kitsunebi

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
ADULTS ONLY
This issue will be of particular interest to at least one person around here, as it features a two-page preview of Divi Dead. 
This issue also presented an unusual problem in that the last 40 pages or so look as if some kind of mold had eaten away a chunk of paper at the bottom of each page.  Without spending too much time trying to recreate the missing areas, I think I managed to make it fairly unnoticeable if you aren't looking carefully.  For anyone interested in knowing what I had to deal with, check out the last two pages (the inside-back cover and back cover), which I left with the missing areas as is.
You can download the demo disc at archive.org here.  Be aware that it requires Win95 to run.
Please feel free to comment or hit the "like" button if you download this or any other file.  That kind of encouragement is really the only motivation we have to keep scanning

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
The front and back cover of this mag were in pretty gruesome condition.  I've done what I could.
Also, please note that while the mag itself is complete, I believe this issue shipped with a supplement covering part of Final Fantasy VI, which was not included with my copy.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、そこで「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where you can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

ADULTS ONLY
I've uploaded the CD-ROM that came with this issue HERE.
The manga section in the back is read R-L and your CBR reader must be switched to Japanese/Manga mode during that section in order for facing pages to be oriented correctly if using 2-page view mode.  If viewing single page view mode, no adjustments are necessary.
Speaking of, a new manga serial replaces the one that had been running in all previous issues, and thank god, as the previous series was pretty gross, in my opinion.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
OK, here it is, the first issue of Famitsu – a landmark issue if ever there was one. Please be aware however, that this IS NOT a scan of the original magazine (which is super-rare and costs hundreds of dollars) but rather is a scan of a reproduction. The gray borders around each page are new to the reproduction, allowing them to occasionally print some commentary on the contents of the page. Otherwise, the content of the magazine, including the ads, is identical to the original.

However, the reproduction is printed at about half the physical dimensions of the original. As such, the quality of small detail suffers somewhat – a fault of the magazine’s printing, not of the scan. The copy I had also suffered from some water damage, which is visible in a few places. Even so, unless someone is willing to scan a copy of the original #1 (I won’t hold my breath), this is probably the best we’ll get, and I feel it’s an important look at the origins of the most influential video game magazine ever published.

Finally…the cover. This is where most of the damage was evident. Warped by water damage and extremely faded, the cover was in such bad shape that I opted to repaint it (something I would normally never do with a scan). It wasn’t possible to repaint all of the tiny spaces between the Japanese characters, so the text is a little muddy, but on a whole I feel the cover is much more presentable than the unadulterated scan. For anyone who finds such digital manipulation an abomination (moreso than spot clone-stamping here and there, that is), I have included the original scan of the cover as the final page before the Retromags splash page.

Anyway, this issue is a special exception. I hope you can look past its faults to appreciate the history! Expect all future Famitsu issues from me to be similar in quality to the previous two I released.

This supplement focuses exclusively on bishoujo games for the PS2 and PlayStation.
このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードをして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、そこで「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！
This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file came from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
 

The CD-ROM included with this issue can be downloaded HERE.
The manga section at the back is read R-L, so your CBR reader must be set to Japanese/manga mode during that section in order for facing pages to be oriented correctly.
Included at the very end of the archive is a scan of this issue's supplement - a "shitajiki" (下敷き).  These are basically hard sheets of plastic that people put under paper when they're writing to prevent impressions from forming on the next page of paper underneath.  No Japanese schoolchild will be without one.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
Lotsa good stuff this issue.  The main features:
Parasite Eve (25 pages and a poster!) Resident Evil 2 (18 pages) Tekken 3 (10 pages) Xenogears (8 pages) Bushido Blade 2 (6 pages) Final Fantasy V (6 pages) By the way, the fold-out poster I stitched together looks pretty great.  If anyone is interested in having a full-size copy (much bigger than the one included in this file), I uploaded it here: https://mega.nz/#!EBxjzCpS!Yv2RRJsutCUNNUuPDZxjs8-MBHFzbfOzmRO0JX6KfnE
It's full 600dpi at 6026x9100px and could be printed out as an actual poster by a printing service if you were so inclined.

