/vr/ - Retro Games

i had a subscription to gamepro in the mid 90s. my brother had nintendo power. i would also buy random mags if they had something i was interested in. i recently looked through the archives of a lot of these mags, and i was taken aback at how little i remembered besides the ads. but i dont think i even read much of them. i was more interested in screenshots probably. i dont think i ever sat down and read one cover to cover. always just thumbed through them.

>>10627630
They're the perfect time capsules if you want to know what people were excited about back then. For example a lot of people completely forgot about how hyped people were about StarCraft Ghost

Or that Tomb Raider was a gigantic cultural phenomenon and that Lara Croft was a digital sex symbol

>>10627630
I miss them a lot

>>10627630
Yes, of course. My dad would take me once every few months to this magazine shop/book store kind of place. He'd browse the car magazines and I'd glance at the gaming ones and occasionally grab one. There's a lot I miss about older gaming culture. It's why to this day, I'll still only look at some screenshots of a game before I decide if I want to play it or not and otherwise I always go in 100% blind. I don't understand the type of people now that enjoy having every aspect of the game ripped and leaked ahead of time.

For me, gaming magazines had just the right amount of hype and speculation without spoiling anything.

>>10627630
they were advertising catalogs you need to pay for
nothing of value was lost
I kind off miss cover CDs though

>>10627630
You might like Retro Gamer. I was buying them for a while. They cover close to everything

It’s pretty weird that “ProTip:” from GamePro became a normie expression via the internet.

>>10627630
I'd read my copies multiple times and stare at the screenshots. Being a gaming journalist must've been the dreamjob at the time.

No, I read them because I had no internet
And also they came with demos and it was easy to convince my dad to spend $4 to buy a magazine than a game

before the internet, Videogame mags were the real only way to get information on the latest games. But websites really killed that aspect of video game magazines. But it was still cool getting a physical magazine in the mail each month. It was always easiest to pay a two year subscription and just let it run it's course. I had a sub to Nintendo Power, GameFan, and a few others. Sadly lost all my Nintendo Power issues to a flood. I miss them to a degree. Even though a few still exist. I still think a game magazine concept could work. But they would be less about exclusives and more about articles/ previews/ reviews, etc.

>>10627630
My favorite thing to do now, is look at that preview/upcoming/sneak peek/etc. game section in those old magazines. You'll find plenty of cancelled games.

I spent years on and off tracking down and playing Japanese imports that I found out about from just a few issues of EGM from around 93-94.

>>10628254
>My favorite thing to do now, is look at that preview/upcoming/sneak peek/etc. game section in those old magazines. You'll find plenty of cancelled games

Not just cancelled games, but early prototype screenshots too. Image related is a said cancelled game.

>>10628276

Early preview of Virtua FighterS, complete with cut Shiba/ Siba

>>10627630
>Do you
>imagine game magazines no longer exist?
lol. no. I can't even imagine someone being retarded enough to imagine that.
>the internet (which was still in its early years of development)
No. Just because (You) didn't know about it doesn't mean it didn't exist.
>You checked them for game reviews/guides/info
Nah. It actually worked the other way around for me. One of the most popular import mags started in a small shop a few blocks from my office. They didn't have a single person on staff who could speak or read Japanese. Kinda weird, but weebs have never been very smart. They came to me for anything more complex than press start and gold right to win.

early Tomb Raider coverage.

>>10628318

All sorts of cancelled 32x games. Jet Ski Rage, Rayman 32x.

>>10628326

Old ET speculation article.

>>10627630
Game magazines in my shithole country were weird copy/paste from European and USA magazines. I was also poor, so I didn't have much access to magazines either. The few that I bought, showed me SimCity and Zombies Ate My Neighbours. Nowadays, I waste my time reading foreign retro magazine on retromags or internet archive. PC Zone is my favorite magazine for now.

>>10628318

some really early 1995 screenshots of Tomb Raider, complete with "Lara Cruz" mention in the write up. As her original name in some of these early previews was Lara Cruz. But changed to Croft, because the devs thought Cruz sounded too much like 'Cruise'.

>>10628072
Retro Gamer is great, they do pretty cool interviews and have actually good features on old games with making-of and history-of write-ups.

