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['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Right-o, let's get straight to business, covering all the game mags of the past two weeks. Apologies in advance if I'm a bit curt for this one -- I'm dealing with a nasty cold at the moment, and my chief motivation right now is "get this done and cocoon myself in bed as soon as possible."

Game Informer April 2010

Cover: Portal 2 (2 covers)

Portal 2 info is, of course, all over the Internet at this point. The original GI article is nice and all -- really, it's one of those games where the visuals tell the whole story in the early-preview-coverage stage. I'm not sure that the text answers the one question that, in my mind anyway, should've been asked first: How will Valve take a game based on a gimmick that was just engaging enough to build a 5-hour game around and make it the crux of another, "significantly longer" title?

Otherwise, it's a fairly typical issue for a fairly dead chunk of the year. To make up for the relative lack of games to review, this issue's Connect front section extends through exactly half of the 100-page magazine, although nothing in it grabbed me too violently this month.

GamePro April 2010

Cover: George Washington staring at you

I'm not wholly sure that a mugshot of one of our bold nation's founding fathers is Newsstand Gold for a video game magazine, but the article inside about Civilization V is pretty fantastic. Showing how the main developers got on to the project, it goes over what's new with the game and goes beyond laundry-listing the features and asks the devs some remarkably in-depth design questions. It's like a case history in Game Design 101 -- which dovetails nicely with the rest of the mag, which has a ton of indie scene/game-school coverage.

It may be time to stop saying that articles like this get printed despite being GamePro, and start saying that it happens because it's GamePro.

The "history of NeoGAF" article is also great, despite the fact that my opinion of the forum is closer to Denis Dyack's than most. (I am admittedly bitter when it comes to Internet communities. Keep in mind that I had to deal with the anime community, even grabbier and more ungrateful than their gamer counterparts, for three years straight. It was a full-time job in itself.)

Official Xbox Magazine April 2010

Cover: Fallout dude staring at you

Fallout: New Vegas is the big story across three Future mags this month, although OXM's Halo: Reach feature is a bit more prominent once you go between the covers, so to speak. OXM also gives full feature treatment to their Final Fantasy XIII review, which is more than P:TOM did -- funny, since PTOM gave it a perfect score (five stars) and OXM didn't (9.0).

PC Gamer April 2010

Cover: Fallout dude staring down at you derisively

If I had to choose, I'd say that PC Gamer's New Vegas coverage is a bit better. Both features are the same style, that Future house look with tons of trivia-laden sidebars and all that, but PCG's is a bit more engaging, somehow. Maybe it's their choice of screenshots that's subliminally biasing my opinion.

Best part of this issue: The "MMO tour" piece, which is written in a pretty non-critical tone but still delivers a neat progress report-type look into a selection of online games.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine April 2010

Cover: Kratos staring at you

It's an exclusive review of GOWIII this issue, one that extends over 10 pages and uses only 5 screenshots -- each splashed out across an entire spread, the review text woven around the imagery. It's a cool, cool effect; one of the most memorable review article designs I've seen in game-mag-dom.

Fallout: New Vegas has a full-on feature in this mag, too, but GOWIII understandably takes precedence on the cover.

Retro Gamer Issue 74

Cover: Ghosts 'n Goblins

Stuart Campbell, who seems to spend his off-days trolling classic-console forums when he isn't busy writing for RG, is back with a big look at all the GnG games, including a WonderSwan release that I wasn't aware of before.

There's also a lovely piece on game controllers, including a sidebar featuring an ergonomics expert calling the Atari 2600 joystick "truly appalling."

Beckett Massive Online Gamer May/June 2010

Cover: Spock staring at you

From an interview with the "FFXI Community Team" (exactly who's being interviewed is never identified) to an in-depth feature about what attending a wedding in World of Warcraft is like, this month's issue of MOG makes me wonder if people buy this only for the in-game item codes or what. It's admittedly not all bad, though -- a feature on the Chinese online game industry is focused on user share and financials over boring game descriptions, and it makes for much better reading as a result.

