kitsunebi

285 pgs
I've always wondered just what type of game Senran Kagura is.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia, but after reading the entire description and not seeing the word "boobs" even once, I realized that the Wikipedia page must have been talking about some other game.

298 pgs
I'll be honest, I've never played any games made after 2008 or so.  So I can't offer any anecdotes about anything in this mag, and there would be no point in trying to look up info on any of the games in it since most people visiting this site probably already know whatever I could turn up.
So I thought about talking about the Jpop group given a 4 page feature, Country Girls, but...sigh...I hate Jpop. Here's the single they were promoting this issue. Maybe you share my opinion or maybe you think this tune slaps 🤨:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1tj7Q1UxXY
 
So instead I'll talk about Yuusha Yoshihiko (The Hero Yoshihiko), a 3 season TV series from 2011-2016.  It has nothing to do with this issue, but you may find it interesting, nonetheless.  It's a parody of JRPGs, Dragon Quest in particular, and they even got approval from Square Enix to utilize a lot of Dragon Quest monsters and the like.  Of course, the show proudly proclaims its "no budget" status, so the monsters are mostly paper mache and guys in leotards and masks (they rarely show up for more than cameo appearances, anyway).
I haven't finished watching the whole series, but so far the second season is not as good as the first.  The whole thing is ostensibly terrible, of course, but it's silly enough to have made me LOL several times.  Fair warning: it can be very politically incorrect sometimes.
The good news is, you can watch the entire thing subtitled in English on the Internet Archive HERE.  
If anyone gives it a watch, I'd like to hear your take on it.
 

This is the original printing with a square-bound white cover.  It appears to have been reprinted several times, each with differences to the cover and/or title.
Variations include:
red spiral-bound cover with the same "Nintendo Strategies" title. red squarebound cover under the title "Strategies for Nintendo Games" yellow spiral-bound cover under the title "Strategies for Nintendo Games" So far as I know, the contents of all 4 editions are identical.

So here's a fun PS3/PS4 game.  Take photos of girls in compromising positions - up skirts and down shirts. If the girls aren't posing in a way convenient for your photos?  No problem - just do a slide or lay down on the ground and you'll have those panty shots in no time.  OH NOES!  HERE COMES THE PERVERT POLICE!!  Run away to be a sexual predator another day!  Wheee!!!
Did you all know that there's an actual law in Japan that makes it illegal to sell any camera (including those on mobile devices) that doesn't make a loud "click" shutter noise when a photo is taken?  This noise cannot be disabled, and finding a workaround is illegal.  That's because of shit like this game happening in real life.  But I guess you aren't allowed to murder people in real life, either, and we've got thousands of games where that's the goal, so...yay, lets take photos of underage high school girls' panties without their consent. 🙄

*kitsunebi edition*
There was already a very good scan of this issue made available here, but this is my all new scan and edit.  I think it offers some improvements, but encourage you to give it a look and decide for yourself.
Some differences include:
slightly whiter pages more complete scan of each page from edge to edge (the older scan was presumably debound with a guillotine cutter, while this was debound with a heat gun, ensuring the entire page could be scanned) more seamless joins of images that spread across facing pages inclusion of an alternate 3-page spread of the opening fold-out ad. This ad was designed so that, after opening the cover, you would see two facing pages.  Next, you would unfold the left page, which would display two new pages that would then seamlessly become a single 3-page image along with the original right-side page.  Thus, the right-side page would essentially be seen twice - facing the original left side page, and also as part of the three-page join once the left-side page was unfolded.  Both versions are included here for the first time to simulate the intended effect of the original ad. (One of the advantages of using a CBR reader is that this will cause no problems regardless of whether you are using single or two-page viewing mode.  If you are using a PDF reader (such as Sumatra) to read your CBR files...WHY?!  Seriously, you're using the wrong type of program LOL.  As such, the intended order of facing pages may not display correctly, but what did you expect - this isn't a PDF. 😜) inclusion of scans of subscription cards inclusion of scans of included demo CD sleeve and disc (and I've uploaded the ISO of said disc HERE.) Here are a couple of comparisons showing how two-page joins in this scan are more complete.  You can see how the older version is missing information near the center of the join:


This is just a regular page to show the slight difference in overall page coloration:

Mags debound and shipped across the sea by yours truly, and scanned by J of Oz.
This title remains a total b!%ch and a half to edit.  I can only get through about 10 pages per hour - it's a nightmare.
Luckily for the world, the resulting edited files mean that no one will ever be forced to look at brown-haloed copies of these mags ever again.  Digital preservation ftw.
  

