Why are the best game magazines all British?

[EvilBoris]

They are in fashion I'll have you know

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showpost.php?p=1319456&postcount=88

[KMxRetro]

Well, I'd wear mine if it was that stylish.

[Kit]

Official UK Dreamcast Magazine and DC-UK were the prime of mags for me, though Super Play was also mint.

Now that was a great mag. Very humorous reviews and some of the best presentation I?ve seen - I even brought one in to show everyone when I was doing graphic design.

Quality wise the closest I?ve seen since is Pcformat but even that lags miles behind Official DC.

[Montaver]

The Official Playstation Magazine back in the day, I found the writing surprisingly good The massive article about the Emotion Engine was pretty jokes though I got in fisticuffs with some kid at school after that, as he was adament the PS2 would have 4 controller ports and I told him otherwise! I used to get SO excited about what would be on the demo disk. I can still picture their Soul Blade review (8/10) to this day, as it was one of my fave games of the generation. Anyone remember the Tekken 3 demo disk? Or the one with Ghost in the Shell demo? Infact a cookie for anyone who can remember, but there was one with a sort of 'sand based' FPS demo, and the competition was for a PS with a big yellow skull on the front, I wish I could rmember the name of that game. On the demo related front, the MGS Demo that came with ISS was awesome.

DC-UK was top quality too, I remember playing the Metropolis Street Racer demo (VXR on London I think), then buying the game and it being nowhere near as good ahah. When I read videogame mags these days though (which I VERY rare) I either get Edge or 'the other one' And even so, it feels like i've read most of it anyway online. Only mags I read these days ar Mens Health and Evo.

Just realised most of my post is abit off topic but felt like sharing

[[nothing]]

As much as I love GamesTM and Retro Gamer (and to a lesser extent, Edge), I sure miss these magazines:

Maximum, MegaTech, MEGA, Mean Machines, Sega Saturn Magazine, Super Play and ACE.

[MikeRox]

DC-UK was top quality too, I remember playing the Metropolis Street Racer demo (VXR on London I think), then buying the game and it being nowhere near as good ahah.

Ah, you mean with all the wheelspinning and burnouts and crap you could do with them fantastic sound effects of the wheels not managing to grip the surface. With the orange beastie off the box around a part of Tokyo. All of that was missing from the finished game That demo came with Official Dreamcast Magazine I think. Only Demo I ever remember getting on DC-UK was Fur Fighters which was a different demo to the one included with ODCM.

KMxRetro, it's not just you that doesn't "get" Smash Bros, and I'm a great big Nintendo fanboy. >_<

[Geoff D]

I used to love EGM circa the early 90s; they used to do very cool things, like have breakdowns of character moves, combos & strategies for Street Fighter 2 when it was still only an arcade machine & the like. It was a great source of gaming opinion & info, rather than rebadged press releases. It was also really thick & weighty & not just full of adverts like it is now.

[noobish hat]

i'm with montaver. PSM (and it will never be OPM in my mind) was one of the greatest (except towards the end of course). I remember my dad used to buy it for me and my brother every month, except the playstation was actually mine, so if he annoyed me i wouldn't let him play the demo. my favourite ever was the first one i got i think, with gta, broken sword II demos on it. we must have watched the trailer for final fantasy VII about a hundred times, until my 4 year old brother snapped the disc (we still tried to get it working XD). thankfully that video appeared on a later disc when it went platinum. the magazine was very funny and remains a favourite.

CVG was also great, not just when it had the freeplay pages, although that was a particularly good period, with lylat wars articles and yoshi's story on the cover, anyone remember the april's fools gags? of course there was the naked lara croft cheat, but i think my friend and i spent a good hour or two trying to activate a joke cheat in fifa or something; you had to score a hat trick and then bounce the ball off the cross bar to unlock all kinds of unlikely characters - ridiculous. i also recall an article about an in production VR suit, which was later to be revealed as one of the writers with bits of circuit boards and tin foil sellotaped to him.
it went a bit crap after that, during the dreamcast period, but i felt that one of it's best eras was the one that came right after. the one that had an issue with three double pages of a gamers bedroom in the past present and future. good artwork, articles, and funny. i remember going ape **** when i saw the first screenshot of wind waker - it looked just like link to the past or link's awakening but in 3d, absolute magic.

honourable mention has to go to gameboy color magazine, or whatever it was called. i think it ran from the launch of the color til 2003 or something. there was just something special about a whole magazine devoted to a system other mags relegated to just a page or two.

that's just my two cents, probably rambled a bit, but with really special mags like PSM and N64 magazine, with the humour and injokes, you really feel that you are part of something, maybe that's what's missing from the US mags, i wouldn't know i haven't read any, but one thing's for sure, with the rise of the internet, paper-based mags need it more than ever to stay afloat.