AP - Real Good Time

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WE'RE GONNA HAVE A REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER - October 1992

You know, it's been said on more than one occasion that here at AMIGA POWER, we're a bit negative. A bit grumpy. A bit miserable. A bit cynical, even. Naturally, such criticism wounds us deeply. Why, if you were to come down to the AP offices, you'd find out in a second just what a cheerful, jovial, always-joking bunch of happy-go-lucky lads and lasses we really are - we laugh all day in this office, honestly, it can be quite painful sometimes, the way our sides keep splitting. You'd probably really like us, actually, and we'd end up being the best of chums and never forgetting each other's birthdays and everything. So anyway, what with it being nearly Christmas and all, we've decided to show you our other side - the positive, enthusiastic face of AMIGA POWER. And of course, being AMIGA POWER, we're not going to do it by halves. Over the next seven (count 'em!) pages, we're going to tell you the things we love about the Amiga and its games, and I'll just bet we're going to have a really great time doing it, too. Or we're all fired, apparently. TOP FIVE END-OF-LEVEL BOSSES It's always been a bit of a controvesry whether end of level bosses are a good thing or not. One side of the argument is that they're the ultimate test of gaming talent, and the other, more cynical side is that they were originally developed for coin-op games to kill you off so you'd have to put another 20p in. Whatever your view, here are our favourite five, choosen for imagination, cuteness, or just plain meanness. 1. The dead rat from Apidya Eeeww! This is gross on a whole number of levels. Firstly, of course, it's a dead rat, and what kind of sicko would want to see one of those lovely, cuddly, fluffy rodents dead, eh? Secondly, it's in a sewer level, full of toxic poisons and deadly cigarette smoke and all manner of unpleasant stuff like that. But thirdly, and most horribly of all, when you've blasted the corpse for a bit and you think you've got rid of it, all its skin falls off and three enormous maggots stick their heads up out of the body and start spewing bullets at you. It's disgusting. 2. The crystal whale in NZS This boss, on the other hand, makes the chart due to its imaginativeness (er, for want of a better word, or one that actually exists in a dictionary at least). The first time you meet it, you'll spend ages blasting at it and trying to avoid it to no avail, until eventually it swoops down and swallows you whole and you think that you're dead. But in fact, you end up inside its mouth, dodging falling globs of digestive juices and blasting at the whale's epiglottis until you make it feel so sick that it simply disintegrates with queasiness. Brilliant. 3. Clockwork owl in Videokid This one's just cute, okay? 4. Scarface from Smash TV No boss chart would be complete without the hardest son of a titanium drillbit ever to be seen on a game screen. You encounter Scarface at the end of the adrenalin-drenched second level of this shoot-'em-up to end all shoot-'em-ups (forgetting, momentarily, that the Amiga version isn't actually very good), but no matter how much slaughter you've just hacked your way through, you won't be prepared for the sheer avalanche of orneriness you're about to face. He's fast, he's vicious, and he can soak up more punishment than your average army. Make a will. 5. The big purple sea dinosaur in Chuck 2 Masterful psychology here from the game designers - this cuddly big dino looks so downcast and sad every time you clobber him over the head with a wooden club, you really do begin to question your own motivation, and whether or not you shouldn't just leave the poor creature in peace. Then he eats you.		STUART'S TOP TEN GAMES THAT NOBODY ELSE LIKES And I don't care, either. 1. Asteroids "Possibly the greatest arcade game ever invented." 2. Monster Business "A bizarre hybrid of Dig Dug and Manic Miner, and if you don't know what I mean by either of those, it's your loss. A great game." 3. Burning Rubber "No-one else sems to have taken to this at all, but I think it's got an original and different feel all of its own, and that's great." 4. Mr Do Run Run "Totally simple, totally addictive, and totally great." 5. Plutos "It looks like a dodgy sub-SEUCK blaster, but it's actually great." 6. Projectyle "Fantastic and confusing ultra-fast future sport. It's great." 7. Dugger "A brilliant conversion of the ancient coin-op Dig Dug, with Amiga sound and graphics. Great." 8. Anarchy "The only Defender game that even approaches being as good as the original, which makes it pretty great in my book." 9. The Blues Brothers "Ooh, this one's great." 10. Asteroids (Can we have the next category now, please? - Ed)
