Crash Magazine #99 kickstarter

[RetroDefense]

Anyone here a fan of the UK's 80s-era Crash magazine?  If so, you may be interested in the current Kickstarter.  They're looking to get the band back together, as it were, to produce issue 99.

[kitsunebi]

I'll admit to a certain amount of jealousy over the UK's embrace of the Amiga and maybe...maybe even the Atari ST at a time when they could outperform the PC, game-wise.  Not that those systems didn't exist in America, but they certainly weren't popular and I never knew anyone who owned either one.  So while PC gamers were stuck with low-res CGA/EGA graphics and PC speaker beeps and boops, computer gamers on the Amiga were getting 32 colors and both the Amiga and Atari were getting midi sound.

That said, I think you actually had to be there at the time (in the UK/EU) to be able to appreciate the Spectrum.  At this point, I play nothing but retro games, but I've never been tempted to seek out a Spectrum emulator and try it out.  It's just a little too retro in ways I can't relate to.  Its games came on cassette tapes, for god's sake.  Furthermore, its library of games is fairly separate from what we were playing in America, so almost none of the Spectrum's best games carry any kind of weight from name-recognition or nostalgia.

For these reasons, I've never read Crash magazine, just as I found early issues of Retro Gamer mag quite dull, as they were heavily focused on the UK's 8-bit computers.  Of course, the Crash kickstarter has already doubled its goal, so obviously there are still lots of Spectrum fans out there.  I assume most of them live in the UK, but I'm curious.  Is anyone here a fan of the Spectrum who isn't from the UK/EU?  Any Americans out there have a story about their experience with a Sinclair computer, good or bad?