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Gaming Mags Worth Their Ink
eToyChest takes a look back at five gaming magazines worth subscribing to. Tellingly, four out of five are no longer published. From the article: "What can be said about Next Generation Magazine that would truly do it justice? In its seven-year run starting in 1995, Next Generation virtually defined what good game journalism should be in the U.S. Interviews with prominent industry figures, even those unrelated to game-making such as Henry Jenkins of M.I.T. and Senator Joseph Lieberman were erudite and informative. Imagine what fun they would have had with Jack Thompson." As I've said before, Futurenet's Edge is my personal favorite print magazine. What is yours?
Maximum PC is a pretty good mag, if you're into PC hardware. Profesionally, Windows IT Pro is worth every penny of the hefty subscription price (compared to many other mags). A few well-written articles in there have helped me implement something at work in hours that would have taken me days of fiddling on my own.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Joystik and Video Games circa the early 80s were decent. The latter had great long articles, and the former - aside from the large strategy guides - had the best artwork and layout of any game-publication of it's time.
Edge is nice, but the delay in the UK releases - and that PRICE - make it a rare buy for me. In fact, I haven't seen it around Borders in the SF Bay area for a while now. Was it discontinued?
Pretty Good Article.
Give us back the three-page BASIC code listings that took hours to type in and then didn't work. Bring back the fun.
Argh.
I used to read PC Gamer when I was in high school. Each issue was at least half an inch thick. Now they are a lot smaller, somewhere around 1/4 inch thick. Also, the demos that they include have really started to suck. They used to be quite large, usually the full game without all the maps. Now they usually include cutscenes, or playable demos with only 1 or 2 maps. At least that's the way it was when I stopped buying it. Can't say if the demos have improved, but last time I looked at a copy, the magazine was still pretty small, and still cost just as much as it originally did.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Does anyone here remeber Gamer's Republic? It was a fantastic magazine that catered to the hardcore gamer. It was probably my all time favorite video game magazine, and it makes me sad that it's gone while crap like Game Informer is pushed at Game Stop.
Given that the old-school Nintendo Power mag listed is nothing like the current one.. it's really sad that out of the five mags listed as "worth subscribing to," only one (PC Gamer) is still possible to subscribe to.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
No nonsense attitudes. They even used to disassemble the latest games to tell you how well they're coded. Unlike today's reviewers that give everything 90+% ratings for utter tripe.
http://www.edge-online.co.uk/
I'm addicted. It's a gaming magazine that doesn't make me feel stupider for having read it... unlike the trying-too-hard-to-be-cool US mags (*cough* EGM *cough*). Even the binding feels high-quality, like a soft-bound coffee table book.
Too bad a subscription mailed to the USA costs *more* than the newstand price. ($130 for 13 issues at current exchange rates vs $8 an issue on the stand.)
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Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.
That all said, I don't think a mag like Next Gen would work today; there was a large element of it that was educating a whole class of gamers about the absolute state of the art as we moved from 2D to 3D (I'm thinking about the features we did on AI and AL, 3D, the NextGen Lexicon, that '98 how to get a job feature, the in-depth technical coverage of the machines, etc.) and in a sense Next Gen readers really did know a lot more than readers of EGM or GamePro at the time. That isn't true today -- your average EGM reader is as well informed about games and the game industry as anyone else, and anything you don't understand (mipmapping or perspective correct texture mapping in the old days, bump mapping or normal mapping today), you can learn about with a four second Google search. I loved NextGen, but there's just not as much of a need for that kind of magazine today in terms of the info it presented.
Today, I think Game Informer and EGM and Play all do a great job with coverage that well exceeds what we did on NextGen in every area (compare Play's interview with David Jaffee to anything done in NextGen), but they all have their own unique tone, and I do miss NextGen's hardcore tone. I still think our salture to subscribers, where we ran every subscriber's name in a special HARDCORE campaign that lasted months, was one of the coolest things ever.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I still have all of my copies of Next-Gen (minus one that I lent out and was never returned). All my other magazines get recycled or thrown out. Next-Gen was unique in that it really made me think about games rather than just inform me about them. It was still grounded in the games though, it never got too pretentious. Any high level concept they discussed, they would continually link back to how it would work in a game. Contrast this with The Escapist, which often seems to use video games as a jumping off point for any random intellectual curiosity.
