Skip navigation.

#

#

### Welcome To RGCD Issue #05!

Finally - a year later than originally planned - RGCD is back with Issue #05!

It's difficult to make a come-back after leaving a project like this to lie dormant for so long; although there were some periods of activity during 2008, the more time passed on, the harder it became to motivate myself and the rest of the team. Several early articles and reviews typed during the initial development phase had to be scrapped as they became embarrassingly old news and even a few of our previews had to be later re-written as full reviews (which is why Issue #05's Extras section is so small) - both of which were serious morale dampers for our staff writers. Even our regular readers began lose hope, as throughout the year emails from our friends and associates slowly changed from encouraging "Love the mag, when's the next one out?" messages to sad-sounding enquiries as to whether RGCD was officially "dead".

To set the record straight, as long as I'm around, RGCD will exist. I invest many hours of my time working on this discmag project because ultimately it's something I really enjoy - my enthusiasm for retro and indie-gaming is genuine and RGCD is a way for me to share my passion and give something back to the scene. The reason for our hiatus is simple; due to a major job change, a temporary increase in working hours, family commitments and other real-life issues I had practically no free time last year, and RGCD suffered as a consequence.

The good news is that my previously chaotic life has now settled down to a manageable state, so hopefully 2009 will see a return to our former quarterly-release schedule for the magazine. We also have a number of new RGCD associated projects that'll be announced over the next few months, as well as several new team members and contributors (special thanks go out to Uglifriut, Chris Allcock, Ptoing and Tomchi for their help).

With 45 articles and over 47,000 words, RGCD #05 is undoubtedly our biggest issue yet. 2008 was a great year for both the retro and indie-gaming scenes and we've done our best to cover as many high-quality releases as humanly possible; personal indie favourites being the awesome ThrustBurst, Jamie Woodhouse's PC conversion of Qwak, Dugan's steampunk'd Red Faction demake Rock Boshers, the Paradroid inspired Droid Assault, procedural shoot 'em up Self Destruct, the epic arcade platformer Noitu Love 2 and of course Bob Fearon's mighty War Twat and it's equally marmite sequel SY!NSO.

On the retro front, Issue #05 has an strong emphasis on 16-Bit Atari content (mainly inspired my recent acquisition of a 4160 STE). There's our regular 'Homebrew Retrospective' feature that covers the best of the machine's back catalogue of independent releases, complimented by reviews of Manical Drop, The Pairs Are Gone, Spy4K and Bob Fossil's Sudokuniverse as well as an interview with D-Bug/Automation about their continued work with Falcon compatibility patches and their innovative ULS project. However, that's not to say that other platforms have been missed; RGCD #05 also includes high-scoring reviews of Bob Smith's Splattr (ZX Spectrum), Sub Hunter (C64), World Reborn (GBA), Lead (Atari 2600), Follia NBA (Amiga) and Plutos/Sirius (Atari 7800) amongst many other new releases for vintage hardware.

Right - that just about wraps it up. See you in Issue #06, hopefully before March 2010!

##

### James Monkman[Status: Active]

Founder of RGCD and currently the magazines editor and main contributor, James has a near obsessive passion for retro gaming, especially with regard to collecting and playing new games for old and unsupported machines.

Officially a 'hater' of next-gen consoles, James likes to pretend that it's still 1992 and prefers his computers to have 16-Bits (or less).

If you feel so obliged, you can become one of his 'friends' by visiting his rarely updated myspace page: www.myspace.com/heavystylus.

### Chris Allcock[Status: Active]

Chris's soul was instantly sold to the 8-bit gods after playing Frogger on the C64 when he was about 6, and despite efforts to the contrary, the years since then have only worsened his addiction to anything retro. The advent of modern BASIC languages has allowed him to hack together some games of his own, and he attempts to vent his spleen on various gaming topics on his woefully average blog at zolyx.co.uk.

Despite being a complete unknown in the world of internet journalism thus far, he aspires to change this state of affairs with a cunning use of verbosity and eloquence to amuse and delight your reading senses. Or something like that.

### Dudley[Status: Active]

British videogame and motorsport expert Dudley is well respected by at least three people for his honest and occasionally completely fictional writing. He runs the combined sarcasm and blog site Ask Duds and has in the past been involved in Retro Fusion Online and the late, lamented website Sega Master System World. By day he works in development for a medium size software company where he attempts to change the universe through innovative accountancy solutions.

Dudley lives in London with a shiney new flatmate, about 50 games machines and several broken pieces of electronics which "might come in handy". While he is the Walrus, he has not spoken to the Egg man in several years.

### Graham Humphrey[Status: Active]

Graham Humphrey has been a die-hard Amiga fan for longer than he cares to remember and is very active in the Amiga scene. He's a moderator on the English Amiga Board, has programmed a few games with another one in development and has been writing reviews and articles for Amiga-related magazines since December 2005.

He owns several newer consoles and a PC but his souped-up Amiga 1200 still gets used on a regular basis. He doesn't like to think about how much money he must have spent on it...

### Mike Bevan[Status: Active]

Mike Bevan first became aware of the strange world of home computer gaming with a rather random encounter with 'Manic Miner' at a local school fete. Enamoured by this not very educational but rather eye-opening application for Sinclair's rubber-keyed wonder he proceeded to nag his parents for his own machine which resulted in the surprising acquisition of a Commodore 64.

