Your favorite video game magazines, memories of them, and have they aged well?

[CapitanClassic]

VideoGames & Computer Entertainment (June 1993)

https://archive.org/details/Video_Games_Computer_Entertainment_Issue_53_June_1993/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater

 

This was the first issue of a video game magazine that I purchased with my own money (about $1 per issue was a steal).  I bought this specifically for the Game Genie codes (pg 30) for Street Fighter II (SNES). SFII Turbo wasn’t out yet, but the Rainbow Edition hack for Championship was all the rage at the arcades.

The Mid Air Specials Code (C4A4-6767, I have this burned into my brain as C4A4-0767) from a different magazine, along with Slow Light Fireballs  (allowed Ken/Ryu to do the Guile fireball trap), Super Fast Headbutts and a few other codes made the generic SFII a fun diversion until the Turbo release in August.

 

The Letter from the Editor (Andy Eddy) noted the ominous coming of a market crash. The cost of making new CD-rom games, and the early 1990s recession had affected game sales.

 

Reader Mail has a piece on the innovative Vetrex, and Brent Webb-Hicks pulls their greatest Kirk Johnson impression. Need Bits covers the Nintendo vs Galoob Game Genie verdict, Steve Jackson vs the FEDs, and the game industry layoffs. 

 

The Review section covers SFII: Special CE (GEN) and notes the poor audio and speech samples, along with the need to get a 6-button game pad. The review of Blaster Master 2 seemed overly harsh, the Super Turrican (SNES) review was spot on though. Battletoads /Double Dragon (NES) was rated highly, but noted the aging capabilities of the hardware make flickering an issue. C+C Music Factory (Sega CD) review goes as expected, and Batman Returns and Cool Spot while the words of the review are accurate, the scores seem lower than they should be by the reviewer (although there is also an Editors Corner score that many times differs from the reviewer). Perhaps Howard Wen just doesn’t like anything non-fighting related.

 

G.O.D.S. (GEN) has a map walk through for the first few levels of the game. Not as nice as some of the maps in Nintendo Power or Tips N Tricks, but serviceable.

 

I skipped over the Handheld game reviews, because bitd and now those type of games didn’t interest me much. The PC Preview section mentions Id working on the their new Doom title (Dec 1993). the PC reviews cover the X-Wing expansion missions for A / B / Y wings, and rates them highly of course. Empire Deluxe and The Prophecy review well, but noted to be derivative of earlier works. The authors also keep noting that their x386 computers struggle with these games. The family may have not gotten a x486 (Apr 1993) until a year later (1994?) when the prices dropped considerably. Space Quest V gets the oddest review from Danny Han who either doesn’t play PnC adventure games, or was desperately trying to meet a deadline for the editors. He claims to be looking for the perfect Role Playing game and adventure, somehow expecting a PnC to fall into this genre. Additionally comments like this, “Sierra uses the PnC interface standardized since KQ5, with six icons indicating different commands, … Sierra’s graphic adventures suffer from being too simplistic; the computer handles everything—you just click at the right time or place using the right item.. No doubt its a boon for the novice adventurer, but veterans will fee the game is too automated.” (Yeah that is how PnC puzzle games work. Standard interfaces are even more important to veterans. I remember when Sierra changed the PnC interface to automatically highlight objects you could interact with (Phantasmagoria), and many people hated it. Sure it stopped awful find the hidden pixel puzzles, but it no longer required you to examine the rooms. You just needed to drag your cursor around the screen until the computer told you there was something there. There also was a lot less funny dialog from the narrator, “It needs salt.”)

 

Wilson ProStaff Golf gets a middling review, noting that Jack Nicolas and Links are the better games on the market. Rome Pathway to Power with Populous isometric view is described as Kings Quest like, although that doesn’t strike me as accurate as the game comes from Maxis. (Never played the game myself though). The World Tour Tennis review seems to focus on the customizable camera angles, which seems an odd thing to focus on for a tennis game. Although how much can you really change about a game that hasn’t change much from Activision Tennis (2600) to Virtua Tennis (Dreamcast). Tony La Russa Baseball II gets good marks as a baseball simulator in the vein of Stratomatic Baseball. S.C.Out is a weird review in that they sound like they are describing an action game until half-way through, where it is clear it is a puzzle game. 
 

