What's your choice?

[CamFu]

I usually like to pick up a gaming magazine once a month. For a while it was just EGM and PC Gamer. Review, Previews, Articles, and Rumors and what usually keep me coming back to pick up these magazines. But lately, I’ve had no desire to buy EGM. I was just so pumped up to get the Halo 2 edition. A lot had to do with what was done with the Second Coming of Halo. I will be truthful with you guys, I was pumped for this game. I loved Halo:CE and the second one promised so much more, I tried to follow it as much as possible. I wouldn’t say that I fell into the hype of it, mainly because I didn’t have the access to the media as this game was getting hyped. But once I got it, it wasn’t as great as it was told it was going to be. No big deal happens to the best of games (Mario, Zelda:WW). But then again, it’s all opinion. This brings me to my question. What review magazine/site do you guys trust the most? I will list the ones that I have read and explain why or why not I do/don’t trust them.

EGM: Used to love this magazine, until recently. Halo 2 got 10 straight across, Game of the Year. Yet, Resident Evil and Metroid Prime 2 both were gigged on little problems with the game. But in my opinion, Halo 2 is just more of the same. Something that MP2 was knocked down for. Commenting on how Resident Evil 4 would have been perfect if Leon could have strafed. Come on, you don’t think that Capcom thought of that? It adds to the effect of the game… like DooM3, you shouldn’t be able to use your flashlight and gun at the same time, it adds so much more to the game.

GamePro: Where do I start with this magazine. Just Horrid! I just hate their reviews, they write childish articles. It feels like their opinion is influenced by the media. I rarely pick this one up… if ever. Every time I pick this up to read, I feel like I’m opening a coloring book. RE:4 Graphics… 4.5/5? What is that about? Idiots!

Surge: This one if fairly new, but when I picked up the second edition, I was reading through it, and they considered Nintendo to be “kiddy” in one of their articles. That pretty much sealed that I wasn’t going to be picking up this magazine again.

Nintendo Power: Another Magazine that I despise. I trust about 0% of what they write. You can tell that they are directing their humor and articles toward the younger crowd. This can’t be helping people Nintendo with their whole age group. I actually took the time once to email into them and tear them apart on their writing, never got anything back. Strange.

GameStar: Another new magazine. Picked up the first edition of it, and loved it. Loved how it came with a CD that has previews/music/wallpaper/extras. Liked the articles, liked the reviews, liked the gadget section, pretty much liked everything they covered in this magazine. So I kept picking it up. But I’ve started to notice that they are being to become the Stuff or FHM of the Video Game Magazine. So I’m getting turned away from it.

OXM: Don’t trust any magazine that dedicates itself to one console (including NP). So I don’t think I have ever bought it before.

PSM: See above.

Play: Out of all the magazines, I think I like this one the most. I never knew it was even out there until I was in Iraq and somebody got it in the mail. I picked it up and got hooked. It’s more then just the writing in it. It’s how the magazine is put together. One big thing is their art style. If you have picked up this magazine before, you know what I’m talking about. In most magazines, when people have their artist go to work, it looks just like the video game. But in play, they add something extra. Hard to explain, since I’m not an artist. But I do appreciate what they do. I haven’t read it for a while, since I can’t find it around here. So I haven’t read it since MP2, Halo 2, RE:4, or GTA:SA have hit the shelves. I just hope that they don’t fall into the same category that EGM has. I really do like this magazine.

Now, lets go to websites. I’m not going to get into all the extras that the websites have to offer (i.e. Message Boards, Email, DL, Extras), just my opinion on their reviews and news coverage.

IGN.com: I would have to say that when it comes to reviews, they come the closest to my own opinion. So I usually trust what they have to say. Only downfall is that they don’t update enough for my liking. They are getting better though. I know that news is slow in the video game business at times, but come on; there is always something to talk about.

GameSpot.com: They are about average with reviews. They never really jump out at me and show me anything different. But I do like how they update their news when they get it. I can check it any time of the day, and bam, something new is there. It keeps me coming back. I also like their previews, they usually keep them coming pretty regularly.

GameSpy.com: This place is just to jumbled for me. So I don’t visit them that much. I’m very easily distracted… oh a pretty colors.

Gamerankings.com: Still don’t know what is so big about this place. I see so many people point out how great a game is, and compare it to GR.com. It’s useless to me.

Bluesnews.com: This place is cool. It doesn’t have anything it really does itself, but it directs me to everywhere I need to go. So if I want to read something on hardware or software, I usually jump there to find the reviews/news for it.

Fileplanet.com: I don’t go to this place for reviews? Does anybody? Or do you guys just go for the dl? I know it’s popular, but mostly for downloading.

Last and not least TV.

Since I don’t have cable, I don’t have a solid opinion on some of the shows that are aired. Heck, I don’t even know all of them. So I’m just going to list 2 of them.

