully-considered barbs rather than mindless abuse on that page — he also wrote witty, creative, unconventional articles that were entertaining to read far ahead of fulfilling some sort of amorphous “obligation”. And he wasn’t alone, either; the writers of Zone, among them, did all sorts of things with even their most mundane articles, with particularly memorable examples including entire reviews written as movie scripts, a “Franglais” preview of Flashback follow-up Fade to Black written from the perspective of its protagonist Conrad Hart, and countless others I’ve doubtless forgotten.

What’s my point? I’m not quite sure, really, but I think it’s that people who wrote about games used to seem like they were having more fun with it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great, entertaining writers out there whose work is a pleasure to read, but rather there seems to be something of an unspoken rule that things need to be taken very seriously these days. You’ve got to get that SEO; you’ve got to get those clicks; you’ve got to capitalise on the popular things of the time; you’ve got to be seen to be criticising the things other people are criticising.

Cynical? Perhaps, but it’s why things like Goat Simulator feel so obnoxiously forced; what should be a silly little game that people stumble across organically and then tell their friends about has become something heavily promoted and treated with, in a number of cases, considerably more respect than I think even its creators intended. Fair play to them for successfully capturing the imagination of the press and the public, I guess, but it’s just not the same as the magic I feel reading an old PC Zone and comparing it to its rivals PC Format and PC Gamer as well as multiformat magazines, each of which had their own distinctive tone about them.

We can’t go back now, though; the world expects daily updates as things happen these days, rather than a monthly digest of things the editorial team thought were interesting, intriguing or just amusing. And the world certainly doesn’t expect a member of a site’s staff to hurl such an amazing torrent of intelligent abuse at them as Brooker did to Mark Richardson above; these days, treating your readership with such contempt is probably a firing offence.

Which is kind of weird, when you think about it; websites deal with reader numbers that magazines, even in their heyday, could only dream of, while for a magazine like PC Zone, every reader counted and thus you’d think posting something like Brooker’s response would be taking something of a big risk.

Maybe it was too much of a risk. Maybe that’s why PC Zone doesn’t exist any more. But I’ll be honest with you; I miss those days. I’d much rather be working on a monthly magazine than a constantly-updated website, but this is 2014; that’s the way things are, so I must, as the saying goes, “deal with it”.

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times’ sake.

Specifically, as I’ve probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It’s nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It’s also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn’t; which supposedly “big games” ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn’t as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn’t have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether “2D” or “3D” is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is “2D”, but that’s a topic for another day, I think.) “Lara is a collection of pixels,” runs the slightly flawed argument, “and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her.” Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let’s not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They’re also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.

1102: The Golden Age of Magazines

I really love re-reading old games and tech magazines, particularly those from the ’80s and ’90s. There’s a rather wonderful sense of innocence about the monsters that video games and Internet culture would become, and an even more pleasant feeling of knowing that an article was written to be a lot more “permanent” than the somewhat disposable writing for websites we have today. I’m not saying that writing is inherently worse today, of course — on the whole I think it’s a lot better for the most part — but that the sheer volume of it these days makes it more and more difficult to build up a portfolio of specific pieces you’re really proud of rather than stuff that’s just been churned out for the daily grind.

Taking video games magazines specifically, I particularly enjoy the completely different approach to games criticism seen in the mid- to late ’90s. Because reviews came out on a magazine’s street date rather than under the carefully-timed embargo of a PR department, you could generally feel pretty secure that the writers in question had spent a healthy proportion of the preceding month with the game, and that you knew they would have explored it inside out in most cases rather than rushing through. Consequently, we got a lot of reviews that were more like multi-page features, filled with big images, annotated screenshots, quotes from the developer and all manner of other things. Sometimes you even got reviews in a completely different format — PC Zone magazine, which I was loyal to initially because I liked it and later because my brother became the big boss man over there (also I wrote a number of articles for it), liked to experiment with short-form quick reviews for budget or crap games, and also held regular “Supertests”, in which they took a variety of different games in the same genre (often flight sims of various descriptions) and compared them directly to each other to determine which one was “best”.

You know what the absolute best thing was, though? No comments sections. I must confess that when reading a 1998 copy of PC Zone on the toilet the other day, I instinctively found myself glancing at the end of a somewhat contentious article (written by none other than Charlie Brooker, who used to be a regular for Zone, believe it or not) to see the ranty comments. I had already flipped the pages to the end of the piece before I realised I was holding a magazine in my hands, and that its content was static and non-interactive. It was probably for the best; Brooker’s article was a candid exploration of “why girls don’t like games” which was very, very amusing, very, very irreverent and would not have got within a mile of today’s Misogyny Police before being torn to shreds — despite the fact that it had a wealth of valid points and was clearly intended to take the piss out of anyone who believed that games were solely “boys’ toys”. But I digress. The point was, there was no opportunity to respond immediately to an article and belch forth the first opinionated effluvia that came into your head; if you wanted to respond, you had to damn well write a letter (or, later — much later — an email) and hope it got published in the following issue. PC Zone engaged in what is surely one of the first acts of trolling their comments sections on a number of occasions, tasking Brooker with responding to the most offensive, rude and generally disrespectful messages on a special “Sick Notes” page. Hilarity inevitably ensued, usually at the expense of the person who had written in.

