It was the best of times. Certainly if you were an Amiga owner. The machine still had an elitist, almost aspirational feel to it in these days and new and innovative software continually surprised us with its quality. This was obviously before the games industry in general, but Ocean in particular, went through their 'every release a platform romp' period of the early '90s.

Two games released this week really did impress everyone who saw them, and made us Amiga owners the smuggest bunch around. Shadow of the Beast from Psygnosis had several unique aspects to it. If you walked into a shop at the time, you simply couldn't miss it on the shelves; the box was HUGE. Not the sort of thing retailers like, generally, but Psygnosis' reasons seemed plausible: inside the dead sexy, matt black box was a dead sexy, matt black Shadow of the Beast T-shirt. So successful was this ploy at getting extra shelf space for their titles that Psygnosis bunged similar garments in several of their next releases - softwear, if you will! Oh please yourself...

Similarly, you couldn't miss the game if you wandered past the demonstration equipment: every Amiga in every shop in the whole of the UK was running the Beast demo, which featured an absolutely breathtaking attract mode. How many impressionable youngsters did this turn into Amiga owners? Quite a few, I'd say, and even the price was impressive - £34.99! The only downside was the gameplay. Beneath the gloss and the sexy blackness was a fairly standard scrolling beat 'em up. But us Amiga owners didn't dwell on that...