Areala

1 hour ago, Rando1975 said:

Very true. I think they are neat, but I don't have any of the old systems, except for some of the mini/classic versions.

Although I'm curious if these "new" cartridges work on clone systems like the Polymega?   

They should as long as the clone systems have a dedicated cartridge connector. The internals of a Super Nintendo are well-known and documented, so engineering something that reads SNES cart data isn't difficult.

On 9/19/2024 at 5:19 AM, douglie007 said:

Do they have the full game walk through or just hints or cheats?

Hints and cheat codes. Prima guides from that era that cover multiple games are always just hint/cheat books. Guides from that era about one specific game are full walkthrough.

*huggles*
Areala

For scanning magazines, you cannot get any better than debinding the magazine and running it through an actual scanner. Book scanners of the type you're talking about merely take a photo of the pages. This can work (crudely) for books, because they're dealing almost entirely with text as opposed to finely-detailed artwork, and the gutter (the point where the two pages meet in the center) is always composed of white space. With magazines, this is exactly the opposite: magazines are printed full-bleed (ink all the way to the edges of the pages, including the gutter), and feature far more finely-detailed artwork than they do text.

If you want to do it for your own personal collection, a book scanner is a low-cost, minimal-effort solution. If you're wanting to do it for our site, the end result won't be high-quality, and we likely won't use them here. You'll want a good scanner with a document feeder; I'm sure some of the other members can recommend specific brands and models. I'm the only one here living in the stone age, scanning stuff by hand-placing it on the glass, and trust me, you have better things to do with your time.

*huggles*
Areala

These are relatively uncommon. I have several of the other guides in the "Secrets of the Game" series for the Genesis, but not this one. The earlier titles in the series had multiple print runs, but later titles only got single print runs, so they can be pricier.

It'll set you back around $15 - 20 to acquire a copy:

https://www.amazon.com/Sega-Official-Game-Secrets-Games/dp/1559583770/

*huggles*
Areala

8 hours ago, koifish said:

At least there's the port of Phantasy Star 1 from Sega Ages. Captures everything you want and nothing you don't, with convenience options included too.

Oh man, I totally forgot about the Sega Ages port of Phantasy Star! Awesome reminder, @koifish!

42 minutes ago, RetroDefense said:

Phantasy Star deserves this kind of attention.  Would love to see Sega hire M2 and have 'em put something together.

It really sucks that the best we're likely to see from the Phantasy Star IP is the Phantasy Star Collection released on the GBA back in 2005.

*huggles*
Areala

7 hours ago, SynthMilk said:

So the joke is that stereograms are lame and anyone expecting the ad to actually contain a stereogram is equally lame?

Well, I haven't felt this insulted since Atari questioned my ability to "connect the dot."

But @SynthMilk, if you just DO THE MATH you will discover that 64 bits is more bits than 32 bits or 16 bits so can't you just DO THE MATH?!

22 hours ago, kitsunebi said:

This is probably why so many people want to believe in an afterlife where they've got all the time and energy they need and money isn't a concern.  Though I would hope that if life after death DID exist there would be more worthwhile pursuits at hand than finally playing that copy of Grim Fandango you never got around to in life, no matter how amusingly ironic that might be.

"Just diffuse the damn bomb, Manny!"

There are three stages of life we all pass through:

1. Adolescence: You have the energy and the time, but you do not have the money.
2. Adulthood: You have the energy and the money, but you do not have the time.
3. Old age: You have the money and the time, but you do not have the energy.

*huggles*
Areala

25 minutes ago, SynthMilk said:

Did this 2-page Secret of Evermore ad actually "work" for anybody?

https://www.retromags.com/rmg_fs/gallery_imgs/monthly_2024_03/large.SecretofEvermore(April1995).jpg.92313b816b4eb7a58d544b01102e6d66.jpg

Based on the instructions, I've always assumed it was supposed to have a Magic Eye-type effect; but any instance of it that I've ever come across seems to be missing the uh "magical" layer.

Printing mistake? User error? Help me out here.

 

There never was any magic eye effect (although it was making fun of those type of things). "The Secret of Evermore" was a game that played big into the notion that the player has an NPC dog that follows them around throughout their time traveling adventures. At one point, the dog mutates into a huge, wolf-like brute with red eyes. That's the "joke" of the ad.

On 8/24/2024 at 3:23 PM, StrykerOfEnyo said:

why... just why?

Because "HELL YEAH!", that's why. 