Overall, I liked VG&CE, since it covered Arcade, home consoles, and PC. I couldn’t pass this issue up because of the SFII reviews and the X-Wing mission pack review.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[NE146]

One mag I don't see get mentioned a lot is Vidiot. It was a short-lived offshoot of Creem magazine, which is probably why they had all these "hip" articles and pictures of rock stars playing vids etc.  It also covered stuff like movies and TV. I dunno.. I liked it, although I can't say I read it moreso than I looked at the pictures

 

 

[newtmonkey]

6 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

The Review section covers SFII: Special CE (GEN) and notes the poor audio and speech samples, along with the need to get a 6-button game pad.

Interestingly, this is actually a review of an 85% complete prototype of the outsourced SFII: CE that Capcom ultimately scrapped in favor of their in-house-developed SFII: SCE (though the review doesn't mention it of course).  They fess up in the next issue.

[CapitanClassic]

18 minutes ago, newtmonkey said:

though the review doesn't mention it of course

The review does mention that Capcom claimed it was an incomplete version ,(that why the sound sucks), although in the end it didn't matter. The final version still sounds horrible.

[Tanooki]

That proto is the STII Turbo one right?  The original build which had the SNES like clean audio samples on voices and stuff?  I've got a copy of that sourced out of taiwan from my friend there a few months ago.  Damn shame that game didn't make it and the abortive crapfest that did arrive was the so called right choice. :\

[Zap!]

On 10/2/2023 at 1:16 PM, newtmonkey said:

VG&CE - May 1992

Kind of a slimy issue.  The cover is Jordan vs. Bird: One on One, which was just hopelessly outdated in 1992, yet the game gets an excellent review in the mag.  I remember renting this on the NES back in the day and being shocked at how simple it was, even compared with Double Dribble from 1987.  I mean, this was a full two years after the somewhat clunky but far superior Lakers versus Celtics and the NBA Playoffs on the Genesis.  It was just a joke of a game at that point, not to take anything away from the original One on One (from back in 1983!).

There's a reason for that. The staff at VG&CE were older gamers, and had extremely fond memories of The Golden Age of gaming from the early 80's, even having produced a magazine back then called Electronic Games. EGM was the opposite, a sorta "Attitude Era" of gaming mags. Martin Alissi was a kid reviewer at the time.

 

Who can ever forget VG&CE's infamous "Tales of the Maltese Vectrex "The Game Doctor?

[newtmonkey]

GameFan (1992)

This mag was first published in late '92, so there are only two official issues this year, though I think there was an "issue 0" before the first issue?  Anyway, it's a nice mag to flip through and even early on the layouts were quite nice... though sometimes so busy that the text is difficult to read!

 

The structure of the mag is not so dissimilar from that of 90's EGM, in that they have a review section containing paragraph-long reviews of each game (at this point, just two reviewers), and then have another section where they give each of the games a page or two of extended coverage.  The big difference is that EGM would spend much of this extended coverage stuff on telling you the story of the game or whatever (basically just filler), while GameFan uses this to expand on their reviews a bit.

 

The quality of the writing is quite poor, but oddly likeable.  It's like reading someone's personal blog or forum post or something.  I could criticize their out-of-control reviews, where nearly every game is awesome and seems to get a minimum 85% score, but it's hard to be annoyed at that because they seem so passionate about video games.

 

One thing that I find hilarious about these early issues is that they keep talking about "scrolls."  At first I though they were referring to finding mystical scrolls in games, and I was totally confused.  They would mention in a review that some 99% awesome game has "tons of scrolls" or ask "where's the scrolls" for some game that merely gets an 85%.  Why is it so important for a game to have scrolls in it???  Then I realized, they were talking about parallax scrolling.

 

Anyway, I think is definitely worth flipping through even today.  I never really read this magazine back in the day, but the writing, screenshots, and layout are all oddly nostalgic.

Edited December 4, 2023 by newtmonkey

[newtmonkey]

GamePro (1991)

I blasted through all the '91 issues over the last week or so.  Not much has changed from 1990 to be honest.  It's basically GamePro as most people remember it now, with reviewers writing as characters, obvious/useless PROTIPS all over the page, and tons of reviews and previews.

 

These are very quick magazines to read through, because so much of the text is worthless today and therefore skimmable or skippable.  Your typical review will have two paragraphs of story (usually skippable... I mean, who cares about the "story" of Midnight Resistance or whatever?), one paragraph giving a brief overview of the game (start reading here), a couple paragraphs simply listing powerups and monsters (what is the point of this?), several paragraphs describing basically the background graphics of each stage (worthless), and then finally a paragraph actually offering some criticism.  In most cases, you can just read the third and final paragraphs, and it actually ends up being a decent review.

 

A LOT of the magazine is devoted to hints and tips.  This was certainly useful back in the day, but now is a waste of time to read.

