I was rooting around in the parents loft a week or two back trying to retrieve some of my stuff which has somehow never managed to migrate over to my house since moving out years back. I entirely failed to find what I was looking for but I did find a box with about 50-60kg of old computing magazines which I’d assumed had been thrown out 10-15 years ago.
The vast majority of these were old PC Plus magazines, which was on the whole a serious publication but did devote a few pages to games reviews and it was one of my few sources for them for a while. I don’t expect there will be many relevant to the blog but I did come across this short Martian Dreams review in the October 1991 issue.
It complains that the game not being on CD-ROM was holding it back, which seems bizarre to say the least. Suffice to say, it didn’t persuade me to buy the game at the time and it was years before I got to play it and found out what I’d been missing out on.
Random question: in those stacks of gaming mags, do you have the PC Format issue that included the magazine’s Daggerfall review? Would probably have been from 1996, and if I recall correctly, the front cover was mostly blue.
I’ve only got a handful of PC Formats and don’t have that one. I’ve do have a PC Zone with a Daggerfall review if that is any use to you.
Thanks for the fast response. It’s more for nostalgia than anything else – it was one of the first reviews that I spent hours rereading in my youth. I dreamt endlessly about owning the game. Took another eight years before I got my hands on a legal copy.
I’m assuming that the PC Zone issue doesn’t have a blue cover? And if it does, that the reviewer’s first name isn’t Dan? Otherwise that’s the one I’m thinking of… (My dad used to pick up a smattering of all the major PC mags back in the day.)
And thanks for the Ultima reviews – they were from before my gamer-consciousness awakened, but I love reading them.
It can’t be this PC Zone review. It was by Charlie Brooker and he didn’t like the game all that much so it wouldn’t have made you want to own it.
I remember doing exactly the same thing with some of these old reviews that were for machines way more powerful than mine, although it was nearly a decade earlier in my case. Finding all these magazines was quite a nostalgia trip.