Anyone Seen The New (terrible) Nintendo Power Issues?

[fan-off-on]

I bought some Nintendo Power again after a long time and I find it's been ruined. Now, nintendo power is devoid of personality. The pages are all just White, with some generic frame, text and a few images. Look at the past NP issues. They all have original back grounds and were full of color. I could just watch it without reading it. Now it looks like a bland Rolling Stone Magazine.

[harrypmgaga]

True, but at least it has quite a bit of reading material, so it's good for the people like me that want to read as well as see what's going on.

But yeah, they should totally put some coloured backrounds or something.

[Saber08]

True, but at least it has quite a bit of reading material, so it's good for the people like me that want to read as well as see what's going on.

But yeah, they should totally put some coloured backrounds or something.

I'd rather they put more strategy articles back in instead of colored backgrounds... but yeah, the pages are a bit bland. They do have quite a few pics, though.

[E-Day]

NP is my favourite of the game magazines these days, but they do suffer from the trend to have boring layouts and no backgrounds. While trying to appeal to a more "mature" audience, they forgot that video game magazines should be fun. The reading material is excellent, but the layout is dull. The magazine with the best layout is Hardcore Gamer magazine, but I don't think it will be aroundmuch longer since they went quarterly at the start of the year. A quarterly game magazine in this day and age just won't cut it.

[Thor]

I actually think that Future has done a good job with NP. There are just a few things that I'm pissed about. One of them is getting rid of the posters. Come on that was a staple of Nintendo Power. If there is one thing that Nintendo did throughout the changes they did to NP it was to always keep the posters in the magazine. Oh well... I never took them out anyway.

[raezyr]

I decided to let my subscription lapse the instant they started running regular ads, which was around 1998-99, I think. It disgusted me that they had touted repeatedly in the past their "no outside advertisements" policy with pride, only to turn their back on it without so much as one sentence of explanation. I had tolerated the occasional back-cover ad for stuff like Domino's Pizza, because it was always part of a Mario promotion. But once they started running full-page ads smack dab in the middle of the reviews, Nintendo Power ceased to be something unique within the gaming info world to me, and I started to turn to the internet for my info.

Thinking back, I remember what you describe with those full-color backgrounds and stuff. I never minded the common criticisms that they never gave a bad review or spoke negatively about the company, because the magazine was put together so darn well. I remember they started to try to emulate the competition by including tiny charts of ratings by a group of completely anonymous "editors" which may or may not have existed (the mag certainly never provided any evidence of individual personalities). That, combined with the ginormous influx of advertisements, started what was apparently a long slide into mediocrity.

Sad. It was once such a great magazine...

[Hidinger]

I kinda agree with the above posters. I think everyone has something valid as to the downfall of what was a great magazine. I remember seeing my first ever copy of Nintendo Power (issue 1) and from that point on I was hooked. I started to lose faith when they stopped giving the ultra cool posters (posters were big at the time) that had one side as a strategy board like the layout to a difficult level of a game and the other side was a Street Fighter II poster (for example). I think it further lost me when it started adding in a bunch of adds as well.

The thing that really ended my subscription after years of faithful subscriptions was when they started giving overly high scores to EVERY Nintendo 1st party title. I don't remember the name of the game off hand but I remember Nintendo Power gave it a 9.2 and everywhere else gave it a 2.0. I know Nintendo Power will favor Nintendo games, but they shouldn't go that far. At that point they lost all credibility in my eyes and I just haven't been able to look at the magazine the same since.

Remember back when it use to have a "High Scores" section where people could send in photos of their high scores and get their name in the magazine. They need to bring that back or come up with a magazine that has that as it's sole purpose. Nintendo Top Tier or something. I would subscribe to that.

[Rick]

Yeah!, They forgot that most of the Nintendo titles are for kids,... well, at least the basic ones..................................................