The Amiga Power crew?
 

I just read this bit of news:
"Fed up of games reviewers giving in to advertiser pressure to go easy on high-budget turkeys? A group of distinguished British videogames journalists has set up an independent site called Digiworld. It's funded by an interesting micropayment system: you pay 50 pence (about 80 cents US) a week for full access [...]"

I think to myself... Jonathan Nash? Sure enough!

"Digiworld is a joint effort between these gin-soaked idiots: Paul Rose (Mr Biffo); Stuart Campbell (Reverend Stuart); Kieron Gillen (Mr Popular); and the other one (J Nash)."

It's the Amiga Power Crew!

http://digiworld.tv/d.tv?a=fnh1#who

I used to read all their stuff when they were on teletext (called Digitiser back then)

They used to give decent reviews and always shunned all the usual hyped up malarkey that's now part and parcel of the games industry.

And it was bloody funny sometimes too.

A refreshing change from all the gaming mags out there nowdays (except EDGE, which coincidentally has a column written by Biffo in it each month)

Never liked Amiga Power and don't care at all about the new thing!

Then your post is about as useful as this one.

BLAH

Digitiser was the sole work of Biffo, though Stuart Campbell used to contribute to the "Panel 4" section. The guy whose name you might not recognise, Kieron Gillen, was AP's resident student layabout and tips-meister "C-Monster".

AP was clearly the best Amiga mag, AS ANY FULE NO. ;)

Ok, cheers for clearing that up :)

I knew I knew two of their names.

Then you are a philistine and a cad. I suppose you prefered (Michael Jackson. Ed) didn't you?

Damn right...AP was the height of Amiga journalism...all else were inferior or wannabees

:laughing Runty! AP was the runtiest piece of journalism ever. No surprises that it was among the first magazines to go down. Nothing compared to CU or AmigaActive. The former was the Amiga flag in the past, the later the Amiga flag in late 90s early 00s... End of story (hey I like that, it reminds me a bit the AP attitude, we say it is the best, and f*ck what the others say)...

CU Amiga copied the entire AP2 website onto their cover CD without permission. Jonathan Nash and co. sued for copyright infringement, won the case, and CU shut down soon after.

Amiga Active first began years after AP closed. AP ran for 70-odd issues; Amiga Active ran for 30 at the most.

From a journalistic perspective, I always prefered Amiga Format to CU - the quality of the writing was far higher. Except when AF started awarding 80% for even the worst tosh in an attempt to boost the software market, of course, but by that time CU had closed.

Remember, kids: plagiarists never prosper.

That's exactly what I am saying. If people whould be interested in the Amiga scene, they would have probably come into some kind of negotiation. Did they win anything by shutting down CU. DID THEY? What a bunch of idiots they WERE in the Amiga market! BTW, do not forget that CU was selling less than 15k copies a month and EMAP could not handle this figure. AF continued with the same figures due to the fact that Future had greater profit margins from other mags too.

AF crew, was also a bunch of idiots. Their reaction towards Amiga in 1999 to equip the Amiga with Linux rather than QNX drove the team really mad. They appeared in the W.O.A. 99 with T-Shirts opposed to that. What kind of proffesionalism is that? Worst ever thing I experienced in my life. Another indication how journalist destroy a shrinking market instead of supporting it.

As for AF awarding 80%+ in everything in the mag, this started long before CU went down. I still remember the review of Eat the Whistle. I think they gave it 82%! Made me laugh. Not to mention the cover disks. CU dominated the Amiga market with the excellent cover disks and CDs. The saga continued in AmigaActive. The AF disks were just amateur.

As for Amiga Active, no mag will get to the issue they got with such a small market. I still rate it as one of the most proffesionally written Amiga mag with excellent editorial team. Their mistake was to drop down Amiga Active for the shake of Digital. They didn't drop down Amiga Active for its bad sales, they thought it is a good idea to differentiate and expand to new markets. They failed. Had they been into Amiga Active, I am 100% the mag would still be around.

- I'd like to make it clear that AP2 was an unofficial follow-up to Amiga Power, written by ex-writers of the mag, so the above allegations against it have nothing to do with Amiga Power itself (which ended several years before AP2).

- Can anyone give details of the court case?

- As far as I can see, the suggestion that CU Amiga was 'shut down' by the AP2 team has absolutely no basis in fact. EMAP (CU Amiga) are a major publishing firm and are a 'Public Limited Company'. This means that they have to answer to their shareholders and cannot justify a non-profit making magazine. Future (Amiga Format) are a 'Private Limited Company' and therefore do not have to answer to shareholders. Essentially, while both CU and AF were not selling in great numbers, Future could afford to keep AF running for a little longer than EMAP could with CU. Of course, it's easier to claim that a couple of evil freelance journalists killed CU Amiga, because poor old EMAP couldn't meet the bills after going broke following a terrible court case.

- As freelance journalists, the AP2 crew were entitled to payment for their work. They were happy enough to put AP2 on the Internet for free, but when CU Amiga used it on their CD, EMAP was effectively making money out of their work without paying for it. Just because it was put on the Internet doesn't mean that companies can automatically make cash out of it. And wanting to be paid for your work has nothing to do with a 'betrayal' of the Amiga scene.