 

Having said all that, it's not a bad magazine.  You get tons of content, and since they review so many games each issue you get to read somewhat in-depth summaries of games that just got a screenshot or two in other mags.

 

One thing that changed in '91 is that the editor stopped bringing up topics in his editorial for discussion in the letter pages.  That's unfortunate, because it gave the mag a real sense of community that other mags didn't have.  Instead, he now just summarizes the games covered in the current issue, which is what Nintendo Power was also doing around this time.  Pretty dull.

Edited December 6, 2023 by newtmonkey

[newtmonkey]

Computer Gaming World (1986)

I finished reading through the '86 issues.  This magazine got both better and worse this year, though honestly I don't think the better parts have anything to do with the actual mag itself.  1986 saw computer gaming beginning to move away from primarily text adventures and wargames, so the greater variety alone makes the magazine more interesting to read today.  This year also saw the release of the Atari ST and Amiga, so it's a lot of fun to read about the early history of these computers.

 

There's a distressing focus on praising computer games for being controlled with a joystick instead of a keyboard.  This makes absolutely no sense to me, because I know what this really entails: instead of being able to enter any command instantaneously just by pressing the corresponding key, now you're slowly moving through menus item by item and hitting the one button to select it.

 

There were several interviews with and even articles written by early game design luminaries Chris Crawford, Dan Bunten, and Jon Freeman.  All come off as completely arrogant and unlikeable; Crawford is especially insufferable.  He claims that he is one of only three developers in the entire world in all of history who has made more than one good game.  He's also living in some fantasy land, in 1986, where the only system worth developing on is the 8-bit Atari line, even going so far as to say that developing a good game on the Commodore 64 is impossible.  Total nonsense.

[dudeguy]

Official PlayStation Magazine was really good "back in muh day", God 20 years ago at this point. man I am old

[CapitanClassic]

[Tanooki]

Walmart Pirate Magazine?

[newtmonkey]

Computer Game Review and CD-ROM Entertainment

I'm more than halfway through the 1993 issues, and sadly this magazine has just gone straight down the toilet.  At some point they picked up most of the editorial staff from VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, and at this point the mag is mostly VG&CE2.  This means you get the usual columns from Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel, good and bad.  It's nice to read a PC-focused Game Doctor column from Kunkel in this mag, but Katz's columns are just awful.  He's brought over the console-focused fanzine review column, which makes absolutely no sense in this PC gaming magazine (surely this would have been more suitable in Electronic Games or EGM?).  His industry news column is absurd... it's issue after issue of him praising "multimedia" software as the future of gaming (think, FMV games and interactive comics), even though he's disappointed every single issue in his other column, where he reviews this garbage software and finds it completely lacking in interactivity.  It just seems crass, or maybe ridiculously naïve.

 

They also started including the "genre survey" articles from VG&CE.  Maybe this was useful back in the day, when you had no clue what games were out there.  But, then again, I dunno... what can you learn from a sentence or two and maybe a screenshot of a game?  This is less an article, and more a catalog.

 

Now that the DOS PC game industry is basically reaching its peak, with multiple complete classics coming out every month, and the poor reviews of this mag are just no longer cutting it.  It was obvious that the reviewers were not completing any of the games they reviewed, and the editor in one issue not only admits to this, but brags about it in a really bizarre response to a negative letter they receive.  Most of the reviews at this point basically are just "the graphics are good, it's easy to understand without reading the manual, I like the sound effects."  This kind of review is worthless for some NES side scroller, never mind some RPG or strategy game that takes a hundred hours to complete.

 

Game Player's PC Strategy Guide

In contrast, this mag is freaking awesome.  Great writing, and reviews are often multiple pages, written by someone who has clearly completely the game.  I end up reading this mag almost cover to cover (except previews)... and that includes sports games and wargames (the latter almost always written by William Trotter, who was one of the best game reviewers of all time).

 

GamePro

I just could not stand to read any more of this.  It has a great layout, nice screenshots, but everything else is just so boring.  You can (and should) skip 90% of the text of their reviews, because it's just regurgitating stuff from the manual, and their review scores are next to useless; every game is awesome.

[dudeguy]

I found out quickly that very few game magazines catered toward anyone with an IQ over 90

[Wayler]

On 11/28/2023 at 10:08 PM, CapitanClassic said:

 

This was the first issue of a video game magazine that I purchased

Oh man what a glorious mess of a cover. Is that Rambo pitching a spiky ice ball with Mike Tyson trapped inside? The agony of holding something that cold is captured nicely on Rambo's face. That ice shard going through his finger probably doesn't help either. And the plain red background works nicely as a warning siren to fend off any potential reader. 