TOP EIGHT FINEST QUALITY INTRO SEQUENCES Yeah, we know, you never watch intro sequences. Neither do we, to be honest. And yes, it is annoying when a game comes on more disks than it might otherwise do just to fit a nobby old story and a few cheesy bits of digitised animation onto a front end that only serves to get in the way of playing the thing, but - well, actually, but nothing. Intros are crap. But since we're supposed to be being positive here, let's at least see which ones are the least of a waste of time. (This isn't going very well so far, is it?) 1. Superfrog A neat debunking of the whole 'glamorous intro' myth, as a sneaky glimpse behind the scenes gives away all the Hollywood-style mechanics of - well, it's pretty funny, anyway. 2. Syndicate Cyberassassins get into their cybercar and cyberdrive around the corner to cyberkidnap a cybercitizen. Brooding, dark and sinister, this Blade Runner-esque mini-film of a corperation controlled future gets you pumped up for the masses of cyberwalking around and cybershooting people. 3. Hook A neat and concise reworking of the start of the film, featuring characters that look almost but not quite like the actors. I dunno, something to do with legal matters, I'd imagine. 4. Flashback Flowing seamlessly with the game, the highlight of this exciting intro is where the hero zips off on his speeder bike amid a hail of laser fire. It's just SOOOO cinematic. 5. Super Space Invaders Complete nonsense of course, but so what? It looks good. 6. Burning Rubber In one of the more pointless intros, everyone leaps around to the thumping bass lines of top disco situationists The Utah Saints. What's this got to do with illegal races across Europe and America? Beat me guv, but it's ever so pretty. 7. Killing Game Show For little or no reason, a superbly rendered killer robot rises out of the desert and blows some targets into a zillion and one little pieces with a multi-barrelled rotary cannon. We don't know why, and we don't really care. 8. Dragon's Lair (That's not an intro, that's the game. - Ed)		TOP TEN TITLES Ask eight out of ten marketing people what the most important factor in selling a game to the gullible public is, and the chances are that 80% of them (and that's 6.4 people, stats fans) will say 'the name'. In a perfect world, your game would bear the name of some hugely popular film, sporting event or TV show of the time, all but guaranteeing colossal sales, but failing that you've got to give it a title that's really going to seize the attention of the punters. Can you imagine the consumer resistance, for example, to going into the local branch of Toys 'R' Us and asking for "I'd Like A Really Hard Punch In The Face, Please by the Bitmap Brothers"? Exactly. 1. Soccer Pinball "It's soccer! It's pinball! It's soccer and pinball!" One day, all games will be named this way. 2. Midnight Resistance We like this one because of the notion it conjures up of someone trying to actually 'resist midnight', King Canute-style. And also because of the self-perpetuating series of bad jokes it fathered amongst the readers of our sadly-departed sister magazine Your Sinclair. ("Fishnight Resistance: 'Not tonight darling, I've got a haddock'" raises a chuckle even today. You had to be there, probably.) 3. Dr Plummet's House Of Flux Says it all really, doesn't it? 4. Obliterator Now THIS is what computer games are all about. Destruction. Annihilation. And - yes! - obliteration. Brings a glow to our jaded old hearts, a title like that. 5. Deathbringer Ditto. 6. Better Dead Than Alien Likewise. 7. Zarathrusta Thus spake the creators of possibly the most gratuitously pretentious game titles yet, of their simple yet sinisterly effective Thrust sequel. 8. Everton FC Intelligencia We're not making this up, you know. 9. Pang There isn't enough onomatopoeia in game titles these days, plus it makes us think of old Batman cartoons. 10. Bitmap Brothers Volume One We were SO disappointed when we opened the box of this one and discovered that it actually just contained some nobby old games, and not three of the founder members of the Bitmap Brothers.
