That said, some of them are interesting in an insight for the assumptions and prejudices the UK gaming industry was working under in the mid-1990s – for instance, there’s an astonishing frequency of mentions of the Satanic Panic, despite the fact that the fundamentalist hysteria had a) largely not touched the UK, at least in terms of gaming went, to nearly the extent it did the US and b) the witch-hunting impulses of populist preachers had already moved on to new targets. On top of all that, there’s the fact that the research tools available to them at the time were not going to be as advanced as those we have today, so there’d occasionally be outright factual errors which today you could catch with five seconds of Googling, even if at the time they were more understandable. This doesn’t seem to have been helped by the usual “industry journalist” approach taken where the news section was filled out by rote reporting of people’s press releases, without much examination of whether what companies were promising was actually plausibly going to come to pass. Many of the reviews are not going to be remotely as useful as looking up a game’s entry on RPGgeek or whatever and looking up current reviews, and much of the news pieces are at best no longer that relevant, at worst proved hilariously wrong over time as people’s plans changed, promised releases got cancelled, and so on. The fact is that whilst old Dragon or White Dwarf magazines are real goldmines of material which is still useful today, much of the content in more elderly copies of Arcane has aged poorly – the entry-level articles are not going to be telling you anything you don’t already know, for the most part, and tend to reflect a much earlier phase of the conversation around a topic. If you were lucky, an issue might include something a bit more meaty – an adaptable system-neutral encounter map and description, perhaps, or even a full-blown mini-game like Puppetland – but these treasures are diamonds in the rough when you’re going over the back issues.
That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.
#Creation workshop ars magica Pc#
It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/ Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome.
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