 

Wait, there's 4 different covers of this insanity? Someone please post them! 

Edited January 14 by Wayler

[jhd]

On 1/14/2024 at 7:23 AM, Wayler said:

Wait, there's 4 different covers of this insanity? Someone please post them! 

 

The Internet Archive has cover #2: https://archive.org/details/Video_Games_Computer_Entertainment_Issue_53_June_1993

 

 

 

[Wayler]

Oh this is such a low ball. Practices like this reek of desperation and having zero faith in your actual product. But having read CapitanClassic's rundown of the issue, looks like it's not exactly brimming with quality content either. 

 

[Arno1978]

When I was a teen in the early 90s, I used to skip school and go to the local cafe/variety store that had a huge magazine rack. I never had much money to buy magazines, so I would thumb through them. Either that or the Coop. Computer Gaming World wasn't always on the shelf, but when it was I would thumb through. EGM and Gamepro were the 2 common and dominant magazines. Occasionally, there would be other magazine companies that would release a gaming magazine for a few months and then disappear off the radar. I had one issue of one of these magazines that had a lot of coverage of up coming Sega CD titles - some of which seemed to be prototypes and never heard from again. Gamepro was my favourite magazine. I found the ratings helpful. And it was through mostly Gamepro that I discovered games that were never available where I lived - at least I never saw a single copy. Strange that Kirby's Adventure was rated as one of NES's best games, yet I never saw it on a shelf or in a friends collection.

[Emehr]

On 1/14/2024 at 5:23 AM, Wayler said:

Wait, there's 4 different covers of this insanity? Someone please post them! 

I've got the Sagat version and as you can see, he plainly disapproves. Funny enough, it was the last issue of VG&CE I bought precisely because it was such a lousy cash grab.

[TeddyBear89]

From the May 1984 Electronic Games magazine.......I have always wondered if this was really a letter written by a real person or just a fictitious "scared straight" type of warning from the magazine.  Anyone have knowledge about this?

 

I know it was 40 years ago but the alleged punishment seems pretty harsh.  Of course, I'm comparing it with the violent and stupid crimes committed by today's youth.

 

 

[ABA180]

On 1/26/2024 at 9:28 AM, TeddyBear89 said:

From the May 1984 Electronic Games magazine.......I have always wondered if this was really a letter written by a real person or just a fictitious "scared straight" type of warning from the magazine.  Anyone have knowledge about this?

 

I know it was 40 years ago but the alleged punishment seems pretty harsh.  Of course, I'm comparing it with the violent and stupid crimes committed by today's youth.

 

 

 

 

True, but remember that back then computers were so new to most folks that the law didn't have the specific language it does nowadays to deal with the use of computers in this example, or the punishments available.  So it is definitely possible.

[dudeguy]

Is there any interest in EGM mags, from 89 to circa 1997 or so? I have a ton of the magazines and don't look at them. don't wanna sell em but I could show case some of them if there's a certain article or month someone wants me to share. I went through a major game magazine phase for a while and then I threw away most of them because I was tired of dealing with them. I regret it of course

[CapitanClassic]

33 minutes ago, dudeguy said:

Is there any interest in EGM mags, from 89 to circa 1997 or so? I have a ton of the magazines and don't look at them. don't wanna sell em but I could show case some of them if there's a certain article or month someone wants me to share. I went through a major game magazine phase for a while and then I threw away most of them because I was tired of dealing with them. I regret it of course

If you have missing issues from Archive.org, you could scan them and add them. Looks like maybe these are missing.

 

68 March 1997

69 April 1997

71 June 1997

72 July 1997

74 Sept 1997

100 Nov 1997

 

[newtmonkey]

This took quite a while, but I finished reading through all the 1992 issues of the magazines in my (digital) collection.  Some comments:

 

Computer Game Review and CD-ROM Entertainment

I don't think many people know about this one today, though it was apparently pretty popular (it lasted from 1991 through 1996).  It's a Sendai publication and has a somewhat similar layout to EGM, just with a lot more text.

     This mag sadly got a lot worse in 1992!  I mentioned this earlier, but the core editorial team from VideoGames & Computer Entertainment ended up jumping ship to this mag, and by the end of '92 it's basically worthless EGM-style reviews for sometimes extremely complicated games, followed by what is basically VG&CE warts and all, including the reviews for fanzines (that mostly cover console games), and the annoying "survey" articles where they just describe in a couple of sentences a dozen games in a particular genre.  Having said that, if you liked VG&CE back in the day, you might want to check this mag out!

