Saturday, October 19, 2013

Electronic Gaming Monthly #9



Just to get it out of the way, yes we skipped EGM 1-8. As I said in the original post on this blog, I will only be commentating issues I actually physically own, and I do not yet possess the first 8 issues. So think of those as a fun Easter egg we will return to at a later date.

Also note that you can click every magazine picture in this blog to get a larger, readable version.

I'm really not a fan of this cover. The blown-up screen shot is not that interesting to begin with, and looks highly pixelated at its large size. The row of squished-together smaller screenshots running along the bottom looks even worse. There is way too much text on the cover, maybe trying to make up for what they knew was as poor image choice.  At this point Atari is still hanging on in the system list above the title.



Interesting that a magazine 90% dedicated to console gaming uses "insert coin" as the title for its Letter From the Editor column.  I like how the U.S. National Video Game Team is listed under Strategy Consultants - I wonder how long that will last. There's the Ed Semrad we all know and love listed as a Game Reviewer, but also an Edward J. Semrad listed as Associate Editor. Evil twin?



The letter pages start out in the front of the magazine, answered by anonymous "ed." The letter page placement would jump around the magazine throughout the years, going from the front, to the back, then to the front again. The "Letter of the Month" has not yet been introduced, nor its infamous (and usually lame) "Psycho Letter of the Month".  The first 3 letters are all about the recently-launched Atari Lynx - a handheld that was firmly in 3rd place when I was young, neglected in favor of the ubiquitous Game Boy and popular Game Gear. There were always 2 or 3 kids with Lynx's, all of them seemingly stuck with California Games or Blue Lightning. I was never much enticed by the Lynx as it mainly featured ports of old arcade games I cared little about at the time.  Michael Ardisson then spoke for us in expressing his displeasure with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. It was quite a shock back then to spend so many quarters on the incredible arcade beat-em up, only to finally get a chance to play it at home and realize you're stuck getting killed by flies and drowning in water.



Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best reviewed game of the month. Steve's initial run-on sentence has to be close to the longest in EGM history. Yet even after all those superlatives, the game still doesn't receive any 10's. For some reason they had in their head that "10" meant literal perfection, which they admit in the reviews cannot actually be obtained. Back in logical reality, 10 should simply mean the very best crop of games as they relate to all other games. And if a game is "as close to perfection as possible" (as Semrad states) then the only logical grade you can give it is a 10.  Unfortunately it would take over a decade for this concept to get through to EGM and they would finally start doling them out.

By this point EGM has moved from the single reviewer to the "Review Crew" that would define the magazine. While the particulars would change and evolve over time, the four-reviewer setup grading games on a 1-10 scale would stay consistent. The reviews in this first iteration are the shortest I can remember, lacking any depth or analysis. The summaries below the screenshots are actually longer than the reviews that follow them.



Check out the screenshot of Phantasy Star 2 - did they get Ed Semrad to try to take a picture of the television screen with his polaroid? Ed's review is really the only one that does this game justice - PS2 was a groundbreaking title, especially in the RPG-starved USA and these guys are treating it like Adventures of Lolo. On the other hand, there are 23 reviews in this issue and the grading across-the-board is pretty brutal. On the following page Bonk's Adventure is reviewed, one of the crown jewels of the TurboGrafx library and it can only muster two 7's and two 8's.

The cover story on Castlevania 3 immediately follows the reviews. It's a simple 2 page spread detailing the game, as it had already been released in Japan at that point. What's interesting is that Konami hadn't announced a localization yet, so the article ends with the downer that anyone reading the magazine will not likely be able to actually play the game for a long time. I think that would've driven me mad as a kid. Simon's Quest was a game that completely confused me when I was young - I loved the music and sprites, but I didn't really understand the RPG concept of leveling up and backtracking back then, so I don't think I ever made it past the first few screens. Castlevania 3 on the other hand was much more enjoyable, at least until the clock tower stage and the endless falling down gears back to platforms prior, something I would later experience ad naseum in Tomb Raider.



I love this ad for Shadowgate. Great color pallete. Only two screen shots but they clearly convey the actual game. This era of video game advertising relied heavily on the "generic kid thrust into video game world" trope which would sometimes be taken to hilarious extremes (especially in pro wrestling adverts).



This is from a section focusing on the upcoming games Nintendo showed off at CES. I picked this page because Bigfoot is one of the cultural icons from my childhood that I doubt anyone under 25 here in 2013 has even heard of. But for me it was all about saturday morning cartoon Bigfoot, posters of Bigfoot on my wall, Bigfoot picture books...for a kid growing up in the South, there really wasn't much cooler.



