Crash no. 98: the final issue
Finally, after buying it off Ebay many years ago, I got round to reading Crash issue 98. I never could motivate myself to read the scans, and looking at it now, I can see why. What a sad shambling mockery of the once glorious magazine. Nothing personal against Nick Roberts, but he just seems to be attached to everything that was wrong with Crash later on. The writing is so juvenile and content free; they deserved to go down first.
The sad thing is that they clearly didn't know right until the end that it was folding. Just a two page advert in the middle about the great new Sinclair User & Crash coming out and in the centre pages, a poster of the front cover with "1984-1992" engraved on it. That's what you get for treating the readership like idiots.
These changes started back in issue 56, and I'm just interested to know whether anyone here actually preferred Crash when it became [sarcasm]really really funny[/sarcasm]? Because for the life of me, I can't imagine anyone who would! Did everyone hate it as much as I did?
Ah well, we'll always have Crash in the good old days, '86 and all that...
The sad thing is that they clearly didn't know right until the end that it was folding. Just a two page advert in the middle about the great new Sinclair User & Crash coming out and in the centre pages, a poster of the front cover with "1984-1992" engraved on it. That's what you get for treating the readership like idiots.
These changes started back in issue 56, and I'm just interested to know whether anyone here actually preferred Crash when it became [sarcasm]really really funny[/sarcasm]? Because for the life of me, I can't imagine anyone who would! Did everyone hate it as much as I did?
Ah well, we'll always have Crash in the good old days, '86 and all that...
Post edited by Spector on
THE RETRO GAMER IRC CHATROOM. EVERY SUNDAY AT 9PM BST. LOG ON USING THE LINK BELOW:
https://discordapp.com/invite/cZt59EQ
https://discordapp.com/invite/cZt59EQ
Comments
I lost interest in the final years - mainly because I got an ST in 1989 and only had a 48k Speccy, so all the games were multi-load and had crap effects. My mates kept their 128ks going for quite a while though, so I was still in touch with the speccy world.
I ended up buying my final edition of Crash in 1991 on a camping trip, and was quite disappointed. The magazine was more like a pamphlet by then, with more invested in the covertape, I'm guessing. And the articles were really childish and crap.
I bought the 'Big Final Issue' of Your Sinclair as I was in Menzies' at the time and saw it on the shelf.. In fact, in one of the 'goodbye' articles in there, one of the reviewers says something like "If someone asked me what the best Speccy magazine of all time was, I would have said Crash, but then when Crash became indescribably crap, it was Your Sinclair all the way."
Your Sinclair mostly concentrated on taking the piss out of themselves towards the end as well, as nothing was being released on the Speccy any more and they had basically given up on trying to be a professional magazine as they had nothing left to work with.
I felt the same about Amstrad Action towards the end. By the time they got to issue 117, it had 24 pages, a covertape with stuff that mostly didn't work on particular machines and it cost ?3.95 and we didn't get a final issue, just an abrupt ending. With the exception of Titus the Fox which appeared on the January 1995 issue covertape, a lot of the covertape programs were crap. (Although DOS-CPC (I can't remember the precise title) did help me put hundreds of downloaded games from the Internet onto real 3" discs).
Hey, The Amstrad had a good run.. The last official UK Speccy publication died in 1993 and the last ST mag - ST Format - wrapped in September '96. (The ST was 16-Bit though, so it did well to compete with that & the Amiga and the rapidly improving PC.)
I guess in relative terms, they all had an 11 year 'vogue' period.. (Speccy '82-'93, Amstrad - '84-'95, ST - '85-'96)
After that, everything went to consoles. I guess it made sense in a way. Most people only bought home computers for the games, so they didn't miss the programming functionality, and if they were 'tech-nerd' enough to want to program, they would buy a PC and write stuff in 'C' and Assembly Language... Still, it largely robbed the populace of the ability to write their own programs.. :sad:
Keeps in step with the rest of the magazine though, doesn't it? Let's take some great quotes from the magazine that proclaims itself on the front to be "funnier than ever":
p7:"Nick Roberts' arse has been squared?! WOh, pi and radius- it's all about those v curvy things you can never find the corners of!"
haha
p8 "Biff! Pow! Ker-splat! I'm a big fan of the silly old Batman series, you know. All those geeky blokes prancing about it in ridiculous clothing- holy gimboids!"
ho ho ho
p17 "The tooth fairy: Went bankrupt after Esther Rantzen lost her milk teeth."
haw haw
And so on...
https://discordapp.com/invite/cZt59EQ
SU seemed to have just completely given up, with about 600 spelling mistakes each issue, entire chunks of reviews missing, black writing on a black background and a "wacky" style that made me want to find every copy and destroy them so no-one else would have to read it....If you want a proper example of a truly crap magazine, then this is it!
