Guardian article on the best video games magazines

[Turtle_Quality]

Wot no Unclear User ?

https://www.theguardian.com/games/artic ... f-all-time

[bluespikey]

Really odd that there's minimal call back to the 8 bit era. And in the honourable mention section there is :

Sinclair User (some of the best cover designs of the era),

Which probably means Crash surely. Unless they really did like Kamikaze Bear

[akeley]

I think it's actually not a bad mix at all, and it cleverly covers all bases. I would place my favourites (YS & ACE) much higher, but then it's not my list. And yeah, Edge, despite its perceived stuffiness and some hilarious mishaps ( GTA 3 - 7/10 lol) probably does deserve the #1.

[Mpk]

Really odd that there's minimal call back to the 8 bit era. And in the honourable mention section there is :

Sinclair User (some of the best cover designs of the era),

Which probably means Crash surely. Unless they really did like Kamikaze Bear

YS,CU,C&VG,Zzap, Crash is in 2nd, surely that's enough 8-bittery?

Quite a snub to Big K though.

I'd have had AP top, I think, but it was always going to be Edge.

[SteveSmith]

Really odd that there's minimal call back to the 8 bit era. And in the honourable mention section there is :

Sinclair User (some of the best cover designs of the era),

Which probably means Crash surely. Unless they really did like Kamikaze Bear

I think SU can be divided into 3 periods: the staid serious period, the humorous period, and then the kids comic period. IMHO, SU had some pretty good covers in the middle period, around 86-87 (looking at thumbnails of them). They didn't have the consistency of the quality Crash covers though.

[ParadigmShifter]

Edge would be better if only you could talk to the monsters and make friends with them

[Lee Bee]

I think Keith Stuart has compiled an excellent list here, with a nice mix of machines, and no shortage of reference to the 8-bit era. I'm personally happy that YS made top ten

Interesting to note that the 18 magazines in this list represents less than 1 in 5 of the total British videogames publications. (Wikipedia lists 86.)

Another random fact is that I think Keith Stuart looks a bit like me LOL

[Daveysloan]

YS, Mean Machines & Retro Gamer for me.

[Cheez26]

Edge would be better if only you could talk to the monsters and make friends with them

So basically, Undertale, right?

[ParadigmShifter]

I guess.

I'm referring to their classic Doom review though which was a bit bizarre to say the least lol 7/10

[smurphboy]

1. Crash
1. Your Spectrum
2. Sinclair Programs


1000. Sinclair User

[Cheez26]

I guess.

I'm referring to their classic Doom review though which was a bit bizarre to say the least lol 7/10

Damn, I really should read more into the history of these tings.

[ParadigmShifter]

I think YS was the best it had a good mix of humour and articles on programming and such.

Crash only really went for the games reviews which were often "influenced" by publishers shall we say

Sinclair User was OK before YS came out, for the programming stuff. Reviews were generally terrible.

Edge magazine was good and glossy but way too pretentious for my liking. Used to read old issues at work when working late or skiving.

C&VG was pretty good they covered arcade machines too.

[Timmy]

For me, because my exposure to them were mainly the later period.

YS stood out because of the writing. The irrelevance of it. The covertapes were usually okay.

SU was fine. They had a lot of programming related articles (that I would still recommend from time to time), and probably the best cover tapes. In the end they ran out of Steam, though.

Crash, I really wanted to like them, but really low quality cover tapes meant that I usually chose the others. They have technical articles, but usually they always left out the real technical part of it. Also their writing seemed to aim at an age group older than I was.

I like a lot of the magazines mentioned in the article, but I was surprised they couldn't spelled Famitsu correctly.

[PeteProdge]

What the hell is YS doing bundled with Commodore User? It's like pairing up a Ferrari with a slipper. Commodore User has nothing in comparison, a different machine (alright, at least the bundling of Crash and Zzap! at least makes some kind of sense), different writing staff and a totally different publisher. If anything, Your Commodore would have been the most appropriate partner, as that was the Commodore-flavoured version of YS from Dennis.

Your Sinclair continues to be the best computer magazine of all time, and as much as people praise Amiga Power to the high heavens (and that really was good), that was still a YS tribute act (and yeah, a reason as to why it was so good - follow the best!)

Looking back on the Spectrum era, I have to say Sinclair User was not a bad cassette really and there are rumours that occasionally you might find one or two okay things to read in the paper it was attached to.

[Andre Leao]

1. Your Sinclair
2. Sinclair User
3. Your Spectrum

Crash was just boring, sorry

[worcestersource]

I don’t have time to read it but my favourite old mags were;

1 YS and my goodness how much did I love that magazine!
2 GamesX for its lovely typography and layout
3 C&VG because it was nice seeing other formats and it generated a bit of excitement if the Speccy popped up in it

By the time I had some purchasing power, I found SU too puerile and I never gelled with Crash. I didn’t know its format changed in its later years.

I bought a random issue of Zero once and really enjoyed that. Games Master was okay but a bit OTT. Post Speccy, we had a Mac because of reasons, and Future’s MacFormat became my magazine of choice (and the short lived MacAction).

For a few years I got into Retro Gamer and there were some great interviews but I lost interest eventually.