Games

[icycalm]

It's not even that hard to see what the problem with the 90s-era EGM was. You basically got a few unbelievably uninformative reviews x3 for no apparent reason. Then the further into the mag you got, the harder it became to tell what was chosen to be there and what was paid for. Going through the July '96 issue is funny, since they really had no problems putting whitewashed "Next Wave" previews of games they pissed on. The punchline is that neither really told you much, but the whitewashing was about 3x longer. If it blew its contemporaries out of the water back then, it's because GamePro generally looked and read as though Jeff Minter were running it.

The only real change between then and now was that they gave reviews more space, but only if they were the big AAA wankfest. And it didn't matter anyway since the reviewers were still fucking morons who were prone to follow the usual tropes. One of the most telling things about Hsu's time as EiC is that the GTA: SA review spent as much space on bullshit sideboxes as review space, and even still the first real mention of the series' chronically deficient controls is quite some time later, in a review of The Godfather game.

The GTA:SA issue was also the one where he saw OutRun 2006 as an old rehash: "unless you have some kind of weird obsession with the original game, you might want to pass" HUR HUR HUR BRNOWT 3 ROX. Naturally, he didn't have this problem with the PSP Lemmings. And it's not like many of the other reviewers were any better, especially Boyer. The better writer in the mag was usually Seanbaby, and they made shrewd use of his wit by putting him at the back of the mag and giving him shit games that no one had any intention of ever playing.

So yeah. Not a huge loss.

http://forums.insertcredit.com/viewtopi ... 460#287460

Pretty spot-on, from where I am standing.

[BlackerOmegalon]

I agree with Jon R. The GTA/Godfather example he brings up is excellent. They also liked to bring up how transparent and ethical they were, when they never made an effort to move away from the support of game corporations' ad money, and they still made deals for exclusive coverage and the like. If a publication cannot survive on the money of their readership, do they deserve to still be in print? That sounds like a failed magazine from the get go, and EGM has been in that position for a long time.

Additionally, their reviews have very little value, and not just because of the reviewers, but because they're so brief and lack any insight. They also review more games than their staff can handle; you can tell just by looking at their review format (multiple scores for each game). In a recent podcast, one of the former EGM reviewers (from the '90s) admitted that he reviewed a game based solely on the attract mode, as he was swamped with review assignments for the holiday season...