Paragon, £2.95

100pp

Here’s the thing that always puzzles me about the minor players in the magazine market like Paragon, Rapide (STOP PRESS: RIP) and IDG. With every new title they bring out, they stick extremely rigidly to the same blueprints that have made their other mags, by and large, the third, fourth or fifth-placed contenders in their fields (of three, four and five, usually). It genuinely never seems to occur to them to challenge for the top spots by making, for example, excellent magazines. It’s not even as if the formula for a top-selling mag is very elusive – where covermounts are equal, editorial quality swings it 9 times out of 10 – and good writers are, in the overall scheme of things, only very slightly more expensive to employ than halfwit semi-literate school-leavers.

So it always escapes my understanding when someone goes to all the time and trouble of bothering to put out a half-baked mediocrity like Dreamcast Magazine. All the pages look the same, there’s no way of telling when one section ends and another one starts, there are no features to speak of at all (unless you count insufferable extended PR-puff "previews", and I don’t), and the writing is of the kind of standard that gets you held back a year in inner-city primary schools.

Doubtless it’ll scrape a few thousand sales and pull in a few cut-rate ads and make just about enough money to limp on for the 18 months or so Dreamcast is likely to last. But look how rich Future got after starting off with nothing but Amstrad Action to their name. Don’t these people have any ambition at all?

Paragon, feel free to shoot me down in flames if ABC figures prove otherwise, but Dreamcast Magazine is, in the most literal sense possible, fourth rate.

PAGES OF ADS: 20

PERCENTAGE OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR BOX-SHIFTERS: 75 percent

BEST UP-TO-DATENESS: Holding on long enough to be the only mag with the accurate DC launch date. Sadly, it doesn’t avoid...

MOST UNFORTUNATE CONSEQUENCE OF DREAMCAST DELAY: The covermounted Sonic Adventure tips booklet, giving away a complete solution six weeks before the game’s due to be out.

LOWEST REVIEW SCORE: 79% (Hydro Thunder, one of only two games to score below 89%)

WORST BASIC LACK OF SEGA KNOWLEDGE: "Sonic first appeared on the Master System platform in 1991" (Sonic Adventure review)

VERDICT: Crap.

DC:UK

Future, £2.95 with preview video

132pp

Now, just to forestall the inevitable whining from sulking third-rate hacks, I’d like to point out that as a result of my having had to take them to court (again) for not paying their bills several months after they were due, Future (sorry: The Future Network) recently banned your correspondent from ever writing for any of the company’s publications ever again until the end of time. So it’s with (as ever) no sinister hidden agenda that I report that DC:UK is an extremely strong magazine. Anyone expecting (as I rather was) a formulaic retread of Official Playstation Mag will be surprised here. Clearly realising that without the official/coverdisc monopoly, PSM’s bland and self-indulgent style wouldn’t cut the mustard elsewhere, DC:UK aims at much the same market but takes a genuinely fresh approach. Eschewing the normal order of things, it jumps straight in with the reviews at the very front of the mag, leaving the rest of it free for a diverse and feature-heavy spread of other stuff.

Visually it’s a little claustrophobic, similarly densely-packed to early issues of Arcade, but taking the opposite approach to palette, ie there’s barely an inch of white space to be seen for pages and pages at a time, which can make it pretty heavy going.

Something else DC:UK shares with Arcade is a deeply, deeply misguided penchant for attempting to sound more "street" by repeatedly using words like "yer" when it means "your". (Although to be fair, Arcade’s habit of saying "ass" when it meant "arse" was probably attributable to the editor having lived in California for the previous five years.) Otherwise the writing is of a high standard, though, and only narrowly below that of the Official mag’s.

PAGES OF ADS: 15

PERCENTAGE OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR BOX-SHIFTERS: 43 percent

POOREST GRASP OF MEANING OF ‘ANONYMOUS’: The opinion column headlined "Dreamtime: In which a renowned industry journalist loses the plot in a comfortably anonymous way. This month: Owain Bennallack".

LEAST DEFINITIVE STATEMENT: "From the moment the game begins, there’s no question that you’re looking at probably the greatest graphical finery ever seen" (Sonic Adventure review). Well, as long as it DEFINITELY might be... Jesus.

LOWEST REVIEW SCORE: 5/10 (Incoming)

HARDEST COMPETITION QUESTION: "What was the name of Sega’s popular 32-bit console?" I must have missed that one.

