Category Archives: Magazine Scans

Ultima 8 Review – PC Zone

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This is a review of Ultima 8 from the June 1994 PC Zone. The reviewer describes it as a love/hate sort of game which I can agree with falling more into the hate camp myself. He was clearly reviewing the first unpatched version and was suffering with the platform jumping.

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I should have had more updates over the weekend but I’ve spent a crazy amount of time getting my Win 98/DOS machine up and running. I’ve got it dual booting into DOS 6.0 now, and have my AWE32 and SBLive coexisting inside Windows. I’ve also managed to get it wired up to my MT-32 and SC-155 via the AWE32. This isn’t ideal as it requires a TSR to process the MIDI in DOS but it works in most games. My USB keyboard causes glitches in DOS resulting in slowdown, or hanging/crashing. I’ve now given in on that and have just got a second keyboard which I swap to as needed.

I found an ancient serial ball-mouse which seems to work ok – first time I’ve used one of those in a very long time. I ought to get something a little better in the long run though. When I use it in Windows I keep finding myself scrolling a non-existent mouse wheel.

I’ve still got some problems in DOS. EMM386 refuses to load no matter what. I’ve tried excluding the entire possible memory range and still no luck. I’ve got QEMM 7.5 running but that is struggling as well as if I load QEMM itself into high memory it locks up. Any advice on that is welcome. I’m thinking that a newer version might be enough. With the tiny cd and mouse drivers I’ve still got plenty of free memory so I’m probably ok for all games except those few that insist on EMM386 anyway.

The only other problem I noticed is that I don’t appear to be able to redirect the MIDI of DOS games in Win 98 to the MIDI-out and I’m stuck with playing them through the AWE32. Not sure if I’d ever run into an occasion where this would be a big issue but it does rule out running some DOS games inside Win98 if I can’t fix it. I expect a poke around the registry might be needed. Other than that it appears to be working well but I’ve only quickly tried a few games. Highlights so far are playing the first level of Dark Forces and a quick blast on the 3dfx version of Carmageddon.

Pacific Strike Review – PC Zone

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Pacific Strike was the featured game in the June 1994 issue of PC Zone, which is perhaps surprising in an issue that features a review of Ultima 8. Aside from getting pride of place on the cover, the issue included a keyboard overlay and a four page review:-

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The reviewer starts off by stating how he hasn’t liked any of the Wing Commander games and finishes by blaming the speed of Origin’s games on bad programming. This doesn’t exactly ingratiate him to me but if you couldn’t cope with a bit of banter/abuse PC Zone wasn’t the magazine to read back in the 90’s. It is actually a fair review for the most part and I wouldn’t argue with the final score.

I did some more work on the site last night. Even the less observant will have noticed the new logo at the top. This came out better than I expected but I may still tweak it. It’s based on the 1989 Origin product catalog cover, except this has a whole lot more balls.

The more observant might have noticed that the images on this post actually use proper thumbnails instead of downloading the full size file and then scaling it down in your browser. This doesn’t sound like much but it’s a definite novelty for this site. Whether I can be bothered to go back through 600 posts and give them the same treatment is debatable but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’ll at least do the magazine scans. Before that, the next job is a new logo to replace the red dot that came with the theme.

Ultima Underworld Strip Ad

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I don’t know how much of it I’ll end up posting on here but I thought I would start systematically going through all the bits I acquired recently and randomly picked this Ultima Underworld advert from the pile. A large part of the collection is various proofs for magazine ad’s + their negatives such as this. All cool stuff to own for an Origin obsessive but I’m not entirely sure what to do with them now I’ve got them. This particular advert mainly consists of some extremely positive magazine quotes from around the world.

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The negatives come as a set of four with the usual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black used in printing. When building the proof you would use these to add a colour at a time in the specified order as I understand. As to what I can do with them myself, I suppose I could take them down to the printers and get nice clean prints which could be tempting with some of the full page ads. If they could be blown up to poster size, even better.

Since we’ve all gone digital these days, it occurred to me that if I ever did want to do that it would be a whole lot cheaper to scan and combine them all myself. Also, I think I’ve only got negatives and no proofs for some of these things so I can’t even see what they look like. This sounded like a good excuse to play around with Photoshop if there ever was one. My Photoshop skills were non existant but I managed to learn enough to create a CMYK image, paste inverted scans of the negatives into the appropriate colours and rotate them to roughly fit together. I ultimately came up with this:-

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Admittedly it’s not perfect. The background is a very off white, and I definitely should have used a better rotational algorithm when I was lining everything up but as a proof of concept it’s a lot better than I’d hoped. The colours are brighter than the scanned proof but come out near enough exactly the same when printed. Higher resolution scans and a little more care and attention and I reckon I could get these looking near enough spot on. Whether I’ll ever actually do that is another matter, but I did enjoy messing around with Photoshop.

By the way, if you ever wondered why printing proofs have all the little lines on the page, trying to align all 4 layers will soon make it abundantly clear.

Omega Review + Tournament Coverage – Computer Gaming World

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This is a review of Origin’s tank programming game Omega taken from the November 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World:-

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In the same issue, CGW started a monthly feature covering the tournament for the game that Origin ran. A flyer for this tournament was included in every copy of the game and it ran for several months with contestants pitting their tanks against each other. The winner won all of Origin’s games, an Omega jacket, $500 and an Omega trophy. The trophy and/or jacket would make nice collectibles to say the least although I’ve no idea what happened to them. Each month’s competition had a brief writeup in CGW with the final results being declared in true Origin style as an announcement by Cybertank manufacturers OSI. I’ve included scans of all of the monthly features below:-

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While I’m posting I’ll mention that I’ve added a couple more guide scans to the downloads page. These are X-Wing Collector’s CD (the biggest guide I’ve scanned so far) + Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. More Lucasart’s scans are on the way when I get around to it.

Times Of Lore Review – Computer Gaming World

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This is from the January 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World:-

That’s all the scans for today. I’ve a couple of other things to mention while I’m posting. I thought it might never happen but Replacementdocs has started to approve some of my submissions presumably thanks to the new editor Pelleas. I never intended to host them all myself so assuming this continues, I’ll be removing them from this site as they are approved from now on. If you want them in high quality, grab them now.

I’m long overdue for some more gameplays and have decided I’d like to take a look at alternative versions of some of Origin’s classics. I’ve been adding some of these to the collection recently which is one of the things prompting this + I’ve got the urge to replay some of the games. I’ll be starting at the very beginning with the original Akalabeth on the Apple II.