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| 1992: That Was The Year That Was | ||
 January, Issue 73 Cover by Colin Jones. Loads of game characters leaping about on a tree, and Kylie Minogue with witchy hands. Spook! The YS line-up at the start of the year: Hutch, Linda, James, Andy O and Maryanne in the Shed, with Rich, the two Jons, Adam, Stuart, Rebecca Norley and Jane the publisher in support. YS was sixty-eight pages long and cost £2.20 Strange tie-in of the month - a Lemmings compo to win a karaoke machine. But forget Rodland or Lemmings itself - this was the month of Santa's Xmas Caper. There were photos of the Shed peeps wearing construction hard hats and nobody understood the Graphic Adventure Creator either. The SAM bounced back into YS with a three-page adverty round-up. Linda: That photo-shoot at Hamley's was ace. Andy: The whole ish was done with one-and-a-half art people you know. Jon: They missed my name off the SAM thing. I was devastated. (Blubber.)  February, Issue 74 Cover by Max Ellis. Dramatic high-altitude nonsense with an irate man in a plane zooming away from an explosion. What does it all mean? Those true but immensely trivial Blim!s arrived. There was a brand-new questionnaire with a suspiciously lifestyle theme, and Linda's Double Dragon 3 Megapreview proved to be the most popular feature for yonks. Hero of the month had to be James. His captions for Replay pioneered a new and extremely silly literary form. Sanity just didn't have a chance. Linda: I bought a Mills and Boon book. Andy: Nobody recognised my marbles in Dave's educational software roundup, (Blubber.) Jon: First mention of Hanna-Barbera in this ish!  March, Issue 75 Cover by Paul Kidby. Straightforward man-blasting-alien pic this month. Spook fact: every picture Paul Kidby does has lots of purple in it. James left, Jon joined, Jonathan Davies bowed out from Program Pitstop and Marcus Berkmann left the Clinic to write for the Daily Mail. The Save Our Speccy campaign started. Haylp! and The World appeared. Stuart returned with an article on sequels, and techyness poked its head out cautiously in the shape of an excitingly tricky machine code toolkit on the tape. Linda: I loved the photos of us starring in our fave record covers. Andy: Erm, I'm not quite sure what happened to page nineteen. Jon: Haylp! was the worst thing ever in YS.  April, Issue 76 Cover by Nick Davies. The YS peeps pursue the villainous Bonanza Bros in a comicky composition. Blimey. Self-indulgent or what? There was also a badge on the cover, but that didn't feature the YS peeps so we'll gloss over it. It was the event of the year! Phil McCardle's Ernie the Psychotic Madman crashed on to the pages of YS, met a 16-bit owner and beat him up. SAM Centre made its first appearance, and Tim Kemp named his fave fifteen adventures. Blim!s were now trying to make the obviously ridiculous sound plausible. The World exploded into a five page feature. Craig Broadbent, Soya Pico and Dr Hugo Z Hackenbush joined the mag. Robocop 3 and Space Gun turned up from Ocean and Where Are They Now? Filled up a page quite nicely. Linda: The Wedding Present announced they would release a single every month for the next year. Andy: Aarghh! The World! Shriek! (He lost all the photos that month and had to pay a whopping fine. Y'see. Ed) Jon: Aarghh! Infy! Shriek! (The instructions were incredibly crap, and baffled readers kept ringing him up to complain, y'see. Ed)  May, Issue 77Cover by Budgetary Restrictions A photo of Christopher Lloyd without any hair in The Addams Family. A bit blurred around the edges, but there you are. There was a badly-printed Indy doorhanger on the cover and The World featured a guide to love that proved quite popular with software houses (honest!). Linda displayed her ignorance of superheroes and a screenshot vanished. Spec Tec turned up in glorious, erm, blue and got his facts about the Speccy's character set utterly wrong. Shop assistants everywhere wept over the joke back cover featuring Leslie Nielsen and a funny barcode. Ernie beat up his Speccy. Linda: The Jetsons. Ugh. I was far too lenient giving it 50°. 