I remember absolutely being a fanboy in the 90s. It was so much better than it’s rivals like EGM and GamePro.
But around 2005, either I aged out of it or the magazine got worse. Then I remember GameStop giving it for free at some point. I just remember it being a shell of a shell of a magazine, as the rest of the gaming industry moved to gaming blogs.
The Gamestop deal would have been 2002-ish. I actually hadn’t heard of the magazine before we started pushing it in the store. With Game Informer’s features mirroring our store marketing, it was the first time I realized how incestuous the industry was (easy to see the signs of it now when looking back at even older mags). The bizarre amount of coverage it had on the PS2 game State of Emergency was one example from the time. It’s wild to me to hear it being called reputable here and elsewhere today when it had such a fundamental conflict of interest for the vast majority of its run.
I was in middle school when I had fond memories of gaming mags, and that’s probably when I was the most infatuated by the publications.
And by high school (2000s) it was getting weird and slowly dropping off.
At some point was the whole Kotaku gamergate BS and completely checked out of gaming news because it wasn’t just weird, but then it got real racist/sexist.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you. My mainstay for the longest time was RockPaperShotgun, probably from 2008–2016 or thereabouts. Once the old guard left the quality of the site drastically changed, and it became significant shallower in terms of reviews. Not really sure where to get the same kind of journalism these days.
oh it was great. I used to try and get in the magazine by drawing on the envelopes and mailing them in. EGM and I think GamePro used to have artwork that people mailed in.
Also prior to the Internet this was THE way to get cheats for games. every time a new issue came out I always checked the back to see if there were cheats for a game I just got.
Tim, Dan, and Reiner in any horror themed Super Replay is fantastic. I went through a really rough separation and I needed something happy-ish to fill the dead noise at night and found the Megaman Legends Super Replay and the rest is history.
I just signed up for their 2 year subscription deal, and always looked forward to getting my latest edition. Also listened to their podcast, which was great too. Super bummed about this.
Fuckin Japan man. They just love their giga corporations way too much. Can‘t even have a single very successful indie studio in peace without throwing themselves at Sony.
Are you saying you don’t get excited for your favourite characters to be “developing the reach of the intellectual property and for expanding commercial business endeavors”!?‽
While not wrong, let’s not pretend that their friends across the ocean aren’t doing the exact same thing. Practically everything Microsoft have acquired has either been shutdown, or crippled to the point where it’s unrecognizable
Sony Music was the business that developed the PlayStation before it moved to SCE/SIE/PlayStation Worldwide Studios, and Aniplex/Crunchyroll. Its basically the only profitable entertainment business they have.
LOL. At this point I think they’re copying Pokemon out of spite. They form a new company (like The Pokemon Company) to manage the IP, backed by a large corporation (Sony instead of Nintendo) that is separate from the development team (Pocketpair vs Gamefreak)
gematsu.com
Aktywne