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"Magazine Wars!"

Which magazine would you buy and which one would you run a way from?

Think of all the magazines there are. Loads and loads. About 5 for all the different formats. Especially for Playstation. Playstation Max, Official PS Mag and many more. Hopefully thinking that they can make a profit from the millions of Sony fans out there. Playstation 2 also has 2 or 3 mags including Official PS2 Mag and PsX and PS2 (a mix of both formats). I collect OPS2 Mag because it offers a demo with every issue. I think that this is the best mag made.

Now i have noticed, when i had an N64 i used to collect a variety of magazines. Some stayed for a feew months and then went bust. But 2 stand out mong the rest. Nintendo Official Magazine (which i don't really like) and N64 Mag (which will be changed to NGC Magazine next issue). They are different in many ways. N64 is funny and more about Nintendo while NOM is sort of babyish, heavily into Pokemon with lots of pictures of games. NOM also brags about being the best a lot when clearly it isn't.

Sega have had a fair few amount of magazines too. They have had Mega Mag, Sega Saturn Official Mag and now DC mag has gone bust they don't really have any more. I used to have a Sega Mega Drive and have some issues of some of these mags. But now Sega is almost dead I am sending a message to Sega about how good they were back then.

Microsoft have now joined the console wars and will be producing special X-Box mags in the near future i would say. They already have loads of PC mags but they don't really have much on games. But we can expect X-Box Mags to be hitting the shops soon after the US release.

Also there are some neutral magazines like Games Master and Games Mag Ltd. These focus on all consoles but are usually big supporters of Sony. I have noticed thta GM have become interested in Ninty with all the GC stuff recently but i have always known them to be big Sony fans. They don't really care much about the X-Box but do many people really anyway.

So anyway. Now to the big question. What is your favourite magazine and what format is it on?

Thanks 4 reading, Afro.

Mr.Snuggly wrote:
> *Massive cheesy grin*

I think the Special Reserve Magazine is
> best!!!!!!

*face hurts*

so do I. yay. we have one thing in common.

*walks away depressed*

*Massive cheesy grin*

I think the Special Reserve Magazine is best!!!!!!

*face hurts*

so he just pasted that here. that was a bit pointless but i suppose he says here it is again.

lol

It was a topic, one he posted a couple of weeks ago.

:-D

you could have made that a topic. it was better than mine in my opinion.

Wrote a long post about this last week - in general, games magazines are rubbish now. In fact, to hell with in general, here's the whole thing again for those who missed it first time...

----------
It seems the only publication of any quality left is Edge, and there is a severe risk of their already huge heads exploding. Last month they denied reports of an increase in the numbers of “hardcore” gamers as their circulation figures hadn’t increased, which I gritted my teeth at.

While my brothers introduced me to the Sinclair around 15 years ago, I only came of magazine buying age around the 16-bit era. Now, maybe at 12 or so I was in their target markets, but do Total! and Super Play not seem infinitely better that anything around today? They seemed to be written with an obvious passion and understanding that made them fun to read, as well as informative. Okay, so you can accuse them of achieving this through in-jokes that only the regular readers got, but at least they were trying. Flick through any of the sanitised, almost clinical publications that are circulating today and you’ve got to wonder how this is an improvement. Reel in horror at the pointless “life style” sections – if I wanted that I’d buy something like Maxim or GQ or any one of the other 20 magazines that specialize in this area. When I buy a computer games magazine I don’t want to read about German Hard House-Techno fusion albums. I want to read people over-enthusing about the latest games. Sure, the 16-bit era journalists’ writing skills may be highly questionable and some of the gags would now seem immature (something I’ll come back to) but at least they cared about the games rather than keeping the games publishers happy. Opps, letting out video gaming publishing worst kept secret – magazines have to keep publishers happy or risk not getting any titles/news and missing out on “scoops” that other magazines are given. In financial terms it is worth being drastically generous with a review one month if it means you get an exclusive on that publishers next title. Ahem, allegedly.

So we’ve moved on and grown up anyway. There probably is a magazine out there just as good as Mean Machines or Total! but being older and wiser the gags just don’t wash and the constant use of exclamation marks grates (the exact reasons I stopped reading the N64 Magazine). What is there for the “mature” gamer to read instead? Well? The official PS2 and Edge are pretty much the only ones around. The Official PS2 one is overly generous with its gushing reviews, in my opinion, and I don’t want to read about just Sony. Also, it is diabolical for features. Edge is very good for features as long as you don’t mind the slightly pretentious, “industry” subjects/stances. Their reviews are a bit hit and miss too – they tend to be overly strict with all but a select few “historic” big boys or industry names… okay, Nintendo, Lionhead and other long-term players.

Why is this happening? There’s a strange loop. Internet replacements to magazines are supposedly the future. They wipe the floor in terms of response time, for example any major site reported live from Spaceworld, yet Edge publishes a magazine a fortnight later and is still unable to mention a word about it until next month – six to seven weeks after the event. Therefore if people want news anywhere near the time it happens they are pushed to the Internet. However, Internet sights still have to send people around the world to do the reporting, as well as paying for the web hosting fees, equipment and day-to-day expenses of hiring writers, designers and numerous other staff. Problem is where does this money come from? Its been proven that print magazines can’t fund good sites as this just reduces circulation of the print magazine and its advertising income. On-line advertising comes nowhere near meeting the costs of the site and readers simply will not pay subscription fees to an on-line site. This means they have to do things in a half-hearted manner – just look at Daily Radar. Born out of the brilliant Future Gamer, Future Publishing threw money at Daily Radar and for a brief, brief period it was all right. Readers were annoyed that the weekly e-zine, the whole reason Future Gamer was good, had gone but the same high quality writing was there and there was still a good community feel. However, Future began to struggle financially and one of the first casualties was Daily Radar. Now it recycles content from Future magazines and has a laughably poor news service.

Truth is, there has never been a period of consistently lower quality in video gaming journalism. Where the writers used to be dodgy at best in terms of pure writing ability, at least they seemed to care. Now we’ve just got FHM rejects going through the motions, yet making sure “corporate partners” get the required review scores. Oops, there’s me and my “accusations” again.

The only way gamers get to sort the good from the bad before purchase is trying the games before they buy and word of mouth. This clearly points to on-line gamer reviews, which is why I’m delighted to see Special Reserve to reward quality reviews on a daily basis with something actually worth having (not that I’m alluding to the numerous other lesser web-sites that will give you a £5 off voucher if you notch up 12,000,000 reviews) and we’ll get our news from the few website that do it well.

and also it is out on Monday so yay. good for the ninty magazine buying world.

Good One!

WolfHound wrote:
> N64mag in a transition to NGC mag????
Where did you hear this one from?
It
> sounds like good news.
I wish they had done this with Super Play(Making a
> transition to N64 rather than killing off the mag)

i figured out the puzzle in the last issue of N64 and it was called NGC and it comes with a free video with 20 mins footage of GC from Spaceworld. cool huh?

I think OPS2 is better than PSM2. The quality of writing is about the same (high), but OPS2 have playable demos and seem to get their hands on more new news. I switched from PSM2 to OPS2 when I got an issue with absolutely nothing in it that they hadnt said in previous issues.