Most articles in Next-Gen got me excited about games. They were often focused on the future, on the possibilites of gaming, not with what was wrong with the current state of gaming. I'd usually want to play some games after reading a few articles. I've read little in other magazines that elicit such feelings. At the same time, Next-Gen was a magazine you could hand off to an adult without worrying about looking juvenile. Compare this with most game magazines today that seem to be aimed squarely at the Bevis and Butthead demographic.
The Edge seems to be a decent Next-Gen replacement but its cost is prohibitive in the US, I'd rather buy games with my money.
...but more like reading a PR release from what I have seen.
A while back I used to read PC Zone and Gamer (im a UK gamer). It was becoming more and more the case that big name / cover games used to automatically get an extra 'few' % points and it came to the point where I just could not rely on them to be impartial anymore.
If I remember correctly Doom3 recieved a score in the 90's yet its sister mag Edge gave it a modest but deserving 7/10. What was even more peculiar was that the reviewers were usually the same. Allright - the reviews never had a name tied to them but the staff writers were always listed in the front of the magazine.
It was almost as though the staff writers knew they had to pander to the advertisers to make sure that various companies kept their page orders up so they would whore a score in the top selling mag and then write a more honest review in Edge. For instance look at Driv3r and the backlash that followed from the public after its 9/10's.
To me it has become the case that paper mags in the UK are no longer credible and as sales go down they tend to become even less so as those advertisers become a more vital source of revenue. Its a pity because I used to base alot of my purchases on what some of the above mags used to say, now its more on word of mouth from friends about what is a good game worthy of my time.
I'm surprised Computer Gaming World wasn't mentioned. It predates PC Gamer by several years, heck it was around in the 80's when I started reading it. It has seen better years, just like all the rest, but they still have some of the best articles and writing today.
For some reason, Future made a deal with Barnes & Noble for exclusive distribution of Edge.
I subscribed to Next-Generation from the first issue all the way to the end. When it switched to the MicrosoftBoughtMySoul XBox magazine it was little more then a marketing magazine and I promptly canceled and am glad I did. A few years ago I got rid of all but one, the issue where they showed off Unreal (which back then was suppose to come out before Quake) Here is the wikipedia link and on my website is a photo of most of them that I took a few years back: next-generation
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Given that the vicious and intrusive copy-protection of Half-Life 2 has pretty much soured me on buying ANY games, I haven't read a gaming mag in a couple of years.
As above
I loved the hell out of this mag. Besides a few issues after the opening December 1988 edition, I used to have every issue that VG&CE produced from beginning to end. Even after they changed their name to "VideoGames" and did a complete overhaul of the book, I managed to start liking it again after about a year's shakedown period. Unfortunately I don't know where most of my copies went; I was thinking about scanning my entire collection at one point. Along with the pre-N64 era of Nintendo Power, this is the magazine I miss the most.
Rob
I gave up on game magazines a long time ago. I don't trust their content at all - I'd believe the word of some random anonymous coward on Slashdot over any of the gaming magazines. Sometimes I'll open one up to read things like interviews with developers if I'm in a bookstore or if a friend has a copy, but anything like a game review or even worse, a preview - it's a waste of time to even bother reading them.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned GameFan. Back in the day, it was THE magazine for hardcore videogamers. The extensive import coverage was awesome. The layout was unlike anything else at the time. It's too bad the internet helped kill it off. :-(
Did anyone else enjoy PC Attack? It was a fairly short-lived gaming magazine from the UK that came out about ten years ago. What was interesting about it was that all its articles were in the form of comic strips, created by taking screenshots of games. I remember it being very funny, more so than PC Accelerator even.
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Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
I've been buying PC Gamer (USA version) magazines for over 8 years and have subscribed for 3. The writing staff is like a second family to me and it's been really fun growing up with them, seeing who sticks, who bails, and who is promoted. I'm really proud of Greg Vederman who started out as an associate editor and has recently been promoted to Editor In Chief. The writing is consistently excellent, the magazine is respected enough to get lots of exclusive looks, and they're unabashed about stating "wish lists" in previews - a category of games journalism that usually reads like an advertisement.
