In-Depth: What The (Game) Papers Say - May 2010, Pt. 2

Author: by Kevin Gifford

[Magazine veteran -- and proud ferret-breeder -- Kevin "Magweasel" Gifford takes an analytical look at the latest video game magazines, including an in-depth pros and cons roundup for the new EGM.] It'd probably be improper for me to smother the new EGM in adulations, considering that I have a four-page feature article in there with my name on it. I wrote that article -- a full-on retrospective of EGM's history -- just after Christmas 2008, for that fabled February '09 issue of EGM that never got printed. It was Ziff Davis Media that paid me for it, not Steve Harris's new outfit, but still, you know... The inaugural print issue has been out for a while and there's already been a great deal of discussion online about it, so I'll just lay out my likes and dislikes in list form. Likes: - The paper is certainly the most high-quality of the market. The cover's very thick and sturdy, and there's no bleed-through at all in the internal pages, something that bothers me a lot about GamePro and other mags. - The visual look picks up right where the old EGM left off, with pretty, smart-looking, uncluttered design. - The reviews are longform and thoughtful as opposed to the oldschool EGM's little paragraphs, although again that's where EGM was going towards the end anyway. - The features are certainly more modern in style, concentrating on long interviews or in-depth looks at trends or game series. The piece with David Jaffe is really interesting, for example -- sort of the way interviews in Play/GameFan could be if they were more thematically written. Similarly, the piece on games going back to 2D and nostalgic roots could've been boring but is instead spiced up tremendously by quotes from all sorts of industry folks. - Lots of one-page commentary columns, which I (and likely not too many others, I must admit) like. - No article in the magazine is split up by advertisements, something people always complained about with the old EGM. Dislikes: - The page size is just a smidge less wide than standard US game mags. - Most of the reviews have a "second opinion" paragraph from another writer, similar to how Game Informer does it. However, like with GI, it's pretty rare (in my opinion, anyway) that these second opinions add a really new perspective or something that wasn't covered in the main review text. - I'm not sure that adding Sushi-X back in was such a great idea. I mean, they took him out of EGM and put him into GameNOW for a reason, right? - There's a news piece on Metacritic and its effect on game development and the media. It's a fine piece, and one well-balanced with quotes and all that, but it's also territory that both GI and GamePro have done fairly recently. - The Red Steel 2 review calls the game "Red Steel Redemption" right in the main article title. Presumably someone had Red Dead Redemption on their mind during the page design and made a typo -- or maybe they were going to review Red Dead Redemption in that section and it fell through, I dunno. I'm sure the editors saw that mistake immediately after getting their printed copies and were all like "Oh God, how could we miss that?!" I know this because that sort of thing happened to me nearly every month during my Newtype USA days. Overall, the new EGM takes all the good things the old mag had going and augments them with a lovely package and some yet-smarter writing. It's a magazine that, like the old EGM at its peak, is truly engaging from start to finish, which isn't something I can say about the new GameFan. I wish it great success, and while much of EGM's future hinges on its pioneering online strategy, I'm glad that Harris still cares enough about print to give us such a nice piece of work. Anyway, click onward to check out the other mags that crossed my desk the past two weeks. GamePro June 2010 Cover: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 I continue to be amazed by GP's design. There's really nothing like it out there in game-land, even with the two new mags that debuted this month. Games like Limbo and Halo: Reach that would get standard previews in other mags receive incredible treatments here thanks to the dint of smart, clean visual design. The writing itself is the best around as usual, too, with top marks undoubtedly going to their history of GameStop that interviews everyone from the senior VP of merchandising to "Kurt," an employee in Mississippi annoyed about the quotas his bosses make him keep. It's neither a fluff piece nor a slam piece, and that's what makes it a nearly perfect example of what "game journalism" can be in the right hands. Keep it up, folks. Official Xbox Magazine June 2010 Cover: XCOM By far the most striking of the month's covers, and the feature inside is both solid and in the classic Future tradition. That other Future tradition -- smaller features on fascinating topics I never thought of before -- also continues, with a final retrospective of Xbox 1 online play and a piece on professional video-game coaches, a service that I hardly even knew existed before now. PlayStation: The Official Magazine June 2010 Cover: Prince of Persia: The Forgotton Sands And along similar lines over at PTOM, we've got a lovely long cover feature -- who knew that Jake Gyllenhaal played Prince of Persia (the first one) as a kid, for example -- and a couple of great secondary features. One of them is worthy of particular note; it's a strategy guide to getting all the trophies and endings in Heavy Rain. Yes, I know what you're saying, strategy guides make for horrible print-mag material, but at least they did it up in an eye-catching fashion, eh? Plus, as someone who hasn't played the game yet, getting spoiled to bits on it is oddly engrossing -- like, they really ask you to do that in the game? The other feature -- a hilarious account of doing QA work for Acclaim during their "heyday" -- is even better and I wish it got more than three pages. PC Gamer June 2010 Cover: StarCraft 2 PCG's visit to CCP Games, a rambling 8-page profile of the utter maniacs in Iceland behind one of the most revolutionary MMOs out there, is my pick for best feature of the month. I haven't been this enthralled with a dev-visit piece in ages -- it's one of the few where I really felt "Dang, I wish I worked there" after reading it. There's no author credit so I'm assuming that the piece is borrowed from PC Gamer UK, but either way, bravo, gentlemen. The real core of this issue lies in StarCraft 2 beta coverage, which seems quite nice but I'm not sure it's offering a lot that isn't online elsewhere. Retro Gamer Issue 76 Cover: Xbox Live Game Room Most of Imagine Publishing's game mags -- this one, GamesTM, Play, 360, and X360 -- are now available in first-run format on the iPhone/iPad. According to the ad copy, you can subscribe to each for 6 or 12 months, purchase individual issues, and even share 'em virtually with friends. I don't have any Apple gadgets so I can't test any of this out for myself, but if anyone has access, I'd love to hear reports. Anyway, this issue's cover piece on the Game Room stuff is nice, but it's the making-ofs that steal the show for me -- one on Masaya Matsuura's Vib-Ribbon, and another on Rogue, the original, er, Rogue-like text-based RPG. There's also a look at the Apple II's gaming capabilities that was, I think, long overdue. Game Developer May 2010 Cover: Tales of Monkey Island Gah, there's already a postmortem on this one?! I haven't even gotten around to buying Chapter One yet, much less all five! Where does the time go, I ask you? There's a nice piece inside featuring Ron Gilbert playing through The Secret of Monkey Island for the first time in 15 years, as well as a collection of crunch-time anecdotes that made my skin crawl in places. Maybe freelance writing isn't such a bad career after all... [Kevin Gifford used to breed ferrets, but now he's busy running Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots of publishers and game companies.]