Video Game Magazines

Files From Subcategories

1. 

   Famitsu Issue 1359/1360 (January 1/8/15, 2015)

   By kitsunebi

   It's been a while since we've had one of these double-number issues of Famitsu, so for anyone out there who's confused, here's a brief explanation.  This is a single issue that is counted as two.  The preceding issue is numbered 1358 (December 25, 2014), and the following issue is numbered 1361 (January 15, 2015), making this issue #1359/1360.  This sort of thing happens 3 or 4 times per year.  It doesn't mean that the double issues are double length.  Sometimes they're longer than average, sometimes not (this issue is 280 pages, which isn't unusually long for Famitsu.) 
   What it DOES mean is that the staff took a vacation.  As you can imagine, turning out over 1000 pages of magazine per month is nothing to sneeze at (especially when you consider that Western mags were typically producing less than 100 pages of content per month), so a few times per year, the staff would be...ALLOWED TO SLEEP!!!  This particular mag came out around New Years, which is the biggest holiday in Japan.  Everything shuts down for 5 days or so while everyone stays home to celebrate with their families (its closest Western equivalent would be Christmas.)  So every year around this time, Famitsu releases a "double issue" so that its staff can enjoy the holiday like the rest of the country.
   But since this is Famitsu WEEKLY, I guess they don't want to break the illusion by having less than 52 issues per year, so whenever they skip a week, they just add an extra issue number to make up for it.  So since this issue was on newsstands for two weeks, it gets two issue numbers.  Kind of dumb, and definitely a pain in the ass when I was first putting together the database, but that's the way it is.  Now you know, and yadayadayadaYOJOE.
   

   84 downloads

   0 comments

   Updated May 9

2. 

   Dengeki PlayStation 120 (October 8, 1999)

   By kitsunebi

   Before writing in this box, I always do a quick flip-through of the mag and comment on whatever happens to strike my fancy, so to speak.  This time, it was Bruce Willis.  Bruce's rugged bald pate from the ad for his PS1 masterpiece, Apocalypse, really stood out from the rest of the ads, not to mention the rest of the games featured in the mag.  It's just so...Western.  Not that Apocalypse is the ONLY Western game to appear in this issue, but the other one is Crash Racing, and that's just cute enough to almost pass as a Japanese game.  But Bruce can't be bothered with cuteness, he's too busy blowing $@^& up.  Yippee kay yay, mother trucker.
   

   128 downloads

   6 comments

   Updated May 9

3. 

   Games for Windows Issue 15 (February 2008)

   By kitsunebi

   *kitsunebi edition!*
   Nothing wrong with the older scan of this issue previously made available, but I scan everything in my collection regardless, and I do feel that my version offers some improvements.  Most of those improvements are due to better debinding, which allows for better editing.  If you start with a guillotine cut in the debinding process, there's nothing you can do when editing to account for the part of the page you cut away.  As always, my scans are first debound with a heat gun, to allow for the entire page to be scanned.  This allows two-page joins to be edited together more seamlessly.
   Other differences include whiter pages and a higher resolution (3200 px vs the older scan's 2200).
   I've tried to show some of the differences with animated gifs this time.  Even though they're alternating back and forth, it should be easy to spot which of the two is this new, improved version, especially if you look towards the center of the join. 🙂
   *you can click on these gifs to see them in a larger window:
   
   
   
    
   And some joined pages of Games for Windows actually have a printed overlap, where the same part of the image is printed on both pages.  In this case, the older scan (despite having some of this overlap area cut away during debinding) still has part of the image appearing twice, whereas this newer scan has more seamlessly edited the pages to remove the doubled overlap:
   
   

   164 downloads

   0 comments

   Updated May 9

4. 

   Game Player's PC Strategy Guide Vol. 2 No. 2 (May/June 1989)

   By kitsunebi

   *RESTORED kitsunebi edition!*
   This is my new edit of marktrade's original scan and edit which is available in 600dpi at the Internet Archive.  Marktrade's scan was previously uploaded to Retromags, though that version does not appear to have received any additional edits aside from being resized closer to 300dpi and having the scan of the spine removed.
   What I have tried to do with my edit is to breathe some life into the scan and restore what had been lost to the ravages of time.  In many cases, the primitive photography used in the game screenshots demanded that each screenshot on a page be edited separately to more accurately restore some of the colors that may not have been captured correctly even when the mag was fresh off the presses.  I hope you will agree that this is the best the mag has ever looked, but if you prefer the naturally aged/yellow look, marktrade's perfectly fine original scan/edit can be found HERE.
   Here are some example pages of my edit compared with marktrade's edit (which is identical in appearance to the one previously made available here):
   
   
   
   

   195 downloads

   4 comments

   Updated May 9

5. 

   Famitsu Issue 1363 (January 29, 2015)

   By kitsunebi

   Flipping through this issue, I noticed a baseball game and wondered if...yep, there he is.  3 years before heading to America and entering the MLB, look who it is - the currently-highest-paid (best?) player in the game, Mr. Shohei Ohtani:
   
   I realize most of you are nerds who stay inside all day, hating sports and sports games alike.  I happen to be a nerd who stays inside all day hating sports, but has been known to enjoy a sports game or two (back when I played games, that is.)  This guy goes beyond sports star, though.  He's a national hero here in Japan, and by far the biggest celebrity.  Basically, he's the Japanese Taylor Swift.  They let the kids here watch the final game of the World Series (which Ohtani's Dodgers won) in school like it was the moon landing or something.
   In this game, he's still playing for the Nippon Ham Fighters.  Did I ever mention that Japanese sports teams have stupid names?  Actually, the team name is "Fighters," but rather than name teams after the city they're in, they name them after whatever giant corporation owns the team.  It's super-lame.  So rather than the Sapporo Fighters, allowing people in Sapporo/Hokkaido to wear their hometown team's merch with pride, they have to basically be wearing an advertisement for Nippon Ham, a giant meat/food corporation.  Plus, when you say it out loud, it sounds like they fight ham.
   