PC Gamer has definitely gotten a lot thinner over the years, but I don't mind terribly as I don't have as much magazine reading time as I used to. The only section I wish they'd flesh out more is the letters to the editor - especially since my own letters never make it to print!
By the way, if you're a subscriber don't get suckered into renewing via the mailed reminders they send. For some reason they charge $35/y for renewals but only $20/y for new subscriptions. Just use a paper insert from a magazine to renew and save yourself a bunch of cash. I can't think of a better way to spent $20.
You PAY for a subscription? Really...next time, fill out one of those "product registration" cards as a VP for the retail software division of a random big box store and watch what happens...
I don't think I paid for either of them. PCG is still my favorite. I miss the Dreamcast Magazine, I still think that was a good one. The PC Accelerator was fun. I have to admit, some of the more porn side of it, annoyed me at times, but I liked the magazine. The early ones were poor, but it seemed to just be catching its stride, when it ended. :-(
:-) Maximum PC is ok, but it doesn't have that super-amazing-hardware thing going for it, like Boot did.
Another magazine I miss, is Boot. That magazine was really for the hard-core gamer out there, and the hardware porn that he could never afford.
Ah, yes, the Official Dreamcast Magazine. The Mag was worth getting just for the gdroms that came with it, most notibly one of the verry few places you could get the upadated browser and the full online compatible version of Sega swirl! Pry my dreamcast and all of the magazine issues from my dead cold hands!
I knew before following the link that ODCM would be on the list. That was an outstanding magazine.
The high-energy presentation of ODCM paved the way for what Nintendo Power eventually turned into (minus the demo discs).
I'm dating myself here but I missed the old Byte Magazines from the early 1980's. It wasn't a gaming magazine but a lot of the ads for the early PC games were drawn pictures that left a lot to the imagination. It would be a good decade later that I would upgrade from my third Commodore 64 to an IBM AT that my roommate brought home to keep my off of his 386. :P
I remember those..... I used to get them a lot back in the day. Subscribed to PCXL (PC Accelerator) since it wasn't bland tech/gaming news. Also had a subscription to Nintendo Power for many years since it was only $5 more then a strategy guide I'd get anyways for a year subscription and the guide. PCXL was mainly for game demos though since I was on dial-up then. I really don't see much of a use for magazines in the day of the internet. Sure, it's nice reading a magazine from time to time, but gaming news seems like it would be best served on a computer, and with fast connections, demo discs are no longer needed (other then for consoles).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
My vote goes to game players. What other magazine covered a design-your-own-game contest with entries like "Fire Dogs" and "Kill your parents?" What other magazine took the risk of publishing the topless screenshots from that Naughty Dog game and the Street Fighter II movie? What other magazine had Gazuga, skullbats, and The Cleansing?
It wasn't so much a game magazine as a secret, hilarious club.
... but I used to remember gaming magazines being a lot better than they currently are. I remember thick issues with lots of great information, previews, import info, commentary by reviewers who were real game players (if they thought a game sucked, they would say it), and so forth. The magazines were made by gamers, for gamers, or so it felt. Even Nintendo Power (completely controlled by Nintendo) seemed better back then.
Nowadays it seems like almost every game gets at least a 7/10 (or numerically similar value... unless it is a total crap title made by a noname publisher that wouldn't advertise anyway), reviewers are wannabe journalists, not gamers, etc. Through no fault of a magazine, new info and tips are available much faster on the web than could ever be put into a monthly magazine. Either way, the magazines just seem to be devoid the feeling of "genuine gamer culture" that I remembered from the 16-bit days.
Maybe it was the web that killed the magazines of old. Maybe I'm an old fogey now.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Websites seem to go out of their way to make accessing their content as difficult as possible. If I just want to see a screen shot of say "Super Mario Galaxy" at IGN, I have to click through a transitional ad followed by digging throught the article (assunming it dosnt have one of those annoying roll over ads that blocks half the screen and wont go away) to get to the sidebar that has a link to the screenshots which then tell me I need to join some "IGN" club to gain access. I dont visit any gaming site enough to justify paying for access (cash or spam are both payment methods IMHO) so usually I just skip it and search for a gaming blog somewhere with an image or wait for the next months magazine to show up. I realize the need for ad impressions and revenue but there has to be less intrusive and annoying way to do it.