     It's still a fun mag to flip through, regardless.  No other PC gaming mag at the time was covering SO MANY games as CGR.  Every issue has what seems like dozens of pages of 1-2 page reviews.  It also has a great strategy section toward the end, which usually covers two games in impressive depth.

     

 

Electronic Gaming Monthly

1992 was a fun year for this mag, as you can see it slowly becoming the monster it would become in '93/'94.  There were even some monster-sized issues this year.  The writing is starting to get a bit better with a bit more personality, and the layout is mostly perfected at this point.  The editors also added a TON of import coverage this year, making it simply a fun mag to flip through, even today.

 

Nintendo Power

For many, NP may have reached its peak this year.  It's still got an awesome layout, excellent screenshots, and the best game maps available.  You've also got the Super Mario and Zelda comics (it was fun revisiting these), and the shallow but likeable George & Rob reviews.  Having said all that, it's hard today to get very excited over this mag; there's little import coverage, so it suffers in comparison with EGM in that respect.  And while the maps and partial walkthroughs are EXCELLENT, they're not really fun to read through today (mostly extremely linear platformers), and they go on and on for dozens of pages.

 

Super Play

This British mag first came out toward the end of 1992, and it's a brand new mag for me.  I got interested in this mag due to the accolades heaped upon it by SNES super fan RVGFanatic (sadly, website down as of posting this).  So far, I must agree: this is a great mag!  Plenty of nice screenshots, fantastic import coverage (both Japan and the US), good reviews, and a great sense of humor.  My only complaint is that they seem to really hate RPGs and shooters, which happen to be among my favorite games.  We'll see how it goes.

 

---

 

I also finished the 1988 run of...

 

Computer Gaming World

The production quality has increased a bit, and there is a much lesser focus on wargames this year.  There is also much less of a focus on game developer "celebrities," which is probably due to the fact that PC games were getting complicated enough at this point where a single developer was not likely to release a commercial game on his own.  The reviews are generally written well, though there are exceptions, and a surprising number of reviews begin with the reviewer subjecting you to several paragraphs of some awful story he's written to glamorize moving one icon against the other in some wargame.  Cringeworthy stuff, but it's easy to skip.

     I must also mention that this year saw the bizarre inclusion of several pages of video game coverage, by none other than Arnie Katz!  I cannot avoid this guy!  Hopefully this article won't last long, because it is completely out of place in this magazine.

     One really fun addition to the mag this year is the Rumor Bag, which has an anonymous editor assuming some weird identity and reporting on industry rumors, but written like a story.  In one issue, he's attending some kind of seance at a spooky mansion, and another he's some Russian guy being tailed by KGB agents in a museum.  Fun stuff!

Edited January 29 by newtmonkey

[jhd]

On 1/26/2024 at 10:28 AM, TeddyBear89 said:

From the May 1984 Electronic Games magazine.......I have always wondered if this was really a letter written by a real person or just a fictitious "scared straight" type of warning from the magazine.  Anyone have knowledge about this?

 

I know it was 40 years ago but the alleged punishment seems pretty harsh.  Of course, I'm comparing it with the violent and stupid crimes committed by today's youth.

 

Without knowing the jurisdiction where this event occurred, it is difficult to say anything definitive about the sentence. There are some other inconsistencies, however:

 

First, I am curious why a teenager would "steal" information from a corporate computer system. What possible value would it be without mechanism to sell it to a competitor? Identity theft was not really a thing in 1984, so payroll data (name, address, SSN) would not be very useful either. There was no "dark web" on which to sell this information. 

 

Second, I find it very odd that a serving prisoner -- even in juvenile detention -- would have access to current video game magazines, much less that the prisoner would be allowed to submit a letter thereto. 

 

Lastly, here in Canada, it is very unusual for a minor to receive an adult sentence. This would require a serious act of violence like murder or multiple assaults. Computer hacking would not come even close to qualifying for an adult sentence. Theoretically the letter writer could have had a very lengthy juvenile criminal record and done a significant amount of damage to the corporation, but still the sentence seems excessively (and unrealistically) harsh. 

 

Also the phrase "chance for probation" makes no sense. Someone is sentenced to probation instead of jail. A prisoner is released on parole after serving (normally) two-thirds of its sentence. Parole and probation may place similar restrictions on an individual, but they are legally different concepts. 

 

All in all, it is my opinion that this letter is not real.