Game Magazines and Books - Post yours

[the7k]

Play was the only other one I subscribed to, but they stopped, as someone in this thread already mentioned. I'm not really sure why I liked them, only that I did.

Play Magazine had a few former members of GameFan in it's employ. Aside from their coverage of niche games, another huge praise thrown at GameFan was it's lay-out, and you can see a bit of that in Play.

The fact that Play also covered anime, movies and other media was another reason I read it over most other gaming rags.

[EvilRyu2099]

Am I the only person that liked Tips & Tricks the most? I know mainly a code magazine, but some of their strategies on fighting games and RPGs were the best... HOnestly I never was a fan of the mainstream magazines such as Gamefan, Gamepro or EGM... They seem to play favorites too much in their reviews... You pretty much knew every Mario or Zelda game was going to get the highest praises... NextGen had some good articles worth reading, but their reviews were a joke as well..

[the7k]

[quote="EvilRyu2099"HOnestly I never was a fan of the mainstream magazines such as Gamefan...[/quote]

GameFan was kinda anything but mainstream.

[EvilRyu2099]

[quote="EvilRyu2099"HOnestly I never was a fan of the mainstream magazines such as Gamefan...

GameFan was kinda anything but mainstream.[/quote] Not totally true... They just tend to play favorites to Japanese developers which is fine by me, but they still had an obvious bias as well... Some of their articles weren't that great and they promoted many games that ended up bombing and not really doing anything for the industry... I preferred NextGen because they approached the game industry unlike any other magazine.. They basically looked at how Video Games were in relation to pop culture and society as a whole... And I also have to admit that NextGen had balls as well.. They didn't just suck up to anyone and were realists... Good example was how Nintendo 64 lagged behind the PS1 in the market and they actually made an article on how Nintendo was suffering at the time due to limited 3rd party games.. Even with all that said, I preferred a strategy code based magazine in Tips & Tricks that had cool articles on overseas culture as well..

[NSBAceAttorney]

DON'T KILL ME! But I'm talking about when it was good, not the shit we have now.

[the7k]

Finally picked up a copy of EGM a few weeks ago. For some reason, I'm in the groove of thinking I don't need to read print (what with these interwebs) - but I usually enjoy reading them all the same.

It's the first time I've picked up a magazine (that wasn't ImagineFX) in months, maybe even a year.

[Gamerforlife]

DON'T KILL ME! But I'm talking about when it was good, not the shit we have now.

I don't really like Game Informer, but they get exclusives on some things (probably due to their connection with corporate giant Gamestop) and do have some informative articles. My issue with them is that they're kind of uneducated about games like a lot of other mainstream mags. I think they started their Batman Arkham City article with something along the lines of "Arkham Asylum broke the curse of the Batman games", which just sounds ignorant because any retro gamer knows there were good batman games before Arkham Asylum with the most obvious examples being Batman Returns and The Adventures of Batman and Robin on the SNES, which apparently the good folks at Game Informer never heard of. Course I guess it's easier to just make stupid statements like that without doing any research. I don't think modern game journalists research anything they write about

That almost made me stop reading, but the rest of the article was pretty good and got me excited about Arkham City

[the7k]

Yeah, GameInformer's ignorance on many things is one thing friends of mine with laugh about. (Of course, we're crying on the inside.) One particular example being their "Top 10 Fighting Game Characters", which consisted of such colorful characters as Akuma, Nightmare and Sentinel. Erk.

[ZeroAX]

I don't think modern game journalists research anything they write about

I believe the words game and journalist just don't mix well.

Imo 99% of professional gaming reviewers are idiot fanboys, who just don't know the first thing about reviewing. They wanted to get a job about video games, and just found the easiest one out there.


That is why gaming blogs are the best imo. Even if someone is a fanboy, he will most likely be more objective than professional reviewers, who intentionally start flame wars to get more hits.


Just look at Eurogamer. Their Mario Galaxy review had so many page hits, that when newer reviews pushed it down the update "list" they put it back on top to get more hits from fanboys arguing. Yes I know business and all, but you can get hits just as well with proper objective journalism.

[noiseredux]

Retro Gamer