Atari Gamer Magazine Review

Atari Gamer Magazine Reviewed by Anthony aka Uniforix

It’s always great to see a new magazine arrive on the scene, so when our very own Andy Godoy asked me to take a look at the Atari Gamer PDF magazine, I jumped at the chance to “read all about it”. Darren Doyle provided us with a preview copy of his new magazine and all credit to himself and his team on putting this issue together.

The first thing that struck me was the awesome front cover, with beautiful large multi-colour chrome Atari logo, and vector grid in the background. Pixelated effects and the careful use of 8-bit fonts all combine to scream “retro gaming” at you, a great cover to draw you in.

Throughout the PDF the layout is similarly well defined, with Darren proudly proclaiming on page 5 his credit for the “Kick Ass Graphic Design and Layout :)” – including the cheeky smiley. Well, you won me over, it does look absolutely amazing.

The magazine reviews many Atari XL – XE games, 60 reviews in all are promised from the commercial releases as well as 20 homebrew reviews, and to someone like myself who hasn’t been exposed to these machines before its an explosion of new and exciting information to pour over. Retro gamers who grew up with these machines, I’m sure you will experience that exciting “oh god, yeah I remember that!” moment, page after page.

One such moment hit me when seeing a review of Hob Goblin as, while I haven’t played this on Atari, I’d played this on the Electron before and the review details its BBC origins and the enhancements that were done for Atari systems, so I could relate to this and it was brilliant to see it reviewed for an Atari system along with screen shots.

Other games reviews include Commando, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Beam Rider, Galaxian, Castle Wolfenstein, Ghostbuster, the list goes on…

Atari Gamer magazine also includes a fantastic two part interview with Darryl Still, former Marketing Director of Atari UK, a very interesting read that starts out by detailing the competition between the Atari ST and Amiga back in the day, and also includes details about the Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx and lots of personal memories of other companies Darryl worked for. A great read, as is the included interview with Chuck Peavey, creator of Lode Runner and other classic Atari games.

There is so much more crammed into this magazine its unbelievable, including a full system review of the Atari 130XE, fun facts and trivia, details of Home Brew games and even an Atari themed wordsearch to print and complete!

In all there are 74 pages of Atari retro gaming fun, for the small price of £2.99 / $4.90 and the magazine is available at: http://www.homebrewheroes.co.uk/atarigamer/

I’ve had to skim over the magazine for this review, but rest assured I’m going to read it front to back as soon as I can, from what I’ve read so far, its worth every penny of the asking price for Atari and non-Atari users alike.

Good job guys, I love the layout and appreciate a huge amount of effort has gone into this, Here’s looking forward to more issues!

There’s only one problem… now I want an Atari home computer!