Debug Magazine

Meet Planted!, the cover star of Debug #18, our latest celebration of independent video games!

Developed by @ClothCatStudio, Planted! takes gardening to ridiculous heights. Grow your crops, defend your patch, and launch vegetables at your rivals.

Bravo. More of this, please!

We’ve seen this kind of thing at a few events recently (including gamescom back in August) and it’s genuinely great that parents are being considered in the gaming world

Hats off to GiC, Poznań

PlayStation 8 with physical media? We can all but dream

As we approach our 4th birthday, we thought some folks might be interested in our story; where we came from, and where we’re going…

We won’t dwell on the past too much (though feel free to ask questions if you’re curious!) but it all started in the early 90s with two brothers, Daniel and Nick.

We’re the ones writing this.

Daniel was born in the late 80s, with Nick following four years later.

Our family were not deprived, but computers and games consoles were not something we had ready access to growing up.

Our school had a couple of BBC Micro computers, which I (Daniel) grew incredibly attached to and learned to programme for - even though the machines were over a decade old at that point in time!

Eventually a family friend gave us one, complete with double floppy drive. I was immediately hooked, and having no access to the internet in what was likely around 1995, I had the very same experience that kids a decade prior apparently had. Copying code from books, to and from software belonging to the school, and even games written by former teachers.

It’s incredibly hard to believe, perhaps, but it was only around this time that we discovered games consoles and modern (for the time) PCs. We must have lived very sheltered lives!

I distinctly remember it was one day on mid-1998, when our school had a delivery of 28 brand new Apple iMac computers. The Micros were out. Yes, really, it was genuinely as late as 1998 when they finally upgraded.

Alongside the iMacs, a number of exciting accessories showed up, including a scanner and a digital camera which stored photos on a 1.44MB floppy disk 😄

Ironically, the iMacs didn’t have floppy drives, so an external reader had to be purchased separately.

These delicious looking computers also came pre-installed with a number of 3D video games. My personal favourite was one called Bugdom - clearly inspired by Disney’s A Bug’s Life somewhat.

I had never seen 3D software like this before, and it set me on a journey of discovery which led me to the magazine aisle of the local supermarkets. The Internet certainly existing by this point, but it would be at least four years before our family had access.

Magazines became my hyper fixation, and my mother - happy to fuel my hunger for information - bought me subscriptions to a whole heap of magazines;

EDGE, PC Gamer, PC Adviser, and several Nintendo and Sega titles which I cannot remember the names of. We had never really owned or even played consoles, and they were secondary to computers for me at the time.

Nick eventually got a Game Boy Color in around 2002, which would be the first dedicated gaming machine either of us owned.

But back to the magazines, I became so obsessed with the concept of them that I started making my own - on a mechanical TYPEWRITER with hand-drawn covers - which I distributed to friends.

My first publication was creatively, and ironically, named PC Games Online 😅

I would read through all of the magazines I got that month, and compile the highlights (in my own words!) into a hand-typed 32 page summary complete with screenshots photocopied from various sources.

Pokemon Stadium - which I have still never played - got a very respectable 8/10 score for it’s creative use of mini-games.

And then times changed, consoles got easier to afford, and we continued like many kids of our generation getting hold of the newer consoles and PC hardware, albeit several years later than everyone else. I’ll never forget finally owning a PlayStation 2 in 2004, for example.

Fast forward a decade, we finished school, went to college, and got jobs.

Myself, marketing within the automotive, then gaming, and finally sports world. Nick, general retail and eventually manager of toy stores.

During 2020, and the lockdowns that ensued, we were out of work with a little bit of savings, and in a moment of madness decided to try games publishing...

Something really cool about this game was the fact it could be played natively on both the original Xbox, and the Xbox 360 - one of only a tiny handful of games for which this was possible