Game Developer March 2010

Cover: Uncharted 2

This is the GDC issue -- you can tell because the mag's suddenly over 100 pages long -- and the cover this time around foreshadows Uncharted 2's major wins at the Game Developers Choice Awards a few days back. The postmortem is nice, but even better is the return of "Coding Tricks," small anecdotes about hacks and kludges game devs have devised to get their stuff to work. I'm just technically oriented to understand it all, and some of it's downright hilarious.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

What's the most scathing video-game review you ever read? I don't mean Angry Video Game Nerd-type stuff; that's meant to be comedy. I'm talking about the sort of review that rips the game completely apart from end to stinking end, one where you can feel the seething resentment from every letter of every word on the page. Roger Ebert's good at writing movie reviews like that, but surely we've got someone like that for us in our industry, don't we?

I'd argue that the closest we ever got was Scorpia. I'm not going to call her the best game critic ever, but when she didn't like a game, she really didn't like it.

I bring this up because I was thumbing through some old Computer Gaming World magazines and came across her review of Ultima VIII, released by Origin in early 1994. She wrote about...ahh, how about I just let you read it for yourself? It starts on full blast and didn't stop until three pages later. (Despite her opinions, she still wrote three more pages of strategy coverage for Ultima VIII in the same issue. It must've been a hard month for her.)

CGW, as I've written about before, was an extremely well-written magazine...or, at least, a very densely-written one. Reviews of big games would often go into the thousands of words, analyzing every little detail of the RPGs, adventures and simulations of the day. In the very early issues -- back when Scorpia was still writing under her real name -- you would have these incredibly complex rundowns of strategy and computer intelligence in games that were literally written in Applesoft BASIC. No American magazine gives a more intimate view of what the industry was like in the '80s, and no writer does a better job than Scorpia in representing how the hardcores saw computer RPGs back then.

That's probably why her review of Ultima VIII wound up the way it did. In a way, U8 is symbolic of what happened to the computer game biz in the early '90s. After technology began to get cheaper Wolf3D and Doom made the industry semi-mainstream, games beefed up their visual displays to dizzying heights in the course of only a few years, going from staid EGA Sierra adventures to the dazzling 3D showcase of The 7th Guest. Ultima was an RPG series that built its name over many, many years with a small but dedicated fanbase; when Origin took on a movie-like approach to game design with titles like Wing Commander and Strike Commander, Ultima tried and failed to play along.

U8 is really not that terrible a game, in my opinion. Buggy and unfinished upon release, yes, but lots of PC games are. I'm not alone with that take, either -- among others, PC Format gave U8 a pretty stellar review. It just shouldn't have been called Ultima. To Ultima fans, the idea of an RPG where the Avatar had to jump from tiny platform to tiny platform was sacrilege -- and I think you can see that shine through in Scorpia's review all too well.

Do you have a past review you remember for its nastiness? Why not share it with me in the comments? I'd like to read some more like this one.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I never miss an issue of Future UK's PC Zone. Sadly, sometimes PC Zone misses me...and, for that matter, the state of Texas entirely, it seems. I hadn't seen an issue on sale locally for months until a single copy of the Xmas '09 edition (above) popped up at the local Micro Center.

Over in Britain, Future decided as of last year to announce its magazine stable's official ABC-audited circulation figures once a year, as opposed to once every six months like before. The move put Future in line with other game-media outlets, but it also served to hide the fact (for half a year, anyway) that every mag but Edge lost readership in 2009.

The biggest loser: Sadly, none other than PC Zone -- already the lowest-circ game mag that Future released, it took a 40-percent dive down to 11,357 copies sold per month, on average. Eesh. I think Computer Gaming World had higher circulation in 1987.

And it's really a shame, I think, because the mag's consistently the one that makes me laugh the hardest and most often. It's one thing for editors to attempt to write a funny game mag -- many try, to some extent -- but it's another to do it well, and so consistently.

