GameFan Issue 09 (February 2013)

If you have ever talked or listened to some of the former GameFan members from the original magazine, you will know that the group is well-aware of several former staff that ended up working long hours for little or no pay trying to keep the magazine alive throughout the years. Many of them left when they were expected to work for free. We went from a full team making this relaunch of the magazine happen, to their not being any money to pay the staff, and now we are down to only a handful of people for the last few issues. Issue 9 took about 8 months since the last issue to release, and reports say that it was assembled by only two people, Dave Halverson and Greg Orlando. The normal GF Staff profiles are gone, and only four other staff are even listed on this issue. One of the graphic designers is listed as "Earnest Storm" -- a long-time alter ego of Halverson that was used even in the early days of the original magazine (being a combination of two games, Ernest Evans and Alien Storm). Issues 8 and 9 were only available in a digital format. 

Highlights From this Issue: There's a look at the Top 50 Games of the Wii, and a 2013 Most Wanted Preview, which is about one paragraph of words on top of some fancy artwork. We have a big section on Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, and a 2012 Year in Review on the best games from the last year. Yet another list of games with a one-paragraph write up. Lollipop Chainsaw wins Game of the Year Honorable Mention (?) and has a producer interview. Borderlands 2 is the Game of the Year Runner Up, and also has a 2-page interview, and Dragon's Dogma wins the GOTY and also has a nice interview. The Viewpoint returns for 2-pages in a simplified format with about 4 games reviewed and scored on each page. There's a nice section on anime, but that's about it for this issue. Yep, no full-page reviews for ANY games. And most game coverage was three lists of the best games for the Wii, the most wanted games for next year, and the best games of last year. Most magazine do "top game lists" at the end of the year, but they also have their other content. There were little things missing before, but this issue is missing so much compared to the last two. Jason Moore is still the art director, and the layouts look nice, but we have several sections that have hard-to-read text again. When I was 15 years old I was writing my own game reviews for myself, and even I learned very quickly that white text on a black background needs to be bold so the letters aren't too thin to read. But we see several sections with very thin white text in this issue. This mag just looks bad, with pages full of artwork and only a small paragraph of text that probably took no time to write. The magazine would go on a 2-year hiatus after this. Only two more issues would be published, Issue #10 and #11.