GamesTM issue 44

[MonkeyWrench]

ha ha well spotted, if I was yer m8 I would be getting a few lawyers on them!

GamesTM is almost as lazy as Sony with that

Well, my mate is up from Bath at the moment and I met up with him for a drink yesterday. He thinks its hilarious they stole his logo and was >< this close to sending Imagine a nasty email when someone from Future Publishings legal team let him know they have sent GamesTM a stern letter requesting that if they use any of their material they get credit and asking that PSM2 gets a mention in the next issue

The funny thing is my mate said that the only version of the logo on the net is a small jpg, which is not suitable for print media. So, the art ed at GamesTM must have actually traced the original logo to make a version of high enough quality to print

[Zed]

Mags seem to nick things all the time. I was flicking thru the Official Xbox360 mag and spotted them ripping off the hand signals for CQB, which i'm sure are copywritted from some SWAT manual, as our team has learnt them in the past. Of course it was uncredited, and the implication was they had created them themselves. Of course a layman wouldnt know, but i thought that was shocking.

So i suppose this GamesTM is one of the ones created during the "transition", and things will resume normally soon? Otherwise bad for sales, well maybe... are sales worse than usual?

[erhgiez]

Ive just read the Shdow Hearts review and from the comments they said the score does not seem justified "more than likely one of the best rpg's you will play of this generation, but it does not build on covenant" 6/10 seems a bit low

[MattyD]

Does anyone know who wrote the Test Drive Unlimited preview? I find the game about as appealing as a taste test at the Ryvita factory but the preview is the best-written article in GamesTM for a long time.

Best of all, it doesn't have a three-paragraph intro that waffles on about nothing in particular, like most of the other previews and longer reviews do.

[PeteJ]

Best of all, it doesn't have a three-paragraph intro that waffles on about nothing in particular, like most of the other previews and longer reviews do.

Indeed - this is one thing gTM has done ever since the first issue. Some of the previews in this particular one do not actually give any information until the final two paragraphs. The Alone in the Dark preview, for example.

I like the magazines upbeat style (which is actually quite downbeat in this one!), however they are really missing a trick by having so much dead space. A magazine my definition doesn't have a lot of room to play with, so why waste 50%+ on each feature with a lengthy introduction?

I've done approximately 30 reviews for ntsc-uk and read hundreds produced by the team, and by and large I'd say the reviews that jump straight into the detail work a lot better than those which take ages to setup. There are exceptions, but the author needs to take a pretty cunning line to pull it off.

At a guess, I'd say when gTM previewed Alone in the Dark they had a few new screens but not a lot of information. Fair play, it is a big game and worth covering - however the 'hook' in the text doesn't come until the final paragraph, at which point the reader has probably lost interest. With little information it'd be better to give it quickly and then muse about the history of the series and what it means...

imo anyway

Don't have a problem with the Wii jokes - they were very good getting the name mentioned at all (Edge was released at a similar time and didn't). The jokes were funny to begin with, when they published it!

[MattyD]

I have written reviews extensively myself and I agree, that jumping straight in and getting the point is more effective. I like to think that, as a regular reader of such magazines, I don't need to be told about the 'state of the industry' and 'the transition between generations' over and over. There's a place for that in the news and editorial content.

[Brats]

Padding is something I agree Games TM can be guilty of. I remember one review of a retro compilation had seperate reviews for each game, and yet in four of the games in mentioned that the graphics weren't up to today's standards.

And many of the previews do smack of taking limited news available on the internet and stretching it out into a two page feature. I do like the videogames maths bits though .

They also suffer from it in the news articles. It seems lots of the news must end with an off the cuff comment, usually along the lines of 'still if so-and-so does such-and-such, then we can't wait!'.