It's for that reason alone that I keep spending $15 an issue on this mag, something I often feel a little silly about afterwards. I suppose Future figures that the mag would go belly-up instantly if they removed the pricey DVD from the package. I can't blame them for thinking that way, either, but as their (probably) sole fan in the U.S. Gulf Coast, I will say that I wish it were cheaper. And available a little more consistently.

(The pragmatist in me wants to say 'Why doesn't Future can the print mag if it's a money-loser and have the editors try starting a humorous game blog, like Old Man Murray or something?' However, I've a feeling that Future's advertising department already has an answer to that question for me, and it wouldn't be a cheery one.)

Regardless, after a false start last week, a great many new mags have hit my mailbox now, and here's what I think of 'em:

Edge March 2010

Cover: Crysis 2

It's almost as if Edge and Game Informer swapped covers this month -- GI (below) has the artistic-looking set piece, and Edge's got the "space marine" with guns a-blazin'. The piece inside is the sort of cover story GI would do at its best, too. It's not about Crysis 2 the game so much as Crytek the company, an outfit trying to reinvent itself as a pioneer on all platforms (not just PC) with this project.

Also worth reading: The interview with Ed Fries, one of the Xbox's founding fathers, whose current play at a big business venture is...manufacturing 3D figures of people's World of Warcraft characters. Hmm.

Game Informer March 2010

Cover: L.A. Noire

This cover story was a must-read for me on a purely personal level. Not to sound sycophantic and...well, like a game journalist, but I've always been a fan of L.A. Noire director Brendan McNamara ever since I conducted a nice, long, extended interview with him for GamePro back in 2003, just before The Getaway hit America. I remember him as a huge "ideas" man, sort of like Molyneux but perhaps without as much of a big mouth, and the feature shows me that the years haven't changed him much -- it's mainly McNamara talking about how L.A. Noire is where he's really, finally making his vision come to life, unfettered by hardware restrictions or whatnot.

I'm not sure I'm 100% ready to believe him -- he said all the same things about The Getaway eight years ago, after all -- but the feature's a really fascinating peek into his mind nonetheless.

The rest of the mag is business as usual, with nothing really grabbing me in the Connect section. One exception: a nice two-page look at the legal status of the Duke Nukem franchise, complete with tons of commentary from a real-life intellectual property attorney.

Nintendo Power March 2010

Cover: Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver

My copy of NP was both late and fairly dinged up in the mail. It's also, sadly, bereft of really hot content -- I've the feeling most Pokemon fans already know most of what's discussed in the cover piece, since the game's been out in Japan since September and is now throughly dissected by fansites on the net.

A lot of space is also taken up by a "best games of the decade" piece which is, in my mind, a bit repetitive after the "250 reasons to love Nintendo" blowout in January.

Mark Turmell's always a great interview, though.

Retro Gamer Issue 73

Cover: The ultimate hero

RG is put in the delicate position of writing a big cover piece about the Ultimate Play the Game era of UK developer Rare without having access to Tim or Chris Stamper, the company's founders and main game designers all through those years. It's a nice little piece nonetheless, if nothing new to dyed-in-the-wool retro fans.

Much neater is a 4-page chat with 87-year-old Ralph Baer about his invention Simon, one of the biggest electronic toy fads of the early '80s.

Tips & Tricks Codebook May 2010

Cover: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

T&T continues to rock its little corner of the industry. This issue devotes large amounts of space to longform strategy guides and surprisingly little to code listings -- there's 67 pages of the former and only five of the latter. I think it's a smart move, even if it means T&T can't print that "Over 7,000 Tips!" burst on the cover any longer.

The mag's multipart poster antics continue as well. This issue's packed with part one of a New SMB poster that, when matched with its partner next issue, is claimed to span over five feet across your bedroom wall. Yow!

Game Developer February 2010

Cover:Borderlands

I loved the postmortem for Trials HD in this issue for two reasons: one, I love Trials HD; two, Finnish game programmers are crazy.

