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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?
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.
Subscription price is a LOT in the USA. You can get it at Barnes and Noble for $8.99 which today is £4.88. A subscription from Edge is £72.00 or $132 a year. I don't care how good Edge is, I can't afford to subscribe to it. If there was a digital version that was substantially cheaper, I would subscribe without a second thought. As it is, I pick up an issue every couple of months.
When you can subscribe to US gaming mags for less than $10 a year by buying the subscriptions on ebay, it is hard to justify $132.
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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.
My problem with Maximum PC is twofold: First, they still distribute their software on CD. Most other mags have moved to DVD and thus are able to jampack more demos and apps into it, making the premium for the disc much more worth it. Second, Maximum PC has A LOT of ads. I know ads bring in revenue (I work in print media), but there's a point when mags have an article followed by three pages of ads--MaxPC has reached this point. It's time for them to have more content or charge more for their ads. They've got a decent subscriber base, they just need to make their advertisers aware of it.
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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.
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.
Does anyone here remeber Gamer's Republic?
I do. I particularly remember one issue where an in-depth profile of Treasure Games was the cover story. That's hardcore. "Forget about Gran Turismo, forget about whatever the latest movie tie-in is, we're going to put a 2D side-scrolling shooter on our cover and then devote 15 pages to the developer."
Of course, with editorial decisions like that, it's no wonder their run was so short-lived. They really only lasted in that form for about a year. After that, they scaled back to the point where they weren't much more than a pamphlet, hung on for another year or so and then folded.
I wish I still had some of the early GR's as well as some of the early Next-Gens. Both of these magazines could approach 300 pages on a good month, and about half of that was editorial (the other half was ads). EGM was about the same girth at that time, although they were definitely more mainstream, which is why they've stuck around. They've shed about 2/3 of their pages nowadays, though.
One short-lived magazine that I liked was Gamer's Republic. I'd give a link, but there seems to be no decent page to link to anymore.
Game magazines, more than most other magazines, are really getting killed by the Internet. I mean, by the time news comes out in a monthly magazine, it's at least 1 or 2 months old. Even exclusives are scanned and leaked with regularity.
What we really need is a gaming weekly. Something with a fast turnaround time and is cheaper to produce. Heck, it wouldn't even have to be thick and glossy like current magazines. Hm...
Newspaper-quality is too coarse and grainy (and the color is kinda washed out). Supermarket flyers tend to be much sharper and more vibrant -- a good midway point between glossy mags and rough newspapers. It seems to me that such a publication could be widely successful. The only other questions are distribution and pricing.
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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
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!
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
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.
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.