Definition of Sound

AP08 to AP14; AP16; AP20

Hideously ambitious attempt to cover every single game in a given genre (a bit like an expanded, narrower The Bottom Line, if you see what we mean) despite all nine articles appearing within AP's first two years. The featured genres were, in order: puzzle games; football games (pre-dating Sensible Soccer, handily demonstrating the flaw in the concept); driving games; platform games; beat-'em-ups; horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-ups; flight sims; vertically scrolling shoot-'em-ups; and god games. As was surprisingly common in the Golden Age, all pieces were uncredited, though the pop pun titles powerfully suggest the participation of Stuart Campbell and Mark Ramshaw.

The redesign of The Bottom Line in AP15 (from review summary reprints to new, summarising mini-reviews) largely soaked up Def's momentum, wringing it into a tumbler of more digestibly writeable looser monthly updates, though obviously covering only games from AP's history; Definition of Sound reached back with shot cuffs into the primordial Amiga broth but then most of that was hopeless old tat so it all worked out in the end.

Foreshadowed the even more spirit-breaking Absolute Power (which readers may recall inspired a compo based around finding games the Complete Guide to Everything had missed, ie vastly more than the compo-setters had anticipated) and, much later, a small run of Def-style anthologies (of point-and-click adventures, Doom games (most of which weren't on the Amiga), driving games again, pinball games, football games again, and film licences; but this was a coincidence unrelated to the original Definition of Sound and based instead on the typical mag tendency to round up past hits when it's become readily apparent no more are likely to appear.

Also, they missed out Chaos, hobely ho-de-ho.