kitsunebi

276 pages.  Includes a review catalogue reprinting all 123 cross-reviews (the 4-person review format which EGM copied from Famitsu) which appeared in the second half of 2014.

2007 Games of the Year issue.  One of which is Sam & Max: Season One.  Sam & Max is no Monkey Island, but the original LucasArts adventure still holds a place in my heart.  I still have a cap with a flaming Max head on it.  And when my mom got two new kittens this past summer, I tried to get her to name them Sam and Max.  She didn't go for it, though. 🥲

Flipping through this issue, I noticed a baseball game and wondered if...yep, there he is.  3 years before heading to America and entering the MLB, look who it is - the currently-highest-paid (best?) player in the game, Mr. Shohei Ohtani:

I realize most of you are nerds who stay inside all day, hating sports and sports games alike.  I happen to be a nerd who stays inside all day hating sports, but has been known to enjoy a sports game or two (back when I played games, that is.)  This guy goes beyond sports star, though.  He's a national hero here in Japan, and by far the biggest celebrity.  Basically, he's the Japanese Taylor Swift.  They let the kids here watch the final game of the World Series (which Ohtani's Dodgers won) in school like it was the moon landing or something.
In this game, he's still playing for the Nippon Ham Fighters.  Did I ever mention that Japanese sports teams have stupid names?  Actually, the team name is "Fighters," but rather than name teams after the city they're in, they name them after whatever giant corporation owns the team.  It's super-lame.  So rather than the Sapporo Fighters, allowing people in Sapporo/Hokkaido to wear their hometown team's merch with pride, they have to basically be wearing an advertisement for Nippon Ham, a giant meat/food corporation.  Plus, when you say it out loud, it sounds like they fight ham.

You know those coffee table art books?  The ones with the super-thick, high-quality paper?  Imagine a gaming magazine printed like that.  And lo, here it is.  This mag is higher quality than any gaming mag ever printed in the Western world, and that's a fact.  Every single page was higher quality than the covers of Western mags.  Granted, it cost 1100 yen (at the time, around $11-12), but damn, this is one fine-looking mag.  Or it was, before I yanked all of its pages out, ran it through my scanner, and tossed it into the recycling.  😱 
Scanners can't be seduced by pretty things.  All will fall before the heat gun.
 
Oh yeah, and you can get the demo disc HERE if you want.

This magazine is 212 pages, which is fairly reasonable for Famitsu.  They're usually a bit longer, though issues exceeding 300 pages aren't common.  Considering they put this thing out on a weekly basis, it's still a remarkable amount of pages per month, sometimes entering quadruple digits. 
But this issue also has an ad for a Monster Hunter strategy guide, which weighs in at 1,568 pages.  That's more pages than an entire year's worth of any Western game mag published contemporaneously with this issue.   That's pretty impressive, I'll give you that. 
I'll also give you a slap on the face if you ever ask me to scan it. 🙂

*RESTORED kitsunebi edition!*
This is my new edit of marktrade's original scan and edit which is available in 600dpi at the Internet Archive.  Marktrade's scan was previously uploaded to Retromags, though that version does not appear to have received any additional edits aside from being resized closer to 300dpi and having the scan of the spine removed.
What I have tried to do with my edit is to breathe some life into the scan and restore what had been lost to the ravages of time.  In many cases, the primitive photography used in the game screenshots demanded that each screenshot on a page be edited separately to more accurately restore some of the colors that may not have been captured correctly even when the mag was fresh off the presses.  I hope you will agree that this is the best the mag has ever looked, but if you prefer the naturally aged/yellow look, marktrade's perfectly fine original scan/edit can be found HERE.
Here are some example pages of my edit compared with marktrade's edit (which is identical in appearance to the one previously made available here):

Scanned by J of Oz
Let's all take a minute and be grateful for magazine publishers who print their magazines on quality paper stock (I'm looking at you, Japan.)
Sadly, not all publishers make quality a priority when printing their mags.  When it came to publishing these UK Star Trek mags, the goal clearly wasn't for the mags to "live long and prosper," but rather something more like "they're periodicals, who gives a #^%@?  Let 'em rot." 
The print quality of these mags is atrocious.  Poor J of Oz was stuck scanning these ST mags for me, and I've heard tale of how the ink on the pages actually rubs off on his scanner rollers while being scanned, forcing him to constantly clean them lest that ink then be transferred onto subsequent pages.  And the aging of the paper?  Good lord.  I've seen newspapers announcing D Day that were less yellowed.  This is unfortunately up to me to deal with in the editing stage, and let me tell you, it's no walk in the park making these things presentable.  But I guess that's the whole point of digitizing and preserving these paper pieces of history in the first place, so that we aren't beholden to how long the physical copy lasts.