Here's a page from the (much shorter) Turbo Grafx CES section. Both Bloody Wolf and Red Alert did end up being released in the USA (Red Alert became Last Alert) and are two of my favorite Turbo games, especially Last Alert with its cd-quality graphics and soundtrack, and hilarious voice acting. Also amusing is that there is an arcade port of Xybots featured in every section.

The Sega Genesis section is mainly made up of arcade ports, but Thunder Force III receives high praise. The Master System is still hanging in there with a few games, although 5 of the 8 shown are sports titles.

These CES pages take up the bulk of the magazine after the reviews. It's interesting in this early era that there are not feature pages of the reviewed games or a section for games right on the cusp of being released.



P.O.W. was one of my favorite arcade games as a kid. The whole idea of Prisoners of War was fascinating to me (spurred on by movies like Missing in Action) and the arcade beat-em up let me act out the movie fantasy. I never actually played the NES version - for the most part I didn't want to put up with the subpar graphics that were a staple of NES arcade ports. What's interesting about this ad is the picture of the arcade cabinet - It's in a Dynamo HS-1, but the joysticks are ball tops instead of the plastic hybrid bat/ball sticks that were P.O.W.'s signature. Also the control panel overlay only covers the top portion of the control panel, whereas the real arcade cabinet's control panel graphics wrap around the bottom as well. I like the angled side art - it's something you would see rarely, such as on the original Street Fighter (regular button version).


Monday, September 30, 2013

Electronic Gaming Monthly 1989 Buyer's Guide aka "The Zero Issue"


I'm not going to pretend to be an academic or historian - I'm just a guy who grew up playing video games, going to the arcades, and reading game magazines. So instead of pretending to instruct you on the history of EGM, let's just get it out of the way with this recap from a really bad IGN article on the history of the magazine:
"Steve Harris [...] pooled funds from his Video Game Masters Tournament to help begin Electronic Game Player. Though that magazine proved to be slightly ahead of its time, lasting only four issues, it was noticed by enough of the right people that Harris soon received funding for a reborn version, Electronic Gaming Monthly. The magazine debuted with a buyer's guide that sold over 100,000 copies, and its first regular issue launched in May 1989." - Origins: The History of EGM by Philip Kollar
I love the completely random cover choices of games: Simon's Quest, Predator (?!) and Thunder Blade. It's strange considering the game that gets the most play inside the mag by far is Double Dragon. I really do love Simon' Quest's box art though - definitely in my top 3 of that era.

It's amusing to think that at one time there was a "U.S. National Video Game Team." It sounds like a group that would be competing in the Olympics, or at least a Best of the Best-style international competition. Nowadays international competition is common in competitive video gaming, but I wonder if guys like Billy Mitchell would've been able to squash their Japanese competition as easily as he did those stateside.

At a basic level the Buyer's Guide is structured in a way and incorporates many of the elements that would later define EGM: The preview section of games yet to be released, the reviews of titles currently in stores, and feature articles between the two, in this case the buyer's guides as well as 1988 year-in-review.


This ad reminds me of those "sell stuff for prizes" company ads found in every comic book in the 80s, although I don't think a bazooka was ever a prize. This was the golden age of video game advertisements, before they were overrun by giant photographs of something gross-out or sexual, where you're lucky if you get one tiny screen shot of the actual video game. Here you get the full box art, multiple screen shots, and the rest of the ad is actually relevant to the game. Metal Gear has of course since become one of video games' premiere franchises all the way up to today, and when I was a kid this was a cartridge that EVERYONE owned, although very few in my age group actually had the patience to master. In fact it was generally considered not much fun, as you couldn't just run through each level shooting everything in sight. Also note that while now we all know that Konami is responsible for Metal Gear, back then it was released by "Ultra Games" (their first NES release), a company that became infamous for releasing the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles console game, an abrupt departure from the arcade beat 'em up that left every kid a little pissed. Today we know that Ultra was just a shell subsidiary of Konami, basically a front group that Konami set up in order to get around Nintendo's strict 3rd party policies (with Nintendo's tacit approval).


Running several pages in length, the Coming Soon... section is about 85% NES games, speaking to their dominance in the console marketplace. The Sega Master System and Atari 7800 make up the remainder in this section and in the rest of the magazine as this breakdown is reflected throughout. The Master System is still treated with respect at this point, but the 7800 is already reaping a bit of derision. I particularly like the AIRWOLF paragraph (yes, this was one of my favorite tv shows as a kid - I mean it's a helicopter that flies out of a freakin volcano!) for stating up front that the television show isn't even popular anymore, but "Besides, it's based on an Ernest Borgnine show so it can't be all bad".