Im evidently the only person who still subscribes to Electronic Gaming Monthly. I still read it regularly, they seem to be the only magazine with the balls to call a crappy game a crappy game anymore even in previews. Its the only one I still get. I have tried them all...NextGen and Dreamcast Magazines were my favorite, beautiful layout, good reviews and interesting articles.
I'm sorry, but Civilization 3 and the last two Gran Turismo games were not better, just longer and harder and tedious. Jak 2 reviews were highway robbery. Why did they screw up a classic? Why is it so boring? Why combine GTA with Jak? Why even call it Jak 2 when it was a totally different game? Why would Sony think combining the two was a good idea. Unfortunately, in movies and games you can become a best-seller just by being a sequel to a brand name (like Matrix 2+3).
I used to read reviews all the time, but now it's so misleading, I just buy old games. I'm 100% certain the original Half-Life is worth my time. Not only that, but I'm not going to regret spending 10$-20$ the way I will $50 on GT4.
It's like grade inflation in High School and college. It takes hard work to get below a B average at a public school. You really have to screw up. And that's the way it is with game reviews now. Madden will always get 9's, and if it doesn't, they actually removed features (X360 version). If they get a 10, there was a significant addition, maybe.
And if you come from MIT (Valve) or Harvard (Blizzard) I'm positive you'll work out.
I have been a subscriber since issue #2, I bought #1 in the store. I used to love this mag, unfortunately I have found of late, esspecially after a recent revamp, that the mag has gone WAY down hill. The Cover stories are still good, and the general games coverage still seems decent. However in the past they had several excellent monthly columns. The ones from the early days have faded away, they were not really replaced per se. New columns have come along, but they seem mainly like fluff and read like fluff. They used to cater to "hardcore" (defined in the loves to play games and wants all the best knowledge on playing games, and what's coming) and casual gamers alike. Now they still cater to "hardcore" (but defined in the when i get off my skate/snow board lets go play some games) and the cusal gamer is sorta out in the cold.
The columns are as I said pretty fluffy. In the case of a couple areas what used to be several pages are now reduced to a perhaps two pages (Hard Stuff).
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If there's one thing that's brought down PCG's quality standards over the years, it's this thing called Greg Vederman.
I used to be an avid reader of Die-Hard Game Fan (later shortened to just Game Fan). I stopped reading after Dave Halverson left as editor.
In its heyday, GF had the best quality paper, filled with content and artwork, the best quality pictures, and the the best articles. They had an anime review section and a real funny mailbag.
Today, Dave Halverson is the editor of Play. Play is a gorgeous magazine, dripping with artwork and high-quality screen captures over every milimeter of its pages.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Zzap 64 of course!
I can't find good coverage for the 360 that doesn't pander to Microsoft or the game companies, certainly nothing out there like the PC Gamer style of neutral and harsh critique. For us over 30 gamers, we just don't have the time to weed through game bins anymore and I've fallen prey to Xbox Magazine's corporate pandering on more than one occasion already.
No one remembers PCXL? It was great; informative with a taste of Maxim-esque humor thrown in.
I loved Next-Gen too (still have the issue with my name on the "HARDCORE" page), but I found this one's demise just as tragic as there were only like, 3-year's worth of issues and I had only gotten into it at the 3rd-to-last issue.
I'm the one that wrote the article- glad so many of you enjoyed it.
I'm well aware of EDGE's quality, as well as PLAY, but in all honesty as much as I would have liked to add them I didn't think it would be fair. If I started to add UK magazines, then I'd have to consider Famitsu and Spiele and all the other international magazines, and I just hadn't been exposed to enough to make a good judgement in such a wide sphere. By limiting the article to US magazines, I acknolwedged knowing what I did not know and gave the best article I could be certain of.
And to the guy that worked at NextGen- The cover of Issue 29 was the largest display of journalistic balls I've *ever* seen in the game industry. "Something Is Wrong With Nintendo 64", indeed.
