Games World
David Bradforth is leaving the building.....
Since I took over the games column last year, development of RISC OS gaming (from a number of quarters) seems to have slowed to a snails pace. Given that a games column, by its nature, should offer a mixture of new games information, hints and tips on recent titles and previews of future titles I've chosen instead to end the regular games column.
If I look back through the last year of RISC World, a number of games titles which had a lot of promise for imminent release seem to still be waiting for that final finishing part. Other games titles have been held up due to educational or work commitments for key members of the teams involved. To all intents and purposes, this leaves me unable to say with any degree of certainty when/if a game title will become available. Given that I've already said I won't preview it unless I'm reasonably sure, there's virtually nothing in the way of new releases I can write of.
Don't worry about this, though: keep an eye within our newsgroup archive. The comp.sys.acorn.games and comp.sys.acorn.announce newsgroups are always kept up to date with the latest in games developments, and it's here from which we recommend you get your gaming news. In a lot of cases, the information is the same as you'd see in an article anyway!
So with the end of the games column, what future for games within RISC World?
All commercial games will be reviewed within the magazine, after release. This is our guarantee - you then have an article about the release version of a title, with no speculation about its contents whatsoever. Why? Because by reviewing the release product we are offering a view of what you can buy. The SOFTWARE section of the disc is intended to contain a game with every issue, and we may elaborate further on how to play a game that's particularly difficult in some way or other - so it's not the end by any means.
So with that I bid you farewell. There is promise of a number of new games at the Wakefield 2001 show - if this is, indeed, the case then we will provide full coverage within the next issue.
David Bradforth