Need Feedback on My Classic Game Magazine Sample

[onemanfilmcrew]

Here is a sampling of my upcoming classic video game magazine. Disclaimer, I am not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, so the look is going to be pretty simplistic. My main focus is going to be on content, the writing and tons of screenshots, etc.

The sample is from the debut issue and is a 4 page writeup on MetalStorm for the NES. Please let me know what you like, what you don't like, and as always, please feel free to be brutally honest.

http://thevgatv.com/magsamp/magsamp.html

[noiseredux]

looks damn good buddy!

[Riqz85]

i love it!

[sevin0seven]

simplistic is awesome in my book. you have all the right ideas here. keep em coming.

[JohnBaxterly]

Great job! Like, better than great. I can see myself reading an entire magazine made by you.

[lisalover1]

Excellent work, man. The review was elborate, lighthearted, and informative of the game's content. You're on a roll with game publications lately; don't slow down, we want to see more!

[Erik_Twice]

It looks good but I think that you should choose to enclose the text in a background so it looks better.

[Cronson]

Very impressive. Are you going to sell this somehow (I say go digital)? For lay out suggestions, check out retro gamer magazine. You probably already have, but they have a great looking publication that really embraces retro.

As for writing, I think the thing that always challenged me was to not be cliche with my writing. Imagine your audience has read everything under the sun, knows a lot about gaming and is about to read your article. How can you create a different take on the same topic? I know thats a really tough thing to suggest but I think people in our crowd demand that.

But again, awesome job.

[Jungell]

It's not bad!

Since you've gotten some great comments, I feel obligated to point out what you can do better!

You need to mix it up a bit and start to use headers, highlight words and make the text and images come together to form a page instead of a page with images and text. Do you know what I mean?
Take a look at this:

3109905340_d773421a7f.jpg (107.97 KiB) Viewed 788 times

The words and text belong together, you can't separate them. Just look at the layout in as many magazines as possible and just steal stuff, use their layouts and make it your own!
It makes for a much interesting read!

[slowslow325]

On one of the pages there was a massive text block that was barely divided into three sections. To keep things simple, yet make it more eye pleasing, you could switch around the middle picture and the middle block of text.

That would divide up the text better.