KANGAROO COURT
AP38-AP47
Sadly, hardly anyone really got this. Dressed in frivolous clothing, it was in fact a serious attempt (pioneered and mostly written by Stuart) to explain, in an entertaining manner, our fundamental opinions on game design and structure.
The plan was, by detailing exactly WHY joystick-reversing powerups, "Loading Please Wait" screens, invisible memory-testing dangers and so on were such heartbreakingly terrible ideas, to hopefully save ourselves from having to keep going on about it over and over again in individual game reviews. Freeing up more review space for awful jokes, Jonathan's amusing cop-show double-act intros, and stuff.
Sadly, dull-witted readers took the court's exemplary sentencing* absurdly literally, and bombarded us with "But taking 30% off for using 'Up' to jump is unfair!" letters until we sighed and gave up.
Kangaroo Court was, in fact, probably AP's most serious-minded and constructively-intentioned feature of all time. That it fell on such stony ground came as a depressing indicator that hardly anyone actually thinks about video games before designing, writing or playing any.
Round about this point, and not unrelatedly, the magazine abandoned its set-in-stone "Features Must Have Something To Do With Games" policy and went all-out for helicopters, dinosaurs and Michael Caine.
Incidentally, since none of the AP team had the time or inclination to read daily newspapers, the feature's apparent extreme similarity to one in The Guardian can only be attributed to coincidence. Although its strong resemblance to Reeves and Mortimer's Judge Nutmeg sketches is, of course, not.
Here, shorn of the elaborately funny cases for the prosecution and the sentences themselves, are the game crimes we higlighted, in the hope that future generations of designers will take heed and our brutal deaths won't have been in vain.