30° would be nearer the mark. Andy: Those Addams pics worked really well as a poster. Pity about the cover though. Jon: I was a bit churlish giving Zeppelin's American 3D Pool 79°. It's sooo playable.  June, Issue 78 Cover by Colin Jones. A dynamic Indy pic with loads of smart details, like the different expressions of all the Nazis, and Sophia beating up the bad guys, and Indy's right eye being slightly strange. The issue price went up to £2.50. Steg made it to YS in the form of a high-score pad, and The Addams Family fell foul of awkward controls The long-awaited Indy 4 proved to be yet another isometric 3D stomparound, and lan Hewett got slightly libellous with his YS Crusader doodlebug. Linda stayed up late to do a sixteen-page Tipshop special and there was a recipe on the poster. Game of the month was Myth, with the ever so polished Shoe People trotting in second. The World was renamed Flip! for some reason or another. Ernie beat up some bank robbers. Linda: That Time Traveller holographic arcade game. Eh? I couldn't stop laughing. Andy: Eighty-four blimmin' pagesl (Swoons.) Jon: I was dead jealous of Stuart's Top 100 so I loved doing the What a Barg! roundup.  July, Issue 79 Cover by Mike Roberts. A fab spoof of cliched superhero-with-clingy-female nonsense featuring the powerful pensioner Captain Dynamo. The only bodge was having to type 'Codies' on the spaceship (We completely forgot to mention them on the cover proper, y'see.) Jon finally came back from the ZX92 tenth birthday party and Linda demonstrated what to do with the Steg card while you waited for the game to turn up. (The programmer had done a runner.) Bert the Stick Insect got several mentions. Everyone hated the adverts for the Amiga 600, Jon had a look at some Speccy hardware and Andy voted Diana Rigg the sexiest woman in the world. Flip! showed you how to throw a frisbee. Ernie beat up some aliens. Linda: I hated that Word Up! dictionary thing. And the poster recipe. Those books I reviewed for Flip! were excellent though. Andy: See that pic in the Summer Survival Special? That's from my immense collection of National Geographic magazines. Jon: That hardware thang was a mess. Half the stuff didn't turn up and I had to ask other people what they thought of it. And that photo! Oy vey.  August, Issue 80 Cover by Budgetary Restrictions. The Batman Returns pic was prompted by a complete lack of games (apart from Bonanza Bros, which we'd already done). Jane didn't realise this until we had the film back from the printers. Fortunately, we got away with it. (Phew.) Hutch left halfway through and Linda moved up to take over the mag. Now, at last, she could write the letters pages! (Erm, actually she'd been doing it ever since she started. Look at all those answers that contain the word 'beaut'. It's a dead giveaway.) Defenders of the Earth surprised everybody (including us) by turning up on the tape in a 128K only guise, and a couple of mad Germans sent us a load of PD demos. YS went to Alton Towers, Dave arrived with the Killer Kolumn, there was a load of wibble about Batman and Linda let slip a nuclear secret. Ernie blew up a park. Linda: Beaut cover, beaut Bat-spread, generally beaut! Except for the Sleepwalker page. Andy: What a stonker! The Bat comic book spread and the Alton Towers trip were the highlights for me. Jon: I loathed the Batman turny-pagey-adventurey-sort-of-thing. (And I wrote it, folks!) Otherwise, it was splendid.  September, Issue 81 Cover by Nick Davies. Popeye boxing with a robot in, erm, a wrestling game. (Oh well.) The prob with this 'un was the sea of pink faces. And Mel Gibson was smoking! Disaster. More changes: Maryanne left and the issue size dropped to sixty pages. The Hideous review was flipped 180° and Sleepwalker featured the adventures of the Fumous Five. Leigh Loveday joined the Jugglers. Linda drew Bert the Stick Insect then went to visit the programmers of Popeye 3 who were so pleased they gave her a demo tape of their new band. Back in the Shed, the new Ed had to fend off complaints about the price of the mag and Andy drew some dubious Chinese pictographs. Jon finally got SAM Centre on the corner flash. SAMCo went bust. Ernie blew up a computer fair. Linda: The Famous Five on the tape-hurrah! The Hideous review was really smart. Hmmm. A fair ish, but to be honest not one of the best. Andy: Top-notch contents photos. First issue l did on my own. Jon: Well it happened again. (Blubber.) But we SAM owners are nothing if not patient...  