One of the amazingly confidential Publishers' Meeting memos idiotically printed out on the AP laser-writer and left for days includes the famous line, "CD32 - the game's up." This is how we found out there would be no second CD issue approximately five months before being told, and so were able to save approximately five months of useless planning and research by stopping sketching out the second CD issue that afternoon.

The memo also includes the unrelated line, "AP Annual - this to become an Amiga Format Special pending budget." No one ever mentioned an AP Annual ever in the history of the magazine. This just goes to show something, although no one's quite sure what.

The CD edition of AP49 was put together astonishingly quickly. Around a week into the issue, Simon The Publisher announced there'd be a companion CD32 version and that we'd better buck up if we wanted to finish it in the next fortnight, what with AP49 proper still to do and everything.

Resignedly, Cam accepted the laborious task of finding a CD-building company, organising deadlines and converting the Top 100 list to all-new AP-Zero-style mini-reviews, while everyone else paused in their spare time to find the best PD games around.

Naturally, this all went horribly wrong as no one spotted the obvious (obvious! Too obvious!) flaw that games using the keyboard in any way would not work. With just days to go, therefore, we suddenly found our teetering pile of demos and games reduced to a piddling twenty and an overwhelming desire to punch the heads of programmers who wrote joystick-only games - yea, even down to entering your name on the high score table - but still required you to press "J" at the beginning to make them work.

Worst of all, the world-famous Jetstrike song Drop The Bomb (Anywhere) did not accompany the demo - although, even as the deadline clock struck now (now! Now!) by ingenious means we managed to slip in the peerless It's A Skull.

Fortunately the disc did not look too empty, as the CD-building company cleverly worked in a 200mb plug for themselves that, with sonorously-narrated dinosaur facts and a truly staggering 3D Milton Keynes, was easily the most entertaining part of the whole thing.

Future then made the CD issue one pound more expensive.

Vowing on the eyes of the orphan children of the world that the second CD edition - "due for Christmas," said Simon The Publisher - would be vastly excellent, we contacted a bunch of programmers who specialised in making keyboard games playable by joystick (with no "up to jump," we reminded them sternly), gave the software companies plenty of warning we'd be looking for CD32 demos in a few months' time, wrote and heavily pre-produced the AP Movie, found the idiotically-forgotten top-secret memo and gave up.

The only bit of the CD that went right, in fact, was the presentation. Discovering we could print directly on the disc, we added an infinitely-repeating circumference poem that you could read very fast through the caddy window. Inspiredly, the box was designed In The Style Of... a horrible dance music compilation. And there was a really funny MULtiMeDIA^TM competition involving Harrison Ford. So perhaps it wasn't a complete waste of our time. Yes it was.

Few AP49-CDs were printed (it was more a "strategic" than "quantity" thing) and none of the (cough) extra bits have been reproduced. (Cam's lost his Cam's InterActive Top 100, although a spare inlay is safely stored in a box.) Consequently we give AP49-CD this score.