Cover Tapes
Chris Anderson using his previous success of covermounted cassette tapes with Personal Computer Games included one with the Christmas special issue of 1985. This included two unreleased games from Ocean Software; Kung Fu and Number 1. But the covermount cassette tape was only an occurrence on the Christmas and AA birthday issues, not becoming a regular feature until AA67 in 1991, mainly due to requests from many readers. Cover-cassettes featured game demos, applications, software utilities and, in some instances, complete games. Due to the low quality of the cassettes used many Amstrad owners found them to be unreliable, something which was commonly reflected in the letters pages. One solution to fixing the unreliable tapes as posted to the letters section was to unwind the tape and put a warm iron on it! Later, a utility was released on the covertape to convert the contents to the proprietary 3" disk.
- Dizzy, AA Special Edition
Codemasters produced a Dizzy game specially for the AA birthday covertape in October 1988. This 'Special Edition' included different rooms and objects to explore.
- Action Pack #1
AA67, dated April 1990, came with the first of the permanent cover tapes called Action Pack #1, along with a new cover price of £2.20. A playable demo of Ocean Software's Total Recall and complete games Hydrofool and Codemasters' Dizzy were included on the tape.
- Action Pack #2
This tape caused some controversy among the readers as one of the featured games How To Be A Complete Bastard featured mild swearing, plus the game's quest was to be violent and obnoxious throughout a house party.
- Stormlord Censored
December 1993 AA99’s Serious Action cover tape included the complete Stormlord game, albeit a censored version. With the self-censoring of the Hewson game it seemed that AA was trying to avoid similar controversy that followed AA68’s Action Pack #2.
- Best Game Ever On Covertape
Voted the best game on the CPC, Firebird's Elite was the complete game given away with the 100th issue's Serious Action cover tape.
Read more about this topic: Amstrad Action, Features and Editorial Style
Famous quotes containing the words cover and/or tapes:
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—Samuel G. Engel (1904–1984)
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—Stephanie Martson (20th century)