Assigning games for review was done according to lengthy and complex secret rules. Anyone could lay claim to a forthcoming release they particularly anticipated, and certain types of game inevitably found their way into certain hands. (Wargames, for example, were always reviewed by Jonathan Davies, although no one knows how this came about, including Jonathan Davies.)
An unknown, genre-expert-unnecessary or not immediately interesting game went into a log-flume of reviewers. From whoever got to the pile of post first, it spilled past the Ed, the Dep Ed, the staff writers, Production (none of AP's Prod Eds was averse to a spot of reviewing. It filled the hours of waiting after exhausting oneself whipping the endemically lazy AP staff into getting on with it), gathering speed all the while until it plunged into the freelancers.
Unlike other mags, being at the end of the line didn't automatically mean the game was unspeakably terrible. There was, almost uniquely, no policy of the Ed passing on the bad so when that job opening came up in a software company PR department - spook! - there was a portfolio of glowingly vague reviews to show you were everybody's friend.
And because it was AMIGA POWER and unquestionably the finest games magazine of all time, to be asked to review a game at all was something approaching an honour. While an alarmingly high number of mags didn't care if the review, screenshots and captions were handed in two hours after the commission, AP had a reputation of excellence to uphold.
(Slight tangent: on mags with "celebrity teams" - that is, which pretended the entire mag was written without freelancers - you could generally tell what they thought of you by whose name your review was printed under. You could play along at home, by awarding five points for an "Ed" down to one for a "Toastered Chicken Burger". Lowest score in the month stood lunch.)
Because AP cared so much about its reviews, we took the trouble to explain our scoring system. It was this:
1. We tell it like it is. We think very carefully about our reviews and games get the mark we think they deserve. Good games or bad, we'll make sure you know what we think. 2. Rating systems get confusing so we give a single percentage mark and a few summing-up sentences. 3. Third points? Old hat, guv.
We later refined it to
1. We play a game until we can bear to play it no more. Then we play it a bit more just to be safe. Then we write our review ignoring all commercial pressures. Because we are your friends. Trust us. 2. The percentage scale's got 100 increments, and we use them all. Crap games get single figures, average games get an average mark - 50% - and only brilliant games get 90%. Unlike other mags, over 80% in AP actually means something. 3. Who cares if a game's got great graphics or nice sound if it's useless? Not us. Our reviews give a single mark based on the game as a whole. 4. We're hard but we're fair. 5. Fifth points? We'd rather have a different joke each month that hardly anyone notices.
and frankly this should be carved into the living brain of anyone who reviews games.* How else can you do it?