ARCADE

Future £2.70 (launch issue £1) 180pp (13 ads)

It's long been a trademark of Matt Bielby launches that they contain absurdly enormous quantities of words, setting a level of text that could never in a million years be repeated in normal monthly issues (and isn't). The practice has been taken to some kind of insane extreme in the premiere issue of Arcade, however - you probably own entire encyclopaedias with fewer words in them than this. This would normally be a good thing (especially given the uniform and unparallelled high quality of the writers employed here, particularly time-served Future stalwart Rich Pelley and the terribly-underrated Jon Smith), but thanks to the incredibly cramped design (again cribbed straight from Future's own Total Film, only much denser), there's barely a postage-stamp of white space anywhere in the magazine for your eyes to land on, making it all but impossible to actually start reading anything.

Still, force yourself in to this uniquely read-resistant magazine, and you'll find a depth and breadth of expertly (if very often a little coldly, and lacking in spark) written content so far in advance of anything the games market's ever seen that it's almost an epiphany. This is, at long last, the first genuinely features-led magazine ever to be published about video games, which is just as well given how stupendously terrible the reviews section is. Not only does Arcade's marking plumb a new all-time low in the even the games magazine industry's (um) idiosyncratic definition of the word "average" (see the figures below), there's also a hopeless inconsistency of approach.

Within the first three reviews, we see one game (TOCA 2) get a review which says, essentially, "I hated playing this, touring car racing is boring, but the game replicates it very well so that's okay" and hence awards it the Playstation Game Of The Month accolade, followed by another review (NHL 99, played by the same person) running "I really enjoyed this, it's a lot of fun, it replicates the sport very well, but ice hockey is rubbish and not as good as football", hence a two-star ("Don't buy it") score. (Later, Time Crisis is memorably reviewed as "The ultimate tension reliever... it piles on the tension"). Confused? I know I am.

A fat tips section, warmly-written but plonked uncomfortably like a big obstacle right in the middle, provides Arcade with an out-of-place, jarringly-kiddy centrepiece, but otherwise this is a hugely comprehensive and mostly well-informed mag that today's 20-to-30-year old gamer won't be embarrassed to be caught reading by his mates. (And make no mistake, Arcade knows they're "his" mates - the unisex appeal promised by the prelaunch ads disappears by page 5, and reaches a nadir when the news section prints a piechart defining "Games starring people" and "Games starring boobs" - meaning ones with female leads, including the hardly-breast-fixated Spice World - as separate categories.) If he's got the force of willpower and the laser-sharp 20-20 vision required to actually read it in the first place, of course.

TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES REVIEWED: "Over 75", ie 73

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "ABOVE AVERAGE": 58

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "BELOW AVERAGE": 2

NUMBER OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR GAMES: 4

"FUCK" COUNT: 2 (One in a quoted title, one gratuitous. See, told you it was grown-up.)

PRETTIEST TURN OF SPEECH: "Much-hyped programming ponces of yesteryear" (the Bitmap Brothers described in a news item). Surely there's a regular column title in there?

MOST REVOLUTIONARY DEFINITION OF THE WORD "NEW": "The new face of videogames", headlining cover star, er, Lara Croft. Oh dear.

WORST ESTIMATE OF LARA CROFT'S BREAST SIZE: "At best, I'd say they're 36C" (A panel of independent female acquaintances viewing Arcade's pictures later reached agreement at a conservative 42EE.)

BEST IRONY: "Some games defy being pigeon-holed", in a piece focussing on weird, original games (as part of a by-genre guide) by, er, putting them in a "Weird, Original Games" pigeon-hole.

OVERALL: Arcade is, by default but by miles, the best videogames magazine for grown-ups currently available, and as such deserves a warm welcome. It's still a long way short of the overall standards of excellence set by the likes of PC Zone and N64, though, and issue 2 will be the real acid test.

TOTAL CONTROL

Rapide £2.70 (est from subs figures) (launch issue £1.50) 164pp (13 ads)

If, by comparison, Rapide's big new multi-format launch seems to get a lot less space than Arcade, then that's because there's an awful lot less of interest to say about it. Seemingly created from the same template used to produce the company's PS mag Station (but with the addition of ridiculously microscopic icons, hidden away on the far corners of pages, used to afterthoughtishly indicate a game's format), Total Control is very much just another fair-to-mediocre by-the-numbers games magazine, except about lots of formats instead of just one. It's vastly more limited in scope than Arcade, and judging by the text, clearly (and probably wisely) aimed at the traditional mid-teens gamer between CVG's audience and that of Edge, although that makes the sober, text-heavy design style a little mystifying. The writing is unremarkable, although - especially in the smaller reviews - there's a distinct preponderance of the "If you like this kind of thing, you'll like it... try before you buy" style, phrases for which, clearly, people ought to be killed with hammers before having their entire family hunted down and slaughtered like cattle. I mean, honestly.

TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES REVIEWED: 38

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "ABOVE AVERAGE": 24

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "BELOW AVERAGE": 13

NUMBER OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR GAMES: 8

POOREST GRASP OF RACING PRINCIPLES: After being No.2 to Gran Turismo, Total Control reveals that Codemasters are apparently preparing to release TOCA 2, "The game that could put them back into the slipstream".

POOREST GRASP OF GEOGRAPHY: "It could only happen in Japan!" (preview of Starshot Space Circus Fever, developed by well-known Japanese publisher Infogrames).

OVERALL: Dull.

COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES

EMAP £1.50, 100pp (22 ads)

Weirdly, the games industry's oldest magazine is also the one with the most youthful approach. CVG's last revamp saw it re-invent itself as a cheap, breathless, Japanese-style mag aimed at pre- and early-teens, garish and lively in both design and content. Reviews are heavy on big pictures and short on words, but still convey a genuine and infectious enthusiasm and excitement about games that's sadly missing from most UK mags. Surprisingly, in terms of scope CVG is Arcade's closest competitor, with a wide net stretching from a regular retrogaming section to fanzine coverage and the ever-popular readers' drawings and game designs, and writers with a knowledge of gaming history that they're not afraid to draw on, despite the age of their audience. The impulse-buy pricing is a masterstroke, and it's an impulse worth following.

TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES REVIEWED: 18

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "ABOVE AVERAGE": 9

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "BELOW AVERAGE": 3

NUMBER OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR GAMES: 13

MOST IMPENETRABLE PUN: "Shaolin-a-damma-ding-dong!" (Shaolin preview). What?

MOST COMMENDABLE RESTRAINT: The "forthcoming releases" list which features 102 games but lists only 3 as "Hot".

OVERALL: Lean, focussed and credible.

EDGE

Future £3.50 148pp (40 ads)

The odd phenomenon that is Edge has already been extensively explored in CTW in recent months, and despite a switch of leadership, very little has changed. This is still, at heart, a magazine by the industry for the industry (21 pages of recruitment compared to 9 pages of game reviews), and you get the feeling readers are thought of as a largely-unnecessary inconvenience. With this, PSM, PC Gamer and much of Arcade, "cold, aloof, insular and unwelcoming " seems to be a new Future house style, and no-one does it better than Edge.

TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES REVIEWED: 7

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "ABOVE AVERAGE": 7

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "BELOW AVERAGE": 0

NUMBER OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR GAMES: 10

BEST CALLOUT: "MOST GAMES LOOK TO THE PAST FOR THEIR INSPIRATION; COMPUTER ARTWORKS' 50% EVOLVA SCIENTIFIC USES 50%COMPLEX SCIENTIFIC USES COMPLEX 90% THEORIES 09% THE STATE OF THE ORGANIC ART" (Lionhead interview). Edge being the way it is, I'm still not 100% sure if this is a mistake or not.

MOST REPELLENT PROGRAMMER INTERVIEW: Elixir Studio's Demis Hassabis, who whinges (of starting up a games publisher) "Nobody said it was going to be easy, but I'd never dreamed it would be as tough as this", barely half a column after telling readers of his turning down a £200,000-a-year-plus-commission job as a currency trader. If I've missed any intended irony, it's extremely well concealed.

OVERALL: Never mind the magazine, feel the ad revenue. The videogame equivalent of Exchange & Mart.

GAMESMASTER

Future £2.75 132pp (15 ads)

It must say something about the lasting impression wrought by Gamesmaster's 75 (count 'em!) issues that, when compiling this feature, I completely forgot that the magazine existed. Only a chance meeting with a colleague outside WH Smith's alerted me to its presence, which is why I now find myself hastily tacking it onto the end. (Skims wildly.) Well, it's sort of like CVG, only a bit darker and not as zingily shouty. Will that do?

TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES REVIEWED: 19

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "ABOVE AVERAGE": 18

NUMBER OF GAMES RATED "BELOW AVERAGE": 1

NUMBER OF ADS WHICH ARE FOR GAMES: 8

FUNNIEST PLAYING TIPS: The detailed instructions on how to make WWF Warzone custom wrestlers for Lara Croft, Marilyn Manson, Fat Duke Nukem and all of the Spice Girls.

MOST CHARMING MISSPELT CAPTION: "Eat this, Des Lynham, you pewter-haired heartbreaker!"

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

1. All issues current as of 12-11-98.

2. The rating used to indicate "average" is that defined by each magazine itself, or 50% where no such guide is given. (Gamesmaster and Edge)

3. Slightly surprisingly, Future would now appear to lead the world in review soft-soaping, with a total of 83 "above average" marks and just 3 "below average", compared to EMAP's 9-3 and Rapide's 24-13.