Megafan Volume 1 Issue 3 (November 1997)

Such a nice mag. Hope you keep releasing it.  Thank you

MegaFan was planned as a 6-issues a year publication. It started as a 32-page supplement in GameFan, then it released separately with Issue #1 being a small-format booklet, like the size of a TV Guide or Reader's Digest, with 196-pages. Volume 1 Issue #2 changed to a standard-sized magazine at 116-pages, but it didn't come out until 8 months later, now with David S.J. Hodgson as editor-in-chief and he mentions that its mostly a whole new crew putting the mag together now. Dave Halverson is now just listed as "founder" and Nick Des Barres joins as an editor from GameFan, along with some others. The layouts and page designs were MUCH improved over the original preview issue and the first standard issue. Game coverage was much better varied, they added a codes section, and most games had 10-pages each. 

Volume 1 Issue #3 took several more months to come out, with this third issue releasing ONE YEAR after the first issue was published. This third and final issue has even fewer recognizable members from GameFan than the last issue. We do have some nice layouts and colors -- this does look a lot better than previous efforts. There are a number of Avatars, like Blinky the Clown, Prince Ratt, and Nightmare. Arcade coverage returns in the Fighting Retro Arcade feature of Yie Ar Kung Fu. Marvel Super Heroes gets 24-pages of content, but it covers the arcade and console versions and has a move-list for many characters. Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha gets 20-pages, and Tekken 3 gets a lot of coverage too, but fighting games were huge at this time, so this is perfectly justifiable. We get some strategies for PlayStation titles, like Treasures of the Deep, Ace Combat 2, Castlevania SOTN, Wild Arms, and Ogre Battle. Fighting game fans get around 60-pages, but PlayStation then gets a number of big games. Good content, with lots of profiles for the fighting game characters, some additional articles to read, and more personality in the writing. It's a MUCH better effort than Issue #2, but this is the last one published. They had 1-year subscriptions for 6-issues in the pages of GameFan, but I would be upset if I had paid for 6 issues right at the start, then waited a full year, to only see three instalments release.