(164pp, 39ads + 4 house ads)

We’ll kick off with Edge, since Future’s aesthetic flagship title has just had a major makeover for the first time in many years. The new Edge is significantly fatter (164 pages in the issue reviewed) and wider – in fact, at 27cm by 23cm it’s almost square – and even more lavishly designed than before, but the content is, at first glance, pretty much unchanged. Second glance, however, reveals a wealth of subtle alterations and additions. A couple of regular opinion-type columns near the front add a bit of much-needed personality to the mag (although even one of those is written anonymously), and a clutch of old and new features are gathered together near the back in a new section called "Codeshop", focussing on "developments in development". To tell the truth, though, it’s a rather artificial distinction – more then ever, the new Edge is clearly aimed primarily at people already in, or seeking employment in, the industry (of the 39 ad pages, 27 are recruitment ads). In sharp contrast to C&VG (see below), Edge has decided that the "stars" of the games business are the programmers and producers rather than the games themselves, and accordingly the magazine is chock-full of bearded, bespectacled and bad-haired coders with colossally embarrassing "cool" job titles (the toe-curling "Hey, Design Guy!" being my special favourite) talking endlessly about "locked vertex buffers", "hardware AA 70 per cent alpha blending" and such. In fairness, the issue contains a comprehensive and informative glossary feature semi-explaining (ie you’ll probably still need a degree in trigonometry to understand it) many of the technical terms, but you just know that subsequent issues will be every bit as impenetrable, only without having the useful dictionary to hand.

That said, for those who ARE in the industry (which includes, after all, everyone reading this feature), Edge is a hugely engrossing read. The level and breadth of feature content (and remember, we’re not including stuff which is primarily previews of particular games) is unprecedented, and even the densest, most forbiddingly technical pieces are broken up with lots of tasty box-outs and soundbites. It’s very hard to flick through the mag without your eye falling on something you want to stop and read, and the design is so lovely that even the lengthiest chunks of small print are easy on the retinas. One thing that hasn’t changed and probably never will is Edge’s baffling and, as far as I know, unparalleled-anywhere-in-the-world policy of not crediting any of its writers on any of its pages, so the mag’s frequent attempts at adding flashes of humour and warmth often, in the absence of anyone visible to attribute them to, end up sounding a little strained and false, as you’d expect from someone trying to be John Humphries and Jim Davidson at the same time. But they’re not totally unsuccessful, and it’s nice to know they’re trying, at least. And at the end of the day, you just can’t argue with this much feature content and this much depth. Terrific stuff, in fact.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 121

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 49

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 59.3% (15 games)

GOOD FOR: Features (obv), pin-up pictures of fat programmers.

BAD FOR: Ordinary gamers without technology degrees. But then, Edge was never meant for them.

OVERALL: You can’t help feeling that a little humanity would still work wonders for it, but if subsequent issues can maintain the content level, Edge will, finally, be just the industry bible it aspires to be.

COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES (EMAP, £2.50 with fantastic Pac-Man beach ball)

(116pp, 14 ads + 3 house ads)

The grand-daddy of all videogames magazines, C&VG has also undergone a recent revamp (and, like Edge, an accompanying price hike, in C&VG’s case by a whopping 67% since the last review). Gone is the cheap-and-cheerful, all-encompassing enthusiasm of the last incarnation, replaced by a no less enthusiastic but more restrained and responsible approach that proves to be something of a revelation.

Two things in particular mark C&VG out as distinct from every other magazine in the UK specialist press. Firstly, while the magazine devotes as much space to previews as anyone else does, their style is radically, almost breathtakingly, different. In the issue reviewed, and also in several back issues that I checked out, not one of the previews contained a single quote from a designer, developer or PR lackey. Where almost all mags treat previews more or less as free advertising for the game’s publisher, printing huge chunks of unchallenged press release and glossing over flaws, C&VG’s concentrate purely on the gameplay (in keeping with the mag’s entire approach, namely that the games are the "stars" of videogaming, not their creators) and, in fact, act essentially as pre-reviews. As such, they offer far more information to the reader than usual, and are actually – blimey, sit down – worth reading in their own right, rather than just lazy space-filling to skip over between the news and tips sections. Furthermore, and this is a policy that extends to the whole magazine, C&VG’s previews state whether the accompanying pictures were actually taken by the writer of the piece or supplied by the publisher, a genius-simple touch that offers the reader both useful information and respect.

Which leads neatly to the second of C&VG’s distinguishing factors. It’s a source of great distress to your correspondent that the specialist press now almost entirely sees itself as an extension of the games industry’s marketing arm, in business primarily to help the industry (of which it sees itself a part) generate profit rather than to protect consumers from poor-quality products, the traditional purpose of the consumer journalist. (Indeed, one particularly poor excuse for a journalist was recently seen in print professing that hardware manufacturers, software publishers, retailers and journos were "all in this together", with "this" presumably being used to mean "the business of parting the sheep-like general public from their money by any means possible". If that’s what journalism is about, your correspondent would like to hand in his Press card right now and become something more respectable and honourable, like a London estate agent or perhaps a crack dealer.)

