JHD

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.

For several years in the early-2000s, there was a publication called PlayStation Quarterly. In Canada, at least, it was freely distributed at EB Games. The content is mostly advertising of new games (original PS, PS 2, and PSP). The most useful content is the specific release dates. There are also announcements of Sony-sponsored gaming events across Canada. Is this a title of interest? There is admittedly limited editorial content. Once I find my copies, I can scan a sample issue if that would be useful.

Are these magazines available at all Wal-Mart locations? I occasionally (perhaps twice per year) do a cross-border grocery run to a Wal-Mart Supercentre in a small town in Northern Maine, and while I always check-out the electronics section -- I bought an NES Classic there! -- I have never seen this magazine. I suppose that it could just be a limited print run and I keep missing out, but after 20+ visits, you'd think that I would have found at least one issue.

While it certainly does not count as an "official" release, both Devil World and F1 Race (among other Famicom-exclusive titles) appeared on some of the various pirate Famiclones that were sold in North America. I have two or three such examples in my collection -- all purchased here in Canada. I was not aware that Devil World was such a significant, albeit early, title.

I am not much of a completionist, at least in terms of video games. I have utterly no interest in certain genres -- sports games and shumps, for example -- so I do not either collect or play those titles. With RPGs (which I do love), I try to play the series in order. I am currently on Dragon Warrior 4; I previously finished #1, I got stuck in #2, and I did not much care for the design/structure of #3, so I quit after the finishing first chapter. That said, while I have played most of the Final Fantasy games, I started with 7 and went through 12 before circling back to the NES (and SNES) titles.

To bump my own thread, just this afternoon, at a local thrift shop, I purchased two (unscanned) issues of the Official PlayStation Magazine from 2004 (for Cdn$.99 each, about US$.72). I also purchased an issue of EGM (already scanned) and I passed on an issue of GamePro (also already scanned) and some issues of an Xbox magazine (about which I do not care). Alas, the magazine pages are too big to fit my current flatbed scanner, but at last I can finally join the august ranks of those members with issues waiting to be scanned.

I view these "partial" issues as a placeholder. Obviously, people would like to have full and complete issues, but a partial issue will serve until the full issue can be scanned. That is how I organize my (personal) files -- for missing scans, I gather together whatever content I can find from those issues. If I eventually acquire the whole issue, then the random pages become redundant. Obviously for some issues, there are only one or two pages available. That is not worth creating a PDF, but what about 15 or 20 pages that include multiple different articles? For example, source A scans articles relating to Sonic games, source B scans reviews of PS 2 RPGs, source C scans all of the articles by a favourite columnist, and source D scans random advertisements. Organizing this content by its original source allows one to reconstruct a magazine that has not been scanned in its entirety; it is imperfect but it is better than having nothing. I have not yet created an example; I shall do so and see what feedback I receive.

Some magazines have not (yet) been scanned in their entirety (or at least the scan is not publicly available), but sometimes individual articles have been scanned by different people for different purposes. For the last several years, I have been collecting scans of miscellaneous pages from gaming magazines where the full version is unavailable. These have been scraped from a wide variety of places (websites, message board postings, etc.). Presently they exist only as an organized collection of scanned pages, but I am considering creating more easily handled PDF files. I would be doing this entirely for my own use, but I wonder: 1) Is it worth uploading these partial/incomplete issues somewhere? I would think that having access to some of the issues' content is better than no access at all. 2) If so, where? I have encountered at least one example on archive.org where only the first 20 (or so) pages of a magazine were scanned; nothing further. This was annoying because there was nothing in the description to indicate that the issue was incomplete. Any thoughts?

I have limited interest in British magazines (sorry), but here is an excerpt from my personal magazine index for this game. It is not exhaustive of all gaming magazines in existence. MediEvil -- Advertisement, OPM 2.7, p. 59 -- Preview, EGM #110, p. 72; GP #120, p. 72; GP #121, p. 96 -- Review, EGM #113, p. 261; GP #122, p. 172 -- Strategy Guide, GP #123, p. 269 GP is Game Players; OPM is Official PlayStation Magazine The page references are to the scanned PDF version; the print version may differ slightly.

A bit of a bump, but I just discovered this thread. Technically, the last console that I bought was the NES Classic, but it remains sealed in the box (in a storage unit, in another province) as I do not currently have a TV with HDMI inputs. More practically, my newest console is a PS 2 slim -- purchased new in about 2008. I am waiting on a price-drop on the C-64 Mini (they are currently at about Cdn$65 at my local Wal--Mart).