*kitsunebi edition!*
Nothing wrong with the older scan of this issue previously made available, but I scan everything in my collection regardless, and I do feel that my version offers some improvements.  Most of those improvements are due to better debinding, which allows for better editing.  If you start with a guillotine cut in the debinding process, there's nothing you can do when editing to account for the part of the page you cut away.  As always, my scans are first debound with a heat gun, to allow for the entire page to be scanned.  This allows two-page joins to be edited together more seamlessly.
Other differences include whiter pages and a higher resolution (3200 px vs the older scan's 2200).
I've tried to show some of the differences with animated gifs this time.  Even though they're alternating back and forth, it should be easy to spot which of the two is this new, improved version, especially if you look towards the center of the join. 🙂
*you can click on these gifs to see them in a larger window:



 
And some joined pages of Games for Windows actually have a printed overlap, where the same part of the image is printed on both pages.  In this case, the older scan (despite having some of this overlap area cut away during debinding) still has part of the image appearing twice, whereas this newer scan has more seamlessly edited the pages to remove the doubled overlap:

Scanned by J of Oz
It's funny - I actually HAD the collector's card mentioned on the cover.  But at some point between debinding all of the Star Trek mags I bought and shipping them off to J of Oz to get them scanned, I misplaced the card.  I'm sure it's around here SOMEWHERE, and if I ever find it, I'll add it to the scan.  But to be honest, as useless tchotchkes attached to UK magazine covers go, this was a pretty lame one.  Just a thick cardboard card with a picture of the Enterprise on one side.  Maybe mine decided it wanted to follow in the footsteps of all of its fellow useless cards which graced the cover of this issue, and magically floated itself into my trash to join with its forebears? 
Don't shed a tear over its absence, is what I'm saying.

Before writing in this box, I always do a quick flip-through of the mag and comment on whatever happens to strike my fancy, so to speak.  This time, it was Bruce Willis.  Bruce's rugged bald pate from the ad for his PS1 masterpiece, Apocalypse, really stood out from the rest of the ads, not to mention the rest of the games featured in the mag.  It's just so...Western.  Not that Apocalypse is the ONLY Western game to appear in this issue, but the other one is Crash Racing, and that's just cute enough to almost pass as a Japanese game.  But Bruce can't be bothered with cuteness, he's too busy blowing $@^& up.  Yippee kay yay, mother trucker.

*COMPLETE* kitsunebi Edition!
The other scan of this issue available here is very good (albeit partially incomplete), so this is not a slight against that scan - I simply scan everything in my collection for my own sake.  It does offer some improvements, however, so if you want to decide if this new version is worth your trouble downloading, I'll try to highlight the differences below.
Higher resolution (3200px high) than the older scan (2200px high) Whiter pages Debound with heat gun to get a complete scan, so every page has slightly more information on the gutter side Images that cross both pages have been better joined A complete scan has been made of an advertisement which was partially blacked-out in the old scan An 8 page fold out advertisement is included (missing from other scan) subscription card inserts are included (who cares, right? Not me. But they're here if you want them) Here are some comparison screenshots to help illustrate the above points (new scan is shown on top):


I don't know what's going on with the older scan of the below ad - looks like part of it is covered with something?  Weird... But now fixed!

Highlighting some of the gutter joins:


Notice the album title: "To Bring You My Love" vs. "To Bring Yor Love" LOL.   (Little fish, big fish, swimmin' in the water.  Come back here, man, gimme my daughter.)