>>10627670
official magazines were really shameless, not that it was a secret but it takes an adult to realize how much they hyped up any shit made by the big producers.

37 here, am i millennial or younger x-er???

>>10628384
You’re an elder millenial

>>10627630
Yes, I miss them but I know it's something that can never be recreated. Those 400 EGMs from the mid 90s are some of my prized possessions and I flip through them once a year.

>>10627630
I miss the SNES era Nintendo Power

>>10628442
>the pros
heh

>>10628442
Nintendo Power from it's inception up until 1996 was magical. The early issues just had this zeal behind them. It's like they knew they were are the forefront of something cool and exciting. Very fun to read as a kid. Things got more restrained and professional when the SNES came around but that's pretty much my nostalgic wheelhouse.

Nothing beat the feeling of coming home from school and finding a crisp new NP in the mailbox.

>>10628254
I always loved reviewing the import sections. There was just this entire galaxy of games found in Japan that I would likely never see.

>>10627630
>what were your favorite gaming magazines back then?
Official Plastation magazine the one with the demo discs (is the same one in whole europe except in la France and Deutschland), Playmania, hobbyconsolas, superjuegos, micromania (third age), etc...

>Do you miss them, or are you glad that everything is available & information/guides are so much more accessible online?
Yes, internet was a mistake, all those forums form 2000s died in 2010s, there so few internet spaces to discuss videogames.

>>10627710
Gaming mags cultivated a kind of excitement for upcoming games that doesn’t really seem possible with other mediums. There was nothing like reading about a game coming out and getting hyped for it while you talked with your friends. My kids don’t seem to experience that.

>>10628017
The shareware cds that came with mags in the 90s were awesome.

>>10627630
Yes, before we had the internet, I poured over GamePro, Game Informer and PSM mags for hours and sometimes it even came with a demo disc that I played the shit out of. It's absolutely nuts that those discs came with like 10 games.


The 90s were so fucking good, I am happy to have experienced it and also sad that it's over, must be how boomers felt about their childhoods, I feel bad for zoomers whose childhood is just full of digital junk: social media, microtransactions, apps, and shitty, watered down facsimiles of millenial things

There's a podcast that does really deep dives on them - https://wavve.link/isohpod

I've been reading nothing but old gaming magazines for years, it's fun

>>10627630
Yes but only foe the images and ads because we grown Lecture Lazy

>>10628359
Do they use emulator screenshots or old tv camera phones?

>>10628283
This is really cool, never seen this article.
People forget how big a deal Virtua Fighter was before Sega mishandled the series into relative obscurity.

>>10628384
The term Xennial exists too. Dudes born between late 70s to early 80s. A little too young to be proper Gen X but a little too old to be proper millennials. Think of Ryan Gosling, Randy Orton, CM Punk, Justin Timberlake, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Natalie Portman, John Cena, Jessica Alba, Brock Lesnar, etc. Basically celebrities who typically peaked or got famous in the late 90s to early 2000s.

>>10629601
Basically this is the last gen to grow up in a pre-digital age.

>>10629601
Come on dude, there's gotta be cooler celebrities than that who were born in the early eighties.

>>10627630
>Flipping through the newest magazine back in the day
>See screenshots of new game, imagine what it would be like from the little screenshot and the author writing that the game uses some crazy new tech that makes the water look real
>Pour over secrets and codes for games you don't even own
>Have fun reading that one game that bombed and the reviewers are just having fun mocking it
>Read about stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwvCl4mgG7g
>Very early internet gaming sites that had 10 seconds of game footage that made you go "holy shit"
>That magazine that had a demo disk and you played each demo a dozen times and watched all the videos

>>10629328
I'm not sure. I imagine they'd use emulator for most since it's just the practical solution when covering so many platforms and games. They do use real hardware when it makes sense is possible, like they did an article comparing filters, upscalers and CRT TVs for picture quality in old games.

>>10630019
>See screenshots of new game, imagine what it would be like from the little screenshot and the author writing that the game uses some crazy new tech that makes the water look real

This is a big part of what made magazines and that era of gaming special. You'd be so excited for a new game because all you'd have most of the time is screenshots and description. I remember most vividly when I was reading about Shining Force III from Sega Saturn Magazine, and seeing the screenshots of hte battles and descriptions of the moves/fights. Still one of my favourite games.
The fact you only got a new issue once a month meant that it was more meaningful when you saw a new cover on the news stands, or alternativley you were more likely to pick up another magazine when you saw it had something you were interested in.