He has run 'Destroy all Monsters!'(www.stickycarpet.com/dam/), a website supposedly dedicated to 2D shoot'emups, on and off (mostly off) since 1999, which is very handy for keeping him off the streets. His current passion is attempting to electrocute himself with old arcade games.

### Ruari O'Toole[Status: Active]

Ruari O'Toole is an avid gamer who found himself caught between both sides of the Amiga vs Atari wars of the eighties and nineties. He is an obsessive scourer of car boot sales and junk shops, and misses the days when chunky polygons and parallax scrolling blew peoples' minds.

### SirClive[Status: Active]

SirClive is a retro gaming collector with a particular fondness for the Commodore 16, VIC-20 and the ZX Spectrum. He can be found regularly at the Retro Gamer forum and also runs the Weekend Gamer VIC-20 Archive.

He is a support member of Team Weekend Gamer, contributing to WGTV - a downloadable gaming TV show.

Both the VIC-20 archive and WGTV show can be found at www.weekend-gamer.co.uk.

### T.M.R[Status: Active]

T.M.R (aka Jason Kelk) has been playing, designing and programming games for 8 and 16-Bit hardware for over twenty two years, almost all for his own entertainment, and writing about them for the last eleven. In short, he's a bit of a show-off, really.

When he finds time in his busy schedule (mostly filled with self-aware sarcasm) he pretends to manage and edit Oldschool-Gaming.com (a reviews site dedicated to recent games released on classic hardware) and is a member of multi-platform 8-Bit game and demo development team Cosine.

### Uglifruit[Status: Active]

Uglifruit is an experienced gamer of quite unexceptional skill, and loses all but one life on the very first level. Although a self confessed ZX-o-phile, he occasionally enjoys having more than 8-bits to play with, and can often be found enjoying arcade puzzlers or platformers of various flavours. In his spare-time and work-time he makes pretty noises, examples of which can be heard and jingles in the Weekend-gamer podcasts or performed by his band ButterflyPolite. Uglifruit is quite tall, and does not eat pasta.

### Elliot Taylor[Status: Active]

Without Elliot, none of this would have been possible. Elliot Taylor is the technical wiz behind the mechanics of RGCD and is solely responsible for all the ASP/XHTML code and design of both the RGCD website and the discmag itself.

Although originally a hardcore Atarian, Elliot now spends the majority of his time creating bespoke business software and web-based solutions. More details can be found on his website at www.ejtstudios.com.

### Neil E.[Status: M.I.A.]

Neil's introduction to computers came via Deathchase on the Spectrum 48K (at the tender age of 4 years old), marking the start of a life long love affair with computer games. A huge fan of 80's computer magazines, such as Your Sinclair and CRASH, meant a largely misspent youth of endlessly typing in listings, only to return to fix said listings to get them to work!

The 90's saw acquisitions of the NES, Mega Drive and the Amiga A600 and A1200 respectively, an era he refers to as his 'Gaming Golden Age'.

Currently in his final year at University, studying a BA in Music Technology, retro-gaming remains a major past-time.

### Ethan Worley[Status: Inactive]

Ethan has been creating digital art for about 8 years and drawing since before he was even conceived. He is currently trying to teach himself animation, guitar, and actionscript but is quite an unfocused pupil. He is also in a volunteer fire brigade and plays basketball poorly. In his free time he enjoys sleeping and looking for food to eat. He thinks typing in third person is strange.

### Mike Rawlings[Status: Inactive]

Mike has recently finished his degree in BSc (Hons) Computer Games Technology gaining a 2:1 and hopes to one day (preferably soon) work in the computer games industry. He enjoys many different genres of games on a variety of platforms but mainly cares about the gameplay over graphics.

Aside from gaming he enjoys going to the cinema, the pub, and clubs. His various sport interests include Football and Snooker and he plays 9-Ball Pool in Pro/Am Tournaments.

Strongbow is probably his favourite alcoholic beverage, so buy him a pint or two and he might make something in 3D for you. Speaking of which you can see his work at www.digital-renegades.co.uk/michael.

### Gnome[Status: Inactive]

Gnome (aka Gnome), son of Gnome, is a gnome, or, to be more precise, a retro-gaming, adventure obsessed, Amiga loving and 8-bit micros cherishing gnome, with a sick passion for video games and blogging that usually comes in 10 minute bursts.

Already trying to figure out how cities work, maintaining the Gnome's Lair gaming blog (gnomeslair.blogspot.com), searching for Retro Treasures (retro-treasures.blogspot.com), wantonly pocket gaming (pocketgaming.blogspot.com) and wondering about life's wonders, Gnome has ambitions of becoming the first and only bearded RGCD cheerleader.

### Travis Fahs[Status: Inactive]

Travis hails from the US, presently residing in the New York area. This means he never knew the joy of arguing over a dozen different home computer standards with his friends, but he made up for it by bickering about everything else gaming-related.

Travis may not live in the past, but he at least keeps a summer home there. A lover of losers, he can't help but gravitate to the systems time has forgotten. As a freelance gaming journalist, he feels a sense of obligation to know his gaming history as well as he can. Plus he's just a sucker for all things 2D.