Did anyone else like Amiga Shopper ?

Or was it just me ! ?

I used to get every Amiga Shopper & Amiga Format every month, other's I'd get once in a while depending on how much money I had or what was on the cover/coverdisks.

Whilst Amiga Shopper did not look such a quality magazine in the early days (black and white, newspaper feel) I used to like it the best due to the non-games content and more technical articles than Amiga Format (it's sister).

On the Amiga I was more into using utils, sound sampling, painting & programming.

I used to have a few favourite games I played, but most of the time I was doing more creative stuff.

Amiga Shopper appealed to the true techie in me !

[Drake1009]

I remember the magazine we subscribed to once. It was mostly because of the C64 reviews we had it though they disappeared with time and was replaced by Amiga software which didn't appear on the C64.

But among the reviews were plenty of other stuff. A cheats section and hardware reviews and utility reviews. I never bothered reading those back then but recently I dug them up and started to read through them. How new utils worked and what they did. How to do stuff on your Amiga. which of the common brands of A500 RAM expansion was good and which you should steer clear from because of hardware problems. I'm sure I could've appreciated that had I actually been looking into buying hardware or needed to use my Amiga for something along those lines. Alas I only had my C128 and would just be amazed at the graphics presented.

Was that CU-Amiga you were reading Drake ?

I remember being as pleased as punch when I got my 512kb ram upgrade - wow, what was I going to do with all that memory !

I used to dream about getting a "massive" 1 gig hard drive !

[stainy]

I prefered Amiga Format, CU and The One.... I only bought Shopper when I was desperate for something to read...

[Twistin'Ghost]

I actually liked Amiga Shopper and bought it whenever I could find it (finding Euro Amiga mags in the US was a bitch as it was..). While I liked games best, I was very well versed on utils, apps, etc. and we used many of them at work (particularly video and gfx apps). In those days, I knew every Amiga util inside out, commercial, shareware or PD. And I got everything as soon as it was released because I was an addict, so while I'd already formed opinions on the programs, I was always intrigued by what the reviews would say, whether we agreed on the same points or not.

I always felt Amiga Format did too much damn coverage of printers...

Yep !!! And printer's weren't exactly exciting those days.....in fact, they still aren't !

It was even worse than the scanners !!!! I'm glad I never got to use one of those hand-held scanners, must have been a right pain in the RRRRRR's !!

I remember the wow-factor looking at those Epson stand-alone scanners they reviewed from time to time. Not because I thought "wow look at the features" - more like "wow you'd have t be crazy to pay £4000 for that !!". I wonder if the quality of those is the same as today's £50 scanners, or even worse perhaps ?

[TikTok]

I bought one issue of Amiga Shopper back when it was printed on that newspaper type paper. It had loads of pages, was packed with info, and lots of great technical coverage. Unfortunately, I also liked Amiga games, so I would get Amiga Format. It had slightly less detail in the technical section, but had good intellectual coverage of games.

I have a few issues of the "new look" Amiga shopper which, although a lot thinner, was still quite a good read. I liked their PD coverage (apps only), and their coverdisks were usually quite varied and interesting. You wouldn't find a whole disk dedicated just to one application demo like you would with other mags such as CU or AF.

After Amiga Format started to go down hill (after about issue 70 IMHO), I would get either Amiga Shopper or Amiga User International, and perhaps CU too if it had something interesting on the disks. IIRC Amiga Shopper was another of those mags which just disappeared from the shelves without any warning (I think AUI and that crappy Amiga Force also did this).

At least they died gracefully I guess, it made me sade when mags like CU Amiga actually announced their demise on the front cover - last ever issue etc... At the time I had already deserted over to PC but I did pick that one up.

I remember hearing recently about a UK PC mag that closed and in the last issue everyone f&&ked it up writing rude comments all inside it, slagging off their bosses and hiding some expletives on the cover.

I think the magazine got pulled off the shelves once someone woke up and realised what had happened.

Maybe some kind soul here can point us to an entertaining news story on the whole affair ?