WORST PET HATE: The repeated use of "floats my boat" as a term of approval when used in reference to males. You have no idea what you’re actually saying, have you?

COVER VIDEO APPARENTLY MADE IN: Someone’s bedroom, by using a camcorder pointing at a TV screen showing demo modes of varying quality from a few non-Sega DC titles, though at least it means you actually get a decent look at the games. Estimated production cost: £2.

VERDICT: Not amazing, but well-constructed and a welcome diversion from the usual Future production-line mag model.

DREAMCAST

Dennis, £4.99 with preview video (subsequent issues will include a demo CD)

132pp

Priced at a breathtakingly bold/stupid (delete according to sales figures) five quid for a magazine with no cover CD, it’s quite tricky to imagine who’s actually going to be reading the first issue of Dreamcast. (And ooh, aren’t all these titles terribly grown-up and sophisticated? Whatever happened to "MAXIMUM DREAMCAST POWER WOW!!!!" and the like?) Any Premiership footballers flush enough to fork out the asking price, though, will find a very stylish-looking mag underneath the shiny cover, and one which, with its bizarre "fashion" spreads and six-page features about the cast of 1980s Grange Hill, is trying very hard indeed not to look like a videogames magazine at all.

Indeed, it’s trying so hard not to look like a games mag that it almost fails to include any game reviews, managing just five - by far the fewest of any of the titles here. I’m still not sure if this is a highly commendable commitment to only reviewing finished articles, or a deeply unsettling demonstration of the way Sega seem to be flinging everything together for the European launch at the last possible second after apparently sitting on their arses doing nothing for the first six months of the year, but I suppose it gives them something to write about next month when they have to bring out a second issue of the magazine before the console’s launched.

The "lifestyle" approach to Dreamcast is further evident in the magazine’s very strong focus on people, rather than games. Joyously, every one of the mag’s half-dozen main features is people-led one way or another, and even the "developer interview" one that they haven’t been able to resist is done in a much less tedious way than the norm, with a high and welcome level of reader interactivity that also appears characteristic of the mag in general, and serves as a counterpoint to the distancing effect of the style-heavy design. It’s a fairly promising start, but the most interesting thing will be to see how Dreamcast’s people-based features hold up after the first two months, when all the obvious candidates have been covered.

PAGES OF ADS: 13

PERCENTAGE OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR BOX-SHIFTERS: 31 percent

PERCENTAGE OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR SEGA: 31 percent

MOST UNFORTUNATE CONSEQUENCE OF DREAMCAST DELAY: Approximately 300 references to "SEPTEMBER 23 – THAT’S THE DATE! DEFINITELY! OH YES! SEPTEMBER 23! WATCH OUT FOR SEPTEMBER 23!" Afflicts everyone to some extent, of course, but you’d think the official magazine might at least have had a hint.

LOWEST REVIEW SCORE: 6/10 (Incoming)

COVER VIDEO APPARENTLY MADE IN: 1993 – split-second jump cuts so you have no idea whatsoever what the games look like, nosebleed techno and Malcolm McLaren. Estimated production cost: £200,000.

VERDICT: See, you don’t have to be shit just because people will buy you anyway for the CD.

DREAMCAST MONTHLY

Quay, £2.95

100pp

See the entry for Dreamcast Magazine, only Quay’s effort looks nicer and isn’t as badly-written, so substitute "third-rate" for "fourth-rate" at the end.

PAGES OF ADS: 7.5

PERCENTAGE OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR BOX-SHIFTERS: 60 percent

LOWEST SCORE AWARDED: A bold 7/10 (one of only two scores below 8) for Virtua Fighter 3tb.

MOST BADLY MISSED POINT: The review of Japanese RPG Evolution in a special "Japanese import games only" feature which complains "It’s all Japanese gobbledy-gook!" in an outraged tone.

WORST ADVICE: "Now you can carry on playing your DC games while you’re in the bath", in a piece about the extremely non-waterproof Visual Memory Unit.

SWIFTEST RESOLUTION: "Dead Or Alive 2 – Better than Soul Calibur?", runs a preview headline. Luckily, you only have to wait 10 lines to discover the answer is "Not likely, mate", making the remaining three-quarters of the piece somewhat redundant.

LEAST RELEVANT INFORMATION: The news piece revealing that a Sonic game is in development for the Neo Geo Pocket Colour. Yeah? So?