Your all time favourite Gaming Magazine

So yeah. What the title says.

My personal favourite is the #1 Australian Games magazine; Hyper. It manages to perfectly strike a balance between hardcore analysis and simple opinions with reviews and previews. It has a brilliant sense of dark, twisted humour at times, and has some of the best Games Feature writers I have seen doing work for them, going into simple histories of game series, to their opinions on various facets of the games industry and their experiences working with it.

I liked Official U.S. Playstation Magazine (owned by Ziff-Davis, a side mag to EGM, but canned after 10 years of issues), Diehard Gamefan (shame the boss did NOT know how to handle money), and Game Players (sadly I only had 2 issues - one in its heyday, and one in its failed rebirth as Ultra Game Players).

edited 19th Aug '11 1:19:08 AM by nomuru2d

I actually used to like Game Informer back in the early, early noughties. At the time, their reviews were actually reasonably concise, their previews didn't eat up as much of the magazine, and they actually had a meaningful, linear review scale where a 6 wasn't a mark of shame.

Alas, those days are gone and I don't like them so much any more.

Consoles + is the French magazine still alive I consistently like the most. Joypad was good too, until around the 2000s with the change of all the staff and magazine design.

The Sega-dedicated magazine Megaforce was my absolute favourite though, but it sunk along with Sega at the end of the Saturn era.

edited 19th Aug '11 7:26:50 AM by AceNoctali

PSN for its sense of humor and bikini spread issues, Tips an Tricks for its wonderfully compressed but usefull strategies and "Hey look it's not just and inflated bit of promotional art" covers, and OPM for the free demo discs. God i loved those demo discs.

Computer Gaming world for their demo disks (mmm) and their amusing editorials.

PSW and Play. Can't be bothered to say why.

PC Gamer for me, really.

N Gamer. I've been reading them back when they were N64 Magazine (and later NGC Magazine) and their bad reviews always crack me up. That being said, it appears to have slightly decayed a bit.

They gave the japanese version of Xenoblade (a game I have preordered and which will be with me soon) a 77%, but they averted 8.8 for me as they added that those who are fluent in japanese should add at least 10% to that; they said it's because they didn't really get the story, or at least the finer parts of it, of the game. Now that it's coming out in Europe, I'm expecting something significantly higher.

To put it in perspective, a game rated 85%+ is considered a must-buy. So they will likely rate it somewhere around 82-92% now that they don't have the story issue.

edited 19th Aug '11 4:31:00 PM by Folt

My personal faves would have to be EGM and Nintendo Power. EGM was probably the closest thing the Western market had to Famitsu. Of course, they were a bit better back in the day, but they're still good reads with a good amount of info on upcoming games and the like.

Pre N64 Era Nintendo Power, hands down.

PS 1 and 2 era Playstation Magazine just for the Swimsuit editions and the odd bits of humor here and there (I loved their Nester Expy, who's name escapes me at the moment, as well as the Smart Bomb sprite comics. Its Machinima in comic form.)

edited 19th Aug '11 6:05:29 PM by Schitzo

Mid-to-End of Game Players. Not sure about the coverage, but damn if the zaniness was hilarious. They had a column about suggesting game ideas which I think started semi-humorously, but then just devolved into insanity with people trying to suggest the craziest games ever. Not to mention the storyline involving a 300-ft. tall, three-eyed ape god called Gazuga plotting to take over the world.

Nintendo Power was awesome, GBC/GBA era especially. I remember being so excited for the Game Cube premiere issue, with previews for Melee and Pikmin and such.

I read Game Informer, sometimes EGM whenever they release the odd issue to the stands. Truth be told though I mostly use websites like this one, Gamespot, a few random professional and non=professional reviews, or fansites to help me decide what to buy these days; paper media just isn't as fast or efficient as it used to be, especially considering what they advertise has become highly reliant on the internet to thrive.

Now as for a magazine I LOATHE? PC Gamer, hands down. Only thing those guys honestly care about is the specs on what they run. It's the only logical explanation as to how games like Crysis 1 or Supreme Commander got insanely high scores, yet a lot of other games get thrashed for arbitrary reasons.

edited 21st Aug '11 8:40:11 AM by SgtRicko

x4 Do they still do those swimsuit issues? I haven't seen them in a while now.

edited 20th Aug '11 6:24:14 PM by BetaRay

Game Informer all the way, buddy! Admittedly, though, it's partly cause they have them right at GameStops.

Game Informer.

It has nothing to do with me being friends with Tim Turi and Dan Ryckert, I swear!

I don't usually buy gaming magazines, but the one I have the most issues of is EGM.

PSM, then and now, but especially the 2003-2005 era. Fuckin' wacky.

If we do a topic on worst Gaming Magazine, I nominate Gamepro.

