inCite PC Gaming Issue 03 (February 2000) 1.0.0

I always thought this magazine was low-quality, with the covers given to celebrities or hot women, and other pics of women throughout the mag -- but it's really not as extreme as I once thought. The reviews are multiple pages with a good amount of text written for most games themselves. I've gone through a lot of gaming mags, and you can tell when a reviewer seems like they couldn't be bothered to type much when you have one paragraph of text on a page, but that's not really the case here. Indiana Jones has 4 pages and it gets a 4/5, which is a higher score than the new Tomb Raider, but that makes sense. Ultima: Ascension gets a 2/5 but the reviewer backs up this score. Its nice to see the PC review for Omikron: The Nomad Soul (4/5). I owned the Dreamcast version, but I always wondered how it played on another platform. Test Drive 6 is the only game to get a 1/5 in the issue! the strategies for Half Life: Opposing Force are decent, and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine has several color maps to use. The layout uses a "three columns and one half-column" which is a nice design for providing a few good chunks of text, but still having some flexibility to put in a few bigger images. I prefer this design -- using "four columns" per page just wastes too much space in your margins. This isnt a bad mag, but I dont believe it lasted beyond 10 issues. I belive you had a good number of respected PC magazine at this time, so maybe there wasnt room for more.

The thing is, I would agree with your initial assessment, Stryker.  They're trying real hard to be the "mature" magazine, and Esquire of gaming, and it gives a sketchy impression.  There is some good stuff in here and other issues, but it's tempered with cheesecake and "extreme" stuff; the Dope interview is evidence enough of the latter, and I really hope the Lara Croft model got paid a lot if they're going to have her pose each and every issue.  The next issue has a fairly long shoot of a port actress.

That said, most of the game opinions are reasonable, despite my personal crusade against Nocturne.  An interview with Chris Sawyer is interesting, I just wish it was a lot longer, but him going into the nitty-gritty of building Roller Coaster Tycoon out of assembly code probably isn't going to hook the audience. You are also right about the longevity, both the PC and console versions of inCite only made it 9 issues each.

1 hour ago, JimJam78 said:

tempered with cheesecake

I like your assessment as well here. "Cheesecake" is a very polite way of describing it. I was honestly trying to be more positive with this mag. I had one of the Video Gaming versions of the mag and I remember it felt "juvenile" to read back in 1999, but when looking at this PC Gaming version it seemed to not be as bad. Looking back, I found out several people from GameFan worked on the Video Gaming one, so I hope those show up down the road. Thanks for editing this one, I still appreciate being able to see these again -- it's fun seeing what didn't work sometimes:)

Hopefully, we will find out soon, there's a few issues of the console version in the big VGHF hopper, just a matter of getting to them.

Geeeeeze, I remember this mag. I'm glad to have it because memories, but...it was bad. It was reeeally bad. The only thing I distinctly remember about it was an article about being cool for women...which included advice about about picking the right email service. 

Because that's what women wanted in the year 2000. A guy with a hot email address.