GamePro Spring Special Issue

Now that Future US seems to have wound down its newsstand one-off output (I don't think I've seen any specials from them since early fall), GamePro and its $4.99 seasonal are about all that's left. This issue, sadly, appears to be entirely reprint content -- previews, reviews, and a two-page snippet from BradyGames' guide to Darksiders. Ho hum. At least the cover's pretty.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Now would be about the time to write another Mag Roundup column, but since I've received only one new game magazine in the past two weeks (oh US Postal Service, why hast thou forsaken me), I'd instead like to show off some of the game-media archaeological work I've been up to lately.

Frank Cifaldi pointed out to me earlier that Google has incorporated the archives of the Milwaukee Journal, the Wisconsin evening newspaper that was folded into its hometown rival and renamed the Journal Sentinel in 1995, into its news search. Why should you care about this? Because it means that Google's put online a nearly-complete run of "Video Adventures," a weekly game-biz column written by longtime Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Ed Semrad for the Journal between October 1983 and December 1991.

Semrad, described as "a Milwaukee-area technical writer and video game whiz" in his Journal bio, provided some surprisingly in-depth industry coverage for his hometown paper. His first column dove immediately to the then hot-button topic of programmers embedding their names into their work (the first Easter eggs), and after that he settled down to a steady diet of console hardware and game reviews. Very timely ones, too; since he was writing on a short-lead weekly deadline, Semrad's column is a great way to tell exactly when your favorite classic-era games were released...and when the industry started falling apart in the mid-80s.

Video Adventures had a bit of an eccentric schedule for much of 1985, perhaps owing to the fact that there was simply nothing to write about. "It is hard to believe that the video game industry has come to an end," Semrad wrote in his April 27, 1985 column. "Just a few years ago the big companies like Atari, Coleco and Mattel were making hundreds of millions of dollars [...] Who would have believed that the end would come so quickly?"

Semrad reviewed The Dam Busters for the Colecovision in that April column, a title he rather dramatically called "the last video game made." Lucky for his newspaper-writing gig, then, that Nintendo showed off the NES at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show two months later, releasing it to test markets in mid-October 1985. Semrad was one of the first (and only) mainstream reporters to cover the system from its release, and he had some very prescient things to say about it: "Overall, if anybody can bring video games back, Nintendo, with its new fourth-generation game system, will be the one. The games I saw in June equal or surpass most computer games not only in playability but in graphics. With the robot, light gun and 17 games Nintendo is giving its best shot."

The column grew more regular as the NES ballooned in popularity, of course, and by the time the TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis rolled around, Semrad had a picture next to his bio and more space to work with than a lot of his compatriots in the monthly video-game mags. His stuff is really well written, too, and there's little doubt that his Journal work is part of the reason why Steve Harris hired him on for EGM.

Sadly, Google News doesn't make it terribly easy to browse through individual columns. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, use the advanced search, choose the Journal as your source, then search with generic video-game terms and see what happens. Let me know if you find anything else juicy!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Simon mentioned to me the other day that The Newsfield Years, a video documentary of one of the most influential game media companies in history, has been released. The 23-minute video, replete with tons of interview footage from Oliver Frey (above, right), Roger Kean and the rest of the main folks behind British titles CRASH, ZZAP!64 and so on, costs £2.49 to download.

I haven't seen the whole thing yet (a bit busy with work this weekend), but I intend to as soon as possible. One passage from the preview video sums up Newsfield's contribution to the industry really well, I think: "In 1983 Newsfield started production of their first reviewing magazine [...] CRASH. The first issue was published in January 1984. Newsfield took the innovative decision to use local teenage gamers to write the reviews. However, for software developers, teenage gamer reviewers presented one big problem...they told the truth."

To put it another way, CRASH and the rest took game coverage out of the hands of computer-mag editors and other "professionals" and gave it to gamers themselves -- a philosophy that still pretty much survives in nearly every media outlet today, for better or worse. For that alone, Newsfield's definitely carved out its place in history.

