Not that I can think of. The Wico sticks were long and very durable, but technically not a flight stick.

A cheap and cheerful way of filling pages. Quite a lot of that kind of content was shared among Newsfield's mags. Things that weren't platform-specific like arcade features, joystick reviews, developer interviews

I must say, I was never heavy-handed or over the top with my responses. This is a fine example of one of my more measured and reasonable rebuttals. 🤣

Unfortunately, modern retro games aren’t my thing, so I have no idea. Sorry.

Oh yeah. Played the good stuff on my own time at home, or at one of my gaming parties. But that was essentially the difference between being a gamer vs. doing my job, if you catch my drift.

Sometimes just a few hours. When you're reviewing 30 games in a month, and the actual magazine is put together over a three-week period, you really have to absolutely cram it. This is why we all had to be exceptional players. No time to hang about. Play it, write the review, move on!

Give it a go. Really showed off what the SMS can do! 😀

Yeah. That article is an absolutely terrible reflection of the industry. The reality is a criminally unjust distribution of revenue between execs and workers. Like most businesses these days, rich assholes coin it in while workers are paid a comparative pittance.

Yes. An average is absolutely NOT appropriate. It’s like doing a national income average including Musk, Bezos et al. Utter nonsense. However, either way, I will note that as an analyst I often say to people, a sample size of “people I know” is rarely the same as a national statistic.

No. The high end execs running the companies drawing obscene salaries bring up the average by a massive margin. Basically echoes current real world wealth distribution, but as an absolute nonsense average.

Often overlooked. It’s aged a lot but at the time was pretty incredible.

No it’s not. It’s been in for 40 years and the verdict was ZOIDS is brilliant. Far too hard and esoteric for the kiddie gamers of the era, but older and more sophisticated gamers recognized it as the fantastic and innovative game it was.

Not at all. US Gold, Ocean, and Elite never, ever normally put uncaptioned screenshots of the coin-op or 16-bit versions to make the game look better than it was on most versions...

That one was my fave. Bought it from some toy shop in Shrewsbury around that time and really enjoyed putting it together. Had it on my desk for ages.

In between AI and actual writers, there be monkeys.

Scorched earth policy to acquire the most exciting new system sounds like a perfectly reasonable proposition to me!