In my opinion, from when I started getting the magazines (around October '89) it was always Your Sinclair that was best, then Crash and then Sinclair User, which I only bought because of the free games (although even those were a bit crap sometimes)...
*Edit - Oh yeah! I actually thought Danny The Duster sounded like a great game, and wished they'd make it for real! And I have to thank Crash for letting me know about the funky foreign games that were being made too, which none of the other mags mentioned....
I was a loyal YS reader but i did buy Crash a few times manily for the cover tape. I bought Sinclair User once and found it dull so i never bought it again.
Even YS became a leaflet towards the end of its day. It was only about 30 pages thick and even then it was mostly adverts because no new games were being made (apart from the occasional Zeppelin or Alternative release).
Yes, I suppose it was, but I guess I appreciated it at the time as I was about 12 or 13 back then so I was pretty juvenile myself.
I did get the odd one but that was about it, I previously had brought every issue since I 'discovered' it. Not sure when I started but quite early on.
I utterly blame NR for the shambles that Crash eventually became ;-) Month after month we were filled with tripe about how cool and "street-cred" he was, whereas all I saw was some fat twat in crap sunglasses, chinos and a leather jacket two sizes to large! When he came aboard the writing became akin to your dad trying to be cool, plain embarrassing and so wide of the mark it was trying to hit!
What's interesting is that in the era of full games on cover tapes you had a magazine like Commodore Format, which really celebrated the history of games by putting some of the best ever early C64 games on their covertape; the issue that came with Pitfall 2 sticks out in my mind. Shame the Speccy never got a mag like that.
Yup, Crash went and became another load of crap, just as YS always was. Sinlair User was the funny mag, Crash was the serious one, and YS was the embarrassing one. Still, it was better than nothing. I was buying them all at one stage.
Despite the final death-throes of Crash, it's still an awesome mag. The best. Nothing can tarnish the memory of its heyday. And even the latter pamphlet version was quite a nice change wiv all them glorious games!
Juvenile indeed! - I was introduced to Viz via the freebie that came with issue 23 of YS.
I'm still reading Viz even now - their coverage of colanders and Sinclair sex robots is top notch, although the price is highly inflated and it's not as funny as it used to be :razz:
(I made a page about it here)
It was to me by far the best Speccy mag for a good few years - and a 'smash' rating was generally regarded as a true seal of quality.
It was sad to see it go right down the pan - it went from being sophisticated, funny and chock full of great reviews to purile crap that was an insult to anyone really (regardless of age)
But - for it's glory years it is still no.1 for me.
Hi
Yup, best Spectrum mag there was :)
In the early stages of "pamphletization" the mag still had some of the earlier style left as well as good screenshots, albeit the content already had become pretty crap quickly. The phase I really detested was when the layout became so messy and colourful - when it was all done on a Mac (I think). The screenshots went from proper photos taken from a monitor to hideously blurry, interpolated pixel abominations.
Shame how it went from an highly expected and lovely read in 1987/88 (that was when I first discovered it) to just another subscribed issue ariving in the post that I'd give one read only to discard it into a binder. I rarely come back to the latter issues.
Exactly this. And it came as such a surprise too when my beloved came with a pamphlet attached to a cassette for the first time. Think I bought about 1 more issue then it was YS all the way after that.
It was successful in that it appeared there successfully for about 6 months - making absolutely no difference to SU at all.
Those final issues of Crash were terrible - but at least it was a mercifully short time for us before the Crash name was sold off.
The managing Editor who took over Crash (Lucy?) took on Zzap!64 at the same time and our C64 friends had to cope with similar problems with Zzap that dragged on for much longer.
Zzap!64 deserved better too.
You can read all the issues here...
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazines/Crash/CrashViewer.html
* Hehe..Karingal just beat me to it, but yeah...they're all there! :)
Poor Crash. What an ignoble ending for such a once-proud publication.