Play Online No.017 (November 1999)

It's interesting to see these Japanese PC magazines.  The PC market is a footnote at best when speaking about Japanese gaming, so seeing that they we're covering System Shock 2 and what-have-you as well is neat. 

Japanese computer gaming definitely had its place within Japan for a while, but never on PC.  Japanese systems like the PC-88 and PC-98 had a lot of influential games, but by the time those died out and only the PC remained, Japanese developers had pretty much moved exclusively into console development, leaving nothing but visual novels (x-rated or otherwise) being developed on the PC front.

Open up a Japanese video game mag like Famitsu, and you might be surprised at how little coverage there is of Western games.  So Play Online is probably the most unique Japanese gaming mag ever created, since it features almost no coverage of Japanese games, as there were barely any "serious" PC games being developed in Japan by the time it was in publication.  Some of the games they're covering aren't even localized into Japanese.

I need to learn Japanese now!