The same goes for all those games companies that complained about piracy. Yes, they may have been upset that they spent two years writing a game only for it to have been cracked and uploaded to a dozen BBSes within an hour of its release, but they should have come to some kind of agreement with the pirates! What kind of idiot complains that his hard work is stolen by someone else and exploited for profit?

Hard work is hard work, whether its a game, a magazine, a website, etc. You can't steal someone else's work and use it to make yourself money. Well, okay, SCO might currently be getting away with it in the Linux world...

Amiga Active was low on editoral, lacked depth and had too many illustrations and too little text. You could argue that this reflects the state of the Amiga market, and you'd probably be right, but I think that if it had been around in the heyday of the Amiga magazine, it'd probably have been comparable with Amiga Computing or Amiga User International. I'd have read it occasionally, but I can't imagine it being a substitute for CU or AF.

@Cody:

A few details are on the AP2 site itself, and whenever J Nash or S Campbell make a website they always include the disclaimer, "And don't put this website on a CD and sell it, or something".

Whether CU shut down because of the lawsuit is difficult to say. Given its low circulation at the time, a costly lawsuit can't have done their chances of survival any favours. The proximity of the two events (lawsuit and closure) indicates a possible cause-and-effect relationship, but it can't have been the sole reason for the closure.

The AP2 members certainly did not shut down CU; they obviously did not have the power to do so. If you do attribute the closure to the AP2 lawsuit, lay the blame on the CU team who willfully infringed copyright, the EMAP legal team who allowed the release of the illegal cover CD, and EMAP itself who actually shut down the mag.

Andrew Corn low in editorial? FFS!!!! You are making the wrong comparison here. I do not judge AA in the history of Amiga journalism, I judge AA in the history of the Amiga market. What they came up for, was an amazing magazine in the most crucial point of the Amiga market. Do not forget, that few days before the first issue, Jim Collas (what a nice guys he was) was sucked by Gateway2000 and the new Amiga project was dead. Yet, they stayed loayal to their initial promise supported the Amiga market when everyone else was laughing at us.

BTW, Amiga active was criticised by people as for having too much text and few illustrations. How did you come up with the fact that they had little text? Personally, I thought it was just right for the days being.

I also thought that Amiga Active was a great magazine - it had a fresh look and was forward-looking without losing site of reality.

And it was great to find a new Amiga magazine by accident in the shops!

As I said, all of the shortcomings I perceived in the magazine were quite probably attributable to the state of the Amiga market.

However, I'm judging it by its value as a magazine (to be compared with CU, AF, AP, and unrelated mags such as TV guides, lifestyle mags and national newspapers), not as some sort of last sacrosanct attempt at establishing the Amiga as a mainstream computing platform that can't be criticised

Having said that, different people like to read different things. Some people liked CU; some people liked AF. There's no "correct" preference.

I do feel, though, that trying to contextualise everything is a dangerous thing to do. It was this approach that led AF to award Eat the Whistle 82%:

- It's a new game;
- There aren't that many new games available;
- It's rubbish, but...
- ...all of the other games are even worse;
- So, in the context of the current games market, this game is worth 82%.

This is precisely the same approach that has convinced people to jump on the Amiga Inc bandwagon (they're a useless company who aren't actually doing anything, but because there's no other option people will rabidly support them) and led to the proliferation of dodgy retailers and even worse hardware companies (DCE, anyone?).

Not that I'm equating Amiga Active with Amiga Inc or DCE, of course. I did enjoy reading AA, just not as much as reading CU, AF or AP.

It was stupid of CU to put such a rotten website on their covercd to begin with :-p

Mmm...not only are you a bounder and a cad; you're completely and utterly WRONG as well. Amiga Power was the longest running GAMES-ONLY Amiga magazine - outlasting both Amiga Action and (by some months) The One. You can't compare the sales of games-only mags to those that cover the ENTIRE scene. As for CU going down; I doubt this was BECAUSE of the court case as the Amiga market was in serious decline by this time anyway - although there probably was SOME financial fall-out. And to put a web-site - crap or otherwise - on a CD WITHOUT permission is, it must be said, quite incredibly stupid.

Well, once again you are wrong! You make a comparison between a games only magazine (AP) and Amiga Active that was a general Amiga magazine. The thing is that if I compare AP with the gaming section of CU and AF, you'll notice that AP had the attitude to snob everything that they didn't like. A typical example was the Sensible Soccer reviews. Just because the editors liked this game more than any soccer game, everything and everyone else who liked other soccer games were considered by them as inferior. This attitude turned me away of this magazine and you could see that it was wrong. I was a regular reader of AP, CU, AF, ACE, C+VG, Amazing Amiga and Amiga Active. I do rate AP really low just for this attitude. The AP team didn't vary in their game preferences. They were people with the same taste in computer games and this made them feel bossy and absolutists. Even if AP was not only a games only magazine, it would have been among the first to go down.