I kind of feel like there was a lot more character about the old magazines in general. I read PC Zone primarily because I enjoyed the writers’ work and knew their tastes and senses of humour; I knew that David McCandless was obsessed with Doom and Quake (particularly multiplayer); I knew that Chris Anderson loved X-Com; I knew that you could count on Brooker for an irreverent, hilarious article — his Fade to Black preview written entirely as a short story about “Monsieur Conrad ‘Art” in Franglais was a particularly memorable example.

Different magazines had their own distinctive personalities, too — I contributed walkthroughs and tips books to the Official UK Nintendo Magazine for a while and was obliged to write using a particularly loathsome house style that effectively required me to write like a chav. Lots of “ya”s and “yer”s, and Mario was perpetually referred to as “Mazza”. It was a magazine primarily aimed at children, of course, so this style was understandable, of course — looking back on it, though, it’s more than a little cringeworthy.

I sort of miss magazines, then — I know they’re still around and all that, but the magic just isn’t there any more when you can get access to high-quality writing for free at your fingertips thanks to the Internet. That’s sort of sad, really; while you can take an iPad into the toilet with you and browse your favourite sites, it’s still not quite the same as having a proper magazine to leaf through at your leisure.

#oneaday Day 852: Carmageddon Reincarnation

I absolutely loved the original Carmageddon. Like, way too much.

I remember discovering it. I was hanging out with my school bud Andrew, and we’d just grabbed the latest PC Zone with its demo disc. Said disc carried a demo of Carmageddon, and we fired it up out of curiosity, as a lot of the press we’d seen about the game (this was pre-Internet for the most part) had been overwhelmingly positive.

The demo in question carried a single level from Carmageddon, time limited to about five minutes in total, if I remember rightly. That may not sound like much, but a single level in Carmageddon was, in fact, a vast open-world environment in which the race circuit with checkpoints was a relatively minor and inconsequential detail. As such, pretty much every playthrough of the demo we had was totally different — though when we discovered that flinging the player car off the top of the tallest building on the map tended to do utterly hilarious things with the game’s damage model, our sessions turned to being races to said building and seeing how many times we could throw ourselves into oblivion before the car became undriveable.

But I’ll back up a moment for those who, for whatever reason, are unaware of Carmageddon.

Carmageddon was a series of PC games (later ported to consoles… badly) that were ostensibly racing games but were, in fact, automotive playgrounds that were absolute joys to tool around in. They were also some of the most unabashedly offensive games of all time, though the whole thing was suffused with such a ridiculous, over the top sense of humour that it was pretty much impossible to be upset by the splattering innards that made a regular appearance. You try not to giggle with glee when your car is pinging around a cramped city block like a pinball (complete with PINGPINGPINGPINGPING noises) and electrocuting passers-by with its “Pedestrian Electro-Bastard Ray”.

Victory in a Carmageddon level could be achieved in three ways. First, you could actually complete the race by going through all the checkpoints in the right order. This was often referred to as “the boring way”, though the later tracks were actually pretty challenging.

Second, you could wreck all of the other racers. This was rather challenging, especially early in the game when your car was a bit crap and couldn’t hope to stand up to the might of a huge bulldozer. But it was immensely satisfying when you pulled it off — particularly when you successfully recreated David and Goliath with an appropriately ill-matched pair of vehicles.

Thirdly, you could run over every pedestrian wandering around the map. This was no small feat, given that most maps had anywhere between 500 and 1,000 pedestrians shambling around, going about their business. The best thing about taking this approach is that it forced you to explore the map fully to figure out where they were all hiding. Most maps included a powerup that showed where they all were on the map.

It wasn’t just mindless carnage, though. You had to strategise somewhat, since there was a constantly-ticking timer putting paid to your best-laid plans. Doing damage to other racers, mowing down pedestrians and collecting certain powerups extended the timer well beyond its starting value, so an early priority when going for the more challenging victory conditions was getting the timer up to a level where you had a bit of breathing room.

It was, in short, a great game, and one of the earliest “sandbox” games that I can think of. I also have fond memories of the game due to the fact I spent a worthwhile and profitable summer playing it to death and writing a tips book which initially was provided free with an issue of PC Zone, and which was later thrown in for free with Virgin Megastores’ special edition version of the game (that came in an absolutely massive box) one Christmas.

Basically, I would love to play a new, up-to-date version with, say, online multiplayer and all manner of other goodies.

And what do you know? Original developer Stainless Games has acquired the rights to the Carmageddon name and is — hopefully, anyway — going to make a new entry in the series. This is possibly the most exciting gaming news I have heard for years. The prospect of a new Carmageddon game on modern hardware with online play is an immensely enticing one. The original games had multiplayer, sure, but they were released at a time where playing online was something reserved for those who knew what an IPX network was. In other words, they were best played at LAN parties or with workmates in the office. Living out in the sticks at the time, I had precisely zero opportunities to do this, so you can imagine my excitement at the idea of being able to crash, bash and splatter friends over my windscreen.

If you, too, have fond memories of Carmageddon — or would just like an immensely fun, irreverent sandbox driving-and-chaos experience — get thee over to Kickstarter and back the new project. With 18 days to go, the project is already nearly three-quarters funded, and there are some pretty sweet rewards on offer for backers, depending on how much you pledge.

Stainless reckons the new game will be with us around February of next year. In the meantime, they’re apparently looking into what it would take to get the first two games (the third had nothing to do with them) released on services such as GOG.com and Steam.