And of course there's the 8-page fold-out ad which was missing entirely from the older scan (smushed into one pic here for your viewing convenience🙂)

It's been a while since we've had one of these double-number issues of Famitsu, so for anyone out there who's confused, here's a brief explanation.  This is a single issue that is counted as two.  The preceding issue is numbered 1358 (December 25, 2014), and the following issue is numbered 1361 (January 15, 2015), making this issue #1359/1360.  This sort of thing happens 3 or 4 times per year.  It doesn't mean that the double issues are double length.  Sometimes they're longer than average, sometimes not (this issue is 280 pages, which isn't unusually long for Famitsu.) 
What it DOES mean is that the staff took a vacation.  As you can imagine, turning out over 1000 pages of magazine per month is nothing to sneeze at (especially when you consider that Western mags were typically producing less than 100 pages of content per month), so a few times per year, the staff would be...ALLOWED TO SLEEP!!!  This particular mag came out around New Years, which is the biggest holiday in Japan.  Everything shuts down for 5 days or so while everyone stays home to celebrate with their families (its closest Western equivalent would be Christmas.)  So every year around this time, Famitsu releases a "double issue" so that its staff can enjoy the holiday like the rest of the country.
But since this is Famitsu WEEKLY, I guess they don't want to break the illusion by having less than 52 issues per year, so whenever they skip a week, they just add an extra issue number to make up for it.  So since this issue was on newsstands for two weeks, it gets two issue numbers.  Kind of dumb, and definitely a pain in the ass when I was first putting together the database, but that's the way it is.  Now you know, and yadayadayadaYOJOE.

There's a report on the PS4 release complete with lots of pictures of people waiting overnight in the cold and proudly holding their newly purchased goods like they're some sort of hero showing off the head of the beast they vanquished.  I've never bought anything at a midnight release event and never will, but if I DID, I think I'd rather not have my picture taken and printed in a magazine.  Who could you ever show it to?
"Oh, you waited in a line for 24 hours to buy a video game system the moment it was released?  Wow, uh...cool story.  --NNERRRRRD!!!!!"

Hope you all are enjoying playing with whatever toys Santa brought you this year.
This mag was released in early 1998, and was an exciting time to be a Star Wars fan, what with the prequels looming as a still-nebulous but guaranteed new hope on the horizon.  I was actually buying quite a few of the toys at the time, mostly out of nostalgia for the original Kenner toys I had as a kid, despite the absolutely fugly sculpts on many of the new releases...

Of course, unbeknownst to me, tragedy was just around the corner, as when the prequels actually began appearing a year later, they mercilessly slaughtered all appreciation and goodwill I had toward the franchise to the point that I can't watch anything "Star Wars" to this day.  But for the time, at least, all was right with the world, and Boba Fett was still one of the coolest dudes you could slap on a cover.

ADULTS ONLY
I uploaded the CD-ROM that came with this issue HERE.
One day I'll have to find something to scan I can upload with a big "KIDS ONLY" warning.  Maybe if I find a mag that's cover to cover Minecraft, Fortnite, and Splatoon.  Or maybe if I ever re-scan any Nintendo Powers.  At any rate, this is not that mag.  (If an issue of Tech Gian DOES ever appear with the words "kids only" attached, for god's sake don't download it - you're likely to be arrested and have your hard drives confiscated by the FBI.)

I thought long and hard trying to decide what I should say here, but I've opted instead to convey it via interpretive dance.  248 pgs

You know, I think I saw this Lara Croft in a movie once.  I still wake up screaming sometimes.
 
    Life choices  

Is there a more data-packed mag than Dengeki PlayStation?  Not that I've ever seen.  I'm not talking about typical magazine preview fluff, or data on how many polygons the game's engine can crunch, but rather just cold hard in-game data.  Just count the numbers of charts and graphs tracking the tiniest details that appear in DP's pages.  I wonder how much of this stuff got reused in strategy guides...