   102 downloads

   4 comments

   Updated May 9

6. 

   Games for Windows Issue 16 (March 2008)

   By kitsunebi

   2007 Games of the Year issue.  One of which is Sam & Max: Season One.  Sam & Max is no Monkey Island, but the original LucasArts adventure still holds a place in my heart.  I still have a cap with a flaming Max head on it.  And when my mom got two new kittens this past summer, I tried to get her to name them Sam and Max.  She didn't go for it, though. 🥲
   

   144 downloads

   0 comments

   Updated May 9

7. 

   Famitsu Issue 1364 (February 5, 2015)

   By kitsunebi

   276 pages.  Includes a review catalogue reprinting all 123 cross-reviews (the 4-person review format which EGM copied from Famitsu) which appeared in the second half of 2014.
   

   106 downloads

   0 comments

   Updated May 9

8. 

   Famitsu Issue 1362 (January 22, 2015)

   By kitsunebi

   This magazine is 212 pages, which is fairly reasonable for Famitsu.  They're usually a bit longer, though issues exceeding 300 pages aren't common.  Considering they put this thing out on a weekly basis, it's still a remarkable amount of pages per month, sometimes entering quadruple digits. 
   But this issue also has an ad for a Monster Hunter strategy guide, which weighs in at 1,568 pages.  That's more pages than an entire year's worth of any Western game mag published contemporaneously with this issue.   That's pretty impressive, I'll give you that. 
   I'll also give you a slap on the face if you ever ask me to scan it. 🙂
   

   94 downloads

   5 comments

   Updated May 9

9. 

   LOGiN 361 (April 2006)

   By kitsunebi

   You know those coffee table art books?  The ones with the super-thick, high-quality paper?  Imagine a gaming magazine printed like that.  And lo, here it is.  This mag is higher quality than any gaming mag ever printed in the Western world, and that's a fact.  Every single page was higher quality than the covers of Western mags.  Granted, it cost 1100 yen (at the time, around $11-12), but damn, this is one fine-looking mag.  Or it was, before I yanked all of its pages out, ran it through my scanner, and tossed it into the recycling.  😱 
   Scanners can't be seduced by pretty things.  All will fall before the heat gun.
    
   Oh yeah, and you can get the demo disc HERE if you want.
   

   106 downloads

   0 comments

   Updated May 9

10. 

    PCGames (January-February 1991)

    By SergioCurti

    PCGames (January-February 1991)
    

    127 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted May 7

11. 

    Famitsu Issue 0197 (September 25, 1992)

    By kitsunebi

    Breaking news.
    
    

    71 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted May 6

12. 

    Computer Games Issue 149 (April 2003)

    By dablais

    Computer Games Issue 149 (April 2003)
    

    107 downloads

    • computer games

    0 comments

    Updated May 5

13. 

    Famitsu Issue 0142 (September 6, 1991)

    By kitsunebi

    Thought some of you might be interested in a 1991 Japanese take on the differences involved with marketing games in the USA.
    Religious conservative culture requiring edits and changes to be released in America...yep, 34 years later and nothing has changed.
    Also, it was kind of them to use the Mega Man from Mega Man 3 to illustrate their point about preferred art styles when they could have just as easily gone with Mega Man 1 to show how we Americans prefer our box art to look like ass.
    
    Translated by Googly.  Click each page to Zoom.
        
    

    69 downloads

    6 comments

    Submitted May 4

14. 

    Computer Games Issue 190 (October 2006)

    By dablais

    Computer Games Issue 190 (October 2006)
    

    116 downloads

    • computer games

    0 comments

    Submitted May 3

15. 

    Dengeki PlayStation 121 (October 22, 1999)

    By kitsunebi

    78 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted May 3

16. 

    Game Developer Issue 084 (November 2002)

    By MigJmz

    Game Developer Issue 84 (November 2002)
    

    66 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted May 2

17. 

    Famitsu Issue 1303 (December 5, 2013) (supplement included)

    By kitsunebi

    54 downloads

    2 comments

    Submitted April 30

18. 

    Game Developer Issue 094 (September 2003)

    By MigJmz

    Game Developer Issue 94 (September 2003)
    

    64 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 29

19. 

    Ahoy! Issue 41 (May 1987)

    By E-Day

    Ahoy! Issue 41 (May 1987)
    

    58 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 29

20. 

    Ahoy! Issue 34 (October 1986)

    By E-Day

    Ahoy! Issue 34 (October 1986)
    

    53 downloads

    0 comments

    Updated April 29

21. 

    Ahoy! Issue 9 (September 1984)

    By E-Day

    Ahoy! Issue 9 (September 1984)
    

    54 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 29

22. 

    Ahoy! Issue 5 (May 1984)

    By E-Day

    Ahoy! Issue 5 (May 1984)
    

    42 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 29

23. 

    Ahoy! Issue 4 (April 1984)

    By E-Day

    Ahoy! Issue 4 (April 1984)
    

    44 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 29

24. 

    Game Developer Issue 048 (November 1999)

    By MigJmz

    Game Developer Issue 48 (November 1999)
    

    127 downloads

    0 comments

    Updated April 29

25. 

    Game Developer Issue 042 (May 1999)

    By MigJmz

    Game Developer Issue 042 (May 1999)
    

    60 downloads

    0 comments

    Submitted April 28