SpikeTV: I’ve watched a couple of game reviews on show. Seems like it’s too main stream for my blood. But if I catch it, I usually watch it because I don’t get to see a lot of video game in the news today. Don’t put any faith in it though.

G4TechTV: Never seen it. I’ve heard a lot of complaints on it though. Once again, I’m guessing it’s very mainstream. Don’t know though.

I have other places that I visit. But those seem to be the most popular ones on the net today. I also didn’t list PC Gaming Magazines, because I wanted to just stick with Console Gaming.

What do you guys think is the best pace to visit or the best magazine to buy? Why do you guys trust it? Do you guys even trust reviews put out by the press?

Usually, I don’t base my purchase off of reviews anyway. I will give it a rental first (or just be an idiot and buy the game because of past ones… Turok Evolution!). The main reason is that I know that even though these are considered “professional opinions”, that’s all they are too me, just opinions. And we all have different ones. And I will like something different then everybody else.

[Null]

EGM is the one i read, they have some stupid people there, and some biased. but its still a fun magazine to read. and PC gamer is the other one i read.

However when it comes to trusting reviews. there is only 1 place. and its not a magazine.

gamerankings.com takes the average of all the game review sites as well as the average of magazine reviews and gives you a score that i find to be quite accurate.

[Vampyr]

I do read Nintendo Power...it's just something that keeps coming back from my childhood, and I can't bring myself to unsubscribe form it. I can tell it's geared for younger people, but I don't mind. It gives me all the info I need about Nintendo Products.

I also read GamePro, but only because I got it for free. It was decent. It was my offline source for games other that Nintendo ones.

Here are the websites that I frequent:

Gamespot: I just love this site. It has the most beautiful layout of any game site I've seen before, a huge community, a lot of user options and ways to customize it, tons of message boards, great reviews, a huge database, and a lot of pictures. The only thing I don't like is that you have to pay to download trailers...which brings me to the next site:

GameTrailers.com: Just awesome. All the videos I could ever want.

Advanced-Gamer.net: The site I work for. I post my articles there, and they are some of the best ones on the entire web. If I do say so myself.

GameTavern.net: I go there for the people!

GameRankings.com: Pretty much anything I need to know about a game can be found here.

[Jonbo298]

When it was just TechTV, it was a much better show for things outside of gaming. When Comshaft (yes yes, hahaha, I made a funny ) bought TechTV and turned it into the BS that is G4TechTV, I lost faith in the show. Occasionally watched it for The Screen Savers but its just not the same anymore.

I used to read EGM quite often but just stopped after awhile. Probably were becoming a little "weird" to me. It's my favorite anything except PC magazine but I like PC Gamer for PC Reviews.

[GameMaster]

I used to get Nintendo Power a couple years ago but then I stopped subscribing for no reason. Now I get two copies of EGM each month for free because of those magazine links that were posted here. I don't read them though. Too much junk and advertisements. I prefer internet sites because it's like receiving a daily subscription. You can get the news and reviews for free without all the junk pages, etc.

[dropCGCF]

I always liked reading Tips and Tricks.

[Acebot44]

None.

I have about a 4ft wide 3 ft high stack of old OXMs, EGMs, Gamepros, OPMs, and XBNs. I didnt even read 70% of the last quarter of Magizines I got so I no longer have any subscriptions. All I need to know comes from the interweb.

[Stonecutter]

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.

[Neo]

I prefer gamespot over ign. Gamespot's interface is much easier to navigate through. You can easily select the game you want through a scrolling window. IGN feels like a big mess to me. Some of their dvd reviews are worthwhile though.

EGM is probably my favorite magazine, though I also get gameinformer. I like the letters to the editor as well as EGM's Sean Baby reviews. They have a high humor factor.

Back in the day I subscribed to Nintendo Power. I remember the 1st issue with SMB2 on the cover. And I remember the little newsletters that were NP's forerunner.

[Stray_Bullet]

PSM had good humor and art. And, since I was only looking for playstation games while I read the magazine, it had all the reviews I needed.

[Teuthida]

Was getting EGM and Gamepro for free at my old address. Before that used to buy EGM every so often. First one I got was when cube and gba were revealed...it had about 4 times as many pages as a normal one...though most of it was highlighting all of the PS2 games.

[gekko]

I don't mind EGM, don't really like it. I liked Official Dreamcast Magazine. I liked Next Gen. EGM is just the only decent choice these days.

But usually, I just use IGN for movies, and news. I'm not big into previews, sometimes for a play test like after E3, but usually if you follow the news, I don't bother with previews.

As for reviews, I usually go with word of mouth, from people I respect. I don't really care if the graphics don't hold up to some big-budget game, or if the sound is so great Dolby uses it for marketing, I'm all for it, but I also like weird games, and you usually hear about those from the few guys who buy them.