POPULAR CHARACTERS WHO SUCCEED DESPITE TERRIBLE HANDICAPS 1. Dizzy It's not easy living your entire life while your wearing a pair of big red boxing gloves, but Diz's dextrous object manipulation is an inspiration to us all. 2. Blob Having no reason to be there, no past, no future and no visible horizon would seem to indicate that you're a blind amnesiac, but the chances are that you're blob. Not only that, he's no hands, so how does he hold his knife and fork? 3. Putty Every time he leaves the house, all his windows fall out. 4. Lemmings Lemmings are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Do you know when you were little and your mum told you off for falling in while trying to jump a stream, and you say you only did it because all your friends did it, and she said "Well, if they jumped off a bridge, would you do that as well?" Lemmings would, that's how stupid they are. 5. Zool Zool likes to dress up as a girl. Allegedly. 6. Nigel Mansell He's boring and got a stupid moustache. We hate moustaches. 7. Galactic Warrior Rats They're not rats at all. Okay, they look like rats in the intro, but they look suspiciously like deep sea diving bells in the game. Their friends must really laugh at them. 8. James Pond Well, he's a pond, isn't he? Well, isn't he?		TOP 20 GAMES WE'D LIKE TO SEE MADE UP OF BITS OF TITLES FROM OTHER GAMES It's often said that there are no truly original ideas left any more, and that all computer and video games are simply rehashes or combinations of existing genres. Here at AMIGA POWER, we'd like to see that trend taken to its natural conclusion, where even the names of games are just cut-and-paste jigsaws of titles of the past. How about this for the Gallup/ELSPA Amiga charts of 1999? 1. Gunship Flashback A platform adventure game in which a heroic veteran of the Vietnam war suffers unfortunate memory slips every time he sees a rotary fan or a food blender, and starts rocketting civilians from his Huey while out shopping at Sainsbury's. 2. Sensible Heroes "The forces of evil are overwhelmingly powerful - they've got hundreds of thousands of heavily-armed troops heading straight for Earth in a huge fleet of deadly light-speed battle cruisers. We've got one small and rather crap spaceship armed with a peashooter, which you might possibly be able to upgrade to a better weapon by picking up bits of debris from destroyed alien craft, if you're lucky. Will you save us?" "Not a chance, squire. Call the SAS, I'm off down the pub." 3. The Legendary Enchanted Crystal Shadow Curse Of Kyrandia Island's Secret Treasure An adventure game. 4. Brutal Sports Rodland Combining cute characters with long purple hair and shockingly graphic depictions of decapitation and bodily mutilation. 5. Street Fighter 2 Last Ninja 3 Two top beat-em'ups can't decide which one's the hardest, so they decide to settle their differences with a game of football, which The Last Ninja wins with a hotly-disputed penalty in the last minute. 6. Bionic WWF Rainbow Daleks In this cutesy comic Manga-style cartoon beat-'em-up, etc. 7. Kick Nick Faldo's Face Off A gratuitously violent multi-sports sim, where the unfortunate English golfer is the victim of an angry gang of American spectators annoyed by his arrogant posturing, who ambush him in a bunker and set about him wearing sharpened ice hockey skates and football boots. 8. TV Sports Trivial Pursuit Challenge teams of poorly animated sports celebrities in a contest where the questions are banal, stupid and of no consequence what so ever. A moronic audience claps at the wrong moments and laughs at all the bland jokes. Hold on, haven't I just described BBC1's popular light entertainment program A Question Of Sport? 9. Sim Cannon Fodder Oh no, hang on, someone's done that one already. 10. No Second Playtime Noddy's fed up of his little yellow car, so he bunks off work and rips off a Kawasaki ZZR1100 from the carpark of the local Sainsurys. Ride at breakneck speeds through six thrill packed levels, but remember to look out for other road users such as Bertie the Bus, Postman Pat and Pugh, Pugh, Barny, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub from Trumpton. Toytown will never be the same again! 11. International Dangerous Chicken Rampage Self explanatory, really. 12. Graeme Souness Vector Backgammon Backgammon with pieces shaped like oddly sharp-edged and jerky footballs and cheering crowds in the backgrounds. 13. Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road Backgammon Backgammon across a texture mapped 3D terrain, with pieces shaped like overpowered jeeps. 