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[Troidal]

Also reviews where the three scores are something like 10, 1.5, and 6 really don't help out my purchasing decisions much. Maybe it'd be better if they just tossed the numbers completely and expanded the roundtable

I agree with this. It doesn't help at all.

I mean its natural that everyone has their own like/dislike, but when you see it in a magazine, then you wonder if it's really good or really bad.

 

[Sho Nuff]

For the love of all that is holy, someone please kill the Hsu and Chan page. It reads like an in-joke that's funny to a total of three people (all of whom work at the magazine).

Aside from that, I gots no beefs with EGM (other than that Seanbaby isn't quite as funny as his older web stuff, but whatever).

 

[Wendo]

Bah! Screw EGM! Game Players was where it was at!

 

[john tv]

For the love of all that is holy, someone please kill the Hsu and Chan page. It reads like an in-joke that's funny to a total of three people (all of whom work at the magazine).

Aside from that, I gots no beefs with EGM (other than that Seanbaby isn't quite as funny as his older web stuff, but whatever).

I think Hsu and Chan may have been reduced to a small one-panel thing. At least I didn't see anything more than that in the most recent issue I picked up at Kinokuniya (with the three next-gen controllers on the front).

 

[elektrotal]

you can get egm from kinokunia? where--on the floor with all the foreign books?

 

[AbeFroman]

I think Hsu and Chan may have been reduced to a small one-panel thing. At least I didn't see anything more than that in the most recent issue I picked up at Kinokuniya (with the three next-gen controllers on the front).

What? You have to buy it? Sheez, you get your GI comped.

 

[ghibli99]

"Print is dead."

Magazines were great in the days when you couldn't get this information any other way. In today's day and age, what purpose do videogame magazines serve, aside from the occasionally thoughtful editorial or tangible reading material for when you're sitting on the pot?

Nowadays, you get previews and reviews the minute they hit the press or net. GAF is a perfect example... the day games come out, you've got hundreds of people sharing their opinion on the retail version of the game. Granted, not all of them are useful, but you get some great insight weeks before you read about them in a magazine.

Or think about when E3 hits. It's like, hit the internet to see all the coverage as it's happening, or wait two months to read about it (and not as exhaustively covered) in a magazine.

I loved EGM back in the day (it's the first place I read about Ghouls'n Ghosts and Thunder Force II on the Sega Genesis), but it's been years since I read that mag, and yet somehow, I can still make good buying decisions.

 

[DjangoReinhardt]

Normally I wouldn't, but there's just so much bullshit here.

Let's do some math. New issue (January 06, #199). 33 games reviewed, 17 reviewers (7 staff, 10 freelancers). Let's estimate that a reviewer spends an average or 10 hours playing a game (very conservative, considering we also play multiplayer, online, etc.).

33 games x 3 reviewers per game x 10 hours per playthrough = 990 hours of gameplay.

990 hours / 17 reviewers = 58 hours playing review gamers per person.

Keep in mind that putting a magazine together is a full time job for the 7 staff people, and that 58 hours of gameplay time is in addition to the usual 9-5. Maybe now you can understand why excuses like "didn't have time" or we got the reviewable "too late" are more like valid reasons rather than excuses. If a game shows up four days before we're sending pages to the printer (keep in mind that we often just get a single copy of the game that three people have to share) we can: A) review it on 1up, B) review it on 1up and review it in the next issue, depending on release date timing, or C) half-ass it and crank out reviews based on the the first couple levels. We never choose option C.

Before you say, "but golden-age EGM had the same four reviewers on EVERY game WTFASAP!" I refer you to the math exercise above. Marinate on that 990 hours part for a bit. Maybe option C was more popular back then, I don't know, I wasn't around.


As for the list of games "reviewed on 1up" on page 136...of the 21 games on that list, I think we got like three of those in very late in the cycle (as in, "too late"). But they're all games that are going to come out while this issue is on newsstands. I don't see why it's so horrible that we'd let our readers know they can find reviews of 'em online.

===

Previews. If a page you're reading is devoted to a game that's not out yet, but the word "preview" doesn't appear somewhere at the top, then apparently it's not a preview. That's what I keep hearing. If that's the case, then yep, I guess we axed the previews section. But I can say that we still devote roughly the same amount of pages to delivering info about games that aren't out yet.

It sounds to me like:

1. The current incarnation of EGM isn't structurally able to compete with websites in terms of timeliness or coverage depth.

2. The leading magazine dedicated to videogame coverage doesn't budget enough time for its staff - the reviewers, no less! - to actually play games.

 

[SuperPac]

Magazines were great in the days when you couldn't get this information any other way. In today's day and age, what purpose do videogame magazines serve, aside from the occasionally thoughtful editorial or tangible reading material for when you're sitting on the pot?

Personally, I like them for historical information. It's a permanent, tangible record of the current state of video games, including advertising and reviews and interviews, etc. Internet sites are great and they have changed the way we get our news now, but sites can close down/consolidate, old screenshots often disappear from circulation, and since people can't find the content from back then in front of them they recall past events through a nostalgia filter (i.e. 1990's EGM was better than the current one!!!!!!).

Remember sites like Intelligent Gamer or the old old Next Generation Online? Those sites were great at the time. But when they went away, so did their content. I'd love to revisit those sites the way they were at the time, but you can't. This is the benefit of magazines. It's a gaming time capsule. And though this is a subjective opinion, the news and interviews and previews work better for me on a printed page. You don't have screenshot galleries to click through to. You don't have thousands of meandering words in a review. The writing's of a better quality in print than online. I don't visit all of the sites every day, so the monthly hit of info is perfect for me in case I've somehow missed something.

 

[Mike Works]

i like hsu and chan

 

[SuperPac]

I'm going to reiterate what Rod up there said and make it a bit more clear: back in the day, when they reviewed all those games? Very few of them got played for more than a few hours. Everyone who whines about how much better the reviews were when Ed Semrad et al were the only four folks reviewing every game every month is basically wishing for reviews based on the first few levels of a game and the press release.

QFT. When I started working there in 1994 I was horrified to see how long a game was played before the reviews were written. Sometimes for less than *5* minutes. And I mean, go back and read the reviews -- it was *clear* they didn't bother to put in more than a cursory glance at some of the games. But when the old staff was swapped out a few years later that changed completely.

People complaining that reviews aren't timely now as opposed to then -- when games were on cartridge it was a lot easier to get a complete version a month or even two in advance. The ROMs had to be done to go off to manufacturing, after all. It's not the situation now where Perfect Dark is final a week and a half before street date and if you miss it when you get it 3 days before deadline you're a *month* late with the review. Print's a harsh mistress sometimes.