CRASH magazine
@crashonlineuk
Celebrating the classic ZX Spectrum magazine CRASH, published by Newsfield. (No relation to the relaunched mag from Retro Fusion Books)
For a long time I've been interested in the question of whether Fairlight 2 can be completed (without cheating). Long ago I concluded it couldn't because there's no key which can match the locked door in this room. But when I emailed Bo he said that, although the game was released unfinished, [1/5]
Fairlight 2, when you're changing screen, prepares an off-screen buffer of the background image of the screen. Noticed today that it even extends to parts of the screen that you don't see, because in play they are covered by the status area, or a decorative border.
My silly idea from last week has got sillier. This is now actual Nethack code being compiled to run on the Spectrum. The first couple of menus work OK, the next one doesn't because I haven't coded the menu side of things properly.
Just a silly idea I had (I assume nobody has done this for real)
For a time, subscribers to CRASH had a Mystical Subscriber Number and received a newsletter, The Journal of Mystical Affairs, along with the magazine. These contained additional special offers.
The CRASH History: published from issues 45 to 48 to celebrate the 4 year anniversary of the mag, this reprinted magazine covers along with a summary of what was going on each montth. You could also get a binder to hold the pull-outs... [1/2]
There are other ads without so much text, so the idea that they are responding to the bugs seems likely to me. Also the image doesn't really seem designed to have a bunch of text over it (imo)
I always liked this friendly instruction from the ZX Spectrum manual
Sleepy Ludlow gets some good publicity from Stewart Lee and Matt Lewis on Harry Hill's podcast.
Actually an alternate loading screen - here's the one used in the game
Don't know whether this is anything that would interest you but I was struck by this claim about the origin of "shoot-'em-up" in "Videogames", James Newman, 2013
@rgdspodcast.bsky.social have an episode where they discuss CRASH issue 12
Happy Christmas from Newsfield in the 1980s (Sorry, I don't know where I got this image from so I can't thank whoever it was)
Warning: boring technical post. Been reworking some of the contents pages on the site to reflect the original design a little bit more. Looking to drop the Yahoo YUI dependency (for those who remember that) and learning about CSS grids, transforms and skews.
Picked up a few more issues of Newsfield's FEAR magazine dedicated to horror and fantasy. Issues 11 and 18 have a fiction section printed in b&w on lower quality paper. By issue 34 the fiction is still b/w but appears to be on the regular paper type.
The most common thing I have heard from people on the internet is that they got a copy of the issue before the injunction. Here's the injuncted version of the cover.
After that my collection becomes a bit more sporadic - maybe I should head over to Ebay to try and fill in some gaps. I believe the last issue is probably #34, October 1991.
From issue 7, FEAR goes monthly and the price drops to £1.50 (the page count going from 84 to 52)
It launched as a bi-monthly magazine costing £2.50. It's printed perfect bound and on glossy paper - it's a more "prestige" look than something like CRASH had. There's interviews, features and reviews. (The mention of Star Wars IV here refers to what we now call Episode I, btw.)