Blogs

Tomb Raider Remastered: Happy Birthday, Lara Croft!

All Croft-aholics know that Valentine's Day is the birthday of Our Lady and Savior, the Divine Ponytail. So what better way to say "I Love You" than to pick up the brand new Tomb Raider I - III Remastered collection from Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics? Yes, for most of us, it was love at first polygon when we caught our first glimpse of The Great One, whether it was that ever-so-alluring pyramid-shaped box or one of the many, many, many magazines whose covers she graced. And today, for a

Areala in Tomb Raider

February 14, 2024

Areala's Thirteen Most Terrifying Retro Games!

Well, it's October, which means the desire for pants-wetting fear has come back into vogue for a few weeks. So what better way to celebrate spooky season than a write-up about some games which genuinely scared me at one point or another! Note that this is not a "best of" list, or similar type of ranking. The order here isn't indicative of a specific game necessarily being better than the one below it, or worse than the one above it. All I'm ranking here is how effective these games were at

Areala in Halloween

October 3, 2023

Updating, Overhauling, and Expanding the Ad Database!

You've probably noticed over the last few days that I've been clogging up the "new images" feed with a literal metric ton of advertising material culled from gaming magazines. A lot of this work has been simply updating old images with better-quality copies. Phillyman started the Retromags ad database all the way back in 2009 by pulling ads from older scans of EGM and GamePro, but a lot of those issues have received new releases in the intervening years offering better resolution scans. We also

Areala in Ads

February 14, 2023

Rediscovering My Love For My Collection (By Destroying It)

In the past four months, I've completely destroyed more than fifty of my own books for the purpose of digitizing and sharing them with the rest of the world. This, I must admit, was something that past Areala had never imagined future Areala would do. After all, I spent years collecting these books, paging through them, enjoying the memories and worlds they unlocked. As a gamer, they were a part of my identity. I fell in love with them because they were books about a hobby I greatly enjoyed

Areala in Books

February 20, 2022

Don't call it a blog

My death at the hands of Retromags

Hey there, Retromags. Long time no see. The reports of my death were spot on, as you well know. My life had indeed been taken, and the killer is you. It all began innocently enough. Almost exactly 4 years ago to the day, I uploaded a single cover. Almost an entire year passed before I uploaded a second. But then only 2 days later, I uploaded a third…a fourth...fifth……All told, 12 covers were uploaded that day. And then the day after that, an additional 25 covers were uploaded…and so

kitsunebi

March 15, 2019

My Scans #1 - PC Gamer April 2000

Floating Down to Agenais

Realizing I haven't posted a blog entry in well over a year is kind of becoming an annual event here in my Retromags world. I'm not as active as I should be, as I'd like to be, and much as I wish I could promise to change all of that, I don't make promises I can't be certain of keeping. One of the most recent things I blogged about was the question of what happens when one's desire to keep up with gaming flounders, and as it turns out, there's still no cut-and-dried answer to that. Playing video

Areala

March 7, 2019

My Scans #4 - PC Gamer March 2000

Update // Oct 30 New file is smaller. All dual ads are together and look better. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UU7cVSQs_3qQ-RRdOj6OYzMqXrJ724Wc/view

MigJmz

October 29, 2018

My Scans #1 - PC Gamer April 2000

My Scans #3 - SWATPro September 1995

This one was standing on its last legs. It was hanging by a few staples so I decided to unbind the mag. Surprisingly the pages were in pristine shape. Very few wrinkles or torns on them. The scans came out pretty clean with very few rescan jobs. Enjoy. https://archive.org/details/SWATProSeptember1995 https://drive.google.com/open?id=15x5cnQRPgB1vRo8xkPMfD0Ea3K8y5PFy

MigJmz

September 4, 2018

My Scans #1 - PC Gamer April 2000

My Scans #2 - EGM's 1997 E3 Show Guide supplement

Found this in my pile of mags. Decided to scan it and share with ya. Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aDp9Spuir3D8P8l-X7PWI7c4SjlTWNqq

MigJmz

August 10, 2018

Destiny 2 Incompatible with AMD Phenom II?

I just published my List of Games That No Longer Run on AMD Phenom a month ago, and then Bungie’s Destiny 2 launches on Oct 24th. The launch has raised the ire of tons of Phenom II users, as the game seems to be crashing mightily on those processors. In the developers’ known issues thread, the following SSSE requirement is mentioned: SSSE3 Required: Destiny 2 will not run on processors without Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSSE3). Wait, what? Usually, the common problem with gam

October 25, 2017

Warframe Starter Guide for Plains of Eidolon

Warframe is huge right now – and for good reason – after their latest big update, Plains of Eidolon, has come out. It is indeed a fantastic update to a fantastic game. If you are thinking about jumping in, here are 12 important things about Warframe you absolutely need to know before starting out. 1. Warframe is really, truly free Warframe is free to play. Really! Make no mistake: If you want, you’ll never have to pay a single dime. It is common for the games press to make the mistake of thi

October 19, 2017

Fallout: New Vegas 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

To celebrate Fallout‘s 20th anniversary, I figured it would be fun to completely start from scratch and tool the Bethesda Fallout game series for new, fresh playthroughs. Since I have now spent an evening’s worth of catching up on, and customizing, each of the Fallouts, I figured I might as well put my lists out here. In fact, I have actually written an article on Planescape: Torment (hilariously obsolete today, with the new Enhanced Edition out) before, and it’s a ton of fun to share this type

October 11, 2017

Fallout 3 GOTY 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

October 10, 2017

Quote of the Day: Frictional Games

October 1, 2017

The Forthog DLC Is Cancelled: Long Live Forthog

We’re hopefully not going to be in the business of reporting news, but the Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War “Forthog Orc-Slayer” DLC has been effectively cancelled, with everyone getting refunds: “The DLC will be withdrawn from sale and will be a free download for owners of Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Anyone who has purchased the DLC will receive a full refund.” In an announcement, a WB Games community manager explains how the logistics of the project became insurmountable, and notes that In

September 26, 2017

List of Games That No Longer Run on AMD Phenom

Note: I do have just enough self-awareness to file this story under our historical category, Time Machine. There is a tiny, though increasing, category of PC platform video game ports: Games that no longer run on AMD’s Phenom AM2/3 CPUs. There is a simple reason why, shared by all these games: They have been programmed to require CPU support for Intel’s SSE 4 (“Streaming SIMD Extensions 4”) instruction set, version 4.1 or higher. The Phenom CPUs, however, only support SSE up to 4.0. This is

September 25, 2017

The Cuphead Runneth Over Dean

GamesBeat writer Dean Takahashi, @deantak, recently had some trouble playing Cuphead: This new video has, in many ways, brought back the game journalist competency debate that last reared its ugly head when Polygon’s Arthur Gies played Doom and didn’t do it very well. The emergent arguments and accusations levied at the person in question have been as various as they are dubious: That Mr. Takahashi’s specific position, as a video game journalist, requires him to be good at all games, or flat

September 11, 2017

The Calculated Corporate Cynicism of Shadow of War’s Charity DLC

Note: For the purpose of this post, I have created a new category of post called “Contemporary Cynicism”. In this series, we are going to offer opinions that discuss the question of right and wrong in video games without adherence to common constraints set upon such public discourse. Since the video game companies of today often seem to be so beyond what we consider ethical behaviour, then maybe we should be, too. Several outlets are now reporting that Monolith is releasing a charity DLC, for