AP49 (CD Edition)
AP49 CD (25K)	Coverdate May 1995 Price £4.99 Size 92 pages, Super A4 Editorial pages 71 (ie, 77.17% of total) Ad pages 21 (inc 6 house ads) Reviews 14 (775.50% total, 55.39% average) Circulation 46,326 (ABC period Jul-Dec 1994) Editorial staff 5 (inc 1 art) Editorial contributors 5 (inc 1 art; 1 prod; 1 photography)

EDITOR Jonathan Davies ART EDITOR Sue Huntley DEPUTY EDITOR Cameron Winstanley PRODUCTION EDITOR Steve Faragher STAFF WRITER Paul Mellerick CONTRIBUTORS Richard Doidge, Richard Jones, Laura "Richard" McGregor, Rich Pelley, Rob Scott-Richard LATE J Nash

Coverdisk A CD, in fact, featuring Super Skidmarks (demo); Jetstrike (demo); the PD games Gravity Force 2, Atom Smasher, Extreme Violence, Cookie, Tetris Pro, Puc-Man, Smidge, Ring Wars, Llamatron, Mutant Camels, Trick Or Treat, Digger, Mine Runner, Cow Wars and Parachute Joust; and the AP (Sort Of) Interactive Top 100

Features 1995's All-Time Top 100 (everyone); Lest We Forget (a Kangaroo Court Special round-up of disk loading screens, JD, CW); The Behind Men (Back Page, JN)

Reviews TFX A1200 (62%/85% A4000); Manchester United the Double (58%, PM); Exile A1200 (89%, CW); Soccer Superstars (15%, PM); Ants (23%, CW); Super Loopz (29%, JN); Whizz (41%, RD); Sword of Honour (55%, PM) (8 games, 383.50% total (TFX averaged to 73.50%), 47.94% average)

Budgets Cannon Fodder (94%, PM); Legends of Valour (89%, PM); Impact (54%, PM); A10 Tank Killer (41%, CW); Ishar 2 (69%, PM); Rome AD92 (45%, PM) (6 games, 392% total, 65.33% average)

Hi-Ho Silver Lining Tellingly, none

PD Aquanaut (4/5); Blast 'Em (4/5); Infection (4.5/5); Toobz (3.5/5); Confuzion (1.5/5); Jump 'Em (3/5) (all PM)

One of the amazingly confidential Publishers' Meeting memos idiotically printed out on the AP laser-writer and left for days includes the famous line, "CD32 - the game's up." This is how we found out there would be no second CD issue approximately five months before being told, and so were able to save approximately five months of useless planning and research by stopping sketching out the second CD issue that afternoon.

The memo also includes the unrelated line, "AP Annual - this to become an Amiga Format Special pending budget." No one ever mentioned an AP Annual ever in the history of the magazine. This just goes to show something, although no one's quite sure what.

The CD edition of AP49 was put together astonishingly quickly. Around a week into the issue, Simon The Publisher announced there'd be a companion CD32 version and that we'd better buck up if we wanted to finish it in the next fortnight, what with AP49 proper still to do and everything.

Resignedly, Cam accepted the laborious task of finding a CD-building company, organising deadlines and converting the Top 100 list to all-new AP Zero-style mini-reviews, while everyone else paused in their spare time to find the best PD games around.

Naturally, this all went horribly wrong as no one spotted the obvious (obvious! Too obvious!) flaw that games using the keyboard in any way would not work. With just days to go, therefore, we suddenly found our teetering pile of demos and games reduced to a piddling twenty and an overwhelming desire to punch the heads of programmers who wrote joystick-only games - yea, even down to entering your name on the high score table - but still required you to press "J" at the beginning to make them work.

Worst of all, the world-famous Jetstrike song Drop The Bomb (Anywhere) did not accompany the demo - although, even as the deadline clock struck now (now! Now!) by ingenious means we managed to slip in the peerless It's A Skull.

Fortunately the disc did not look too empty, as the CD-designing company cleverly worked in a 200mb plug for themselves that, with sonorously-narrated dinosaur facts and a truly staggering 3D Milton Keynes, was easily the most entertaining part of the whole thing.

Future then made the CD issue one pound more expensive.

Vowing on the eyes of the orphan children of the world that the second CD edition - "due for Christmas," said Simon The Publisher - would be vastly excellent, we contacted a bunch of programmers who specialised in making keyboard games playable by joystick (with no "up to jump," we reminded them sternly), gave the software companies plenty of warning we'd be looking for CD32 demos in a few months' time, wrote and heavily pre-produced the AP Movie, found the idiotically-forgotten top-secret memo and gave up.

The only bit of the CD that went right, in fact, was the presentation. Discovering we could print directly on the disc, we added an infinitely-repeating circumference poem that you could read very fast through the caddy window. Inspiredly, the box was designed In The Style Of... a horrible dance music compilation. And there was a really funny MULtiMeDIA^TM competition involving Harrison Ford. So perhaps it wasn't a complete waste of our time. Yes it was.

Few AP49-CDs were printed (it was more a "strategic" than "quantity" thing) and none of the (cough) extra bits have been reproduced. (Cam's lost his Cam's InterActive Top 100, although a spare inlay is safely stored in a box.) Consequently we give AP49-CD this score.

Rarity Value: 7