Up until now, each cover I've looked at illustrated one of the games found on that issue's disk. Not in this case, though, as what we have here is an exciting glimpse into the future. At least, it was at the time when this issue came out.
As far as I can tell, this cover is a loose interpretation of Anti, a game that would appear one month later on Game On 03/90: In Anti you are indeed flying around in a (VTOL) jet. However, you are not attacking a military base, but instead defending a nuclear power plant from incoming missiles.
Perhaps there were plans to publish Anti on this issue, but then the game had to be postponed for one reason or another. Admittedly, this is pure speculation on my part. Maybe they were just in dire need to put something exciting on the cover because the games listed on it were pretty much the antithesis of excitement.
The artwork is of the magazine's usual quality. It has some nice color gradients, but everything looks a bit lopsided, thanks to various perspective errors. The jet's exhausts, for example, are so deformed, they seem to be melting from the sheer heat that's coming out of them. The jet also appears to be shooting a laser beam at an awkward angle that caused some structure in the background to catch fire. It could also be a very distinct heat trail of a missile that already hit its mark.
Starting with this issue, the cover lines do not have solid colored backgrounds anymore, which makes some of them a bit hard to read, but allows for the picture to be more visible.
Cover Lines
Here's a challenge: Try to write thrilling one-liners for a Breakout and a Pong clone without resorting to lies. Good luck!
- Quad II is a tight action game, according to CP Verlag. I'll tell you what it is: It's a Breakout variant where you simultaneously control a horizontal and a vertical paddle. The ball only ever moves at 45 degrees or completely straight, which makes hitting the last remaining bricks an exercise in tediousness. If you lose a ball, the game swears at you.
- Ball's name is not only amazingly unoriginal, the cover line describes it as a perplexing ball game, which is uselessly vague. It's Pong with a ball that can change the way it moves. Instead of feeling perplexed, I got bored with it after a few minutes.
- The rest of the cover lines list the utilities and are therefore more of a descriptive nature, albeit still with a mild dose of hyperbole. All of them end in exclamation marks because disk utilities and BASIC extensions are so exciting!
Magazine
The picture of this issue's introduction article may look oddly familiar.
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| The Sentinel (Firebird, 1986) |
Articles
- The introduction article comments about how, in order to create amazing games or demos on the C64, it is not enough to spend the occasional Sunday afternoon typing in a listing from some magazine and then wondering how one would create such a program from scratch.
The article claims that coding needs a lot of dedication and time, which includes sleepless nights spent in front of a computer screen. Considering the technical quality of the games found on these diskmags, it's no wonder that many of them were made by teenagers who could afford spending inordinate amounts of time figuring out the inner workings of their computer. - In the mail section a reader laments the lack of quality control in the disk production and points out how the last few issues contained buggy programs. The editorial staff was obviously still struggling with this problem, as was evident in the Game On issue of the same month where one game had a broken ending.
- Among the reviewed full-price games is Rainbow Arts' Rock'n Roll, an action and puzzle game that requires the player to steer a ball through a maze to the exit. This was the first time I based my decision to get a game on a review. I remember requesting Rock'n Roll for my twelfth birthday two months later, and it turned out to be just as fun as the review made me think it would be. I guess this positive experience sort of conditioned me early on to never buy a game without reading at least a review first.
Notable Game
Shift
Other Notable Software
When Decton was published on the previous month's Magic Disk 64, the editor could not be completed in time. Instead, it got released on this issue. I wasn't very interested in using the editor back then, as I didn't like the game very much. I've recently experimented a bit with the program, and it seems to be quite easy to use. Creating levels for Decton isn't very complicated anyway since all they require are a couple of platforms. The biggest challenge is probably getting the difficulty right, as that's where the standard levels stumbled more often than not.
While Rudolf Stember is credited as the sole author of Decton, the editor was created by Robin Stember, which I assume is his brother. This would not be their last collaboration that saw a release on Magic Disk 64.
I have to admit that I didn't spend much time with any of the other utilities on this disk. I briefly played around with WINDOW BASIC, which is a BASIC extension to create menu- & windows-based applications, but I never found any real use for it.
Summary
If it weren't for Shift, this issue would be a complete flop in my book. Both Quad II and Ball were just plain boring, and the other programs didn't hold my interest either. The Game On issue of the same month had similar problems with the software on the disk, which makes me think CP Verlag's staff had difficulty finding good titles for their diskmags at that time. Luckily, the next issue of Magic Disk 64 would already show a significant improvement.
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