JHD

The only thing I remember picking-up at EB Games was the PlayStation Quarterly "magazine". It profiled the new and upcoming games (PS, PS 2, PSP) and there was a section for promotional events -- invariably held only in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. It lasted for a few years between ca. 2000 and ca. 2005. I do not presently have the capacity to scan these myself, but I can send my duplicate issues to someone (in Canada) who is willing to do so.

The recent posting of the old Eaton's flyer has inspired me to share some video game-related memories of that store. Eaton's was one of the only local stores to have demo system (Sears did not sell video games, Zellers did not have any demo consoles, I VERY rarely went to K-Mart or Woolco because they were located in far distant suburbs). When the Colecovision was launched, the store had a console with Donkey Kong; that was the very first time I played the game (even before the arcade version). I remember it attracting quite a crowd. Several years later, the same store had a demo console for the Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog. Oddly, I do not remember seeing any other game consoles at that store. Video games were considered part of the toy department (located on the ground floor), but the same store briefly sold PC hardware (and software) in a corner of the furniture department located upstairs on the third floor. Not related to gaming, but when I was about six years old, I managed to lose my Mother while browsing in the toy department. She was (apparently) panicking and searching for me, while I calmly went to the sales counter and had her paged.

Note that this catalogue predates the name change to remove the apostrophe (to make the store name more palatable to Francophones).

While I do not happen to be interested in any of the specific titles for which strategy guides have been added recently, I am very happy to see this section of the website growing. I am certainly aware of Game FAQs and similar sites, but I really like the vintage guides -- most especially the maps, screen-shots, and other illustrations. My favourite part of old magazines is when they publish a strategy guide. Thank-you to all concerned!

Thank-you for letting us know about this site! As a professional librarian, websites like this cause me mixed feelings: it is a truly amazing repository of content of all sorts, but there is literally no organization nor even some mechanism to search the files. It is like venturing into a "library" where the books are all piled randomly on the shelves (and the floor). It is near impossible to find anything specific. Sigh.

So you can only ever borrow it once? Can you not borrow it for an hour per day, for as many days as required to copy the whole thing? If someone is willing to expend enough time on a project, amazing things are possible. I once watched someone spend several days hand-copying a lengthy volume of government records. There were restrictions about photocopying or photographing this material, but there were no restrictions on creating a complete handwritten transcript. Frankly, nobody was expected to have that much patience and determination to circumvent the intent of the Legislation.

This format is very common here in Canada with (Federal) government publications that are issued in both official languages. "French text on inverted pages" is the commonly used physical description. I cannot recall having seen two different publications being printed together in this way, other than a very few examples of "humour" magazines and such like. Personally, I would treat it as two separate titles and create two distinct scans/files. It has been many years since I did original cataloguing, but there are rules for disparate publications that have been physically bound together.

Have you considered "borrowing" it and then capturing a screen-shot of every page? That would be a very time-consuming process, but then you would have a permanent, offline copy for your own enjoyment.

How easy is it to navigate these e-shop sites without a reading knowledge of Japanese?

I realise that kitsunebi is trying to make a point here, but there is something to be said for maintaining personal copies of interesting content. For example, I am very interested in Canadian history. At least two longstanding, publisher-affiliated sites hosting Canadian academic journals have either gone offline or decided to restrict access in the past year or so. Another scholarly journal made the decision to go "open access" for just a few months, at which point the content would then be restricted again. If I had not grabbed personal copies of this content, I would not now have access to it! In a similar fashion, I have downloaded copies of several hundred YouTube videos that are no longer available on the site. Now, I have no plans on sharing my collection in any fashion -- indeed it lives in an external hard drive that is disconnected from the PC when not required -- but I can still see the argument for making backup copies of online content.

I am having a similar issue with Chrome. Rather than not save the file, I get a pop-up stating that it is insecure (sometimes more than once) and asking if I want to keep the file. I respond affirmatively, and things proceed as normal. I have not tried Firefox or Edge, so I do not know if the problem persists across platforms.

Ok, so the title is a bit odd, but I cannot find a better way to phrase it. Sometimes, a gaming magazine will remind me of what happened in a particular month/year. For example, the latest upload of PSM is from August 1998. I did not own a PlayStation at that time and so I was utterly unaware that this title existed. On the other hand, August 1998 was a very significant month for me as that was when I moved cross-country (far away from my family) to attend Grad School. Most of that month was consumed with making arrangements (flights, hotels, shipping large items ahead of me), tidying my affairs at home, packing, and still working part-time. Early in the morning of August 28 I embarked on my journey. Not every month/year has significant memories, but some certainly do.

The lack of an obvious publication date was odd (though someone could make an educated guess based on the release dates of the games reviewed; I had to do this with another magazine once). I also noticed multiple contact addresses (in different states, even) for different sections of the magazine. Nevertheless, thank-you for adding this to the database. I love reading the contemporary reviews and (especially) the strategy guides.