I had to remove the mailing label with my old address from this so none of you could travel back in time and track down my 14 year old self and kill me or force me at gunpoint to learn the electric slide or something.

I started out thinking I'd just do the ads for the gallery and then ended up editing the whole thing.  This is probably the earliest Nintendo mag that's been scanned yet, but it's mostly interesting to me seeing how Famimaga itself evolved over time.  This issue has large b&w sections, quite a bit of which is manga, while by a couple of years later, Famimaga will become 100% full color and drop most of the manga, setting it apart from Famitsu, which at this point was still half a year away from launching.
Another interesting thing is noticing that some of the manga is based on Famicom games published by Takuma Shoten - which is also the publisher of Famimaga.  Famitsu had the same deal - it was published by ASCII, who also published tons of Famicom games.
How this worked and they were able to maintain any sense of credibility with Japanese consumers I have no idea.  Imagine if EGM was published by Electronic Arts and GamePro was published by Activision - who could trust them to treat the games they covered fairly?  Or if Nintendo Power was published by Nintendo?  Oh wait, it was.  But that proves the point - no one read Nintendo Power expecting honest reviews and uncompromising criticism, they just expected lots of colorful pictures and maps, and that's what they got.
In that sense, I guess Famimaga could be seen a bit as the Nintendo Power of Japan, since, like Nintendo Power, it was published by a game publisher, was probably the most colorful gaming mag on the stands at the time, and took the high road by abstaining from reviews for the most part.  It also seems to be the most beloved nostalgic mag for Japanese gamers of a certain age despite its lack of any strong critical/editorial stance.  Add a Japanese Howard Phillips to the mix and they'd be twins.
 
***Oh yeah, forgot to mention - as usual, Family Computer Magazine is printed Japanese-style and is read from right-to-left.  Your CBR reader must be set to Japanese/manga mode throughout the entire issue if you want facing pages to be oriented correctly.
Also, the color manga sections were actually a pullout with narrow landscape-aspect pages.  I recommend setting your reader to "fit height" during that portion of the mag, which will basically fill your screen with the entire page and make it easy to read.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
The G's stands for "girls" and that's just what you'll get.  No Mario or Solid Snake in these pages, just lots and lots of bishoujo games, pretty much none of which were ever released outside of Japan.  But that's what makes it interesting, hey?

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
Saga Frontier 2, Metal Gear Solid, and  Suikoden II are just a few of the games featured here that Western gamers are familiar with.  But as always, the main interest here (for me, anyway) are the dozens upon dozens of Japanese-only exclusives you might not have read about before.  ENJOY!
232 pages
Please note that there was one page that had been torn out of the magazine.  The front side was the second half of a two-page advertisement and is missing from this scan.  The back side was a different ad, which I have included here using an identical copy of the ad from a different magazine.
EDIT: The missing page has been provided by Akane and is now included in the download, making this mag COMPLETE!😎
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
Thanks to ccovell for donating the issue.  Also the gavas bucks page was missing, so he provided a scan of that page to make the mag complete.  For anyone who missed it in my forum thread, Gavas were a big scam run by Famitsu to trick kids into thinking they could win fabulous prizes by buying every issue of Famitsu that hit the stands.  Below is a closer look at just how impossible getting those prizes actually was.  Listed are the prize, the amount of Gavas needed to win the prize, the number of Famitsu issues you would need to purchase in order to have enough Gavas, and approximately how much that many issues of Famitsu would cost.  These are all in 1988 dollars, so it would be much more today.
As of May 1988 (these are not all of the prizes, btw):
A Famitsu Pencil Case - 780 Gavas - 49 issues - approx. $195 A Famitsu T-Shirt - 1680 Gavas - 105 issues - approx. $420 A Famicom Game - 2900 Gavas - 182 issues - approx. $728 A Famicom System - 9800 Gavas - 613 issues - approx. $2,452 A Sega Master System - 11200 Gavas - 700 issues - approx. $2,800 A PC Engine (TurboGrafx16) System - 16500 Gavas - 1,032 issues - approx. $4,128 It should also be worth noting that Famitsu was bi-weekly at this point.  So assuming you really wanted that PC Engine and you bought one copy of every issue that hit the stands, you would expect to finally have enough Gavas approximately... 38 years later.  So...sometime in 2026.  Of course, Famitsu eventually went weekly, of course, so you actually would have been able to finally get that PC Engine sometime in 2009.  Well, except that PC Engines had long since ceased production by then.😒
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
Merry Christmas!  (well, that's the cover date, anyway.)
As always with Dengeki P, lots of RPG and giant robot coverage (I mean, this IS Japan, after all.)  All in all, 264 pages of PlayStation goodness.  I've eschewed including stitched-together two-page joins this time, but when viewed in two-page mode, those pages (ads, mostly) should look seamless, since they were joined together during the editing process, edited as a single pic, and then separated again.
Sometimes these Japanese mags are just ornery:  The files within the cbr are numbered correctly, but you'll notice that the page numbers don't always match what's printed on the page.  That's because there were lots of strange instances of unnumbered pages.  For example, there was a multi-page advertising section where the first and last pages of the ad were given page numbers, but the middle 4 pages, which were printed like a fold-out poster, went unnumbered.  Another advertising section was printed on a series of pages of differing widths.  Only the full-sized pages were given numbers, while the narrower pages all went unnumbered.  Craziness!!  Thanks to the fold-out section, I actually had to swap one page's location in order to ensure that further pages would be paired with the correct facing page when viewing in two-page mode (don't worry, you'll never even know which one).
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

*このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！
ADULT CONTENT
This issue: 2 words (for our resident warrior nun): DIVI DEAD
I uploaded the demo disc to the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/TechGianApril1998
Be warned that it is designed for WIN95 PCs, so unless you have experience running WIN95 software on modern machines, you'll be unlikely to get most of the demos working.
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

Bilingual - English and Japanses

The CD-ROM included with this issue can be downloaded HERE.
The manga section is read from R-L, so your CBR reader must be set to Japanese/manga mode during that section in order for facing pages to be oriented correctly.
Included at the very end of the archive is a scan of this issue's supplement - a "shitajiki" (下敷き).  These are basically hard sheets of plastic that people put under paper when they're writing to prevent impressions from forming on the next page of paper underneath.  No Japanese schoolchild will be without one.

Even Japan got fooled into thinking Daikatana was cover-worthy.

I see you down there.

Is this tiny cameo Ms. Croft's first-ever appearance on a Japanese gaming mag cover?  Quite possibly.  Japan was about the only country in the world that never caught Croft Cover Chlamydia.  aHEM. Fever.  I meant, Croft Cover Fever.
Not that they're really talking about Tomb Raider at all in this issue - it shows up in an article rating how accurate the depiction of guns in various games are.  Poor Lara comes dead last in realism with 2 out of 5 stars.  I'm not sure whose idea it was to include Tomb Raider in any comparative evaluation of REALISM, though.  Have they even played the series?🤔

The CD-ROM included with this issue can be downloaded HERE.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
A couple of warnings: page 127 has a somewhat terrifying bit of defacement using whiteout. Also, the bottom 1/4 of the page that makes up pages 95 and 96 had been cut out, so I filled it with white space to keep the pages the same dimensions as everything else. Otherwise the issue was in great shape. Enjoy!

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
Adult content: covers adult games for the PC and consoles.

Please note that the demo CD-ROM included between pages 2 and 5 is counted as pages 3 and 4 in the issue's pagination.

I have uploaded the CD-ROM to the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/TechGian1997Sep
This CD-ROM is designed to work in a 16-bit Windows environment, so it will not run on 64-bit versions of Windows unless emulating a 16-bit operating system.

このスキャンは皆のために作ったので、ぜひダウンロードして、友達に伝いて、楽しんでください！もしほかのところでこのスキャンを分け合ったら、「このファイルはRetromagsからで、そこで誰でもでタダでダウンロードすることできる」と伝いて下さい。雑誌電子化は皆のために。よろしくお願いします！ *
*This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file is from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!
Lots of good stuff this issue including in-depth strategy sections for Resident Evil 2, Tomb Raider 2, Tales of Destiny and Xenogears.
Other games include Parasite Eve, Final Fantasy V, Gran Turismo, Bushido Blade 2, Tenchu, and as always, tons of coverage of games that never saw a western release.