>>10630239
Since you had to wait a month between issues of your favourite mag, the dump of new screens and info all at once made it seem so much more exciting.

>>10630246
Similar to what others said, I still kept most of my old gaming mags. More recent ones like Xbox Magazine I sold off, but the ones from my childhood that I have fond memories of like SSM and CVG I'm holding onto. Still love to pick up a random issue and see what they were talking about at the time.
It's a beautiful time-capsule that can't be altered like websites etc.

>>10627630
I had a yearly subscription to gamepro from like 93 to 98 i think? Loved it.

Nothing more exciting than getting off the bus with my friend and xhecking the mailbox like "oh shit check this out" and both of us going through it.

Miss the hell out of that feeling.

>>10630264
I know what you mean. I was thinking about it the other day when walking past a newsagents. It's weird to think that a newsagent was one of the most exciting shops for me to visit when I was a kid, looking to see if a new gaming mag, comic or Mad magazine was out.

>>10627630
Magazines used to be like finding a treasure. Way better times before shitty internet ruined everything. Your mind wondered the possibilities of rare glimpse of news or shred of info you didnt know if rumors were even true.
Unfortunately I think magazines are the next target of scalper speculators upsellers to get their greedy hands on them. I wouldnt be surprised if they started vga grading magazines just like what happened to guide books. no fun or cheap collecting allowed. Upsellers have to ruin every hobby.

>>10630362
I've collected magazines casually for oh...about 20 years now* and I'm a little surprised it hasn't happened yet (but it will). Prices have been ticking upward for a while now and stuff like old Gamefans go for 30+ dollars for an issue in good quality now.

And actually, I just checked but it looks like the grading shit has started to happen. There's an issue 2 of Nintendo Power on ebay right now that's graded and is going for 2500. Old NPs were always kind of pricey but this is insane.

*long story short, I threw out my entire collection when I went to college in 2003, realized I made a mistake a year later and started to rebuild my collection. My first purchase was 45 issues of Nintendo Power for 40 dollars. An insane deal at the time).

>>10630362
that swimsuit girl cover may be the best cover a vidya magazine ever had.

>>10630374
Good luck. I too also regret getting rid of some of my collection. I lost a lot of my old magazines from back in the day over the years but still have a few that I kept and are sentimental from my older brother. Whenever I see mags for cheap I try to buy them. I really miss the PSM magazines because the demo discs give me so much memories and nostalgia.

>>10627630
Oh boy, do I ever. It's one of the things that makes me most nostalgic. I still have most of my old magazines here btw, stored away.

>>10630437
I've sold some of my newer gaming mags, but kept all my stuff from the 90s/early 2000s.
Through emulation and things like ODE/Flash-Carts I'm getting into older consoles I never played much of back in the day like PS1 and N64. I should keep an eye out for cheap magazines for the fun of seeing what it was like back then from the other side. Having said that, I don't know if I have that much space, but a couple of odd issues would be fun in addition to all the PDFs I download.

>>10630362
>Unfortunately I think magazines are the next target of scalper speculators upsellers to get their greedy hands on them
Fortunately some autists are scanning and uploading as many as they can

>>10628317
>No. Just because (You) didn't know about it doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Oh please, go ahead and tell us what internet gaming news websites you were browsing in the mid-90s then.

>>10628549
Member that cool as fuck Star Fox comic they had going over several issues of NP? so sick.

>>10630506
Good for them. There is not enough scans of old mags. Or worse they get claimed and taken down.

>>10630543
>the internet is gaming news websites
You probably want to see a doctor about that

>>10630543
nta but for me it was gamespot and happypuppy

Here, for some nostalgia
https://web.archive.org/web/19961105034129/http://www.gamespot.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happypuppy.com/games/index.html

Printed magazines were really nice though and important too for information, but not as essential as in the early 90s before we got internet. I didn't have any subscriptions either so it was just individual issues here and there.