14. MicroProse Backgammon A 1300 page manual takes you through the history and tactics of backgammon, then you place the keyboard overlay which correctly identifies all 34 keys used in the game. Stereo sound accompanies stunning vector graphics as you fly your B17 bomber over a, um, giant backgammon board. 15. Quest For Glory 2 - Trial By Backgammon In a primitive and backwards alien society, justice is an abstract concept. In a scenario harking back to the days of witch-hunting on Earth, guilt or innocence is decided in front of the entire village in a boardgame showdown against one of the community elders. Victory proves guilt, defeat means innocence. Sadly, the penalty for losing the game is death. 16. PP Hammer And His Pneumatic Backgammon More humorous platform antics. Based on backgammon. 17. Noddy's Risky Backgammon The children's favourite pixie is a reckless player, frequently tempting fate in his titanic tussles with Big Ears by throwing all his pieces forward without regard for their safety and consequently spending much of his time trying to get them back off the bar while his opponent cruises to victory. Can you teach the little fellow to improve his game, or is he destined to be a loser for ever? 18. Oh No! More Backgammon Guide green haired backgammon pieces across hundreds of levels littered with traps and, er, things. Sort of. 19. Emlyn Hughes Military Backgammon Um... 20. Cover Girl Strip Ba- (Stop this right now. - Ed)
HIGH QUALITY DEATH SEQUENCES One of the most telling features of a good game is the sense of value you attach to your 'lives'. Games which give you a dozen ships or a seemingly-limitless energy bar are very rarely addictive, because there's no precarious living-on-the-edge tension, no real sense of overwhelming loss when you get killed. Another side of the same coin is that when you do die, a good game really rams the point home - it's a giant taunt, a direct challenge to your hardness. You've screwed up, pal, what are you going to do about it? Here's some of the death sequences that really make us want to throw our joysticks to the floor, them pick them right back up and teach those baddies a goddamned lesson. 1. Overkill You scream towards the ground, smoke billowing from your tail, you hit the dirt and bounce along a few times with a succession of sickening crunches, the pilot jumps out and legs it off the screen as fast as he possibly can, then the ship explodes into a million rainbow-coloured fragments. Make no mistake about it, mate, you're dead. 2. Bob's Bad Day Bob is so nauseated by the poverty of your performance, he actually throws up right in your face. You can't let him down like this! Pull yourself together! 3. Smash TV Eurgh! Eyeballs and training shoes all over the shop. 4. Jetstrike Kind of like Overkill, except that you gouge a huge furrow in the ground as you go down deep enough to plant three tons of potatoes in. 5. Speedball 2 The sad face of the dead player bleeding on the ice as the stretcher-bearers come on to carry him off to the knacker's yard is possibly the most poignant sight in Amiga games today. 6. Project X Not spectacular, but the sudden, silent, powerless glide after impact followed by a smoke-trailing plunge off the screen is curiously moving. 7. Defender The death of the Defender ship itself is a pretty powerful one, but the game's real tour de force comes when, through your unspeakable incompetence, you let every single one of your humanoids get killed or mutated by the evil Landers. You don't actually die yourself, though - it's the entire planet that gets it in the neck, in a shattering, mountain-range-destroying explosion that leaves you in no doubt as to just exactly how useless you are. The terrifying onslaught of Mutants that follows immediately afterwards seems like only fair punishment, really.		TOP SIX CRAP THINGS DONE BY COMMODORE Marketing, eh? Wouldn't it be a good idea if Commodore had some? 1. Bringing out the A500 Plus and then denying responsibility for incompatibility problems and not doing anything to help, thereby alienating and annoying loads of loyal customers. 2. Bringing out the A600 as soon as the A500 Plus had established itself as the No.1 Amiga, thereby alienating and annoying loads of loyal customers. 3. The CDTV. 4. Bringing out the A1200 and then almost immediately dropping the price by �100, thereby alienating and annoying loads of loyal customers. 5. Releasing the CD32 in a no-games bundle, several weeks before any software was available, thereby causing loyal customers to fork out �300 on a big grey paperweight, hence alienating and annoying them. 6. Not sending us one no matter how many times we asked them.
