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MartinIII

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  1. I was doing research on this game for Wikipedia and ran into an unexpected stumbling stone: I can't seem to find any evidence that it was ever released in North America. I haven't been able to find any coverage of the game in the major North American gaming magazines of the time (Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, etc.), whether previews, news, interviews, or reviews. Looking on Ebay (the US Ebay, at that), the only listings I can find for Zelda's Adventure are the PAL version. Sites like GameFAQs likewise only have images of the PAL box art. Was Zelda's Adventure a Europe-only release? If not, what year did the game come out in North America?
  2. Okami. This got big raves from the media when it came out on PlayStation 2, and my little brother (whose taste I ordinarily have the utmost respect for) enjoyed it. Then it came out for one of my favorite consoles, the Wii, and all the critics said the Wii version is even better than the original. So I got it. Where to start? How about the fact that half the game is quick time events? I actually like quick-time event games if they're well done, but even I would admit that the appeal of a good QTE is in the cinematics; there's nothing intrinsically exciting about performing a predefined sequence of control inputs. Okami's QTEs are just about watching plants grow. How can you get any more dull? Simple: By using some of the most inaccurate motion controls the Wii has ever seen, thus requiring you to restart each QTE 20 times over. Speaking of which, the controls make most of the special moves impossible to execute. One move requires you to swing the Wiimote three times in quick succession - in theory, at least. In practice, the game won't read a motion if you do it 1 second or less after another motion, and restarts the combo if you take longer than 1 second. So the only way to get a succession of two swings is if you get a control glitch which misreads a single swing as two swings; three swings simply cannot be done. I was at this for an hour and finally had to restart the game because it won't let you leave the tutorial until you perform your new move correctly. Seriously. Then there's the endless, monotonous, utterly pointless battles. So long as you don't stay in one place for more than five seconds, you'll dodge every attack, and even the most basic enemies take such a ridiculous number of hits that my arm was sore from swinging the Wiimote after just two battles. After a while, my arm muscles would actually clench in anticipated agony every time I got caught in a random encounter. Obviously this wouldn't be a problem in the PS2 version, but the dull repetition of having to hit easy enemies with crude attacks over and over and over would be the same. When I finally gave up on this game and sold it, I was about 40% of the way through. Usually I complete every game I play, unless I absolutely cannot manage to progress. Okami is a rare example of a game that I stopped playing simply because I couldn't stand it any longer.
  3. Not sure this is the right forum for this, but hopefully an admin will move it if not. Some time ago, while reading through the mags uploaded to the site, I stumbled on a curious mystery. An article in Electronic Gaming Monthly (I think; I should have made a note of the issue and page number but didn't) reported that AT&T and Sanyo were cancelling their 3DO models. It elaborated that Sanyo, having gotten a look at early 3DO sales figures, was deciding to take a "wait and see" approach. I've read every issue I can find of EGM (and GamePro) from the 3DO launch until its discontinuation, and I have yet to find a follow-up to this article. The mystery here, of course, is what made Sanyo change their minds, since the Sanyo 3DO ultimately was released, albeit only in Japan. Can anyone here point me to a magazine issue which answers this mystery?
  4. Thanks so much for the answers, Areala! That indeed resolves all my questions. Cool to hear that Dave Halverson is digitizing the old issues of Diehard Gamefan. Selling digitized versions of pre-internet comic books has been popular for a while now, but this is the first I've heard of a publisher of gaming magazines taking an interest in monetizing their back catalog. I'll definitely buy a few of those as they become available (the first three issues of the mag don't really interest me, since I'm mainly a fifth generation console guy).
  5. So what exactly is the deal with this? This listings for Diehard Gamefan are all marked "Not allowed", but there's no explanation in the listings for what this means or why it is in place. Searching "Gamefan" in the forums only increased my puzzlement: The results show a couple threads talking about members uploading issues of Diehard Gamefan to the site, but there's absolutely nothing about why these uploads were taken down, or indeed anything at all about the "Not allowed" designation other than a single offhand remark that "Our only rule on uploading magazines is our cut off dates and Game Informer and GameFan are not allowed." No explanation of why this is a rule (or what "cut off dates" means, for that matter, though in that case I can guess). Help?
  6. MartinIII

    Thank you

    Couldn't find a good place to post this, so I figured I'd just do it here. I just registered here, and the first thing I wanted to do was say thanks to the Retromags community. I've already been downloading magazines from your database for months now, and it's just so exciting to read about history as it was happening rather than from a hindsight perspective. Gaming historians tend to forget that the 3DO was seen as a major contender as late as the first couple months of 1996, that Phantasy Star IV came off as extremely outdated when it was released, or any other number of things you can dig out of these old mags. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to explore it all. I have a few magazines in my own collection, including a near-complete run of Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine, so I hope to be able to give back to the community at some point. Still trying to figure out all the rules here and the logistics of creating magazine downloads.
  7. Hello MartinIII, Welcome to the Retromags Community!

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