DIGI BACK TO SOME SORT OF NORMALITY!!

Paul Rose AKA Mr Biffo was forced by Teletext to write a brain-dead version of Digitiser for much of the past year. This is because the powers that be always hated Digi (despite the fact that for much of its life it was the computer games magazine with the highest readership in the UK - about 1 million!), and eventually forced him, after nearly a decade, to turn it into a copy of Ceefax's joyless computer games pages.

However, after ratings for the pages went into freefall, Teletext grudgingly allowed him to be funny again, and to be able to rate games properly instead of giving everything 3 or 4 out of 5. At first it was a compromise, decent journalism returning but the weird humour kept to a minimum - but in the past week or so it's gone all crazy again, which is nice to see. The reason for this is because of two things - it's Digitiser's 10th birthday this coming New Year's Day, and secondly Paul Rose is believed to be leaving Teletext soon, to pursue other projects. So perhaps they're letting him have one last fling before he leaves. Which is an awful shame, but maybe he'll resurrect Bubblegun...

I'm quite annoyed over the 4 pages thing - Teletext have decided to rebrand the kids/teen/entertainment pages, and as a result they've messed everything around. I don't know why they've done it, other than some consulting agency of some kind said that it would get them a more desirable demographic or some crap like that. That's usually the reason why these things happen. And the newly redesigned pages look like they've been dug up from 1981...

Hooray! As long as there's room on those 4 pages for reveal-o-jokes.

And now he can start taking the piss out of the letter writers as well.

Bring back The Man With A Long Chin!

Hahahah I thought this thread was going to be about Digimon!!!!

Is Biffo really leaving? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! He can't! Digi is the only reason I read Teletext.
If he is leaving, they should replace him with someone else with a mad sense of humour.

PLEASE NO GO BIFFO!!!!!

Whoops. Somehow I missed the bit about Biffo leaving. Sigh. Doesn't sound promising. But then I don't read Digi much any more because I'm not really a gamer and I don't even have any consoles made in the past ten years.

Please, somebody tell me. IS MR BIFFO LEAVING?

Did any of you ever read the music pages on C4? Truly that John Earls guy and his buddies are the WORST WRITERS EVER!

Ceefax music pages are marginally better, but still really bad.

I've mostly stopped reading teletext, but I always used to think the C4 ones were much less bad than the BBC ones. Mind you, last time I read them after a few months of not reading I did think they'd gone downhill: there was a Sonic Youth review packed with mistakes and some chinstrokingly cool ambient glitch album or other got a review something like, "This is nice, it sounds like Alice Deejay," which I suppose could've been hilariously snarky, except I'm sure it wasn't supposed to be.

I read some awful awful reviews on C4, although it's much of a muchness. I guess my gripe with the BBC guy was that the writing was bad, whereas with C4 it was that the writing was bad and they were really closed minded and made dullard comments like "this isn't your will or gareth stuff" in EVERY REVIEW. Also with C4 people like John Earls taste was distinctly blurry, he never criticised or praised anything in an interesting way or a way which showed some kind of pattern to his tastes. I mean what kind of music critic uses "all the songs sound the same" as a criticism. It's so hackneyed. The album in question here was Daft Punk's Discovery.

It's better than a Ceefax Page. But yet, a dog turd could write a better review than any Ceefax page. They are witless and utterly ball-less. At least on Digi you can laugh at Bifos jokes. Eg. Zombie Dave, and the other day he was talking about "Knocking policemans helmets off."

Splendid.

good old zombie dave made a reappearance today:

Word reaches our ears that Game Boy developer Pocketeers has managed to get a version of Quake running on the GBA. Any release depends upon licensing issues.

"Rrrr lrrrk irrsrrz rrrf prrnrr mrrgz."

UK developer SCI has announced a pretax Profit of £2.2M for the past year, thanks to hits such as Conflict: Desert Storm.

"Mttt wrrrfz frrrnrr rrz rrrz drrrry rrrz rrrr drrrrzrrrrt."

such smut!

andy
(got alevt working last week - it's a linux prog for capturing teletext pages given a suitable tv tuner card. is great, downloads every single page on any channel and just lets you click though them at your own speed.)

I read Digi the other day and man with the long chin was on it, saying he wasn't returning. This is sad.

Also, does anybody believe that it's lost a certain something? It isn't as funny as I seem to remember.

Nice to see Insincere Dave and Zombie Dave back though.

Like Sarah, I thought this was going to be a thread about Digimon.

the word is NORMALCY. now write it out 100 times.

Ah.