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Games mags

Started by madhair60, May 29, 2019, 12:59:26 PM

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Jerzy Bondov

I used to get CVG and whatever Sega mag was going. Mean Machines Sega and Official Saturn Magazine were great but when the Dreamcast one came round they tried to make it all grown up. They had a feature where the writers would sit in a trendy bar chatting games. I remember one where there was a bar where the drinks were gas, in little canisters or something. Pure wank.

OSM had the greatest demo disc ever released: the entire first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga.

seepage


popcorn

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on May 30, 2019, 09:17:20 AM
I used to get CVG and whatever Sega mag was going. Mean Machines Sega and Official Saturn Magazine were great but when the Dreamcast one came round they tried to make it all grown up. They had a feature where the writers would sit in a trendy bar chatting games. I remember one where there was a bar where the drinks were gas, in little canisters or something. Pure wank.

I remember that well. They tried to make it all lifestyle.

Ham Bap

Couldn't remember the name yesterday but just did.
Mean Machines was great.
Don't buy any magazines anymore, all online now innit.

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/mean_machines_all_issues.php

madhair60

Quote from: Ham Bap on May 30, 2019, 10:43:41 AM
Couldn't remember the name yesterday but just did.
Mean Machines was great.
Don't buy any magazines anymore, all online now innit.

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/mean_machines_all_issues.php
Sega Power was better

Space ghost

Quote from: lazarou on May 29, 2019, 11:56:52 PM
A particularly odd example was Your Sinclair's boyfriend/girlfriend reviewers Rachel Smith and Gwyn Hughes, both of whom were written by John Minson who was also writing for Crash at the time.

Blew my mind. I thought that was all real.

The Culture Bunker

Your Sinclair I consider one of the best magazines ever, though I was only a kid when reading it. Wish I'd kept all my copies now that the YS Rock and Roll Years website is gone.

Sega Power was a lot of fun too - can remember those little novella things they made based on various games (from memory: Road Rash, Desert Strike, Super Monaco GP), all about the same character, Alex Player. Years later, I did a two week placement at Offical Playstation Magazine and met the guy who wrote a couple of them. Nice chap. Was a great fortnight too, as - unlike most these sort of things - I got to do some actual work and picked up a fair few bylines and also got my ugly mug in the mag.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on May 30, 2019, 09:17:20 AM
OSM had the greatest demo disc ever released: the entire first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga.

That's a good one but at little bit like being given the opening act of a film for free (it's not something that you can just enjoy as its own separate thing - great marketing tactic though and yeah, a very cool demo for gamers).  On that basis, I'd argue that the greatest demo disc games were Christmas Nights Into Dreams and a one level demo of a shoot 'em up for the Mega CD (I forget the title).  The latter because the developer simply coded a cut off point from the main game after the first level but forgot to remove the level select cheat, meaning that players with the demo were able to access the entire game!

Natnar



Used to love Arcade but i think it was only around for a year or so.

popcorn

Quote from: St_Eddie on May 30, 2019, 01:17:05 PM
On that basis, I'd argue that the greatest demo disc games were Christmas Nights Into Dreams and a one level demo of a shoot 'em up for the Mega CD (I forget the title).  The latter because the developer simply coded a cut off point from the main game after the first level but forgot to remove the level select cheat, meaning that players with the demo were able to access the entire game!

I think that might be Keio Flying Squadron 2 on Saturn (the original Keio was a Mega CD game). I had that demo and a while ago a mate asked to buy it off me for the reason you explained. I turned my parents' house upside-fucking-down searching for it and couldn't find it. Really fucking annoying.

St_Eddie

Quote from: popcorn on May 30, 2019, 02:12:02 PM
I think that might be Keio Flying Squadron 2 on Saturn (the original Keio was a Mega CD game). I had that demo and a while ago a mate asked to buy it off me for the reason you explained. I turned my parents' house upside-fucking-down searching for it and couldn't find it. Really fucking annoying.

Ah, okay.  It probably was for the Saturn, as I don't remember the Mega CD having cover mounted demo discs.  The fact that the original Keio was on the Mega CD would indeed explain my mix-up.

madhair60

Quote from: St_Eddie on May 30, 2019, 01:17:05 PM
That's a good one but at little bit like being given the opening act of a film for free (it's not something that you can just enjoy as its own separate thing - great marketing tactic though and yeah, a very cool demo for gamers).  On that basis, I'd argue that the greatest demo disc games were Christmas Nights Into Dreams and a one level demo of a shoot 'em up for the Mega CD (I forget the title).  The latter because the developer simply coded a cut off point from the main game after the first level but forgot to remove the level select cheat, meaning that players with the demo were able to access the entire game!

