COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 7/14/07
['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]
Considering that four US magazines have folded this year (or in Tips & Tricks' case, downsized into a basically automated codes mag), I'm faced with fewer titles to cover on a biweekly basis. As a result, I think it's about time I started covering the UK's Edge in these little mag roundups, since I buy it every month and there's an official US subscription distributor -- one that, depending on how the exchange rates run, actually allows colonists to buy Edge for cheaper than the Brits can get it.
At its core, Edge isn't much different from US mags. There's news and columns up front, previews and features in the middle, reviews in the rear, and screw-around stuff in the way-back (in Edge's case, dev profiles/classifieds, letters, and retro coverage). Certainly the way that it approached game coverage was revolutionary when it launched in 1993 (back when EGM was still 85% previews and strategy guides), but nowadays pretty much every US mag has taken on an Edge-style mix of serious industry newsmongering and hard-hitting game coverage.
So why is Edge worth importing? I'd argue that it's a combination of design and writing. US magazines have improved their visual look vastly over the past few years, but Edge still has a simple, clear look that makes each page immediately enticing. This, coupled with a robust page count (130 pages every issue), nice thick paper, and Edge's traditional lack of back-cover advertising, make the magazine look proud on your father's coffee table, rather than the toilet racks many game mags end up lurking around in. The text, meanwhile, is also great -- its complete and total uniformity in style (there are no bylines anywhere) means that if you can dig its intellectual, sometimes dry feel, then you're guaranteed to enjoy anything written in the mag, no matter what it's about. (I've always thought that people who think Edge is pretentious should go back and read GameFan from around 1995 forward. Now that's pretention, and without the writing talent to back it up either.)
Edge is hardly a perfect magazine. Their copy editing isn't flawless. They published a piece on Saboteur this month that extols the WWII action game's unique use of color, but does a very poor job illustrating the tricks in the accompanying screenshots (GamePro, of all mags, performs far better in its own Saboteur feature). However, there's still no other magazine out there that takes such a deliberately intellectual-yet-casual approach to game coverage, and for that alone I think it's important.
Anyway, click on to read about all the US mags of the past two weeks -- all very good mags in the own right, too, I hasten to add.
Electronic Gaming Monthly August 2007 (Podcast)
Cover: Soulcalibur 4
I could write a whole column on the future of Ziff Davis Media (and I may just, someday, once I have some whiskey and Dr. Pepper in me). For now, though, I think it should be said that subjectively, I think EGM uses the cheapest paper out of any US game mag these days save for Beckett Massive Online Gamer. All the American game magazines I cover this installment are 100 pages in length, but EGM's thin and not-very-glossy pages make the magazine noticeably thinner when you compare them all. EGM also has the smallest page size (the same height as OXM and GamePro and so on, but about two millimeters off in width), and the thin paper coupled with EGM's primarily white color scheme makes bleed-through (text and graphics from one page being visible on the flip side) noticeable almost everywhere you turn. Why should the top magazine in the US content-wise have to feel cheaper than GamePro?
Speaking of content, this month starts out with a piece on video-game violence studies and the flaws that show up in how they're conducted. It's classic EGM, with a very serious main text that has quotes from sociologists coupled with a bit of silliness, like a sidebar featuring professional gamers seeing how well their skills apply to a real-life gun range. Besides that and the 14 pages of fighting-game coverage (10 on Soulcalibur 4), nothing in the mag is over 2 pages in length, making for a very tightly-packed issue.
It may be my imagination, but increasingly the back section of EGM is getting a lot more interesting. Seanbaby is still funny (which is amazing, considering he's been EGM's bad-games editor for about five years now), and Jeremy Parish's retro stuff is getting a lot more enticing to read now that it's more theme-oriented and less focused on this or that game. In this issue there's also a two-page picture with 21 references to random video games that you're meant to guess at -- pretty funny, but difficult.
GamePro August 2007
Cover: Fall preview guide
This cover falls dangerously close to GamePro's bad old days of putting about 40 game characters on the front page and using the Photoshop glow effect on all of them, but the colors are all nice and coordinated, and overall it's not a bad effect.
A four-page preview of Saboteur is arguably the nicest game coverage this month, though, going to show what you can accomplish when you've got good assets on your side (something GamePro does amazingly well, actually). The magazine's near-obsession with "numbers" features is also hard to ignore this issue, which includes the 52 most important games of all time (No. 1 is GTA3), the 3 upcoming games to die for, the 12 upcoming games that "break all the rules" (the main preview feature), the top 5 stories at gamepro.com, and 8 reasons why the Xbox 360 Elite is dumb, along with the "The 9" capsule-preview department. Statisticians love GamePro, no doubt.
Tips & Tricks August 2007
Cover: Transformers
This is the 150th issue of Tips & Tricks, but also sadly the next to last -- made even worse thanks to EIC Bill Kunkel's bold announcement this issue of tipstricks.com's official opening. That's pretty rough, there.
Still, the articles are quite nice, kicking off with four pages on the coolest arcades in America (apparently they still exist) and keeping it real in the "Games on Film" column with an interview with Zack Ward, the guy playing the hero in Uwe Boll's Postal movie. Wow! (There's also interviews with assorted Square developers that are among the most text-laden pages I've ever seen in T&T.)
Official Xbox Magazine August 2007 (Podcast)
Cover: BioShock (subscriber), The Bourne Conspiracy (newsstand)
This is the first OXM split-cover I can think of, and also the first Future subscriber/newsstand split cover since they experimented with it on PSM for a while last year. I'd argue that neither cover game lends a particularly strong and enticing image to the magazine (not knowing anything about Bourne, the newsstand cover is just some white dude staring at me as far as I can tell), but the internals are hot as always, with each page seemingly packed with content.
For deep-thinkers, though, the mag may be most worth buying for "Gone Too Soon?", a piece by Dean Takahashi discussing whether Microsoft scuttled the original Xbox too quickly, not to mention an in-game sponsorship investigation that's basically the same as the one Computer Games published earlier this year but is still a heck of a lot more interesting.
[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]
Comments
Excellent write up once again, though I can't say I consider EDGE to be *that* sophisticated, really. Still, it's above most stuff out there..
Posted by: gnome | July 15, 2007 9:27 AM
Kevin, can I request that you look at PC Gamer UK? It's arguably the best UK games magazine, and yes, I have a major bias because I write for it. (But then I write for Edge too...)
Posted by: Rossignol | July 16, 2007 5:55 AM
The one thing I like about Edge is they have one article in the magazine that comes out of the left field of gaming. Like their coverage of Flash animation games and the companies consolidating them. It is about gaming but EGM or GI touch upon these topics very lightly if at all.
Do many gamers care about Flash games? Probably not but I found it interesting that it is big business and people get paid a nice sum for each game.
Posted by: Lincoln | July 16, 2007 9:18 AM
Oh yeah -- PC Gamer is also a good magazine, but that I don't buy as regularly because it just costs too much.
Edge does cover out-there stuff like that, it's true. Most US console mags have always had an aversion to things like cell-phone games as something their readers aren't interested in -- which may or may not be true.
Posted by: keving | July 16, 2007 2:20 PM