Hi, @Palmtree!

An awful lot of magazines, going all the way back to the 1980s, ran "best of" lists in their pages. As just one example, PC Gamer Issue 3 ran a feature ranking the top 40 PC games of all time (well, at least up through August of 1994, when that issue saw print). They would go on to update this list numerous times over the next two decades.

Features like this were guaranteed to generate a lot of buzz and talk among the typical subscriber base, to say nothing of people who only periodically picked up magazines, and publishers usually made these their cover feature to entice rack shoppers to pick them up and see where their favorite game(s) wound up ranking. Browsing through our cover gallery is a pretty easy way to locate these.

Many console-specific magazines kept floating ranking lists like these as regular monthly features, where the editors and readers would submit their choices to the magazine. Nintendo Power did this for years, maintaining not just a list of what the readers liked, but also the best-loved games played by their game counselors.

Magazines which didn't focus on a specific console, like EGM and GamePro, usually published monthly statistics on the ten best-selling titles and most-rented titles, where their figures were pulled from consumer sales indexes along with information supplied by large video game rental outfits, like Blockbuster Video. These were regular departments in the magazines, so any given issue from the 90s to the early 2000s had a page or two showcasing the trends.

Landmark issues of specific magazines were often causes for retrospectives of this nature, where the magazine would dig through the archives and put together features about their best- and worst-ranked games over the publication's life to that point. Depending on the frequency of a magazine's publication, you might look at issue #6 (for bi-monthly publications), issue #12 (for yearly publications), issue #24/25, issue #50, issue #100, fifth anniversary, tenth anniversary, and so on. It wasn't uncommon to see this sort of thing from a first issue, especially if the magazine was making its debut in the middle of an already-crowded field, which is what PSM did in their first issue.

Finally, if a magazine made a transition from one name to another, check out the first issue published under their new moniker. When Computer Gaming World re-branded as Games For Windows, sure enough, their very first issue featured their countdown of the Top 10 PC Games of 2007.

Welcome to the site, and I hope this helps give you some starting points to work with!

*huggles*
Areala

1 hour ago, StrykerOfEnyo said:

We have t-shirts? Sweet. Oops... just did it again.

Well, we did. Problem is, they got confiscated back in 2014 after @E-Day used them in an unauthorized wet t-shirt contest in Ontario which he "won" by virtue of being the only participant.

Hey @Phillyman, I think it's time to change our tagline.

"Retromags: You Better Bring A Spare Pair of Underwear!"

"Retromags: Making You Shit Yourself With Joy Since 2009!"

Let's get it on the t-shirts ASAP!

10 hours ago, dablais said:

Hahaha!!!  Just curious, how do you know about it! 

Because I bought them, obviously.

18 hours ago, StrykerOfEnyo said:

I like Play Magazine, too -- both versions. Though I found their "Girls of Gaming" a little creepy. (i believe they published those)

If you thought those were creepy, wait until you hear about the Playboy issues where they showed off the hottest ladies of gaming sans clothing. 

Just a correction: we don't keep a mirror at archive.org. Those files are usually uploaded there by people who aren't affiliated with the site. Some of our members do host their files there as well, but Retromags itself does not do this.

*huggles*
Areala

16 hours ago, SynthMilk said:

Got curious about this the other day when I came across a few eBay listings for early 90s EGMs that were still sealed in their original bags.

Any idea which issue and/or publication kicked off the polybag trend?

Also curious whether people tended to hold onto the bags to safely store the mini strategy guides, trading cards and AOL discs they contained, or if you just tore it off and tossed it away as soon as you got home.

This would be difficult to answer, since polybagging magazines was normally only a thing for shipping them through the mail, and even then, not all publications did it. Normally magazines were polybagged on the newsstand if they contained something the publisher didn't want to get lost/stolen, like a 3.5" floppy or a CD-ROM, or if the contents were not appropriate for all-ages. You most commonly saw this with PC magazines of the era, where you could pick from the regular issue or pay a few dollars more to get the one with the disk/CD. I usually paid the premium for the CD.

As to who did it first? My subscription issues of Nintendo Power from the late 80s always shipped in polybags, but they were the only gaming mag I had a subscription to back in the day so I don't know if EGM and GamePro were doing that first. I picked up some newsstand issues of EGM and GamePro back in the late 90s and early 2000s that were polybagged, because they came with a poster or a mini strategy guide, but this was not the norm.