October, Issue 82 Cover by Nick Davies. It was only after the cover was done we found that Jimmy Hill was detested by anyone (a) Scottish or (b) interested in football. Yet! The issue completely sold out. Odd! The new circulation figures were in: from selling 59,059 copies per month we dropped to a still-market-leading 40,648. Adam Waring put aside his Spec Tec hat and took off to circumnavigate the globe. Jane left, and Colin arrived to wear the spangly publishing trousers. Reckless Rufus arrived on deadline day and proved to be an instant hit. We tried spacing out the Pitstop lists and there was a three-page ad for the Future Entertainment Show. Flip! dropped to a spread. The previews got extremely silly and Brendan Thompson asked for more sex and violence. Ernie caused a massive fight in a warehouse. Linda: I went to Norwich this month and Pssst! got laid out in entirely the wrong way. That was the last poster, too. Andy: Lovely cover. Hmmm - Pitstop didn't work at all. Easy to read but rather limits the programs... Jon: Ta to SAM peeps for keeping the faith - it saved SAM Centre. Oh, and Rufus was a nice surprise. (Thank heaven.)  November, Issue 83 Cover by Colin Jones. Erm, it's a bit brown don't you think? But it does achieve the near-impossible task of making Daleks look exciting.The original idea was for Davros's T-shirt to say, 'Your Sinclair - it's crap in a funky skillo sort of way' but WH Smith objected, the basts. Yup, a Doctor Who special. Dave wrote tonnes of Who wibble for the love of it. After months of chasing it around the world, we put the PD music utility Soundtracker on the tape. Yet another colour page went wrong, and Popeye 3 turned out to be a great disappointment. Where Are They Now? Ran out of steam and SAM Centre actually had a few screenshots to break up the text. Simon Cooke took on the mantle of Spec Tec Junior and Linda typed in two hundred Input Output coupons. Ernie smashed a console to bits. Linda: Totally excellent - my favourite of the recent crop of issues. Andy: I had hours of fun drawing Daleks and TARDISes. Hurrah! Jon: I was really pleased with the turny pagey etc etc game. Soundtracker - hurrah! What a fab issue.  December, Issue 84 Cover by Paul Kidby. A top-notch purpley illustration (natch) and - spook! - a fave with both Dizzy-lovers and Dizzy-haters (the former because it features their hero and the latter as a dirty great troll is about to rush up and brain him). Issue size dropped to fifty-two pages - the smallest mag in all of Future. (But we dropped all the house ads, and someone worked out we had a proportionally high number of editorial pages or something.) Things got very heated with the arrival of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy and there was a huge argument about the state of the games industry. Steg finally arrived and was startlingly good. Count Duckula 2 got the lowest mark ever, Linda cleaned out the Tipshop files with a Dizzy special and Steve's Programming Launderette started to teach you BASIC (sort of). Haylp! left the scene, Killer Kolumn moved to the back page and Street Fighter 2 was announced. Sadly, after the issue went to press Jon was killed in a car crash. Rather than hire a new staff writer, Colin grew a clone and named him Jonathan Nash for tax purposes. Ernie took a break while Phil took a course of therapy. Linda: Bit thin, isn't it? That short story's good - pity it was hidden away at the back of the mag. Andy: Well l was pleased - I managed to use up the fried egg I drew for Pssst! but which didn't fit. Jon: Two faves this ish - the voice from the washing machine and the Silence of the Lambs Seymour. Ha ha! Oh don't fuss - of course I can type while I drive. The Year Ahead People with consoles will suddenly realise that they can only afford one game a year and will retrieve Speccies from attics. The Speccy market will pick up and Your Sinclair will go from strength to strength. Hurrah!
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