When I saw this issue at the newsstand, the cover art immediately reminded me of the docking bay from Star Wars: A New Hope. I suppose that was the artist's inspiration, even though it is not an exact copy from the movie.
Compared to last month's facial disaster, this picture is actually pretty good. For one, the perspective is quite accurate with a common vanishing point, and the only people depicted are either very far away or have their face obscured by a helmet. If I want to get extra nitpicky (and that's what I usually do here), I can point out one thing: Assuming the ship in the front is the same model as the ones seen further back, then the pilot in the cockpit must be a giant compared to the people you can see standing around the other ships.
In any case, the cover evidently fulfilled its purpose, as I found it quite captivating. It's a pity, though, that it somewhat oversells what is on the disk. None of the games feature any space stations or ships. One game has a starfield and some moons/planets in the background, but that's about all the similarities I can find.
Cover Lines
- Reaction and JASG are introduced as three fantastic power games. Yes, three. I suppose another game was planned but didn't make it onto the disk. Apart from that, it's safe to say that the superlatives are once again wild exaggerations.
- Color World and Demo Designer are touted as powerful graphics programs. Color World is a raster bar editor, and Demo Designer allows you to create a simple demo (or intro) with raster bars and some scrolling text. They're both serviceable tools, if not exactly powerful.
- Alpha V3 is a game creation utility that lets you design a custom font and then put together a screen where said font gets used. It's quite neat if you intend to make a single-screen game and want to do everything on original hardware. The program was created by Frank Abbing of Saurien Software. I've encountered that name before in Dinorace which was made by the same author. It's quite possible that the Frank Abbing used Alpha V3 to create the dino racing game's background graphics.
- The pink bottom strip announces the fourth and last part of the poster. As I mentioned previously, I had that poster on a wall for quite some time. As far as I can tell, the Internet is still missing any scans of the artwork.
Magazine
Similar to Game On 04/90, the disk image of this issue does not load the magazine part. I haven't found a working alternative, thus I can't comment on the disk's articles, at least for now.
Notable Games
Reaction
JASG
Other Notable Software
Alpha V3 is a font and screen editor which is probably the most useful tool on the disk. Still, there isn't much to say about it, so I didn't make a separate blog post.
Summary
After the previous Magic Disk 64 which had some genuinely great games on the disk, this issue turns out to be a bit of a downer. Reaction is a simple reaction test (who would've thought!) that gets pretty hard pretty quick. JASG is ridiculously difficult from the very start and only gets worse from there. All I can remember from this issue is the frustration the games caused me, especially because Reaction didn't even work properly on my machine. The remaining software is nothing to write home about, so I'd say you can safely skip this one.
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