*huggles*
Areala

4 hours ago, arlinn said:

Totally agree on the sorcery bit. When I learned what save states were, I was blown away. It made so many of the more difficult NES games beatable.

Believe it or not, I was aware of save states before I was aware of emulators! Naki made a piece of hardware called the Game Saver for the Super NES. It had the side effect of letting you play Japanese carts on North American SNES units without having to physically modify the console, so my brother and I bought one so we could import games if we wanted to. But the thing's primary function was to create a save state for the game you were playing so you could quick-save and quick-load on the fly and avoid having to go back to the start of the stage, or a checkpoint, or whatever. It was extremely basic, with only one state possible on the game, and it only worked as long as it was plugged into the wall (you ran the power cord into it directly, and it had its own passthrough cable that then went to the AC power port on the back of the SNES), but still. Save states in, like, 1995. 

*huggles*
Areala

I remember discovering iNES all the way back in, what, 1996 or thereabouts and being utterly blown away that I could turn my little Toshiba laptop into a Nintendo Entertainment System. I mean, I had a vague idea that it was possible to run games previously designed for one system on another system, thanks to carts like Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits on the SNES. But I had no idea some random person in the world could just write a program on their own that would translate the ROM data from an NES cart into information that could be read and processed by a PC. Like, that was utter sorcery to my teenaged brain.

*huggles*
Areala

Not to brag, but I have a complete-in-box copy of Madden 2005 for the original Xbox. I'm not entertaining any offers for sale at this time, but rest assured, if the day ever comes when I just REALLY need some Taco Bell, it'll go up for sale.

*huggles*
Areala

On 2/14/2024 at 7:41 PM, OutworldArcade said:

I recall seeing a feature in a gaming magazine maybe Summer/Fall 1993 era that gave a first look at Mortal Kombat II arcade game. If my memory serves me, it was a very brief mention and was just a few low quality camera shots of the game that showed Reptile and the Dead Pool stage. This was definitely the first time I saw any look at the game and I would stare at it over and over!
I have scoured through EGM, GamePro, and Game Players '93 issues, among a few others with no luck. It looks like the main coverage of that game started in December '93 with photos from the October AMOA show and was then a main feature in Jan '94, but considering it started hitting the arcades that Fall, I expect what I'm looking for would have came well before December.
I can't remember what magazine it was in or what month and have been looking for this for years! Anyone else recall this? No one I've talked to seems to remember. I would love to be able to find this again and soak up that nostalgia! 

Welcome to the site, @OutworldArcade! I'm doing some digging into the archives to see if I can find anything out. I can't promise anything, but I'll certainly do my best.

*huggles*
Areala

On 11/21/2023 at 8:48 AM, Liquidd said:

I remember a particularly humorous event though - which occurred in the forums of either PSM or EGM - where a reader complained about all the scantily clad female game character art stating that she would be happy to see just a pic of Cloud Strife (FF7) in his underwear. So I drew a pic of Cloud in his skivvies and sent it in. They printed it under the headline "One Reader Comes Through For Another" lol. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for that issue, but I'd love to see how much my art has improved since that piece.

Oh my gosh, I remember both that letter and the Cloud In His Undies artwork that showed up a couple of months later! That's freakin' HILARIOUS! Good on you for making her wish come true! 

For anyone else wanting to check this out, the letter appeared in EGM #100, page 16, written by someone using the pseudonym "Terra" from Springfield, MA. EGM's response was that after all the controversy surrounding them publishing the info about the Nude Raider website, they couldn't possibly show such a thing.

The responses came in issue 102, on page 12, first with a letter from "Celes" excoriating EGM for printing a picture of Lara in a bikini on the page immediately following "Terra"'s letter (in EGM's defense, that was an ad, not internal artwork or a reader-submitted piece) and asking for said Cloud in Undies picture. Right below that is @Liquidd's letter and artwork.

As another amusing aside, the letter just below that is about the secret message EGM ran in issue #100 about GamePro. The response from the editor tells readers to keep an eye out for other hidden messages from EGM, because sometimes they just throw one in there for the heck of it. Which they actually did right there, since the first letter of each sentence spells out the word 'THANKS'. Cheeky buggers...

*huggles*
Areala

57 minutes ago, JimJam78 said:

Modern controls, you say?  Excellent.

They're not 100% perfect, and actually make a couple moves harder to execute (those original games were built around the tank control scheme), but I could see the devs listening to fan response and getting them better. They're already taking feedback to some of the changes that made a couple of items harder to see in the new graphics engine.