SynthMilk

MK logo's flipped the wrong way? Wonder what the hell happened there.

This was my first and only issue of Gamer's Republic. Picked it up at a bookstore and wrongly assumed, based on the title, that it was a British/Euro mag. Was definitely surprised to see Dave Halverson as EIC -- I'm asking myself 'Did E. Storm move to the UK?' lol. Scooped it up for the Sonic Adventure and Shenmue coverage. Enjoyed the issue overall, but my gaming mag obsession was definitely winding down by this point.

Gamefan vol 7 issue 3 from the same month (March 1999) has a 9-page Sonic Adventure cover story. No idea which mag would've got the scoop on this one, but I'd assume (outside of Japan at least) that everyone was NDA'd prior their respective March '99 issue.

90s EDGE/Next Generation definitely fits the bill for video game industry and technology journalism -- I love going back and reading their features with the benefit of hindsight -- but their actual game criticism was every bit as superficial as the reviews you'd find in the adolescent-targeted mags (e.g., GamePro, EGM). Of all the 90s gaming mags, EDGE/NextGen had by far the strongest bias toward games that pushed technological limits for graphics/presentation (as one would expect given their name), while appreciation of the more subtle aspects of game design was almost entirely absent. The game reviews are hilarious, just the number of bona fide classics (usually 2D, sprite-based) that get middling to poor review scores for no other reason than they don't fit the EDGE/NextGen narrative of polygons-over-everything. You also have to make it past the snarky, superior tone of the writing (typically anonymous) that, again, stems from the magazine's edict to be an authority on the future of gaming. The features, particularly the interviews and 1000ft industry perspective stuff, are still pretty enjoyable to read. Just steer clear of the reviews.

My favourite was always Gamefan. Loved the game coverage and those sexy-as-hell layouts, and found the reviews to be very reliable once you worked out which reviewer(s) your own tastes most closely aligned with. Like most of these magazines, the earliest issues are pretty rough; but from the end of volume one until about the end of volume five, it's a pretty incredible monthly love letter to video games. ECM era, while not quite reaching the same heights as the Halverson/ Nick Des Barres/Casey Loe issues, still sits well above the competition for me. For feature articles and state-of-the-industry stuff, Next Generation was my fave. Lost interest in gaming after the entirely-too-soon death of the Dreamcast, so can't really comment on 2000s mags.

Cartoonist Kayfabe did an episode on it: Awesome channel, btw. CK does commentaries on Wizard magazine, which might be appealing to some people here, and a ton of other comic-related content.

I'd love to see scans of Casey Loe's Next Generation fanzine.

Based on the dozen or so EGMs I've got from 92-94, I'd say this level of insight is very much on brand for Uncle Eddy. Outside of whatever surface-level opinions could be squeezed into those tiny 'Review Crew' segments, it's nothing but back-of-the-box reviews that might as well have been written by the developer. 95% plot summary; 5% commentary on a game's length/difficulty; grab a few screenshots from the first two stages and call it a day.

It's almost certainly an exaggeration, but maybe that figure is loosely based on the number of dev kits that went out. I'm half remembering a story in EDGE or possibly the Ars Technica interview with Andy Gavin that said these kits were relatively easy to obtain from 3DO.

Found this while looking for advice on how to remove those pesky stickers. The EB Games price tags are just the worst. Asking strictly as a collector (not scanning), if the goal is to remove the sticker and have no glue residue left behind, what's the process? Heat the sticker with crafting heat gun, remove sticker once loose, dab up liquified glue with... tissue? Is it possible to remove all the sticker/mailing label glue in this way? Thanks!

Was this guide packed in with an issue of Gamefan? There's no price printed on it anywhere, and no hints in the editorial or masthead that I could see. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

In an interview in Next Generation issue 2, Miyamoto was asked about his involvement in Donkey Kong Country which, interestingly, the interviewer attributes primarily to Miyamoto, referring to it as "your game". His response only refers to the character design process, translating hand-drawn images to CG, and it's unclear whether he had any involvement beyond that. Perhaps he was trying to distance himself a bit from it, if the rumours of the Yoshi's Island and DKC internal rivalry are true. Hey, maybe that's why Nintendo passed on acquiring Rare in the early 2000s. lol Having read through that NG interview numerous times over the years, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the statement the OP is referring to was made by Miyamoto, just because some of the responses are a few degrees spicier than you'd expect from such a prominent figure at Nintendo. If it's true, then it is surprising that it wasn't removed at the request of some Nintendo PR person prior to printing; but both that interview and the OP's quote are from an era where, if Miyamoto so much as smoked two cigarettes while leaning against the cubicle of a programmer working on some first party title, he'd be credited as a producer, so maybe he felt he had some latitude to speak his mind. lol I like DKC, btw, although playing it on a modern display is pretty painful. Those dithered CG visuals really benefit from a consumer CRT with fat scanlines.

Oh man, just as someone interested in graphic design I cringe hard at the site of the standard edition/blue cover. So many poorly chosen fonts, and that '50' with all the aliasing that's been tilted to make it look like it's printed on the PlayStation lid. Yikes. As far as the reasoning behind spinning up a PS-only publication, this quote from former Gamefan writer Casey Loe (aka Takuhi) talking about their publisher, Metropolis, is illuminating: (https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-gamefan-magazine-drugged-coffee-pirated-games-and-empty-bank-accounts) "They were always asking us to expand into new ventures, which led to GameFan creating a lot of spin-off publications that only lasted a few issues. Magazine publishing, in the US at least, lends itself to sleazy business practices because newsstands pay you a percentage of the sales for whatever you ship to them at the point when they receive the product, so you can generate short-term revenue by “stuffing the channel” – sending lots of copies of magazines and strategy guides and whatever to newsstands – get the initial cheque, and then leave the newsstand with a bunch of junk they’ll never sell that ultimately gets destroyed. (Of course, it cost money to get all that content printed, but you can always switch printers and leave the first printer to try to collect.) I suspect that there was a lot of that sort of thing going on to try and make payroll."

Can anyone confirm if there were other issues besides the two versions of the premiere? I recently got a copy of the blue one and was pretty disappointed with both the content and the design/aesthetics. Sadly, a PlayStation-only Gamefan this is not. Maybe it could've established an interesting identity if it had survived a little longer, but this was not a great start. I was reading a Gamefan editorial recently where DH was expressing his frustration with some other PlayStation-centric publication getting the 'official' designation from Sony, and how poor the quality of that magazine was; but this attempt from Metropolis is certainly nothing to brag about. I can understand why they opted not to include the 'Gamefan Presents' badge on the standard/blue edition. The Lara Croft cover design is a little less painful.

...but I suppose if we're talking about near-mythical status magazines, it'd be the never-published digital file for Gamefan vol 9 issue 1, alluded to in the Hardcore Gaming 101 GF alumni discussions. Almost certainly lost to the tides of time.