Phew, gaming mags. I've read far too many
Man, EGM used to be the ****. I subscribed for close to 6 years (like 97-03) but then they changed everything, all the people with any talent left and they they changed the format of the magazine around (really, what was wrong with the old review system? I understand only having 3 people review games instead of 4, but the reviews used to be nice neat columns, organized and color coded by systems, then they threw in full page reviews, which was fine, and mini reviews, which was also fine, because I don't need 3 reviews of the same sports game, just use one to give me the low down and the other two to tell me what's different fro m system to system. Then they started putting ads in the review pages, then they changed everything to red and made the whole thing a damn mess.
I subscribed to NP forever. I have or at one point had every single issue from the SNES days, I also had more than half of the issues from the N64 days (we're talking like issues 28-120 or higher.) Nintendo's losing the dominant position in the market combined with NP's complete lack of objectivity (not quite complete, but it got really, really bad there for a while) led to me allowing my subscription to run out.
I subscribed to PSM for a while. I don't know if it is any more but at the time it was put out by a company that did a magazine called "Ultimate Gamer" or something like that. I actually liked this mag LOT when I had it, it was dirt cheap (this was the $1 an issue when you subscribe one I think.) It was light years better than OPM, but OPM had the demo disc, so naturally that's what everyone read.
Speaking of that "Ultimate Gamer" I don't remember much about it but I did buy a few issues. It wasn't bad. They did PC games too, which I thought was cool.
GamePro. Sad to say that I subscribed to this for two NON CONSECUTIVE years. Yeah, something actually made me reup. What a complete pile of crap. I have believe that it is responsible on its own for at least 5% of the stigmatized crap that we put up with as gamers simply because of the amount of gaming morons it generated in the early to mid 90s. I wonder if it still uses that ****ty
:|
rating system. Pfft, blow me GP. It doesn't get any worse than Game Pr-
OH Snap! that's right, it does!
GameInformer: I'd call this thing toilet paper, but it's not even fit for my asscheeks. The rotting corpse of the embodiment of sucktitude of that piece of **** store Funcoland. Gamestop isn't much better than FULand was back in the day, but it has improved. At one point 50% of their pages were full page ads, and probably another 10-15% of the "content" pages had some type of ad.
Computer Gaming World. Subscribed for two years, until my PC became too weak to run any of the games that were featured. Now I do have a capable PC but I don't really care to read it anymore. Not a bad mag, not spectacular, I don't miss it but I wouldn't turn anyone off of it based on what it was. I liked it better than PC Gamer but I've only read 1 or 2 of those.
Finally.....
Maximum PC. This is more of a Hardware/Mod magazine, but they do PC game reviews too. I LOVE this mag, but it is insanely expensive (Like 9.19 or something like that per issue.) I'm sure it's cheaper to subscribe. If you're a big pc hardware guy you could do worse. Of course if you're a big pc hardware guy you can get most of this information on your own with some research but it's nice to have the work done for you and presented in a comprehensive magazine format.