Untruth is out in force, broken milk carton in hand and contemptuous sneer in face. But he fears this not. Dispensing comparative justice with chiselled impartiality and steel-capped boots, he is...

The Disseminator

AP47 to AP62

One of the highlights of receiving the month's magazines was to ripple through ("Michael Jackson" - Ed) and ("Currant Bun" - Ed) to see what ludicrously inflated marks they'd given to undeserving games.

Inspired particularly by ("Michael Jackson's" - Ed) brazen customer-mugging corruption, Cam had the extremely bright idea, slightly polished by JD, of printing these scores in AP as a service to the readers. Want to know what the three Amiga games mags think about recent releases? Read AP's convenient TABLE OF TRUTH and save yourself from having to buy the other mags, or at least scuff across to the shops in stabbing rain and glance through them on the shelves. An extra £7.90 in your pocket and/or continued disease-free wellbeing? Thanks, AP!

Thus The Disseminator, a popular and pioneering feature in the news section whose clear and lasting influence lives on in the myriad meta-review and opinion-comparison services on THNTRNTeiee, and several consumer magazines from two or three decades ago.

Of course, we were strictly fair. For non-judgmental informational purposes The Disseminator's list had little squiggles that indicated if a game was "on the cover"; "reviewed as an 'exclusive'"; or "also available from magazine as 'special offer'"; AP's own jaunts into these areas carefully recorded with strict accuracy (except the time we got the squiggles wrong and nothing matched up).

Such was The Disseminator's POWER OF FACT that we didn't need more than a quarter of a page to list the scores, emotionlessly indicate any special factors like "appears as coverdisk demo" and intro the corner with another exciting chapter of The Disseminator's down-these-mean-streets life.

Instinctively prevailing from overexposing a fantastic idea, that's the AP way. Though it did slightly knack the The Disseminator Special where (inspired by ("Michael Jackson's" - Ed) sociopathic lies in reviewing PC versions and pretending those games were on the Amiga) we printed a bunch of screenshots from their reviews and a bunch of screenshots from the PC and Amiga versions of each game, and everything was too tiny to make out. Blithering incompetence, that's the other AP way.

The featured mags were a bit cross at The Disseminator, but, of course, printing scores breached no copyright laws. We think ("Michael Jackson" - Ed) had some kind of short-lived anti-Disseminator specifically to pop at AP's reviews, but naturally they couldn't find any of the disgraceful reader-betraying self-hate that was their own stock-in-trade (and thus, we suppose, assumed existed in everyone else) and the feature faded away with no effect except to bemuse and upset their remaining customers even more with a bitter and incomprehensible in-joke.

The adventures of The Disseminator came to a natural conclusion when we ran out of mags to expose. ("Reviewed in the all-new ("Currant Bun" - Ed)" had been afforded a squiggle some time ago, sorrowfully marking the end of the least terrible one.) The Disseminator himself slipped away like a shadow in the night. He remains at large and has affectionately kicked over Cam's bins at least four times.