Breaking it all Down

Alright, the GamePro recaps continue with issue #37 for August of 1992, with another movie licenced game on the cover – Universal Soldier, based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. Remember when the Muscles from Brussles had a career? Okay, that’s a cheap shot, particularly since JCVD might revitalize the man’s career (I’ve heard very good things about it) – but basically from here, and maybe Street Fighter 2 on, the man’s career goes into a steady decline.

Editorial: Summer CES has come and gone, and they saw a bunch of new games that they’ll be talking about this issue. And no – they won’t be doing any discussion of anything other than the contents of this magazine in the Editorial section.

The Mail: We get a request for tips on older games, or more in-depth strategy guides for games that have been out for a bit, and get pointed towards GamePro’s SWATPro Magazine. For the record, I think there might still be a market these days for a “strategy guide subscription” Particularly if we can get something like the Kindle with color. GameFAQs has it’s merits, but a well laid out strategy guide with label maps and pictures of relevant areas of the game is still helpful, and might help me with situations such as, when the Flood was introduced in Halo 1, my getting lost – which actually ruined the emotional impact of the level. We also have another question about getting into the game industry – alas, the internet is not wide spread enough at this time where you can put an FAQ on GamePro’s home page with an answer to that question and put a link to it on the very front. We also get a request for more Master System coverage, since Sega hasn’t officially stopped supporting it yet (the problem is that many of the new games for the Master System are taking a hop, skip, and jump over the US and heading to Europe, where the Master System generally did well). Read more

We continue with our recaps of GamePro with issue 36 for July of 1992. This issue is of pretty average length at 112 pages long – with what is probably GamePro’s first extremely awesome piece of cover art, complete with jets of blood. I’m surprised that they got away with the blood on the cover, to be honest. It’s not a perfect likeness of H.R. Giger’s disturbing design, but it still captures the intensity of the design.

Editorial: After several issues of awesome editorial columns, we’re back to spending the editorial column doing the job the cover and the table of contents are supposed to be doing – hyping the contents of the issue. Disappointing.

Letters: Of note in the letters is one letter calling for 8-bit to die already. Long live 16-Bit! Long Live 32-bit! Long Live 64-bit! Long Live Quantum Computing! *gets hit by the readers* Ow!

Cutting Edge: This issue they’re covering CD games. We’re starting off with Commodore’s console system, the CDTV, which actually came out, though nobody remembers this because Commodore died 2 years after this issue hit newsstands (1994), and the OS was already obsilete. Anyway, Commodore killed this system the next year, in favor of Amiga’s CD32, which isn’t remembered much either, because, again, Commodore died the next year. Next up is the Phillips CD-I, with a list of various games coming out for the system, including one called Guest which would actually be The 7th Guest. Read more

So, onwards with our GamePro recaps. Our next issue is #35 for June of 1992. This issue is at a semi-average length of 117 pages long, and it’s cover story is Taz-Mania for the Genesis. That’s right, it’s the early 90s, and now the Tazmanian Devil has the most marketing muscle of the Looney Toones. Not Bugs, not Daffy, not Tweety, not Sylvester, not Porky, not Elmer.

Editorial: Well, they’ve changed the rating system again, from a 5 point system to a 10 point system. Sort of. It’s more a 5 point system with half-points in-between. I’m more of a integer guy myself. To make things a little easier, they’ve also stopped giving a “point” score for difficulty, instead giving a brief descriptor – which is good, because on the number system difficulty was working on an entirely different scale from everything else. Well, we’ll see how the new system works out. Oh, and they’ve also added a new sports section, instead of doing semi-annual sports issues.

Mail: Our first letter is related to cross compatability between Phillips CD-I system and Nintendo’s “upcoming” SNES disk system, and rumors of plans for a color GameBoy. I suspect Nintendo is working on a Color Game Boy, though I know we don’t get it until around 1998-ish, and Sushi-X wants one even more than he wants a ninja pony. Also, they get called on a slight goof on their April issue, when they billed Jordan Vs. Bird as being for the SNES instead of being for the Genesis. We also get a letter bitching about Nintendo not putting out a 8-Bit converter for bringing NES games to the SNES (speaking of a pony), and a letter wanting to contact some of the “GamePros”. I still find obfuscating the reviewers identies through the use of false identites a little questionable – it feels like they’re trying to build popular identities for various writers and get readers to follow them, but to do it in such a way that the writers are disposable, and possibly making it difficult for writers to find work elsewhere, because the writers themselves aren’t actually getting credited for their work. Now, I could be (and I hope I am) totally wrong, but that’s the impression that editorial decision gives me. Read more

Well, we continue with the GamePro recaps with issue 34, for May of 1992. Our cover story is Splatterhouse II for the Genesis (though they forget the Roman numeral). The issue is pretty short, about 100 pages long.

Editorial: actually has some content, in this case regarding Nintendo’s decision to increase the amount of carts they’re letting their licencees put out for the SNES, with, basically, GamePro’s editorial staff saying this doesn’t matter, because it’s still not providing variety, with multiple, for example Golf carts coming out the same time (which is, by the way, a horrible example – these different golf carts often have a variety of courses with no overlap between them. Frankly, in my opinion, different genres of games have different thresholds for overkill. For example, you can probably get away with 2-3 different football (or soccer, for that matter) series, and I’d say that having that variety is a good thing. By having multiple football franchises, the developers have to work to make their game different, and generally work on improving their game, and working to build a better football game. When that happens, everyone wins. On the other hand, I’d say that the games market can support 7-8 ninja based action-platformers, because there’s a lot of different ways you can use ninja in your games. You can tell a post-apocalypic story, you can have the modern vigilante ninja, the urban fantasy demon-hunting ninja, the Sengoku/Jidagaki period ninja, etc. I’m not saying all these games will be good, but I am saying that the market can handle this many games without hitting saturation. Read more

Well, the streak of GamePro issues continues unabated. The next issue of GamePro is issue 33 for April of 1992, featuring Michael Jordan (who is not wearing a number on his uniform in this picture) on the cover. This issue is, again, fairly short – about 100 pages long.

Editorial: Finally we get some actual journalism in the editorial, relating to responses to questions posed to Nintendo of America regarding the SNES. First, related to the lack of backwards compatability, and whether or not an adapter will be shipped to allow older NES games to be played – they consider it inappropriate to sell an add-on adapter, instead we include all the cables necessary to play both (thus, if you sold your NES to upgrade to the SNES, and hoped for backwards compatibilty like the Genesis or TurboGrafx systems, we can make more money off you when you buy a new NES.) Also, some SNES games around launch have been experiencing slowdown and other framerate drops – this is because of the systems 4 CPUs working togeather to provide a superior graphical experience (in other words, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature – I thought Nintendo had actually learned something from the last video game crash, and all the crappy, buggy games being put out by companies like Intellivision, which is the company that coined the phrase). They also hype their CD-ROM add-on, which never comes out. Now, they don’t do the next step here, which is draw the necessary conclusions (Nintendo of America is an asshole), and respond as appropriate – Nintendo hasn’t changed their tune, in spite of their settlement with the FTC. However, from what I understand, the Debug systems that they use to review the pre-release code for games are basically property of Nintendo, so if they do say thing negative, in theory Nintendo could pull the consoles, and they wouldn’t be able to review games until months after they’d hit shelves, potentially killing them. Read more