It’s a discovery of restoring-faith-in-human-nature proportions, then, to find that C&VG has adopted the old-school "the first responsibility is to the person who buys the mag" ideal that had seemingly become a museum piece in today’s specialist press. The magazine is loaded with consumer-focussed features (such as a guide to which shops have exchange policies when you buy a new game that turns out to be rubbish), and is the only one to really acknowledge the fact that games actually cost real people money. It’s also the only mag in living memory to take a balanced, honest, consumer-focussed look at the whole issue of piracy, or to provide a reasonably accurate breakdown of where the money from a game’s retail price goes, and so on and so forth. (It really does give you a warm feeling right there.) To cap it all, C&VG offers a visual design that’s clear, highly distinctive and ultra-modern, but still manages to pack a hefty chunk of text onto each page. The old C&VG was a pretty decent magazine, but this is a sheer and unexpected joy.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 99

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 9 and it’s consistently funny and imaginative

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 63.5% (28 games)

GOOD FOR: Reinvention.

BAD FOR: The industry. Apparently.

OVERALL: It might be nearly double the price it used to be, but it’s more than twice as good. Absolutely superb.

ARCADE (Future, £2.99)

(116pp, 4 ads + 8 house ads – two of which appear to be for Arcade itself)

This, on the other hand, breaks my heart. At launch, Arcade promised something new and different for the world of games magazines – a mature, intelligent, features-led mag, unifying the whole cultural history of gaming for arguably the first time. Sadly, when the first few issues failed to produce explosive sales figures, Future panicked and eliminated almost everything that made the mag stand out from the competition (a similar fate, only even more so, to that which befell DC-UK), retaining nothing but a couple of talented writers and a clean design. What’s left is a shell of a magazine (containing nothing even remotely challenging or original – not even the lightweight and funny trademark My Beautiful Arcade - to frighten off the focus groups of brain-damaged 10-year-olds that Future evidently consulted before swiftly redeploying almost all of Arcade’s experienced launch staff elsewhere in one go) that seems to be over before it’s had a chance to begin, so quickly do you get to the end of it. (Just one proper feature in the issue reviewed, and that a rather hackneyed "playing games with the wrong controllers" effort, albeit done much better than it usually is.) I fear that this may be true in the bigger sense too.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 92

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 12

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 60% (40 games)

GOOD FOR: Intelligent, and an easy, relaxed style.

BAD FOR: Comparing with the old Arcade.

OVERALL: You can almost sense the crushed hopes shining weakly from every page, and with that ad count it surely can’t be long for this world. Which is a shame, because Arcade deserved and deserves better.

GAMESMASTER (Future, £2.75 with tips book)

(116pp, 11 ads + 3 house ads)

Judging by the reader-artwork section (heavy on the crayons), and the level of the letters pages, Gamesmaster’s audience these days is around 12 years old, which makes the flood of barely-disguised and fairly hardcore drugs and sex references on almost every page seem a little incongruous. But that’s the only thing really worthy of note in GM. Otherwise, this is a competent, readable but wholly superficial and unremarkable mag that you could probably get a machine to turn out every month. In other company it would probably look pretty good, but beside the three mags it’s competing with, Gamesmaster looks like a relic from another, more primitive, century.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 90

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 6

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 75.8% (43 games)

GOOD FOR: Innuendo. A few funny jokes. (I particularly enjoyed "Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game".)

BAD FOR: Reading after any of the competition.

READ-ME-FIRST NOTES:

"Real editorial pages" means just that – pages which contain new original content. Not included, then, are ads (obviously), directory sections (vastly the same every month), or tips (lazy-arsed space-filling as often as not nicked off the Internet or sent out to everyone by the publisher).

"Feature content" means real features about some actual subject, ie not previews by another name.

The issues reviewed were those current as of 19 August 2000.

NEW! MORE ACCURATE!

WHO’S THE BEST?

This was a real surprise, to be honest with you. Last time round the pioneering and innovative Arcade led the multi-format field by a mile, but it’s had almost all the life kicked out of it in an attempt to – conceptually, anyway - bland it down enough for an evidently mythical mainstream market. Meanwhile, Edge has beefed itself up considerably and C&VG has undergone a butterfly-esque transformation into the most original yet accessible magazine in the entire specialist press. It’s definitely a good time to own more than one games machine.

1= COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES

1= EDGE – it’s really impossible to separate, or even properly compare, these two. Both do a fantastic job of catering to utterly different audiences, using almost diametrically opposite approaches - Edge is all brain, C&VG is all heart. Edge’s scope is much wider, and provides for an intellectually stimulating read in its own right, but C&VG focuses like a laser on what its audience wants – information and criticism about games, with entertainment thrown in on top. The two magazines complement each other beautifully – buy them both.

3. ARCADE – a pale shadow of its former self, but still excellently written and highly, if briefly, readable.