Your Sinclair

Your Sinclair, originally Your Spectrum or YS, is a discontinued British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, mainly the ZX Spectrum. It was commercially published between 1984 and 1993.

History

The magazine was launched in January 1984 as Your Spectrum by Sportscene Specialist Press.
Initially, it was published bimonthly, changing to monthly in June 1984. With the January 1986 issue, the title was relaunched as Your Sinclair, with the intention of expanding coverage of the QL into the main magazine, and any future computers produced by Sinclair. However, the magazine remained focused almost entirely on the ZX Spectrum games scene.
In 1990, the magazine was sold to Bath-based Future plc, and the April 1990 issue was the first to be published by the new company. That issue's news section contained a feature on the change in publishers, which jokingly suggested that Future had intended to buy a Sinclair C5 and had ended up buying the magazine by mistake.
Publishing of the magazine ended in September 1993, after the commercial life of the Spectrum ended and the magazine had shrunk to fewer than forty pages per issue. A 94th issue, a retrospective on the magazine, was published in 2004 and given away free with Retro Gamer magazine. It featured interviews with some of the writers and reviewers from across the magazine's history, a four-page memoir written by former staff writer Phil South, and several new reviews and tips, keeping the style of the original magazine throughout.
The magazine introduced a unique writing style, inspired by launch editor Roger Munford and expanded upon by subsequent editors and writers. Influences can be found in titles ranging from Private Eye to Viz. Towards the end of the magazine's life, and particularly under the editorship of Jonathan Nash, the style was further influenced by magazines YS had itself inspired, in particular Amiga Power and fanzine The Thing Monthly.
The original 1986 Your Sinclair team included Kevin Cox, Teresa "T'zer" Maughan, Sara Biggs, Pete Shaw, and Phil "Snouty" South. Marcus Berkmann joined as staff writer in early 1987 when Maughan took over as editor. Freelance writers of the time included John Minson, Mike Gerrard, Max Phillips, Tony Worrall and David McCandless. The final 1993 team consisted of just two permanent staff members: Jonathan Nash and Andy Ounsted. Steve Anderson, Rich Pelley, Tim Kemp, Simon Cooke, Dave Golder and Simon Forrester were among those working on a freelance basis.

Content

YS content varied widely, occasionally ignoring the subject of computers entirely. As the Spectrum scene diminished and there was less software to review, this happened more frequently. The tone of the magazine was inspired by teenage magazines such as Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. In 1992, under the editorship of Andy Hutchinson, several 'lifestyle' type sections were introduced. These included Haylp!, an agony aunt column, and The World, which contained reviews of films and books. This section included The Killer Kolumn From Outer Space, dedicated to science fiction news, rumours and reviews. It was written by Dave Golder, who went on to be the second editor of the successful SFX. Writing in the 100th issue of that publication, Golder cited his earlier work on YS and described SFX as "like hundreds of Killer Kolumns stapled together". Flip! was discontinued, but the Killer Kolumn was kept on until the penultimate issue in 1993. A similar page to Flip!/The World had existed in 1987–88 called Street Life, but this had also contained Spectrum game charts.

Pssst/Frontlines

The news section was originally called Frontlines and dealt with Sinclair news and rumours. It also regularly contained mock celebrity interviews and trivial charts, as well as features about the writers themselves.
Subsections of Pssst and Frontlines included T'zers, a column which contained rumours about possible forthcoming releases for the Spectrum and, later on, the SAM Coupé. It was named after and originally written by Teresa Maughan, but the column remained after she left the magazine, as it was felt 'T'zers' was an appropriate title since it contained 'teasers' for future games. Rock Around The Clock, which first appeared in 1991, was a small column dedicated to looking at a particular back issue, as well as news and current affairs from the same time.
Perhaps one of the odder sections of Pssst was the Peculiar Pets Corner. Editor Matt Bielby originally intended this to be a showcase for YS readers' exotic pets such as snakes, pigs, monkeys or spiders, but these "pets" also included such things as a purple fruit gum and a tuba.
When an editor or member of the writing staff left, the magazine would often concoct fanciful stories surrounding their leaving. Matt Bielby was carted off to the funny farm after declaring himself to be God, Andy Ide became a Green Party ambassador, and Andy Hutchinson left to design a skate park at Alton Towers. In actuality, the majority of ex-YS staff went on to work for other magazines, such as Amiga Power.
Image:YS93.jpg|thumb|right|The final issue of Your Sinclair, September 1993

