COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/17/08

It's another exciting installment of my biweekly look into the beguiling world of video-game magazines! Huzzah! Except -- hang on -- there are only three mags to cover this time around. Curse Future Publishing for putting out all four of their mags at once and wrecking any sense of balance I had with these updates!

Still, this update is still remarkably interesting for one important reason: Edge and Game Informer both have the hot world exclusive etc. scoop on the new Prince of Persia, and since each mag wrote their coverage off largely the same access, it's the perfect opportunity for me to compare how the USA's top-circ game mag's approach to game features differs from the world's smuggest most dedicated game publication.

Edge June 2008

Cover: A new Prince of Persia

Out of all the Edges I've read in the past few years, this is probably the cover story with the least amount of meat to it -- a far cry from the GTA feature of two months ago, which had enough content to write an entire coffee-table book with. Meanwhile, this eight-page feature is illustrated with six screenshots, a couple pieces of concept art, and some glamour shots of the development team.

Besides the visuals, you can summarize the factual content of the game in a few short phrases: The world is threatened by Corruption, the game's got an open-world structure, combat is one-on-one, and (most famously if the weblogs are any indication) a Wii version will "never, ever happen."

There! I just saved you from having to buy the issue. Or did I? Without any hands-on time or other factual experiences to report (the author blithely admits in the end that one of the fundamental gameplay concepts of this POP is still under wraps), Edge instead lets the developers talk their heads off about the game, their inspirations, and nearly everything else under the sun. The result reads almost like a "pre-mortem", as compared with Game Developer's postmortems, and the tone of the piece is much more techie/developer oriented than GI's features.

The rest of the mag is much more full-featured, chiefly thanks to features on Alone in the Dark, the new N-Gage, GarageGames, and the quest for convincingly "stupid" AI in games -- all aggressively dev-oriented pieces, all running for many pages. There's also a making-of bit on Kung Fu Chaos, which proves that Edge, for all its high points, has a pair of ridiculously rose-colored glasses that it polishes off whenever covering a British developer's work.

Glossing over the fact that the game is horrible and the personification of how uneven Microsoft was at first-party publishing outside of Halo for much of the Xbox 1's life, the article (and its interview subject, designer Tameem Antoniades) tries to blame KFC's sales failure on ultra-politically-correct EGM reviewers. Seriously. EGM wishes it was that influential. (The Edge writer also seems unaware that EGM uses a three-score reviewing system, which is a bit of an impressive oversight.)

Game Informer June 2008

Cover: Guitar Hero 4

Unlike Edge's POP story or EGM's Guitar Hero 2 cover piece of once-upon-a-time, this is one seriously dense article backing up GI's cover. It goes over all of GH4's new customization and editing features in exhaustive detail and outlining exactly what the new drum set will be like and so forth.

More interesting to me, however, is their POP piece. Compared to Edge's article (they both work with pretty much the exact same amount of dev access and level of assets), GI's piece tries to stick to the facts -- how the fighting mechanic will work, what the world and story line is like, how the narrative will likely unfold.

There is a bit of dev commentary, but while the makers took center stage in Edge's piece, here producer Ben Mattes's quotes are window dressing for the author to decorate his descriptions of the hero's glove or what the Corruption looks like. Here lies the main difference between a GI game feature and its Edge equivalent. GI covers the game; Edge covers the game's role in the genre, the industry, and the developer/publisher working on it.

To put it in website terms, it's the difference between, say, going to IGN or going to The Escapist for coverage on this or that game -- both sites will tell you when the game's coming out and how many players can have at it online at once, but one's going to go a lot more intelligently in-depth than the other because they are writing for an audience better prepared to appreciate that.

The news section is usually GI's best part, but this time around I feel like I'm getting only part of the story with the main pieces. There's a piece on low-quality Wii shovelware (not a new subject), an interview with the Madden manager that is remarkably softball for how much the game gets picked on by hardcore fans, and a piece on Stardock that features Brad Wardell warbling on and on about how he's right and every other PC publisher is wrong when it comes to copy protection.

There's also a piece on the top 10 video game books that has Masters of Doom at number one (I can dig that), Phoenix at number two (I can't dig that; have you actually tried reading it? It's denser than my grad-level computer engineering textbooks), and Snow Crash as number three (oh come on).

Game Developer May 2008

Cover: Rock Band

The devs at Neversoft spend a lot of their GI piece obliquely railing on the deficiencies of "our competitor's game," but Harmonix design director Rob Kay writes a killer piece on Rock Band's development, from figuring out how to make the game useful in multiplayer to getting all the Chinese manufacturing wrinkles sorted out.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]