The best demo disc is the Official PlayStation Magazine one that had all those Net Yaroze games on it.

That or the Tony Hawk demo.

idunnosomename

N64 and Arcade (both Future Publishing) were my favourites. Good staff and funny with lots of the usual "err, steady on - Ed" jokes you got in 90s magazines. Arcade I think lasted a bit longer than a year but that seemed like a long time back in the day. The Games Night thing was particularly entertaining a read. Especially when they got silly and played hide and seek or something rather than just Mario Kart.

I remember making fun of the Official Nintendo Magazine for being unwaveringly positive and pointless, and also with a really artificially slangy writing style that can be summed up with "SLAM IT IN YER SLOT AND PLAY IT WITH YER MATES"

good times

all in the bin now

Twed

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on May 30, 2019, 01:01:59 PM
Your Sinclair I consider one of the best magazines ever, though I was only a kid when reading it. Wish I'd kept all my copies now that the YS Rock and Roll Years website is gone.
An aside, but I did archive the videos part of that site if you're ever missing it. And here are the mags on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/your-sinclair-magazine

Twed

Quote from: madhair60 on May 30, 2019, 02:31:14 PM
The best demo disc is the Official PlayStation Magazine one that had all those Net Yaroze games on it.

That or the Tony Hawk demo.
Hm, yes to both of those. Happy days.

holyzombiejesus

Crash was brilliant, the only magazine I ever got delivered. Oli Frey's cover art was perfect for a teenage me and it was so exciting going in to WHS before school on the day it came out.



Twed

No cover tape presumably at that price point (and with no "Wot, no tape?" bit on the front cover). That's probably why I never read that one. Foolish kid.

Twed

Sinclair User had some absolutely amazing cover tapes. There was a lot of real artistic talent in the magazine world back then.

Go Bear Go!



Brat Attack



Brat Attack is a good example of something that excited me when I was a kid, because it had in-game messages that were written with the current culture of the magazine you'd just bought in mind. They were written in the present, like BBS posts. This was my first introduction to the idea of computers being used for communicating with other real people (even though it was one-way) and although I couldn't pinpoint the context or bigger picture it just felt cool to me. My computer was showing a message that somebody had written that week, instead of just loading up a bunch of timeless inhuman artifacts (or 'games' as people who can cope might call them).

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: Twed on May 30, 2019, 03:51:58 PM
An aside, but I did archive the videos part of that site if you're ever missing it. And here are the mags on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/your-sinclair-magazine
Well, that brought a lot of memories back. Cheers!

magval

Quote from: madhair60 on May 30, 2019, 02:31:14 PM
The best demo disc is the Official PlayStation Magazine one that had all those Net Yaroze games on it.

Demo 42, which was also the Metal Gear Solid demo, had the Net Yaroze Hall of Fame. I've found the ROM of that online if any emulator people want the link.

Thursday


Alberon

Crash was brilliant. The same team went on to produce a lifestyle mag called LM which didn't last long. Wonder what they're up to now?

madhair60

All dead sadly. In a crash. What a world.

Twed

Amiga Format's contributors all died too, from being formatted. They were robots with disks for brains!

lazarou

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on May 30, 2019, 01:01:59 PM
Your Sinclair I consider one of the best magazines ever, though I was only a kid when reading it. Wish I'd kept all my copies now that the YS Rock and Roll Years website is gone.

Thankfully there's a almost 100% complete archive of ysrnry thanks to those fine folks at archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20151113112825/http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/cover1.htm

It's a real shame the site got taken offline. The creator's still knocking around, but he decided he was done with the spectrum scene after getting hounded out of it by supporters of the Sinclair Vega+ project, which he publicly (and very rightly) called out as a very sketchy operation that was probably going to (and very much did) leave everyone hanging.

Arcade was a great mag but never did better than dismal numbers so sadly it was never going to be long for this world. That was around the point 'official' mags had really started to take over due to their exclusive covermounts and the like. A (recently cancelled) source put it at something like 35,000 for Arcade vs 400,000 for Official PlayStation. Of course these days 35k would be nothing to be ashamed of and the latter number would be unthinkable.

EDIT: Checked some recent numbers and well, bloody hell:
QuoteThe narrative goes that print is in decline, but Future's Official PlayStation has bucked the trend with a 9.6 per cent increase in physical magazine circulation year-on-year.

These figures come as a part of Audit Bureau of Circulation's final 2015 report, which indicates that Official PlayStation Magazine's print circulation rose to 26,659.