I, for one, am always happy to see a "new" PlayStation magazine added! I had other interests when the system was current, so I never paid any attention to what gaming magazines were on the newsstand. Was this title a one-off or did it last a while?

I do not remember there being a Toys R Us store in Halifax, Nova Scotia when I lived there in the late-1980s/early-1990s. Of course given my age and lack of interest in console gaming at the time, I would have had utterly no reason to shop there. I think that I first went into a Toys R Us store around 2008 when I finally bought a PS 2 console; I remember buying some arcade game compilations.

I see that some Turbo Graphix-related magazines have recently been uploaded. Were these originally sold at retail, or were they subscription only? I only ever saw the TG-16 for sale at the local Radio Shack. There was very minimal software support, and I never met anyone who actually owned one. I have yet to see one turn-up at a thrift shop or used game store. I had no idea that there were (at least) two magazines published in support.

Slightly O/T, but back in the mid-1980s, there was a music producer that would release monthly cassettes with excerpts of their latest releases -- not full or complete songs, like a sampler, but just short snippets of music together with some commentary about the album, artist, etc. These cassettes were not expensive, but they were essentially just advertising. I have a copy of the Nintendo 64 promotional videotape that I found at a thrift shop many years ago. I did not realise that it was connected to Nintendo Power magazine.

Thank-you for slow but steady progress towards making all of the issues of EGM available online!

1) Thank-you for posting this! 2) The "unauthorized" nature of the guide is painfully obvious -- there are no maps or screenshots, just a few hand-drawn illustrations (that do not actually relate to the game). It is about the same quality as something on Game FAQs. (I am not criticizing that site, but that content is free and this title was sold at retail.) 3) Does anyone else who has played this game think that it looks like a straight-port from the Sega Genesis/Megadrive? It was one of the very first RPGs on the PlayStation (in English, at least), and it shows.

On-and-off for the past few years, I have been compiling an index for my own personal use. This index includes reviews, previews, strategy guides, and even the first appearance of advertisements. The catch that it is limited to those games/topics that I care about -- so, overwhelmingly PlayStation and PS 2 RPGs and commercial emulators (and not all of them; just those titles that appeal to me). It is not complete or comprehensive, and it never will be as that is not my goal. It is an ongoing work-in-progress. It is formatted as a Word (technically, Open Office) document; nothing fancy. If someone would like to use this list to link to individual magazine scans on this (or another) site, I am certainly happy to provide it. The "research" is done; only the data entry remains.

Thanks for the suggestions; I am familiar with the Internet Archive. There is masses of content, all of it poorly organized and not readily searchable. (I am a Librarian by profession, so we really like consistently (and correctly) spelled titles -- amongst other things). The language filters are useful if they are correct, but I have seen British gaming magazines flagged as being in Polish! I have found other random sources for historical magazines -- sometimes complete or (substantially so) runs -- but there does not seem to be anyone systematically collecting them in one place. To me, the quality of the scan is secondary to legibility. For example, the 1990s Canadian publication The Computer Paper has been scanned (almost entirely), but the quality is so very poor that most of the text is unreadable. It was printed on cheap, acidic newsprint-like paper and it is oversize, so I doubt that a complete run has survived in either private or institutional collections where it could be properly re-scanned. The scanned issues are close to useless.

I realise that this was the subject on an April Fool's Day post a few years ago, but I have a sincere question -- are there any sites that systematically scan non-gaming magazines? Aside from older video games, I very much enjoy reading about history. The publishers of Canada's History Magazine (formerly known as The Beaver) have made an almost complete run available online: https://canadashistory.partica.online/canadas-history/the-beaver-autumn-1970/flipbook/1/ Numerous Canadian academic journals have made back issues available online, too, but these target a specialist audience. I have also found some scattered issues of BBC History and National Geographic History, and the occasional random issue of other historical titles, but nothing systematic. Almost all of these publications are quite recent, too, so they would not qualify for hosting under Retromag's guidelines. Sadly, historical magazines turn-up at thrift shops only slightly more frequently than gaming magazines.

I was very surprised to see the New Zealand (~5 million people) received its own version, while Canada (~37 million people) did not! Is the editorial content much different from the British version, or is it mostly just the advertisements?

I did not acquire a PlayStation until quite late in its lifecycle (around 2004), just a retail support was starting to decline. Consequently, I paid no attention to video game magazines in the 1990s and early-2000s. I am now endevouring to get caught-up in what I missed. Looking at all of the various and sundry collections of scanned video game magazines (i.e. not just this site), far more British PlayStation magazines have been scanned than American. (Sadly, there are apparently no Canadian-specific video game magazines.) For example, I have found only a small handful of issues of the Official PlayStation Magazine (US version), but many issues of all three series of the UK version. It also appears that there were many more Playstation-specific titles being published in the UK. Are there more British PlayStation enthusiasts scanning magazines than American PlayStation enthusiasts? Is there some other reason? I admittedly have two random issues of the American version that have not yet been scanned, but I would need to purchase a larger scanner to do so -- and moving/finding a new job closer to home is far more of a priority for me at present.