Let's go back to modern times for now, though. Click on to check out all the mags that have crossed my desk the past fortnight.

Edge February 2010

Cover: Halo: Reach

I am proud (for no good reason) to say that this month's Edge has a huge profile of the game development scene in Texas, covering outfits like id, Arkane, Sony Online Entertainment, and my hometown heroes at TimeGate Studios, just down US-59 a ways from my house. Even if you aren't in the business, the roundtable interview inside is pretty neat, featuring folks from SOE, BioWare, and others shooting the industry bull for eight pages -- no real theme to it, but fun nonetheless.

The cover piece, meanwhile, extends a bit on Game Informer's by framing itself more as a state-of-the-union on Bungie as the studio takes one final shot at Halo before moving on to the next big thing.

Along similar lines are the bits on Game Republic (Yoshiki Okamoto's company) and Tecmo's Quantum Theory, a game nobody treated seriously upon its debut -- a topic that the devs aren't afraid to tackle in the text -- but is actually getting some decent press these days.

GamePro March 2010

Cover: Medal of Honor

The second issue of GP's redesign picks up where the last one left off, with one slight addition -- a few more columns up front from folks like freelancer Robert Ashley and Japanese game-localization guy (and, in the interest of disclosure, my frequent boss) John Ricciardi. The effect's sort of like the monthly columns in the back of Edge, and I like it.

The mag's new emphasis on dev interviews and commentary is sharp as always, and I really enjoy it -- sort of like Play in that respect, but a great deal more focused and better written. The cover piece is the best one out of the lot this week, focusing on Mr. Davison's interview with three "Tier 1 Operators" and the goofy security hoops he went through to nab it. (The fact that real special-forces guys are so gung-ho about this game probably says a lot about EA's dedication with rebooting this franchise.)

Another piece -- "Digital Discrimination," an article about how video games have treated the concept of racism in their stories -- all but confirms the Edge-ness of the new GamePro. Neat, if extremely cerebral.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine March 2010

Cover: Crysis 2

The cover may say "PlayStation," but I'm getting flashbacks to the late, lamented (by me) Xbox Nation, what with Greg Orlando writing the cover story and Evan Shamoon contributing a piece on Yakuza 3 and a couple previews. Both features are nice, especially the latter with its crisp visual style.

Doug Perry puts in another PTOM appearance this month, too, although it's just a quick preview of Dante's Inferno.

Official Xbox Magazine March 2010

Cover: Lost Planet 2

The cover piece is a long preview feature -- one very similar to the roundups EGM did around the mid-aughts, right down to the fun little icons classifying the games being covered. I'm always a little bored of pieces like this, but the companion feature -- a basic "40 things we love about the 360" -- is quick fun.

Otherwise, the main draw of this issue is likely the BioShock 2 review.

PC Gamer March 2010

Cover: Mass Effect 2

I'm not exactly sure what's meant by calling the ME2 review "uncensored" -- I think that's just a way of saying it's a bit spoiler-y if you're worried about being absolutely virgin before playing. I was hoping to see the F-word in PC Gamer and everything, too. Aw, well.

Otherwise, it's a pretty typical issue, replete with a BioShock 2 review and a (kind of late) game-of-the-year roundup.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It's January! And, largely, that means the game industry is still recovering from Christmas and hasn't built up the steam to start beating the E3 drums quite yet.

I'm taking advantage of this lull to go on vacation. By the time you read this, I'll be the guy depicted above, dodging trees and scoring all kinds of 1000-point bonuses over in the Sierras. Until I return, magazines will be the furthest thing from my mind!

That's then, however. This is now, of course, and I have a big stack of magazines to recap:

Game Informer January 2010

Cover: Halo: Reach

A very solid issue that goes a further distance toward making GI into the Edge-ish "industry journal" it seems to be angling to become. There's a very good interview with Activision's Bobby Kotick that successfully makes him seem like a decent, intelligent executive instead of the evil overlord some parts of game-dom see him as. The Halo: Reach piece is standard for GI cover pieces, but the bit that follows it -- an overview of Irrational Games -- is straight-on challenging Edge at their own game, and I think they made a decent success of it.