Reviews

Your Sinclairs reviewing system varied throughout the magazine's life. During the Your Spectrum era, game reviews were confined to the Spectrum Soft section, later called Joystick Jury. Games were reviewed by a panel of reviewers and given a mark out of 10. In practice this was a score out of 9, since no game ever received a perfect 10, on the rationale that a better game could come along at a later date. After the name change to Joystick Jury, games were judged by each individual reviewer to be either a 'hit' or a 'miss'. The hit and miss system was abandoned with Issue 19, and with the transition to Your Sinclair, the review section was renamed Screen Shots. In Screen Shots, games were still rated out of ten, but they were also given separate ratings for graphics, playability, value for money and addictiveness. They were also now reviewed by individual writers, rather than a panel.
In 1988, Joystick Jury was superseded by Joystick Jugglers, and the familiar cartoons of reviewers were introduced. Screen Shots was removed as a self-contained section in 1989, and reviews began to appear throughout the magazine, generally with the bigger games being reviewed towards the front. Budget games had their own section, Bargain Basement. The magazine also began using a rating out of 100, rather than ten, when reviewing games. However, this was referred to as a 'degree scale' rather than a percentage scale, with a graphic of a thermometer representing the rating; the higher the rating, the "hotter" the game. Reviewer Jon Pillar embraced both extremes of the review scale, giving Count Duckula 2 a mere 9˚ and Mercenary 99˚. The final change in review style came in late 1992 when the various ratings for addictiveness, graphics, and so forth were replaced by a summary of the game's good and bad points, with an overall mark below that.
Image:ysfinalbackcover.jpg|thumb|Back cover of final issue.
"Our work here is done."
Games which were scored at more than 90˚/90%, or 9/10 before the degree scale was introduced, were awarded YS coveted "Megagame" status, though this was undermined slightly when Duncan MacDonald gave it to his own deliberately bad Sinclair BASIC creation, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, in a moment of surreal humour. The logo was used in advertisements for games, big and small. Reader games were also reviewed for a while in the "Crap Games Corner", many being inspired by Advanced Lawnmower Simulator or being just as deliberately bad. Good reader games sometimes ended up on the covertape.
YS reviewers were often 'interviewed' in a column at first called Joystick Jury, then Joystick Jugglers, and finally The Shed Crew, a reference to the recurring joke that after the move to Future Publishing, their office was now a garden shed. The Jugglers were depicted with caricatures mostly drawn by Nick Davies, although some writers drew their own and art editor Andy Ounsted drew most of the latter reviewers. The Juggler caricatures took on something of a life of their own, and in 1990, a game, YS Capers, was given away with the magazine in which you had to shoot the YS crew, depicted in their cartoon forms.

Tipshop

Originally, the tips section of the magazine was called Hack Free Zone, to distinguish it from Hacking Away, which was dedicated to type-in POKEs. Hacking away was written by Chris Wood and "ZZKJ", while Hex Loader was written by Phil South under the pseudonym of Hex Loader. The sections were merged in 1987 to become the Tipshop.
It contained all tips, cheats and complete solutions sent in by readers, and spawned its own book, the YS Tipshop Tiptionary. Dr. Berkmann's Clinic, originally set up to provide help for the game Head Over Heels, allowed readers to provide solutions to each other's gaming problems, more often than not solved by Richard Swann. Practical Pokes, hosted mainly by Jon North, was the successor to Hacking Away, and contained both type-in and Multiface POKEs. The Tipshop was hosted variously by Phil South, David McCandless, Jonathan Davies and Linda Barker.

Technical sections

While YS is often thought of as primarily a games magazine, throughout its life it hosted a variety of technical columns, mainly dedicated to programming technique.
Program Pitstop, first hosted by David McCandless, then Jonathan Davies and finally Craig Broadbent, contained type-in programs and was one of the last columns of its kind, a remnant of an era when computer magazines would dedicate entire sections to BASIC program listings. Most of the programs were in Sinclair BASIC, although some were in hexadecimal machine code, for which a special interpreter, the Hex Loader, was written. It replaced the pull-out section Program Power; the main difference was that Program Pitstop mainly included listings for utility programs and demos, while Program Power also included games. Program Pitstop also featured contributions from well known programmers, such as the Rainbow Processor by Dominic Robinson, which allowed the Spectrum to display more than two colours per character.
Spec Tec and its descendant Spec Tec Jr were home to readers' technical queries. The introduction to these columns were typically written in the style of a Philip Marlowe monologue, occasionally including ongoing plots.
Other technical columns included Rage Hard, an occasional page which brought news of peripherals and other enhancements for the Spectrum; Steve's Programming Laundrette, in which Steve Anderson took the reader step-by-step through producing a BASIC game; and Simon Hindle's Dial Hard, which helped you connect a Spectrum to the Internet.
Before the magazine's relaunch as Your Sinclair in 1986, Your Spectrum contained a plethora of technical articles, including guides on programming in machine code and Forth, and information on how to upgrade the basic Spectrum set-up to incorporate better sound and more memory.