TOP SIX THINGS CHARACTERS DO WHEN YOU DON'T TOUCH THE CONTROLS It's one of the stranger phenomena of recent times that games seem to be designed to stop you playing them. Or, more precisely, to reward you for not playing them. Leave any half-decent platform game alone for 10 seconds these days without making your character do anything, and it'll suddenly take on a life of its own, performing all manner of little tricks and visual gags for your amusement. But - hey - it's not just platformers. These are some of the coolest consequences of catatonia in our book. 1. Hudson Hawk A bit of a dull platformer, this one, but it wins a whole load of brownie points right back when you put your joystick down for a minute. After the usual foot-tapping and bored looks, Hudson starts to look a bit worried and beads of perspiration appear on his furrowed brow. Leave him for long enough, and the reason for his concern becomes apparent - a huge piano appears from out of nowhere and falls on his head, crushing him to death. 2. Cohort 2 Leave the controls of this Roman wargame alone for a while, and, miraculously, your soldiers will go ahead and win the battle without you. Lions led by donkeys, eh? 3. Oscar Leave him alone for just a few seconds, and this cheeky wee chappy does a whole host of things. He pouts and pulls faces, whips out a Gameboy and moves around continually like a small child on a long car journey. Shame the game's not up to much, though. 4. Kick Off Leave the controls alone, touch the controls a little bit, wrench the controls around until your hands fall off, what's the bloody difference? Your players still do exactly whatever the hell they feel like. 5. Project X You die very quickly. 6. Tam + Rit Surprisingly, in this cutest of cutesy games, if you leave the joystick alone for long enough, our two gorgeous little fairies actually produce an old-fashioned revolver in place of their magic rods, and start to play Russian Roulette with each other. If you still don't move the controls (and it takes a hard-hearted man to stay untouched by this point), the game progresses to its logical but horrific conclusion, when one of them gets their head blown apart and the player concerned loses a life.* * This isn't even slightly true. - Ed		TOP FIVE INCREDIBLE VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OF PHYSICS Wouldn't life be dull if computer games had to be realistic all the time? You bet it would. Still, some games take liberal interpretations of geological imperatives just a bit too far... 1. I Hang Suspended (In Nothing) In Blob, platforms hanging in space, connected to nothing, doing nothing, achieving no purpose. How? Why? 2. Einstein Was Wrong Your speedometer reads 300 km/h, but in half-an-hour's driving you only actually cover 20 kilometres. Clearly, the race is being watched from a spaceship travelling at fractionally under the speed of light. Or something. 3. Slowing Down Wouldn't it be great if real life slowed down when there were a lot of things happening at the same time? It's a bit weird in Sensible Soccer, Wiz'n'Liz or Street Fighter 2, but that's nothing to how it would be in the actual world. Imagine it - you're sitting in your house with a couple of mates having a bit of a chat, when the doorbell goes and three more of your friends walk in. Suddenly, it takes you five minutes just to get up and walk over to the other side of the room and everyone's voice sounds like a Dr Who bad guy with laryngitis. And as for a decent party, well, we're probably talking about the rest of your life. 4. The Incredible Moving Mount Fuji from Prime Mover For more details on this bizarre geological phenomenon, check out the review on page 93. 5. The 'Curly Muffin' manouevre from the Turrican games. For this experiment you'll need to find a garage with a flat roof. Start off in the garage and run out, jumping up as you get to the open doors. As you sail upwards, turn round to face the garage and head back towards it, so that you end up on the roof. If you manage to end up standing on the roof, then congrats, you've successfully done a 'curly muffin', and defied the laws of ballistics by reversing your direction in mid-flight. It's hard (not to say impossible) but the guy in Turrican manages it on a regular basis. Incredible.
