kitsunebi

Breaking news.

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.
    

Adults Only
I've uploaded the included CD-ROM HERE.

Adults Only
I uploaded the included CD-ROM HERE

This is almost a 300 page mag (296 pgs), but there's one big difference from a similarly-sized American mag:
Famitsu 1305: 296 pgs.  33 pages contain advertising EGM 88: 294 pgs.  147 pages contain advertising Famitsu: 11% ads
EGM: 50% ads
That's even more impressive when you consider that Famitsu produced this much non-advertising content on a weekly basis.  And the Famitsu costs less than the EGM despite having (one would assume) significantly less ad revenue.
Not that I'm knocking ads.  Ads are fun.  Just pointing out a difference.

Scanned by the Great and Wonderful J of Oz
If you don't love at least a couple of the games in this mag, we grew up playing very different games from one another.  The first feature article is about point-and-click adventures for crying out loud.  I still have a flaming Max-head cap to this day...
And would you believe I bought this mag right here in Japan?

220 pgs total: 188 pgs + 32 pg supplement
Included with this issue is a supplement covering the top 50 best-selling games each for the PS1, PS2, and PS3. 
What's the best-selling game out of all 3 systems?  Hint: it's not Final Fantasy VII (that one's not even in the top 5...)

As it says, this is a Star Trek special, so about 2/3 of it relates to that franchise, while the other 1/3 hits upon other genre TV/movies like Buffy, Andromeda, and Farscape.

236 pgs including a 32 page "PlayStation Hardware Catalog" supplement featuring every variation of PlayStation console hardware ever produced in Japan prior to the PS4 (good lord, so many PSPs....)

Not all games that get front-cover treatment can be winners.

The mag itself is 262 pages, and there's a 44 page PS4 supplement included for a grand total of 306 pages.

*kitsunebi edition!*
This is an all-new scan and upgrade to the other scan of this issue available here.  The following information is provided for the benefit of anyone unsure of which version they should download, or whether they want to replace their copy if they already downloaded the older scan.
Improvements include:
pages are saved at 3212 px height (around 300dpi) vs. the other scan's 2200 px (around 205 dpi) whiter whites brighter colors debound with heat gun to ensure full edge to edge scan (the other version has the gutter side of every page cropped off) images spread across facing pages are joined as seamlessly as possible more complete cover (due to a foldout ad on inside cover, part of the front cover image is actually printed on page 5 (if the pages of the foldout are counted separately).  This strip of image appears joined with the cover when the mag is closed.  This strip from page 3 has been edited together with the front cover to seamlessly show the full cover as a single image)  *see below for image comparison the aforementioned foldout ad is shown in its entirety.  This ad was designed so that, after opening the cover, you would see two facing pages.  Next, you would unfold the left page, which would display two new pages that would then seamlessly become a single 3-page image along with the original right-side page.  Thus, the right-side page would essentially be seen twice - facing the original left side page, and also as part of the three-page join once the left-side page was unfolded.  Both versions are included here for the first time to simulate the intended effect of the original ad. (One of the advantages of using a CBR reader is that this will cause no problems regardless of whether you are using single or two-page viewing mode.  If you are using a PDF reader (such as Sumatra) to read your CBR files the facing pages may not display correctly.  I strongly urge anyone still using a PDF reader to read CBRs to upgrade to a CBR reader like CDisplayEX or the alternative of your choice.) subscription cards included Comparison screenshots:
cover/extended cover
 
2-page joins - note the missing part of the image in the center of the older scan:


In addition to general white/color differences, the cropping on the gutter side of the older scan is apparent even on pages that don't connect with facing pages. As you can see, the right of this page is cropped off in the older scan.  Viewing the older scan in two-page mode feels more cramped due to the lack of this gutter-side space:
   
 

236 pgs
Supplement included
This is (I believe) the most recent of any mag I've ever owned.  It goes without saying that I've never played any of the games within.  For some people, this mag is 10 years old.  For me, it's 20 years too new.

"kitsunebi edition" is a label reserved for scans I release which are superior in some way to scans already available here, but in essence, ALL of my scans are "kitsunebi editions," since I always do my best to make my scans look as good as I can.  That doesn't mean that all scans require the same amount of effort, of course.  A mag in good shape printed on quality paper will be a much faster edit than a damaged mag printed on cheap, yellowed paper stock.  And paper stock doesn't come much cheaper than these early Game Player's titles.  So this certainly took as much time and effort to edit as any other "kitsunebi edition."
But it's not really the aged paper that makes editing these such a hassle, it's the primitive and poorly reproduced screenshots throughout.  This mag is from the era where magazine screenshots were made by pointing a camera at a TV/monitor, and without a carefully controlled environment, every single photo seems to have a different hue and brightness caused by the varying lighting conditions under which it was taken.  This often necessitates editing each screenshot on a page separately, since, for example, something meant to be white is yellow in one screenshot, light blue in another, and a dull grey in a third.
The end result isn't going to fool anyone into thinking this is a high budget mag from the 90s, but it's still the best this issue has ever looked.

Scan Updated March 22, 2025   The demo disc included with this issue can be downloaded HERE

268 pgs
Fun fact: Although I scanned and edited this file in 2020 (couldn't upload it here due to the cutoff date), this was actually the very first magazine I ever (test) scanned with my first ADF scanner, way back in 2016.
Debinding mags is a step that deters MANY a potential scanner.  People just have a hard time wrapping their brains around the concept that "to preserve you must destroy."  I eased my way in by debinding THIS mag to break in my (then) brand new ADF scanner, since I had two copies of it, so destroying one still left me with one intact.  I didn't scan the entire issue at the time, just the first 10 pages or so, and I later scanned the entire thing from scratch, which is what you'll get if you download this file.  But this mag popped my debinding cherry.  
Now, of course, I'll debind anything that moves without batting an eye LOL.  And that extra copy I had of this issue?  Yeah, once this scan was complete, I just tossed that extra mag into the recycling as well.  Who needs it?  Isn't that the whole point of making a scan?
What I'm saying is, becoming a scanner will change you.
     

This mag was ravaged by time, scanned by J of Oz, and edited with excruciatingly time-consuming exactitude by moi.
   

I don't know much about Minecraft other than that it seems to function as the Oregon Trail of the current generation of kids in Japan (i.e. it's the most entertaining game you're allowed to play at school - granted we only got to see if we could avoid getting dysentery back in the day on the rare occasions when we had a class in the computer lab, while kids today get to whip out their school-provided tablets and play Education Edition Minecraft whenever they've got a free minute between classes.)
But it must be a pretty decent game if kids are still playing it all these years later.  This issue, from 2015, previews a Minecraft clone...but it's Dragon Quest themed.  And yet here we are 10 years later, and the kids are still playing Minecraft, while Dragon Quest Builders is all but forgotten.  If a Dragon Quest Minecraft clone can't compete with the original in Japan, you know it's got something.

268 pgs
A rare case of a Western game making the cover of Famitsu.  Minecraft, Witcher 3, and GTA V even crack the top 30 sales that week.  That's 10 percent!!  Western games on the rise?