[Tim Janssen]

Amiga Shopper? I don’t think this magazine was even sold here in The Netherlands. However, I remember it came as a free supplement with an issue of Amiga Format in Summer 1992. I wasn’t exactly impressed by it’s black-and-white layout and content of the articles.

I always found Amiga Format big ‘n’ beefy: When buying the standard 2 coverdiscs you got a big magazine for free. I generally liked the articles in AF (the printer and scanner-ones too) and their specials about games (The making of First Samurai, filmlicences and programmer’s favourite dreammachines) make a nice read.

The last issue of AF I bought was its last issue ever (May 2000). This issue cost me fortune but it was worth the money. The magazine had turned into a special interest newsletter for a small but vast Amiga community. The articles looked very technical and for some obscure reason every few pages a picture of AF’s editor, Ben Vost, was printed.

[Drake1009]

Originally posted by Jim
Was that CU-Amiga you were reading Drake ?

I remember being as pleased as punch when I got my 512kb ram upgrade - wow, what was I going to do with all that memory !

I used to dream about getting a "massive" 1 gig hard drive !

No it was some danish magazine. We couldn't get any non-danish mags unless we were to import it ourselves

The magazine is still alive though they slowly switched over to being PC only.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Well, although I bought every Amiga Format issue I ever saw on a store shelf, there was always something about it that caused me to sneer. In the US, all of our Amiga mags were top-heavy on app info and contained miserable, ignorant game coverage (yes, even .info), so Amiga Format was a bit like a Euro Amiga World with good game coverage. When I wanted to know about apps and stuff, I dug up Amiga Shopper, when I wanted to read game reviews, Amiga Power. But I suppose the thing that bugged me about AF was maybe the rivalry between AF & AP...maybe I just identified with AP more, but their constant bitching about AF's smugness and preferred treatment from Future Publishing, as well as game publishers - it just seemed like the black sheep little brother and the preppy older brother who always got good grades. In real life, I identify with little brother who was always in trouble or pissing someone off (which is always more fun!), which AP paralleled more closely. AF needed to let its hair down more and to take off that blasted neck tie!

[Amiga1992]

I liked Amiga Format, specially the layout of the pages and stuff like that. Real nice.

The only mag I tried to buy always was The One. They sued to bring them every month specially for me.

Whenever I found any other Amiga mag, I bought it. Amiga Computing and Amiga Power come to mind.

[turk182]

The one ruled ,it was just the games & nothing else... I liken it to PCzone that is around today.
Amiga Shopper was cool It taught me a loot of things about C coding/compilers to get etc.. on the machine I still have a load of disk adfs from the around issue 28 or so , I did have issues 1 to 40 odd but for some reason I threw them away! in my naivitiy

[Minuous]

Amiga Shopper was very good, Amiga Format and Amiga Power were also quite good, especially the later issues. Sorely missed. At least they did not have half their contents devoted to non-Amiga issues like AmigActive did.

"Small but vast Amiga community?" :-)

Amiga shopper rocked! The only amiga magazine which really concentrated on the more serious side of the Amiga and not just games. Although I was also subscribed to Amiga Format aswell, just to see what was going on etc.. games and otherwise..

[Andrew]

I used to buy Amiga Format and didn't ever buy Amiga Shopper, but... after buying a load of mags off a very kind person, there was a load of Amiga Shopper mags in there too.

I really enjoyed reading through them. The Q&A bit was great and I loved the AMOS and programming section. A great mag!

[Jherek Carnelia]

I first tried AUI then Amiga Format, but when I found Amiga Shopper, that was the one for me. I had loads of mags, but when I moved about ten years ago and my daughter came along there was no room for my beloved mags. I shudder and curse now, but they all went to the dump!!

And then (horror of horrors) five years ago I succumbed to the Empire of the Gates and sold my A1200 (030 accelerator, extra RAM, extra floppy drive, big, beefy PSU, multisync monitor, apps, games, floppies the lot! Oh, hateful day!


(Still I have now got a basic A1200, so things are looking up!)