DAVE'S TOP TEN LIBELLOUS THINGS WE'VE SAID BUT GOTTEN AWAY WITH (Snip! - Legal Dept)		STUART'S TOP TEN EX-MEMBERS OF AMIGA POWER "Ooh, I've seen 'em come and go in my time, y'know. As the only member of the AP team present since Issue One, I've watched all the to-ings and fro-ings of the ever-changing AMIGA POWER staff line-up. Tearfully I recall the Matt Bielby Golden Age, a smile crosses my face as I think back to the time Gary Penn ate a tin of dog food for a bet and rendered the office uninhabitable for an entire afternoon, I wince as I remember the frankly frightening fan mail Lisa Nicholls used to get from some of our, er, more enthusiastic readers. But that's enough of the past - what heights have all your favourite ex-AP staff scaled since we gave them their start in professional journalism?" 1. Matt Bielby Ah, the Golden Age. Matt's a kind of avuncular King Midas figure to the rest of us, wandering from place to place working his spooky magic on magazines until they're all but perfect, then moving on to pastures new. After creating both AMIGA POWER and the wonderful Super Play practically single-handed, he was head-hunted by his own publisher to launch the already-amazing (and it hasn't even come out yet) PC Gamer. These days, we find it hard to believe he ever worked on the same magazine as any of us - we're simply not worthy. 2. Lisa Nicholls It just isn't the same coming into the office in the morning and not finding it in knee-deep in flowers from starstruck admirers. Or, for that matter, having pages on which all the screenshots aren't set at a jaunty 10 degrees from the horizontal. As Art Editor of Super Play magazine, Lisa had the thrill of working with Matt 'Golden Boy' Bielby for a while before he left to do his PC thing, and although she's only on the floor above us, she has never returned to see us. Not ever. 3. Neil West Professional jammy git Neil now reviews cutesy shoot-'em-ups from a beachside apartment in California, where he lives with a harem of beautiful women and servants who cater for his every whim. Every now and again he bangs off a column or two on his incredibly expensive Mac notebook and sells it to a worldwide syndicate of magazines for a colossal amount of money. We bet he misses his old AMIGA POWER days, though, even though he doesn't return our calls or reply to our letters. 4. Gary Penn Gary, by contrast, hasn't done so well since leaving the fold. Once a veritable giant of the computing industry, AP's erstwhile Consultant Editor now ekes out a living as Project Manager for various big name games which probably won't ever come out (ref. Batman Returns), and by writing increasingly bitter instruction manuals and show reports. We miss his world-weary cynicism, all the same, and Stuart misses that tenner he once lent him, when Gary popped out for, and we quote, "just a minute." None of us have seen him since. 5. Jacquie Spanton Jacquie's tale is an especially sad one. Once one of AMIGA POWER's most talented art staff ever, the pressures of work gradually took their toll on her over the early part of last year, and her work became more and more erratic and she worked increasingly irregular hours, which she fitted around ever-longer trips to the pub. Eventually, we had to carry her off in a confused and emotional condition and deposit her at the door of the Betty Ford Clinic, where she remains to this day. Sal has expressed a desire to mount a breakout for her old drinking buddy, but we think it's best to leave her alone until she's well again. Jacquie's one of the few ex-members of AP who would like to visit us, but sadly, several locked doors and a court restraining order prevent her. 6. Tim Tucker Poor Tim. A confused soul at the best of times, the trauma of the fatal bus accident that ended his days with AP severed his last links with reality. Now the crudely-reanimated zombie cadaver who bears his name simply doesn't know where he is any more and wanders the offices of Future Publishing, absent-mindedly working for whichever magazine he comes to rest in that morning. After a short spell on AP tribute mag Sega Zone, he's now operating as Deputy Editor on the esteemed GamesMaster. Next week? Who knows? 7. Matthew Squires Accident-prone insurance defrauder Matthew's legendary short attention span hasn't changed any since his game-reviewing days. Flitting like a butterfly from subject to subject, he was last seen on a magazine called Camcorder Plus (via music technology mag Future Music), before finally giving up the publishing business altogether to go and work on a farm. We expect he's probably an astronaut by now. 8. Mark Ramshaw Despite his oft-stated intense hatred of computers, games and kids, Mark now edits top-selling console pamphlet Sega Power in between trips to the beach and long hot nights wearing cut-off shorts in sweaty nightclubs. 'It's more important to me than being the editor of a computer games magazine,' he said, yesterday. 9. Tim Norris Tim's going to be a dad, you know. I weep for the future. 10. Dave Green First there was an AMIGA POWER Production Editor. Then there was another one of it. Then there was another one of that. Which was Dave. But now he's gone to seek his fame and fortune writing plays for Harold Pinter, or something like that. Visit our planet again sometime, Dave, won't you?