246 pgs.
Another edit finished, another magazine tossed into the recycling bin.  And yet the pile of mags waiting to be scanned never gets any smaller.  Indeed, just when you think you're making progress clearing out the mags cluttering your home by the box-load, you "accidentally" buy some more.  In your head, you know what you're doing is abhorrently wrong, but just like this duck, your body has a mind of its own and your finger clicks the "buy it now" button before your brain has a chance to stop it.  You hang your head in shame.  This is the scanner's own private hell.

I uploaded the included CD-ROM HERE

So it seems the editors of Famitsu thought that people would like to see Persona 5 on the cover.  I mean, sure - on a NORMAL day, that might be the case.  But how they decided to go with Persona 5 when they had this in the same issue, will forever be a mystery:

This is Tsuri Bit.  Which means "fishing bit."  Note the fishing rods?  Wikipedia tells me that this jpop idol group formed out of a desire to sing, dance...and fish.
Their concept:
You can't even make this stuff up.
Based on views, this seems to be their biggest hit, from around the time this magazine came out (the song's title is "I'm going to dance, fish" presumably meaning "I'm going to dance and fish," or maybe "I'm going to dance, then fish" and not someone addressing a fish and telling it that they're going to dance.  Though I suppose it could be that...)
 

I had a certain song playing through my head while flipping through this mag, looking for my random "about this file" comment.  The version on Youtube is from an older version of the 5th grade elementary school English textbooks, and has been updated for the newer ones with new music and lyrics (same refrain and melody, though), but the newer version isn't on Youtube, so far as I know.  But it's ironic? fitting? that the song (Yokoso! Welcome to Japan) was stuck in my head when I came across a page featuring this toy:
 

A twin-barrel battleship gun emplacement...that couldn't be more Japanese if it tried.  I think foreigners who have never been to Japan watch some anime or some wacky Japanese commercials or whatever and think that Japan must be some zany place fully of quirky people doing quirky things like they saw once on a game show or in a video of an idol concert in Akihabara or something.  But it's actually a really quiet, ordinary place.
Except for the cuteness.  Everywhere you look, CUTE CUTE CUTE.  The kawaii aesthetic is everywhere.  Please observe exhibit A, a collection of roadside construction barriers.

So why not make cute anthropomorphic guns?  If you absolutely positively HAD to be shot out of the sky, wouldn't you prefer it be by something adorable?

Scanned by J of Oz
For once I can't show you a before and after comparison of the raw vs edited pages, since I already deleted the raw files - oops.  Suffice it to say, what you'll find here once again is an edit of the mag that looks light years better than the hot-off-the-scanner pages did, and probably looks better than it did when they were hot off the press.  Can I get a George Takei "Oh my!"???

This is the final issue of Games for Windows.  It could also be considered the final issue of Computer Gaming World, since that's what it was before they (unwisely) changed the name.  And I'd like to say it's the final issue needed to complete our collection of this title, but unfortunately we're still missing issue 5.  Phillyman owns it.  It's in a box he has in storage.  Pester him if you want to see it scanned.  Don't worry, there's nothing he likes more than a good pestering.
I for one am glad to be done editing issues of this title.  I scanned 15 issues out of GfW's 17 issue run, and every single one of them had an obscene amount of elements spread across both pages, forcing me to edit them together as a single image to ensure perfect joins in two-page view before splitting them back apart for the CBR.  This issue had 64 pages that had to be joined.  And it's only a 100 page mag!  I shake my fist at you, GfW art director, whoever you were...

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!!!!!"