The main feature of the magazine is the Player's Choice Awards. The Video Game of the Year as you can see is won by Double Dragon for the NES. There are a few things odd with this. First is that the NES version of Double Dragon doesn't allow two players to play through the game at once (the screenshot you see is of a lame "player vs. player" side mode) - which was basically the entire point of the arcade game. This is highlighted later when they give an award to the Master System port of DD, which for whatever reason does not win it the Game of the Year. Even funnier is right next to Game of the Year we have Best Arcade-To-Home Translation which they randomly give to Rampage, even though their game of the year is an arcade-to-home translation. Honestly all the of these year-end picks are pretty weak. It would be hard for me to put Double Dragon even in a top 5 NES games of the year when your other choices include Karnov, Contra, Lifeforce, RC Pro-Am, and Metal Gear.


This is a cool ad for the very first Phantasy Star, released for the Sega Master System (and which can now be played on the excellent Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for PS3/Xbox360). I like how you get a nice piece of fantasy art, a bunch of screen shots, and text about the game. It's a far cry from the ridiculous stuff we would later see in the mid 90s.


This part of the buyer's guide highlights some titles not necessarily released in 1988. Capcom's 1942 is an arcade translation, but Wizards & Warriors and Rad Racer were two huge NES exclusives and two of my favorites from childhood. I've always wanted to see 2D update to the Wizards and Warriors series - the quasi-free-roaming nature of the game was something you didn't see much of back then.


Here you get a taste of the original iteration of the "Review Crew". At this point it's not really a crew, as only one person handles each review. Ed Semrad, who would go on to be Editor-in-Chief of EGM for many years, handles most of the reviews which are designated either Hits or Misses. Each review gets a full page although more words are spent on the description than the actual review. A very different Rambo III was released a few years later for the Sega Genesis. As a big Rambo fan I always thought there should've been more than what we got, and it's definitely another license that deserves some retro love in the current landscape.


And finally stuck in the back is a multi-page International Scoreboard. There are different listings for coin-op games and console games and I'm assuming these were all self-reported. If you scan through them you can pick out some familiar names, such as Robert Mruczek from King of Kong fame. The scoreboard is a nice little hardcore gaming touch, but it would've been nice to have an explanation of how scores were collected and/or verified.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Mission Statement

I love old video game magazines. I loved reading them then and I love reading them now. I grew up in a household that always had a video game console in it. First was the Atari 2600, then the Commodore 64, then NES and Sega Genesis. There was no collecting back then - no thoughts of keeping the boxes or making sure the labels stayed in good condition. Just a video game system hooked up right in front of the television via r/f switch and a bunch of carts strewn around it. Back then I would be able to get two new games a year: one on my birthday, and one on Christmas. This had the negative effect of missing out on a host of great titles, games you hoped your friends had picked up so you could experience at their house, but also the positive effect of making you focus on the games at hand, learning everything about their gameplay quirks, level layouts, and secrets. Of course, if you got stuck with an awful NES game because you picked it out primarily because of the awesome box art, well...it was a long wait until you could rectify that mistake.

 This is where video game magazines came in. It is an understatement to say that I lived vicariously through video game magazines. Every game I couldn't play, every console system I had no hope of buying was at my fingertips in the pages of Electronics Gaming Monthly or GamePro. I was fascinated by the exotic non-Nintendo/Sega systems like the Turbo Grafx-16 or the Phillips CD-I. I would pore over the current and coming soon releases for the system I did have, making lists of games I wanted and reading their reviews so often I almost had them memorized. Video game magazines were a way to experience at least of taste of everything in gaming that I couldn't afford and would probably never come my way. This would all eventually change thanks to the internet, ebay, and the growth of classic gaming as a culture which allowed me to go back and acquire the systems and games I lusted after in the pages of the gaming mags. The internet has also allowed me to go back and rebuild my collection of said magazines, as the originals were lost or trashed a decade and a half ago during my transition to college.

 This blog is a celebration of the video game magazines from my youth. I will be re-reading each magazine, providing commentary, scans, and tidbits that tie into my gaming experiences at the time and current thoughts as a classic gamer. I am very much against emulation, against mame, preferring to play classic games on real systems hooked up to CRT's like they were meant to be. This same philosophy guides this blog as each issue I review will be an actual physical magazine that I own - no pdf's downloaded from the internet.

 We will begin with Electronic Gaming Monthly, which was my flagship magazine growing up. The plan is to go in order from the beginning, and end around issue #170, right before the PS3/Xbox360 generation rolls out. Other magazines on the dock are Next Generation, Game Fan, P.S.X., and EGM2. It's possible I will begin peppering these other magazines in from the beginning, so that we can see how different magazines handled the same time periods. I also own a bunch of other fun gaming-related publications that I will highlight: from offbeat stuff like Game Room Gallery to interesting hint books, etc. It should be fun.