>>10627630
If I'm being honest, I just miss my mom buying the magazines for me. Gaming magazines still exist and I've considered getting a subscription a few times, but going to a website and paying dozens of dollars for a book that won't even be in print for a couple of months is absurd to me. If local hobby shops started creating their own cheap fanzines I'd definitely check them out.

>>10631286
Wow, I used to browse happypuppy all the time as a kid, haven’t thought about that site in like 20 years, what a throwback. Thanks, anon.

>>10627630
>Do you miss video game magazines
no I still have all mine

>>10627630
Very much so. Gaming mags were one of the best experiences growing up. I didn't get them often so I would read them cover to cover multiple times. They were more expensive than other magazines at the time due to the demo discs. But boy did I get a lot of hours out of those. I have memories playing some demos more than the actual games themselves. Having less just made them worth more. Now we can have full ROM sets and it feels so much more empty.

>>10630565
All the NP comics are good but yeah I like the Star Fox one the best. It portrays Fox as this hothead and he constantly loses his shit on people. My favorite part is when he gets delusional about going through the Black Hole and Falco beats the hell out of him while doing the “this is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you!” thing. Good drama.

>>10632940
No way they really put tifa fat ass and pantsu on the front cover? lewd

I do actually. I even miss how they guided the narrative of what games everyone was talking about, however skewed it might have been. It was some modicum of structure to what is otherwise a bunch of turbonerds and virgins shouting down people discussing anything at all.

>>10632940
i doubt you can pull it out a cover like the tifa one these days. great one btw.

>>10632940
>tifa.... bulge

>>10632940
From what I'm reading about this magazine, it's pretty much what a Siliconera or Niche Gamer would be today.

I want to start collecting some magazines, any recommendations?

>>10634580
Uk pc gamer before 2002
Super play

>>10634580
Depends on what coverage you're looking for and what era.

No. Advertising you had to buy. Worse they were 'fake news' before that was a thing.

>>10627630
Not really. i still have a lot of magazines in relatively good condition though. But paying $5-6 monthly (if you didnt have a subscription) feels absurd in hindsight. As a kid, you didn't really process how deceptive and bought out many of the magazines were like Gameinformer at that point. That said, it does conjure up good feels of my youth.

If you care about modern Nintendo games, there's some fan continuations in the spirit of Nintendo Power. Looked like the best one was NF Magazine.

>>10634621
>NF
o I forgot it stands for Nintendo Force

captcha: MAPS

>>10630543
Many were fan related and small news cycles. I remember finding out about Donkey Kong Country 2 in mid 95 at the age of 6 with the help of my uncle on his computer. i believe it was a few weeks after the E3 of that year in May. First thing i told my mom was that was what i wanted for Christmas.

>>10632940
Reminds me of Gametype, those came with a CD full of japanese trailers and such, it was something really cool that will never come back.
I always brought gaming magazines every trip to Spain, I remember Hobby Consolas, Super Juegos, Play Mania and Screenfun.

>>10635051
yeah, gametype is loading sequel magazine, same guys, and yes that tifa cover was real back then in late 1999 or early 2000

this was my favourite one due to demo I was poor back then, hell I am still poor 26 years later.

>>10631632
Demos were amazing, I also have memories of a lot of games I played the demo of but never got the full game for some reason or another. Sometimes I'd go back and get it years later when I saw the game cheaper and remembered how much fun it seemed.

>>10627630
Yes. I only remember having some odd EGMs, PSMs for the demo discs, and subs to Game Informer when I had Power Up Rewards in the early 2010s, so I didn't really get to read the "golden age" of gaming mags.
But I also miss magazines in general - especially after going to school for design. Magazine and print design is much more interesting to me than modern web and app.

>>10635741
>so I didn't really get to read the "golden age" of gaming mags.
Almost all of it was paid shilling to some degree with lot of questionable games getting unusually high scores (esp from Gamepro in 90s). Plenty of sites out there that have scanned copies of most old magazines if you wish to go through them.
I think a lot of people just miss the sick ass and inventive advertisements from back then that you saw between reviews and news. Shit you'd bring up during lunch at school.

>>10635772
Good example is shit like this where they really had to try hard to kill off any perception.
>Nintendo Ad Department: oh shit Rare added a fucking baby gorilla in the new DKC and we have to face this off against Playstation's 96 holiday release lineup of Twisted Metal 2, Tekken 2, and Crash Bandicoot not to mention the release of the Nintendo 64. What should we do to make sure kids buy this game and not call it gay kiddy shit on the schoolyards?
>Ok add a badass tatoo biker gorilla and make sure he takes up half of the page real estate and try to change that incoming perception of the character

>>10635772
>Almost all of it was paid shilling to some degree with lot of questionable games getting unusually high scores
In hindsight, absolutely, but I doubt I would have noticed as a kid. The advertisements are definitely a big part of what I remember and look back on now though, yes.

>>10627630
I used to buy them in stacks back in the late 2000's because I liked having bookshelves filled with them. These always had great articles to read, even the sucky ones. Eventually, I had to move out and put them all on the sidewalk along with the empty DVD cases with printed game and dvd box art.

>>10635772
>>10635914
In all honesty, it depended on the magazine. Gamepro definitely was the king of grade inflation and Gamefan would give out very high scores as well (very convenient considering they ran their own game store) but after reading a lot of old Game Players and EGM mags, their scores aren't too far off than what I'd give the games. If anything, they tend to underrate stuff I like. Even Nintendo Power, despite being an arm of the company itself that gave games glowing coverage...if you look at the actual scores they handed out, you'd think they were lukewarm even on some of their own games.

>>10627630
Is there a good archive of Nintendo Power's later issues, from like 2001-2005 anywhere? These are the ones I grew up on and they're harder to find than their earlier issues.

>>10627664
The irony is the written previews and reviews are basically the ads and the ads were the entertainment at least for 90s console stuff

>>10636556
I remember around 2001 is when I stopped buying the magazine because it just felt sterile and lost a lot of what made it unique. I'm not surprised at all to later find out it was outsourced to another company around that time.

>>10627630
I never got one because they were just advertisements with spoilers and sometimes cheat codes.

>>10636823
You're not wrong, it was kind of boring compared to other publications at the time, but it still has nostalgia value for me.

>>10634585
Fighting games, mmo's, and racing games mainly. 90's and early 2000's. Half the reason I loved magazines was for the art, so I'd only want to collect ones that look nice.

>>10636823
>>10636860
It still had uniqueness and charm, then, even still. The outsourcing to Future US (abysmal retards running that joint, some who hadn't played a Nintendo game since late 80s) is what killed the rest of that.

>>10627630
The thing I miss the most in retrospect were the ads in the back from sketchy mail-order game companies, mostly specializing in Japanese imports. Importing games from japan seemed like such a "foreign" concept to me in the mid-late 90's, the idea that I could import Saturn X-Men vs Street Fighter from Japan might as well have been moonrocks.

>>10637164

>>10627630

>>10627630
I sort of miss them, but the internet also has other benefits since I already pay for it. The magazines were how I found what I liked most and helped me make choices with the little money I had to maximize. I liked the Nintendo Fun Club, Famicom Tsuushin, EGM, Diehard Gamefan, etc. I am glad so much is accessible now.

>>10632940
Holy crap, just how old is that piece of FF7 art?

>>10639792
at least from August 1999 or before

>>10639792
I think it's safe to assume it was created for that cover around FF VII's international launch, between Summer to Fall 1997.

PSM commissioning top talent from the America Comic Book industry to draw popular video game characters produced some cool illustrations.

Surprised there's so much talk about not liking the mags because they were basically advertisments.
I know it's often true, but I did feel like the magazines panned the bad games most of the time. I can't think of many times I didn't agree with the review scores, or feel similar excitement. When it did happen, it was usually because they shat on a game I liked lol.
I do think it was also just a cool way to get your news and reviews. Having it curated and only once a month, it made it feel a lot more special than just having all the latest info at your fingertips instantly like today.
>>10637164
Importing was so cool. I only ever imported games from the UK to Australia for my Sega Saturn, and even that involved having to ask my uncle who had a fax machine for his business to fax an order over and get it mailed.

>>10641508
>Surprised there's so much talk about not liking the mags because they were basically advertisments.
Don't get that like a general idea, here in /vr/ we had retro ADS threads, at least one per month.