I spent a fair chunk of October working on content for Tap!, the iPhone and iPad magazine, on the stands later this month. The magazine’s official Twitter feed just announced that it’s doing a one-off special offer of three issues for a fiver, for anyone who subscribes before Friday.

From what I’ve seen of the mag so far, it’s going to be all kinds of fab, and so anyone with an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad would be a banana to not take advantage of the offer.

Printing Choice has a comparison of iPad vs magazines. At one point, it refers to ‘the pricing problem’, seemingly suggesting iPad magazines are a massive rip-off, due to the “lack of subscription options” creating a “price disparity for magazine/app buyers”.

On looking at the figures, it’s an easy conclusion to come to. One issue of Wired on the iPad is $4.99, which is the same as the subscription price. But a year of Wired on the iPad is $59.88, compared to $10 via subscription.

Some readers might have just had an alarm bell go off in their head, at least if they’re not American. No, that’s not a typo—Wired really does cost as little as a dollar per issue in the USA. To my mind, that is the pricing problem with magazines, not a supposed price-hike on the iPad. US publications are already absurdly dependant on (declining) advertising revenue, and due to low subscription costs no-one sees any value in them. (Maxim’s figures are even more absurd, with a subscription costing less than two newsstand issues.)

I remember when I was a kid, games magazines would clamour for ‘exclusives’. Every cover would scream EXCLUSIVE REVIEW! at you, and every mag would somehow have the same EXCLUSIVE! coverage of the same EXCLUSIVE! games. It was hugely tiresome.

However, one thing that was apparent with games mags back then is the people behind them often played games for an absurd amount of time before coming to a conclusion about them. But with the shift to the web, the need to be first with reviews is coming pretty close to breaking the entire point of critical coverage.

As a case in point, I happened across a couple of reviews earlier today for two new iOS titles. These games were released last night, and reviews are already online, rating the games and providing buying information for the website’s readers. On reading the reviews, it’s horribly clear that neither game was properly tested, because there are inaccuracies throughout. There’s little point in naming the site, because it’s hardly unique in doing this kind of thing, and with readers demanding to know RIGHT THIS SECOND whether or not something’s any good, it’s hard to blame the editors.

It would be good to see sites have the balls to try a different approach, and only review games when they’re ready to be reviewed. This is what I do with iPhoneTiny. Even though the reviews are only 140 characters long, I aim to only review a game or app when I really know what I think about it. This is why some reviews are turned around a few days after a product’s release but others take weeks. Online, this could be a differentiator, and in print it’s ridiculous to not take this line—after all, any EXCLUSIVE! review within a mag’s pages has already been ‘outexclusived’ by myriad websites.

Some gaming experiences stay with you forever. I’ve played more videogames than I care to remember, on many different platforms, but I distinctly remember ambling into a very small arcade in Clearwater and, among the beaten-up and half-dead machines, spotting S.T.U.N. Runner.

Akin to smashing a futuristic bobsled game into a rollercoaster experience with a hammer, S.T.U.N. Runner got over the feeling of speed in a way no games had done before and few have done since. The pace was breathtaking to my younger self, and the game over incredibly quickly. But on getting to grips with the game’s mechanics, S.T.U.N. Runner became a fantastic means to while away an hour, escaping from the hot Florida midday sun.

Snapping back to more recent times, Ed Rotberg was kind enough to chat with me last year about his classic tank game Battlezone, and we then talked about S.T.U.N. Runner. Preparing for the interview a day earlier, I fired up the game in MAME and had forgotten how pretty it is. Sleek vector-based designs shoot past at breakneck speed, and even when using a PC, control of the craft is just perfect.

Perhaps this is nostalgia putting the boot in, but I think it’s a massive shame that the game has never been done justice on home formats (with the exception of an astonishing and surprisingly faithful Atari Lynx effort), because even in today’s rush for increasingly extreme gaming experiences, S.T.U.N. Runner still impresses.

My interview with Ed (and co-conspirator Andrew Burgess) is in the current Retro Gamer.

Imagine’s answer to EuroGamer, NowGamer, went live recently. With the publisher having a dedicated retro magazine—the rather spiffy Retro Gamer—it should come as no surprise that NowGamer offers a dedicated retro section.

Most of the section appears to be reprint, but there’s some great stuff in there, including a slew of making-of articles, a smattering of company profiles and a couple of ‘def guides’ to videogame series. A fairly random selection of my own articles has been reprinted on the site, including The Making Of: Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where I interviewed Steve Meretzky about his collaboration with Douglas Adams.

The game itself remains one of the meanest, toughest and funniest pieces of interactive fiction to date, and with the original article buried away in an old issue of Retro Gamer (and not making the cover nor even the contents pages), it’s great to see it get another airing, not least because Steve Meretzky was a wonderful interviewee. I hope that we can one day talk about the controversial Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which would make for a fun making-of in the mag.

Elsewhere, you can also read my making-ofs on seminal soccer title Sensible Soccer, ubiquitous action puzzler Tetris, US platformer Miner 2049er, fantasy/chess mash-up Archon, and overhead bouncing ball action game Bounder.

As for the magazine itself, Retro Gamer’s on the stands, priced £4.99, and can be bought from retrogamer.net. The current issue includes a making-of Space Invaders, Amiga and Mega Drive retrospectives, and my interview with Ed Rotberg and Andrew Burgess on their classic S.T.U.N. Runner.