JONATHAN'S TOP TEN VIDEO GAME BABES With so many computer and console owners being spotty sex-starved adolescent boys with limited social skills, it's not surprising that game publishers often use hormones as the way to a punter's heart. We asked AP's resident testosterone-charged lust god Jonathan Davies to nominate the most successful efforts. 1. Kiki from Gem'X 'She loves me, apparently.' 2. Doralice from Fascination 'Phwoar.' 3. Zooz from Zool 2 'Zool, but dressed as a girl - surely every video-gaming boy's dream.' 4. Sonia from Indy 4 'A fine, independent woman.' 5. Anthemis from Entity 'Leather, whips, dinosaurs and magical powers. I think you know what I mean.' 6. Elvira 'Would have come higher, but she's a bit, well, real.' 7. The mystery girl from the beginning of Ishar 2 'She might have been just newly murdered, but...' (Snip! - Ed) 8. Kate from Back Sides 'Especially in AGA mode, eh lads?' 9. Jane from Back Sides 'Nnnnggghhh.' 10. Muriel from Back Sides (Jonathan? Hello? Jonathan? - Ed)		TOP TEN PERIPHERALS The Amiga's a fine machine in its own right, of course, but to make it the complete gameplaying engine, it needs a few power-ups. We say - an Amiga's not an Amiga without this little lot stuck on the back of it. 1. The Gravis joypad The saviour of the platform game fan. The Gravis is a nifty SNES-style joypad anyway, but the extra buttons which serve as auxiliary up and down controls, and hence provide fire-button jumping on games which otherwise require the nightmarish 'up-to-jump' system. Also especially good for those awful, awful 'up-to-accelerate' driving games, which are possibly even worse. Genius at work. 2. The Bug Still the incomparable Sensible Soccer accessory, and the perfect tool for everything except the fiddliest of platformers. 3. The Pac-Man joystick Big, hard, and heavy enough to actually stick to your desk when you put it there. We never thought we'd see the day. 4, 5 and 6. The Spectravideo Freeflight joystick, the Freewheel and the Quickjoy Footpedal In the few months since Steve joined us, virtual racing has becomes a reality. With his earphones cranking out the sound, he crouches before his souped up A1200 (complete with 4Meg of Fast RAM) and whiles his days away in a fast and aggressive F1GP sort of a way. He reckons he's got the game almost as good as it can get, which is just as well really, because the computer's running out of ports for all his add-ons. 7. The one meg upgrade Can you believe there are still some people out there who haven't got one of these? 15 quid! Get it together, for God's sake. 8. The null-modem link cable Playing Stunt Car Racer or Knights Of The Sky against a friend is one of the greatest joys of Amiga gaming. Or life, in fact. 9. The external disk drive We'd rather not imagine where we'd be without these babies. Disk-swapping is, we think, one of the biggest single reasons for the resurgence of the consoles. And who's got enough money for a hard drive these days? 10. The PCMCIA card for the A600 - I don't bloody think. I've got this really groovy laptop, right, and it runs Protext, same as the A600, so I thought 'Great, I'll be able to type files in on Protext, save them out to the smart card, then stick it into the PCMCIA slot on the A600, load up Protext and transfer them across - it'll be brilliant, I can get lots of work done when I'm stuck on trains and stuff and life will be wonderful. Hurrah!' Fat chance. The cretin who decided the two machines should use different formatting systems for a card that works perfectly on both machines, but not at the same time, should be taken round the back of our car park and kicked in the head until he dies. (Steady on, Stu. - Ed)
LISA'S TOP TEN VIDEO GAME DUDES Token no-sexist gesture for our seven female readers combined with joke at Lisa's expense. Hurrah! 1. Postman Pat "I love a man in uniform." 2. Captain Furillo of Hill Street Blues "I love a man in uniform." 3. The doctor from Life & Death "I love a man in uniform." 4. The referee from Manchester United Europe "I love a man in uniform." 5. The Fat Controller from Thomas The Tank Engine "I love a man in uniform." 6. The barbarian from Barbarian "Phwooar, eh girls?" 7. Dexter Fletcher from Gamesmaster "Ooo, I think he's lovely, and he's real." 8. All the players from Sensible Soccer "They must be all hot and sweaty at the end of the game" 9. All of the Sabre Team "I love a man in a black jumpsuit and a balaclava." 10. The driver from Out Run "He's got a big sports car."		TOP TEN COMPETITION PRIZES Oops. We appear to have slipped back into our old ways just for a second at the end there. But hey, we tried. If you think you could be even more positive than us, though, why not have a go? Send your own top ten of favourite Amiga-related things in the same vein as the ones above to 'I'm Happy, I'm Happy, And I'll Punch The Man Who Says I'm Not', AMIGA POWER, 29 Monmouth Street, Bath, BA1 2DL, and we'll award next month's top ten Amiga games to the best one.