Twed


lazarou

#56
Quote from: Twed on May 30, 2019, 10:02:31 PM
https://archive.org/details/your-sinclair-magazine

This one. Not that one.

Not the same thing though. Ysrnry has a lot of supplemental info the regular mag archives don't have, along with indexes of all the reviews, articles and the like.

On a similar note, one of the best sources for the kind of business that really went on in games mags back in the day was AP2, a retrospective of the life and times of an old games mag that's as fascinating as it is self-indulgent. And it's somehow still kicking around: https://theweekly.co.uk/ap2/

Once you get past the very late-90s web design it's easy to lose entire days trawling that one. You can start of with 'Disseminate essential information' for the full story, or just jump straight into 'Dissent' for some incredible contemporary dirt.

a personal fave:
QuoteAP43's New High Score feature, where we wondered why terrible games were given high scores in other magazines and invited software companies to discuss what they'd learned (if anything) from AP's reviews, was introduced with this transcript of an imaginary phone call.

(Ring ring.)

US: Hello?

PUBLISHER: Have you got some kind of vendetta against us?

US: Pardon?

PUBLISHER: You haven't given us a single good review since Game X.

US: Well, that's because Game X was the last decent game you did.

PUBLISHER: But what sort of message do you think it sends out to the readers when you give Game Y 20% (or whatever)?

US: A message telling them not to buy it, because it's rubbish.

PUBLISHER: You're not going to get a copy of Game Z because I know you're only going to ("Plucking" - Ed) slag it. I pull my ("Brick" - Ed) out for you, and you chop it off.

US: Er...

PUBLISHER: No one likes you at this end, and Commodore and the other software companies aren't happy to see a maverick magazine like yours on the market.

US: Hang on a minute. That simply isn't tr -

PUBLISHER: The best scenario I can see is that AMIGA POWER will be dead by mid-1995 and the Amiga will be history by the end of '96.

US: You're taking this personally, aren't you?

PUBLISHER: Yes I ("Clucking" - Ed) am taking this personally. I can't work with people I don't get on with, and I don't get on with you. If the Amiga goes down it's your fault, and I hope you're out of a job in the next few months.

US: Right. Er, bye then.

Except it wasn't imaginary. Using outdated chromakey technology - but secretly ironically - see us paint over the pseudonyms to reveal THE TRUTH.

(Wish-wash wish-wash.)

US becomes Cam Winstanley, who - foolhardy fellow! - elected his phone to be the Official AMIGA POWER Reader Call Line.

(Wish-wash wish-wash.)

PUBLISHER becomes Keith Smith of Millennium. Neither he nor the company ever spoke to us again.

(Wish-wash wish-wash.)

GAME X becomes Morph (AP27, 86%).

(Wish-wash wish-wash.)

GAME Y could be either James Pond (AP38, 46%) or Wild Cup Soccer (AP40, 14%).

(Wish-wash wish-wash.)

GAME Z is either Vital Light or Mr Blobby, both of which we went out and bought instead. Vital Light got 11% in AP48, but Mr Blobby turned out to be surprisingly tolerable, earning 37% in AP45.

Had Keith placed a large bet on the time of AP's death, of course, he would have been tearing up his ticket and throwing his hat to the floor. His estimate of AP50 was certainly wildly more inaccurate than all of the mighty beings' (who, when AP48 appeared in the shops, drew a table upon the Big Deadline Whiteboard indicating when each staff member thought the mag would close, the blue felty contents bursting fireworkingly around the AP60 mark) except J Nash's, which was AP47.

Incidentally, JN would like to enlist the help of anyone with a greater knowledge of films than his to place Keith's manly-man cheated stockbroker/ detective's-friend cop cry. "It's a bit like 'I treated you like a son and you stabbed me in the heart!" from True Romance,' considers the innumerate one, "though with different words, and, astonishingly, used in real life."

Twed

Quote from: lazarou on May 30, 2019, 10:07:10 PM
Not the same thing though. Ysrnry has a lot of supplemental info the regular mag archives don't have, along with indexes of all the reviews, articles and the like.
Fair dos, I was a bit hasty and OCD there.

As mentioned above, I did archive the videos that were on the YSRNRY site (I had to contact the author to get the original files and make them available again). I found them charming. If anybody feels like mirroring them, helping the data survive or just wants to see them please let me know.

lazarou

Definitely interested here yeah, I remember really enjoying those at the time and they tend to keep getting copyright struck on YouTube due to all the music used. Sent you a DM.

bgmnts

I was a real nerd and actually subscribed to OXM in the early to mid 00s. I wish I still had all the issues and demo disks, I have no idea what happened to them.