Next Generation Issue 002 (February 1995)

Love the Cover.

This mag has some great covers for its first year. Many mags would stuff their covers with lots of detail and many characters, but NextGen had a way of making them simple, but they were still eye-catching.

Highlights From this Issue: This 6-page interview with Shigeru Miyamoto is a perfect look at the way the magazine is designed. Many mags would interview him over a new Zelda or Mario title being released, but NextGen instead asks more interesting questions instead of doing it just as a promotional piece or tie-in. Miyamoto offers dome great insight. We get 8-pages on the Saturn and what is planned for the launch, and we get some news about the PlayStation, Amiga, the Neptune (Genesis+32X), info on Reality Labs, and more. There's an article on a current boom of retro gamming, and what's it like playing games on the internet in 1995. The previews include Alone in the Dark 3, Road Rash 3, Absolute Zero, BioForge, Clockwork Knight, Tekken and a few more.

Many previews are 2 pages long, and give you several screenshots and a good amount of info. But everything is still simple and clean -- most pages only have 2-5 screenshots for the most part, and are made of four columns that can be used for content, and usually only two were filled with text. And they didn't pack every column with stuff -- there was open spaces on the sides on many pages, so it never felt crowded like other mags. I always remember this, and I do enjoy this design today. You'll notice the reviews section uses all four columns for text, but that's because they are cramming as many as six reviews on a page, but this never bothered me. There are lots of reviews but a few highlights are Under A Killing Moon (pc), Club Drive (jaguar), Cosmic Carnage (32x), Eternal Champions CD (sega-cd), and Magic Carpet (pc). Not because they are all good games, but because they got good coverage. And you still have five pages of Genesis and SNES games. As you can see, there is so much content to each issue. This was such an exciting time during gamming history, and this mag worked very hard to deliver this level of content and energy.