Old Magazine Chat

Mas if you really want to play them, could always emulate them or buy them on the Wii Virtual Console?

I'm looking at playing through a few "best games ever" candidates next year (such as Final Fantasy 6 that you mentioned elsewhere) and will likely just buy/download a digital version.

I'm not sure if they are on the VC as I posted elsewhere what I could find that I could play with out spending a fortune and on systems I own as I'm not emulating unless a official emulation eg Virtual Console.

I know Master of Darkness is on the Wii VC and the 3DS VC, due the style of the game I think I'd sooner play on a 3DS.

Everything old is new again, with the announcement that a new issue of Super Play is being made, complete with cover art from Wil Overton. Bundled with this month's issue of Retro Gamer; I reckon it'll have unusually high sales figures. I will do everything within my power to get hold of a copy. Can't wait... and yet must.

I subscribe to Retro Gamer and was pleasantly surprised to hear this. They covered the SNES Mini games last month so I wonder whether this looks more in depth at the original reviews.

Well up for getting this as it has a great bunch of folk working on it including Greener & Chris Schilling.

https://www.retrogamer.net/blog_post/super-play-returns-with-retro-gamer-172-2/

What's everybody's of Super Play? Online, it seems to be held in even higher esteem than N64 Magazine, which itself was better written than The Holy Bible. I've never actually read a Super Play - I didn't get my first gaming magazine until Summer 1997 and my first issue of N64 Magazine until Christmas that year.

On a side note, that issue of Retro Gamer goes on sale five years to the day that the last Nintendo Gamer came out.

I also missed Super Play, having for some reason started off on Total! magazine, even at the point where it became literally almost unreadable. The Japanese aspect seemed a bit "much" for me at the time; N64 of course was a different matter.

I won a subscription to Super Play when I won a competition in Digitiser where you had to say what you wanted to see in the then-upcoming Yoshi's Island.

DIGRESSION ALERT: In a short time I will have been alive for four hundred and fifty months.

I remember saying I wanted to see "a move away from the outdated concept of a time limit". The point is I might be biased. Super Play was a lovely read. There was the sense of it being something different, with its gorgeous covers and anime/manga coverage in addition to really delving into the import scene. Further bias may occur when you consider that it covered the SNES, still my favourite Nintendo console. Add in skilled writers talking about magical games and you have something pretty special.

Big fan.

I tweeted gJones awhile ago about NGC or NGamer and would he be putting more up past the ones already up and he said unlikely and it seems he will be doing something with his mate.

I voted for gJones for contributor of the year due to the retro stuff he been doing, as I like really liked it and I think it's a shame that it hasn't continued. I don't really want to do it myself and I don't know where I'd even look to get stuff on the magazines (I think gJones may have posted once to a site where they had been scanned in) but I do think it would be a shame to see it go or if not the magazines some other sort of monthly retro themed thing, I don't know maybe someone could look to see what came out in Feb 2008 on Wiki then find some reviews on Metacritic or something.

Basically some monthly retro thing would be nice.

We'll look into doing something monthly when the Nintendo Online Service thing comes out, I've no doubt. In the meantime, I'm not sure...

That's a little different and more of the lets all plaything which is something else I'd like to see come back and as it seems to be NES games even if we don't sign up for the online, it is likely we will have them is some form to have chat about them.

I gutted the cupboard in my old bedroom at my folks' house the other week, and I threw out a lot of old games magazines. I kept all my N64/NGC/NGamer/Nintendo Gamer magazines (natch), but all sorts of others from the last twenty years went into the bin. I had to keep this belter though - Playstation Power from August 1998. 



Playstation Power wasn't one of the great British gaming magazines, but it was cheap, and it had a very different style, tone and energy from the Official magazine did at the time. Anyway, I gave it a quick butchers, and I quite enjoyed it...in a guilty pleasure kind of way! It's very 1990s, and of particular enjoyment was the A-Z Reviews section at the back, and the absolute horsing that they gave a lot of the games. Some of these are pure poetry, somewhat controversial, and blatantly not giving a toss about being completely wrong - let's have a swatch!















You don't get games journalism like this anymore 

"The Shatformer". Incredible.

That was a belter but I like the ones that are clearly pandering to the rabid playstation fanboys when they mention a game being SNES-like/16-bit as a negative.

I don't know, I think at the time when a game wasn't 3D it was considered old.

I also enjoy seeing the days before the term "FPS" when they were just "Doom clones"

masofdas wrote:

I don't know, I think at the time when a game wasn't 3D it was considered old.

That's basically what I'm laughing at though.

Yeah you can tell that this might not just be aimed at, but could even be written by the ignorant "2D gaming is lame" brigade. Saying that, I remember there being some terrible writing in the Official Nintendo magazine at the time. Remember the Fony Greystation comments?

Aye, looking back that stuff is equally as bad.

Wonderful! Oh that takes me right back. Any game that gets below a 4/10 for me is now officially either 'a goat's arse of a game' or 'mind-bendingly dump'. All those single-figure scores! Brilliant stuff.

gjones wrote:

Saying that, I remember there being some terrible writing in the Official Nintendo magazine at the time. Remember the Fony Greystation comments?

And the way they wrote the OoT guide in 'how do you do fellow 80s kids' speak? Yes. Yes I do.

Yeah some of this wouldn't fly now as look at IGN making a joke about God of War, which lead to the editor of the Xbox section having to come out and apologise.

The review for Space Jam just reads "limper than John Inman's wrist - 9%". So, aye, obviously there'd be no getting away with that these days. The review for Nascar Racing is my favourite though - it's masterful!

ONM was mince right enough - everything was 96%, and everything was 'sell yer gran'. N64 Magazine's writing was light years ahead of anything ONM could have hoped to produce. 

Total 64 was similar in tone to Playstation Power here - if I recall correctly, they absolutely savaged Mischief Makers and NBA Hangtime with sub-20% scores, because they were 2D on a console that also hosted gaming powerhouses such as FIFA 64 and Clayfighter 63 1/3.

The scores bands are belting too. 'Buy it you fool!' 'Rancid dregs'.

If that doesn't win post of the year there's something very wrong... or very right, clearly!

That's exactly why I liked the unofficial magazines over yer ONMs and OPSMs - outside of the much better quality tat, they lacked those reviews which proper tore a game a new arsehole. And that's worth more than any demo disc to me.

These are quality, thanks for sharing! The Bubsby review is my favorite, but there's a pantheon of bangers here.

I remember getting a few Playstation Power mags, but whereas now I'd agree with Jay - that those reviews + the tone is worth more than a demo - at the time the demo disk was what always brought me around to the official magazines. I think my parents were happy to support me reading magazines when I was little, but by the time I might've started acquiring better taste they weren't going to pay for anymore gaming magazines.