A best-of-'09 roundup isn't quite as enthralling as the 200th-issue spectacular two issues ago, but the vast amount of space given to The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (5 pages out of 100!) is extremely well-used.

It seems to me that GI has changed their paper stock to something a bit flimsier and less glossy starting with this issue. If it's true (and not my imagination playing tricks on me), they likely did it to lighten the mag and thus save on postage. They wouldn't be the first publisher to do this, either -- Future prints the subscriber editions of the mags in lighter stock than the newsstand versions, and I remember there being all sorts of pressure along similar lines back during my GamePro days. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I hallucinating?

Edge January 2010

Cover: The best of 2000-2009

The cover was washed out a fair bit by my scanner; apologies about that. It touts an internal feature that should've been just another boring game roundup, but shines a fair bit thanks to its choices (World of Warcraft winning "game of the decade") and to the industry folks they tapped for their opinions.

The other main features, including a preview of Metro 2033 (a bit more in-depth over GamePro's last month) and a look at motion-capture tech that's basically a slightly friendlier take on a Game Developer article, are solid if not blockbuster.

It being January, this month's Edge comes with a massive 2010 calendar poster, this year themed around Zelda: Spirit Tracks -- timely, because there's a long interview with Eiji Aonuma between the pages too.

Nintendo Power February 2010

Cover: NBA Jam

64 pages of this issue are devoted to previews of 2010's Wii and DS games. Is NBA Jam the hottest game to lead with? Well, I think so, but then again I was squarely in the target audience for the original arcade game, so nostalgia's undoubtedly having an effect on me there. The coverage is all great in the feature, remarkably enough, and even includes a cameo visit from Ken as portrayed in the NES title Street Fighter 2010 (timely!).

Folks who can't stand preview roundups like this one may be a bit disappointed by the issue, but don't blame NP -- they've got only four non-downloadable games in the review well this month, requiring them to do stuff like give a full page to The Glory of Heracles.

Official Xbox Magazine February 2010

Cover: Mass Effect 2

It's a slow review month in Xbox-land, too, and OXM makes up for it by devoting 13 pages to coverage of Mass Effect 2 and BioWare -- stuff you'll eat up if you're a fan. The following piece, a speculative article on what Halo 4 may be like, reminds me quite a bit (in a good way) of the way, way early Halo 2 cover EGM did a long time ago.

Otherwise, much of the mag is previews, along with a "2009 game awards" piece that doesn't jump out at me quite as much as Edge's similar feature.

Play January 2010

Cover: Mass Effect 2

Best part of the issue, bar none, is the three-page art spread of old video-game platform mascots, further expanded from what they did in the November edition. In my opinion, anyway. Apologies to Doug Perry, who wrote 10 pages on Mass Effect 2 that goes into a great deal more depth on the machinations of the game than OXM did (although it's not a review).

Retro Gamer Issue 72

Cover: Gradius

I did not realize that the ZX Spectrum port of Gradius was "infamous" -- I thought "bad" would've been a more appropriate term for it. However, Gradius's flyer art makes for a pretty awesome cover, and the full-on look at the arcade game inside is pretty well worth reading. (To answer my question: Among other things, the coders based their port on the MSX version for some reason.)

Beckett Massive Online Gamer March/April 2010

Cover: World of Warcraft

MOG has more pages than Play this month, as much as that fills me with chagrin. I can't argue with success, however (or survival anyway), and this issue has all the usual in-depth coverage of what seems like a million MMOs. And a poster!

Game Developer January 2010

Cover: Aion

Speaking of which, here's a postmortem on an MMO now! The Aion piece is up to GD's usual level of enthrallment, filled with neat details and tales of woe ("development was part soap opera, part meatgrinder").

