Foreign press reviews in Tilt magazine

[Hoagie]

Having read lots of vintage game magazines from several countries, I noticed that sometimes they quote foreign magazines, but rarely do full press reviews to help their readers discover the gaming press around the world. The exception was Tilt, in its time the best French computer game magazine. They run this kind of press review twice in their history (I made links to the scans at Abandonware Magazines, the images were too big).

The first time, it was in their issue 22 (6/1985). They have a look at the major magazines of this era - but nothing from Japan. One of the few magazines I didn't know was Topscore, from the Netherlands. I tried to search info about this magazine (or some scans with the image search), and what I found was, er, not what I expected. Take a chance if you want, but for %*µ's sake, activate SafeSearch beforehand. I warned you.

Presse sans frontières (part 1/2)

Presse sans frontières (part 2/2)

The second time, it was in their issue 87 (2/1991). It's a whole eight-page article, giving lots of info, places where these magazines can be found, their price, how to subscribe, the specificities of each country... And this time, Japan is not forgotten.

Presse mondiale (part 1/4)

Presse mondiale (part 2/4)

Presse mondiale (part 3/4)

Presse mondiale (part 4/4)

Too bad other magazines didn't run this kind of article, there's valuable info inside.

[kitsunebi]

I was looking at the chart on the last page there and wondering what the Japanese mag "Computec" was, until I realized they were probably talking about Comptiq (com-poo-teek - a combo of "Computer" and "boutique").  If your reading of the katakana is sufficiently poor (i.e. incorrect) and you don't notice the small イー in コンプティーク, then the pronunciation would be com-poo-tec.  That isn't much of an excuse though, since early issues also print the name in alphabetic characters.

Also, they incorrectly list Technopolis as "Techno Police."  While in this case the katakana for both would be identical, again, the mags themselves have Technopolis printed in smaller print right next to the Japanese title.  Besides, as cool as "Techno Police" might be as a name for a game or anime, it makes a lot less sense as a title for a mag about computers/computer games than Technopolis does.

 

PS: I did a google image search for "Topscore magazine Netherlands" and didn't find a single pic from that mag.  What I DID find in those search results, for some reason, were all of the Comptiq covers I uploaded here yesterday.  Weird.

[Hoagie]

I did a search with "Topscore dutch" or "Topscore dutch magazine" with Duckduckgo, and the results (with or without pics) were quite explicit. After a small research, I discovered that topscore.nl (yes, the extension for Netherlands) was a long-running pr0n online store, thus the confusion. The problem was that I forgot/didn't know that in Netherlands the sale of pr0n stuff with animals was legal, and the cache of search engines stored these images pretty well. Damn, I love animals, but not THAT much.

[kitsunebi]

Yikes, thanks for the heads up.  I will definitely not be replicating your search.  (insert vomiting emoticon here)  I've never heard of duckduckgo before, but I just tried an image search for the latest mag I just added to the database: "コンプティーク 1988年10月."  Google image search gave me lots of relevant images, while the duckduckgo search didn't have a single pic even tangentially related.  I guess I'll stick with google.

[gingerbeardman]

On 5/13/2018 at 12:15 AM, kitsunebi77 said:

Also, they incorrectly list Technopolis as "Techno Police."  While in this case the katakana for both would be identical, again, the mags themselves have Technopolis printed in smaller print right next to the Japanese title.  Besides, as cool as "Techno Police" might be as a name for a game or anime, it makes a lot less sense as a title for a mag about computers/computer games than Technopolis does.

Sorry for the revive, I just stumbled across a handful of issues of Technopolis on archive.org - cool design - besides the borderline hentai

https://archive.org/details/@miralita

• 1989–01
• 1989–02
• 1989–03
• 1989–04
• 1989–05

Edited May 12, 2019 by gingerbeardman