Richard's Online Journal
Click Video Magazine
Putting journalists in front of cameras is usually a bad idea, but often quite funny. For proof, you need only look back to 1991, and the release of Click — a magazine on VHS tape which lasted just two issues before vanishing. Each one cost a fiver, which was an astronomical amount for a magazine at the time, but I bought both of them and remember them very fondly. They were very much products of their time, trying to turn the character based banter of most gaming mags of that era into something more like fly-on-the-wall comedy. A lot of it was pretty eye-rolling even at the time, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t fun. The writing was on the wall as soon as the first one appeared in shops though, and I wasn’t surprised when Issue 3 never appeared.
I think I’ve still got the tapes somewhere, although I no longer own a VHS player, and for years I had the sneaking suspicion that I was the only person who even remembered them. Then for some reason they came up in a conversation with the PC Format boys this morning, and out of curiosity, I hit Google. And what do you know, it seems that there’s at least one other person who remembers them, and they go by the name PJVonoBox. And not only does Mr. Box remember them, he’s uploaded them to the internet. Hurrah for PJVonoBox! May his bottom always be fragrant.
The second episode was a good bit tighter, attempting to have at least something of a story running through the reviews and features, and with most of the cast a bit more comfortable in their on-screen characters. The features weren’t as good though, mostly because of the trouble of getting early-90s computing to look cool. Whatever happened to all those awesome Virtual Reality games, anyway?
Oh. Right…
The scary thing is that I remember watching these at the time and being deeply envious of all the Amiga/ST people who got to play such awesome looking games, while I was still stuck with an out of date IBM PC without even VGA graphics, along with my Nintendo. To all the people who had those systems at the time, and liked to gloat over us PC users with our strategy games and stats-based roleplaying titles and classic text adventures, please don’t think I’m gloating when I say: Hah! We win!