As for best, probably EGM.

EGM is the worst imo. But Game Pro is just as bad.

Wait wait wait... old EGM or new?

Actually, I would like to nominate a runner up for my #1 Gaming Mag, another Australian Magazine known as Total Gamer. It was an A5 format magazine that was placed into the same categories as stuff like Disney Adventure, K-Zone and D-Mag. However, it quickly became unique. How? It became BATSHIT INSANE. Making some truly demented articles and images, it quickly became a very unique experience. And yet it still had very honest opinions and some great content, made better by it's twisted sense of humour. However, that was it's downfall sadly. It only lasted 27 Issues, as, again, it was placed in the A5 category, and thus going in a very awkward demographic with the around 10-13 year old kids who were buying it. It had MUCH more mature content than what was suitable for that demographic. I mean, while the other aforementioned mags were having their shit reviews about how the new Beyblades or Dragonball game was "Totally rad!", Total Gamer was making detailed references to stuff like Ultima, Deus Ex, and System Shock, and talking about Jack Thomson going on a rampage where he force fed broken Mario Sunshine disks to a choir, and a Joke Metal Gear timeline where Snake and Big Boss get into a destructive argument over if Mc Chicken is made of Donkey Meat. And there were times where they pandered to the younger crowd, and you could tell the parts when they did that pandering. It really stood out. And admittedly, I hated the craziness when I was younger, but looking back now, it was great.

After it ended, alot of the team stayed on to make a new magazine: Nintendo Gamer, which was in A4 format. It was void of all the creativity that Total Gamer had, contained very bland reviews and features, and was generally mediocre. It lasted 4 Issues before getting canned. However, some of the best are doing work for Hyper, which I greatly approve, my favourite writer being Dan Stains. He became known, among other things, for his discussions on flawed morality in games, and his deep hatred of Final Fantasy VII and Gill from Street Fighter 3 (His notes on Gill a character battle between Gill and Alpha-152, are utterly brilliant. I can share them on an appropriate thread if anyone wants).

Ah yes I remember Total Gamer. I started reading it when I was 10, but sadly I only caught the last several issues. I have very fond memories of reading magazines like K-Zone as a kid but even back then I could tell that they had a sort of fakeness to them, like they were too afraid to write actual reviews under the assumption that kids cant handle actual content and opinions. Then Total Gamer came along. Finally a kids magazine that felt like the writers were talking to you, not at you. I remember loving just how funny and witty everything was, instead of it just being a 100 page commercial booklet disguised as a magazine, it was like reading K-Zone with balls. They would even call kids out on things in the letters they sent in, something mags like K-Zone and Mania would NEVER do. My personal fav being some kid writing in asking if it were true that Nintendo was making an SUV with Wii's (Revolution at the time) built into it only to have his letter cut of with a reply that pretty much said "you know full well that isn't going to happen." Again, other kids mags would never allow that. Also due to it not being so limited they were able to talk about some really zany stuff and report some really funny stories, my all time favorite being the story of the gang war that broke out in Ireland over a Play Station. When I was 13 I threw out all my TG's thinking "I've read them a million times, might as well make room", still regret doing so. TG was around for such a short time, but it was still the best. I only hope that one day another mag like it comes along for kids who want to read something with actual content in it. My runner up would be n.Revolution. My main reason for being so into magazines a kid was the fact we didn't get the internet until 09, so my only source of info was magazines and the school computers which had pretty much everything blocked. So I would love reading through an issue of n.Rev getting as much info on games like Mario Galaxy even if it was a bit behind due to it being imported from the UK.

edited 25th Jul '15 5:23:15 AM by Mantis128

My all time favorite would be a very specific one: Official Australian Play Station Magazine...the cover's gone but there's a reason this is the best. We were entering a golden age of gaming, one that would arguably not be seen again until nearly a decade later. Soulcalibur, Gran Turismo, Resident Evil 2 and Duke Nukem were covered. Reviewed were Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Street Fighter, Time Crisis, Ace Combat, G-Police, Video Game,Final Fantasy VII, Grand Theft Auto, Bloody Roar, Fighting Force, Resident Evil, Broken Sword and Wipe Out, phew that is a lot of games. I learned of oddities like Steel Reign, Mass Destruction, Courier Crisis, K1: The Arena Fighters, Treasures of the Deep and Masters of Terras Kasi. Even the letters, fan art and cheats were of high standard. They were also the first, or one of the first, to have demo discs and they outdid themselves with this one for their generosity, with FFVII, Ace Combat, Broken Sword, and Tomb Raider being highlights and giving a preview of things to come with the types of games we could try before we buy. There may be better collections of games, or stronger titles to review, but in my mind this was a time where they got utterly everything right, and is fondly remembered.