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Amiga User International

Now, being a fan of the coverdisk, this mag had my name written all over it. AUI used to pack so much into the two coverdisks - granted, you needed to buy a pack of blanks to unpack them to, but it was worth it for what you got, this is definitely "value for money" when it comes to the coverdisks.

So, we'll take a look at some of the coverdisks that I owned. Now, I did struggle to find a lot of them, as Amiga Magazine Rack only has a few of them, and google images searches didn't yield a lot of results. It appears that scans of the mags and coverdisk labels are a bit hard to come by.

Amiga User International: December 1994

This was my first AUI mag, and I felt like royalty with the amount of goodies that were on them disks

The Magazine

AUI was always a bit thin, but tbh, there was still quite a good bit of content. Whilst AUI was not a games focused mag primarily, there was plenty of game reviews in this issue, right from Theme Park to Superfrog CD32. There was also an interesting article about RISC processors and the potential for their use in the Amiga

The Coverdisks

These expand out to several blanks, 5 for this issue, so I'll summarise it a little

The utilities included: MFormat, AssignManager, StoneCracker, SnoopDos and many more - plenty of useful utils

The games: High Octane, Battleships and Knights

High Octane: a nice looking racer, but it's top down racer, and I'm not keen on them
Battleships: the classic board game adapted to the Amiga, it's ok, but nothing ground breaking
Knights: a Gauntlet-esque dungeon game with plenty of parameters to control the mission and the entire game, me and my brother played this a lot, it's great.

The Verdict on this issue

What a great introduction to AUI, the mag is interesting, the coverdisks are jam packed full and it's definitely value for money.

Amiga User International: April 1995

A few months later, I got another AUI mag with a lot of cool stuff on the disks, but the mag? hmm, it was good, but not amazing

The Magazine

Quite a bit lighter on the gaming content this time round, only featuring 3 game reviews, but, there's lots of interesting articles about other more serious applications on the Amiga, so if that's your jam, this is a worthwhile read (spoiler: this was me)

The Coverdisks

We have the following:

Music Makers Essentials Disk: featuring the program "QuadraComposer 2" allowing you to make music
Top Utilities Disk: including "Dion's Disk" which is a collection of a lot of small tools that are awesome
Disk Users Essentials Disk 1: containing ReOrg, DiskSalv, ABackup and Artic
Disk Users Essentials Disk 2: featuring SuperDuper, SysInfo, AFCopy, A-Lock, AntiCicloVir, FF, SmartCache and SingleFile
The Great Games Disk: packed with Insectoids From Outer Space, Pong, Poing!, GameStor and Tetris

That's quite the coverdisks - the games were ok, there's quite a few to pack on a single floppy, but they're not ground-breaking. This time round it's the utilities that I was after.

The Verdict on this issue

So many utilities and applications to get my teeth in to, this was an amazing set of tools to get my hands on, and many of these programs are still useful for Amiga owners today.

Amiga User International: May 1995

More coverdisks with software shoehorned in to two floppies* (that you need to expand to at least 5 other disks)

The Magazine

We're back to having quite a few game reviews this time, and there's some good ones in here, however, here's some of note

AUI were far more generous to Akira CD32, giving it 75%
ATR gets 83% - it's a decent game and I think worthy of the score
Skeleton Krew gets 82% - not a bad game, but not one I played a lot - it's well regarded by many though

The Coverdisks

Top Utilities Disk 1: Spondulix (Spreadsheet), LZX (Compression), Lottery (Lotto Predictor), and more
Top Utilities Disk 2: Blitz Basic 2 Guide (Documentation), MCS (HD Menu System), AutoAppMenu (Launch apps from Tools menu)
Essential Clipart Disk: kind of speaks for itself if you ask me
Essential Fonts Disk: also speaks for itself
Great Games Disk 1: Xenex - an "asteroids" game on steroids
Great Games Disk 2: SpaceJest, ThinkMania, Sneech and Frontier Guide

Sneech was awesome, me and my brother did play that quite a bit at the time.

The verdict on this issue

A lot better for the games side, still retained enough serious stuff and the coverdisks are still cool.

Conclusion

Amiga User International did something different - they tried to cram as much as possible on the disks, and I'm sure that sold magazines at the time. The reviews were ok, but I'm not sure they're right though, especially Akira CD32 getting 75% which is nuts (it's crap, trust me bro)

I had more issues of AUI than the ones above, but it's been near impossible to track down the other issues I had.

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