The only for sale magazine I read wrt games is Game Developer Magazine. Most of the other magazines bore me as they tend to have old news and clueless writers. Besides almost all of them have audio shows / podcasts anyways so I can just listen to them. Generally the inaccuracies in them are enough to quench my interest in picking them up in paper form.
Eg one of the shows (I think it was Hot Spot, produced by GameSpot / EGM IIRC.) didn't know what languages most games are coded in (C/C++). IMHO that's a bit like a sports commentator not knowing on what kind of surface hockey is played on.
Anyways, GDM has clue-ful people making interesting comments. They tend to have a couple of articles which focus on deconstructing game design (eg the "Post mortems", these are sometimes linked from Slashdot on the GDM sister-site Gamasutra) and a few on the state of game production. They also have reoccuring articles on the details of game making, such as the column on audio production and in depth algorithms.
Basically, GDM is the only game oriented magazine which I can put down feeling I have actually learned something. The other magazines I mostly feel like I've lost knowledge (or been filled with disinformation).
The only other game mag I read is the Scandinavian GameReactor. It's a free magazine and it has slightly less ads than most other magazines. I wouldn't trust the reviews blindly, but they seem to be pretty on the money compared to stuff I read online. And the price is right.
I prefer Computer Games Magazine. The layout is much cleaner compared to PC Gamer or Computer Gaming World and a lot of the gaming commentary articles are well thought out. They also have a reader submitted article which is usually excellent.
I find there is a lot less of the self absorbed hipness and juvenile humor than in competing mags.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Print is dead.
While I do enjoy Edge, it's usually a month or more out of date by the time it reaches me. Traditional paper magazines just cannot compete with the speed at which gaming information can be disseminated across the internet.
It was only a short-lived publication and, truthfully, it's reviews were often half-baked, but IE was the gaming magazine I remember with the most fondness. Interactive Entertainment's claim to fame was that it was a magazine-on-a-CD, back in the era when CD-ROMs were still new and exciting. That's right, the entire magazine was on the CD-ROM. And it wasn't just a dry collection of written reviews and demos; the reviews were read by a talented collection of voice actors. The reviews themselves were chirpy and upbeat, quite often lacking much in the way of true information but obviously written by people who loved computer gaming. The magazine also featured a number of "interactive interviews" and a lot of video-clips of in-game footage (this in an era when it was common to only show screenshots from the cinematic sequences). As a further bonus, most of the issues also came with a complete version of a game (several years old, of course, but not all dogs; thanks to IE, I got the complete Magic Candle series).
Ultimately, the high cost of producing each issue, coupled with a low subscription rate and an inability to attract any advertisers meant IEs days were numbered; they got bought out by Strategic Review. The magic was gone; within a few issues, IE became little more than a run-of-the-mill demo-disk and shortly thereafter the publication disappeared entirely.
Nonetheless, Interactive Entertainment still ranks up there as one of my favorite magazines; it was fun, irreverant, topical and entertaining. I still have a blast re-reading (listening?) to their reviews of 10 year old games. I wish more magazines captured their flair.
I miss Compute! Magazine from the 80s. Aside from the nice reviews, previews, I got a big kick out of the ads. They also listed source code for simple games (in BASIC) you could type in, and this is what actually got me started in coding.
Fast forward 10-15 years...
Up until recently, before getting broadband, the only reason I still bought game mags was for the demo disks. Mags these days just don't have the allure of the good old days.
Nintendo Power and PC Gamer are still in print!
Good karma sticks to me like velcro on a piece of plexiglass.
Move along, citizen.
The only gaming mag i still read is PC Gamer. They still manage to stay very humorous and even beat out the internet on having the first previews for some games.
I also read Maximum PC, but I don't count that as a gaming magazine. It's still fun to read, although most of the previews I've seen on the internet by the time the magazine arrives. They have some cool how-to's once in a while still.
EDGE is my favourite by a long, long way. It's the only really 'grown-up' games magazine that I've found that actually offers a unbiased opinion, and their review scores, while among the harshest out there, are never anything but fair.
When I saw this, the first thing that came to my mind is the online only, just over a year old Escapist. It reminds me a great deal of NextGen, with very intellectual articles and outstanding writing throughout. They cover things from consoles to PC, with some very interesting takes on gaming that I thoroughly enjoy.
The Escapist
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"