*Alan's application for the savagely-contested position of AMIGA POWER Wee Work Experience Lackey was accepted mere days before we were all brutally slain. Subsequently he appeared in a lackey capacity on gentleman editor Jonathan Davies's PC Gamer, going on to become a regular reviewer until falling in the bloody freelance purge following JD's departure for N64 Magazine.

Alan appeared on the pretty doorstep of AP2 waving a manuscript and coughing violently. Invited to become one of AP2's testers, he'd sacrificed both his lucrative career as a wheel-tapper (as with so many others, he'd been attracted to this coveted job by the glamorous portrayal of chief wheel-tapper by Will Hay in Oh Mr Porter) and his locally-famous Garden Of Strangely Big Trees to ensure the page reached you, our readers, without exploding injuriously or blanching furniture, and he felt that to publish his cruelly spiked PCG article on foolishness in game design would be reciprocally generous on our part - especially as a rogue footnote had pierced his lung and he had less than six months to live. Here he produced a photograph of himself consulting a doctor in corroboration of his statement and put a hand to his head as if swooning.

Readers - how could we refuse?