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

After a bit of a difficult birth (it faced delays and changed editors-in-chief before anything had been published), Future's heavily hyped subscriber-only WOW mag is finally hitting mailboxes in the US. The verdict? Well, like with EON, it's a little hard for me to gauge, since I'm not particularly familiar with the game in question.

One thing I can say with reasonable confidence, however, is that WOWOM (is it safe for me to call it that?) is generating remarkably positive buzz among WOW players on Twitter and the relevant forums -- and Future can't be sad about that, 'cos it seems like that was just what they were aiming for.

Like EON, this mag is meant for dedicated enthusiasts to its core subject. I hesitate to use the word "hardcore," but this sure ain't for newcomers, either. It's straight-on content for the fanbase from start to finish, from the requisite interview with Blizzard's CEO to tactical articles on this battleground or that player type. There's also a fair bit of community content, but not so much that it seems like the focus of the mag, a pitfall Beckett MOG can sometimes fall into.

Design-wise the mag is top-notch. Future's obviously spending a lot on printing this mag, going for fancy paper and a book size that's identical to the one Edge uses. The articles inside are all immaculately designed and illustrated, and the only real quibble I can find is that features seem sprinkled willy-nilly throughout the mag instead of being organized into themed sections.

Either way, it's a great effort, and now all that remains is to see how many WOW fans get hooked on it.

Click on to check out some of the other mags that have crossed my desk so far in 2010.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine February 2010

Cover: Gran Turismo 5

Mr. Steinman hasn't been leading PTOM for too long, but already you're beginning to see his mark on the mag. The streamlined, exremely Sony-like visual style is still there, but many pages -- particularly the look at Uncharted 2's online play in the back -- are packed with little box-outs and sidebars and other little diversions that you didn't see much of before. It's not like there was a lot of excess waste in PTOM before now, but in a 100-page mag, every inch is important.

The content itself is pretty nice. Features on racing games have a reputation for being really boring (especially when they're cover stories), but the Future-y design on the GT5 bit keeps everything bite-sized, avoiding GI-style text narratives that outlast your attention span. The best-of-'09 feature that dovetails it is also engaging, thanks to its refusal to give out awards in any of the usual, boring, VGA-style categories.

PC Gamer February 2010

Cover: Crysis 2

PC Gamer has a typical sort of "top games of '10" preview roundup occupying a few pages. If you're expecting a Crysis 2 blowout, prepare to be disappointed -- the content inside involves a simple two-page preview spread with a couple of detailed but unexciting screenshots.

The "Top 100 Games of All Time" feature that follows, meanwhile, is a lot more fun. A combo effort between PCG's US and UK editions (along with a few people from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it manages to stay succinct and readable while saying something palpable about all 100 of the games profiled.

Retro Gamer Issue 71

Cover: After Burner

I recently had the honor of renewing my subscription to RG, a feat made a fair bit cheaper by the current exchange rate and the still-valid "YOUTUBE" discount code. (If that doesn't work for some reason, you can type in USA instead to get 13 issues for $80 instead of £80.)

I'm glad I did, because the cover piece is brilliant -- the way the RG editors disassemble arcade games is one of the best running things they've got going right now.

Tips & Tricks March 2010

Cover: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

Poster maniacs be alert -- this issue of T&T has the second half of the Halo Legends poster, the partner of the first half included in the February '10 issue. "Use a butterknife or similar utensil to open up the staples in the center page," the editors write. "It should come out pretty easily. But don't forget to bend the staples back to their original positions after you remove the poster, or you might end up with loose Codebook pages all over the house!"

Something about that paragraph gave me the oddest flashback to late-'80s Nintendo Power for some reason. The strategy guides inside are more '90s NP in style, of course, and you can't complain about that, eh?

It should also be noted that the eight-page guide for Ubi's C.O.P. The Recruit inside is arguably the most coverage that DS game has ever received in any game-media outlet.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs 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 and lots of publishers and game companies.]