Sometimes I struggle to have anything interesting to say here, and I think, maybe I should just type:
Dengeki PlayStation Vol.115 (August 13/27, 1999)
and leave it at that, just like anyone else would do.  But then I think, nah, I've gotta say SOMETHING, no matter how small or insignificant an observation it might be.  So today, I bring you a line dashed off in one of the Syphon Filter reviews which says something like "The exhilarating feeling of becoming a strong hero like 007...and defeating bad guys is truly American!"
How ya like them apples, UK? 😜

ADULTS ONLY
It's interesting how Tech Gian front-loads all of the advertisements. All of the ads are grouped together near the start of the mag, and once the magazine proper starts, there isn't another ad until the inside back cover.  This is a stark contrast from the ad-heavy American mags I read in the late 90s where every other page was an ad.  Which do you prefer? 🤔
The CD-ROM included with this issue can be downloaded from my Internet Archive account HERE.

These days it's pretty much nothing but visual novels, but back in the day, both the consoles and computers were flooded with dating sims.  The "sim" part of these games usually involved micromanaging daily routines in an attempt to woo the girl (or boy) of your choice right out of their pants.  Nowadays, no one has the patience for that, I guess, but looking at old gaming mags like this gives you access to some hilariously dull "strategy guide" features like this one which breaks down the times throughout each day of the game that you can reach each girl either at home or on her cell.  Any veteran of this type of game knows that this kind of extreme attention to detail is no joke, however.  Miss one opportunity to make contact or fail to say just the right thing when you do, and you can pretty much forget about ever seeing those pants come off.

This issue hit around the time of the PS4 launch, making the weekly sales chart look a little lopsided:

That's the PS4 standing alone on top with 322,083 units sold, with the next best selling system being the 3DS with 30,284 units sold.  Congrats to the Xbox360, which managed to outsell the last-gen Wii with a whopping 239 units sold.  It's not often you see a Microsoft system anywhere but dead last in Japan, so thank goodness 148 people bought a 7 1/2-year-old Wii that week, giving the poor 360 a chance to have an edge over something.
As an aside, I just flipped through an issue of the UK's GamesTM mag lately, and it had the results of a reader poll where the 360 was voted the best console OF ALL TIME.
Cultural differences make the world interesting.

This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file came from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

This issue includes a Dark Souls II supplement book, which I've appended to the end of the archive.
Ah, supplements...I've been guilty of it myself once or twice in the past, but releasing supplements separately from the magazines they belong to is a practice I'll no longer be a part of, unless of course, I have a supplement but for some reason DON'T have the mag it came from (as was the case with many of the supplements I scanned, which were thrown in as part of a donation years ago.)  I like to adhere to the primary definition of the word.
supplement /sŭp′lə-mənt/ noun Something added to complete a thing, make up for a deficiency, or extend or strengthen the whole. So please enjoy this magazine, complete with supplement. 🙂
260pgs

*kitsunebi edition*
This is the place where I usually wow you with comparison shots with the older scan available here, showing off some of the two page spreads.  I can't do that this time, because...THERE AREN'T ANY!  Nope, just single pages the whole way through. 
So this is what this download will get you:
Higher resolution - this scan is 3200px high, while the other is 2200. Whiter pages This mag was debound with a heat gun in order to get an edge to edge scan, while the other was debound with a guillotine cutter, cropping part of every page.  However, as I mentioned before, there are no two-page spreads, so the cropping on the other scan is barely noticeable since it was mostly just white space on the gutter side that was cropped away.  So the improvements to this scan in this regard are of minimal importance. To anyone who previously downloaded my scan from OGM or the Internet Archive, this version has been remastered/improved and those sites will be updated with this version once I'm able to do so. Unlike some of the other scans I've done my own updated version of, there isn't anything flawed about the older scan available here.  Which you prefer may be a matter of taste, but this new scan is still noticeably different enough that I feel it's justified offering it here for anyone interested.
This scan is on the LEFT, the older scan is on the right.


Oh, and WOW.  While I was comparing my scan to the other just now, I noticed that one of the pages is completely different.  Page 122 of my scan is again on the left, while page 122 of the older scan is on the right.  Perhaps there were regional variants?  Or maybe my copy of the mag was sold at Toys R Us stores?  Who knows, but the fact that there's an unexplainable and confusing variant of a Game Player's magazine shouldn't be too surprising to anyone familiar with their first several years of publications.  At any rate, now you know you need to download BOTH scans of this mag if you want your copy to be 100% complete BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
page 122: