Amiga Power - Philosophy

Philosophy

Amiga Power had a number of principles which comprised its philosophy regarding games. Like almost all Amiga magazines of the time, they marked games according to a percentage scale. However, Amiga Power firmly believed that the full range of this scale should be used when reviewing games. A completely average game, neither overly good nor bad, on this scale would therefore be awarded 50%. Stuart Campbell offered some rationale for this in his review of Kick Off '96 in the final issue of the magazine:

"Giving something like SWOS 95% is utterly devalued if you also give, for example, Rise of the Robots 92%. Percentage ratings are meaningless unless you use the full range, and you can't give credit where it's due if you're pretending that everything's good. What encouragement does that give developers to produce quality? They might as well knock it out at half the cost and in a third of the time if they're only going to get another 3% for doing it properly. Of course, the market will die much faster if people get continually stiffed by crap games, but hey - there's always another machine to move to and start the cycle again."

Amiga magazines at the time (as with most games magazines right up to the present day) tended to give "average" games marks of around 70%, and rarely below 50% except for very poor games. Because most people - including game publishers - were used to this method of grading, AP gained a reputation among publishers for being harsh and unfair. AP occasionally hinted that game reviewers were being given incentives by game PR divisions to mark games highly.

In fact, fairness was a central part of their philosophy. They despised cheating, and frequently berated their own readers for using cheats to gain advantages in games. (They also believed that this applied in reverse; that games should not be allowed to cheat the player, either.)

They also believed that above anything else, games should be fun to play, and that if this criterion could be met, other factors such as graphical quality, age or heritage were unimportant.