Gaming Mags Worth Their Ink 108
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:1)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:1)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:2)
well that's what sucks about this day and age, It used to be about providing content to people, Now it's just about making money.
The few magazines I
Re:Maximum PC (Score:1)
I know the rose colored glasses can distort history pretty badly, but what plaent are you from? Magazine publishing has always been about making money. The difference is that people used to get upset when advertising started outweighing actual articles. As competition for advertising has increased (with the rise of the web), the prices payed out for carrying advertising has decreased. To make things worse, readership ha
Re:Maximum PC (Score:1)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:2)
When I used to get magazines they were filled with a lot of great info, now a days though they are filled with far to many ads then what they were filled with.
I understand it's either that or up the subscription price but if it ment I could get more articles and information out of a magazine for a higher price I would rather do that then be stuck with a magazine that doesn't give me anything but ads upon ads for less.
Re:Maximum PC (Score:2)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:1)
Re:Maximum PC (Score:2)
Next-Gen aside (Score:1)
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?
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:1)
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:2)
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:2)
The price isn't too bad in the UK - £4. How much do they add on in the US?
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:3, Interesting)
When you can subscribe to US gaming mags for less than $10 a year by buying the subscriptions on ebay, it is hard
No, Barnes & Noble only (Score:1)
Re:No, Barnes & Noble only (Score:1)
I never even looked at the subscription cost - holy crap - over 130.00? Haven't the english figured out the value of advertsing metrics tied to a hard-subscription model? That's why pubs are cheap in the US. I used to wo
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:3, Interesting)
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 b
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:2)
It's a shame they only made it to 36 issues.
Re:Next-Gen aside (Score:1)
Hard Copy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hard Copy (Score:2)
of course, after 8 pages of hex number, you ran the program it was just another shoot emup/maze game close that just ran faster than basic
(ok, ok, there was one or two really good programs there ultimately)
Re:Hard Copy (Score:2)
I miss those old BASIC games. My coding career started by figuring out how to default my 3 lives to 255!
Re:Hard Copy (Score:2)
Re:Hard Copy (Score:2, Informative)
The rise and fall (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The rise and fall (Score:2)
Re:The rise and fall (Score:2)
Re:The rise and fall (Score:3, Informative)
They responded by making fun of me and jeering at me. I felt like I was being mistreated because I had actually caught them at an error and therefore they were l
Gamer's Republic (Score:2)
Re:Gamer's Republic (Score:3, Interesting)
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, th
Re:Gamer's Republic (Score:1)
http://www.playmagazine.com/ [playmagazine.com]
Sadness (Score:2)
Your Spectrum (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Your Spectrum (Score:2)
Modern games have orders of magnitude more code in them and would take a lot more effort to determine how well they are coded. I guess you could focuse on core aspects of the engine using a profiler. But would it be worth it? Usually the graphics card is the limiting factor for games to run well currently whereas back then the code really needed to be efficient to take full advantage of the meager CPU power available.
From my own experience with Half-Life 2, it seems graphic drivers can easily make as big
Edge magazine (Score:2)
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.)
--
Carnage Blender [carnageblender.com]: Meet interesting people. Kill them.
You PAY for a subscription? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You PAY for a subscription? (Score:1)
Re:Edge magazine (Score:2)
Re:Edge magazine (Score:1)
Re:Edge magazine (Score:2)
Re:Edge magazine (Score:2)
It's not just the gaming magazines. The digital photography magazines are the same. I currently subscribe to Digital Photo Pro which has great articles and is printed on high quality paper stock
Why can't the US publishing houses pick up on this? I remember Final Frontier magazine, a space magazine. W
Re:Edge magazine (Score:2)
NextGen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:NextGen (Score:2)
Re:NextGen (Score:2)
I actually stopped getting NextGen when they changed their paper/cover stock. I was also sad when DailyRadar.com went under.
I was reading the Trip Hawkins interview from 94 or 95 the other day and it's hilarious looking back. Keep on telling y
Next-Gen Was Personal Favorite (Score:2, Informative)
It's not so much reviews anymore (Score:1)
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 th
yup (Score:1)
Re:It's not so much reviews anymore (Score:2)
burned by Jak 2 Civ 3 and GT series (Score:1)
I used to read reviews all the t
CGW (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CGW (Score:1)
Re:CGW (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:CGW (Score:2)
CGW was *the* standard that all others aspired to. Staffed by adults. Well written.
Not to mention crazy policies like actually waiting until a game was available on store shelves *before* reviewing. Imagine that kiddies, reviewing the same version customers actually play, not some pre-release/demo crap thing.
I've still got a hundred of these from the early/mid 90's on my shelf I can't bear to part with.
NextGeneration (Score:2)
Short Answer: "No." (Score:2, Interesting)
Video Games & Computer Entertainment (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Video Games & Computer Entertainment (Score:1)
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Re:Video Games & Computer Entertainment (Score:2)
I remember when VG&CE had some photos of an NES prototype that looked flatter and used phone jacks to connect the controllers... it looked really cool back then to see something like that.
Re:Video Games & Computer Entertainment (Score:1)
PC Attack! (Score:2)
Re:PC Attack! (Score:1)
PC Gamer FTW (Score:2)
Re:PC Gamer FTW (Score:1)
I used to be a huge fan of PC Gamer, back when each issue were monolithic tomes of gaming goodness. While I still like the editorials and the better-than-average reviewing, the mag has fallen a long way from its heyday. I remember reading the first preview for Deus Ex on PCG, it was a massive page-turner chock full of tantalizing tidbits. Things like this just don't exist these days. When they say "preview", you can realistically only expect a half-page blurb that's more market-speak than real, actual, prev
Re:PC Gamer FTW (Score:2)
Plus, some of the previews still really grab me. For instance, I found PCG's coverage of The Sims to be a million times more entertaining than the game was. I also enjoyed all the excitement and revelatio
Re:PC Gamer FTW (Score:2)
I am subscribed to CGM and PC Gamer (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Dreamcast Magazine (Score:2, Interesting)
Official Dreamcast Magazine (Score:1)
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).
Still miss Byte Magazine... (Score:2)
Re:Still miss Byte Magazine... (Score:1)
Magazines? (Score:2)
Re:Magazines? (Score:2)
Pfft (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't so much a game magazine as a secret, hilarious club.
Maybe it is nostalgia from the 16-bit era... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe it is nostalgia from the 16-bit era... (Score:2)
Sometimes paper IS more convenient (Score:2)
Re:Sometimes paper IS more convenient (Score:2)
PC Gamer (Score:2)
PC Gamer USA Edition (Score:1)
Die-Hard Game Fan (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
retro (Score:2)
Any Good 360 Coverage? (Score:1)
Re:Any Good 360 Coverage? (Score:2)
Game Developer Magazine (Score:3, Informative)
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 [gamasutra.com]) 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 [gamereactor.se]. 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.
For old fart computer gamers like myself (Score:2)
I find there is a lot less of the self absorbed hipness and juvenile humor than in competing mags.
Egon Spengler (Score:2)
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.
Interactive Entertainment (Score:1)
COMPUTE! (Score:1)
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.
4/5 Out of Print?? No. (Score:1)
Next Generation was the shit! (Score:1)
The only gaming mag i still read is PC Gamer.
Futurenet's EDGE (Score:1)
Escapist (Score:1)
The Escapist [escapistmagazine.com]