Ah yes. This issue of Plan B, and the preceding one (which I’m not in) have that wonderful thing that rare objects have; strong feelings attached to them, even if it’s not for any apparent reason. Maybe it’s the purple blue of the covers, but they both have this indelible sense of longing attached to them. I was living essentially alone in Glasgow, regularly pining for my girlfriend in Edinburgh, and these issues makes me think of trips together to Monorail to pick them up, browse records and get home-made ginger beer; and of times spent alone on my mattress on the floor reading them on cold nights with no more John Peel on the radio.

I have an incredibly strong emotional attachment to Plan B, I suppose, and I feel absolutely privileged to write for it, even if I’ve never actually managed to write anything intentionally about music for them. They got someone else to do Final Fantasy, even though he’s a Toronto boy! Even that couldn’t put me in a huff with them. Miss Amp did it, and she’s alright in my book.

This is the first time I worked with superstar journalist Kieron Gillen, and it’s a job we’ve managed to work together on for nearly 2 years now, and it’s been just great. Crikey, I’m getting a bit emotional here, so I’ll just move on.

For this, my first meaningful print journalism, I submitted reviews of Acclaim’s terrible pimp racer Juiced and of lovable GBA RPG Pokemon Green, which itself has the strong emotional attachment of being played on all those long bus trips to Edinburgh, but don’t get me started on that again. Of most interest to readers is probably the fact that this was a review of an early, but complete, version of Juiced (possibly even a more advanced copy than which Edge reviewed in roughly July of that year) that included the hilarious and awful intro featuring grime artist Shystie, which is now available on YouTube, as linked by Simon Carless on GameSetWatch.

This back issue is still available at the Plan B website.