HuguesJohnson.com - Game Players Magazine Premiere

Sometime earlier this year I came across a few old issues of Game Player's magazine. Maybe it was at a garage sale, maybe a thrift store, I don't remember any more. I figured I'd scan and post the interesting parts. After doing their Nintendo Strategy Guides I remembered how tedious scanning a magazine is. The actual scanning is monotonous, but the real killer is trying to come up with comments for each page. Sure I don't have to, but then what would people send me hate mail about?

I decided to leaf through the magazines and scan anything that appeared interesting. Along the way I found that one of them was the premiere issue of the publication. That's kinda interesting so I decided to scan the whole thing... until monotony set in again. So I resigned to only scan the good parts. I'm sorry, that means you'll have to miss out on the Super Mario Bros. walkthrough. I know that finding Super Mario Bros. walkthroughs on the internet is nearly impossible and I apologize if you were counting on this page to finally defeat Bowser after 20+ years of trying.

The cover is in pretty rough shape but the rest of the magazine is fine. For some reason the previous owner felt it important to highlight that this was dedicated to "Video and Computer Entertainment"."Hey, this thing says it's the 'Leading Magazine', what bunch of BS.. oh wait, 'of Video and Computer Entertainment', OK I'll believe that"

Table of contents, so you can see the sections I didn't bother scanning. Trust me, the "Nintendo Game of the Month: Super Mario Bros." really wasn't worth the effort.

I spent too much time internally debating whether to blur the swastika image on the side of the rocket. I'm a libertarian and strongly believe in supporting free speech, even highly offensive free speech. In this case, the image isn't even there to offend or intimidate anyone. It's an old DOS game where the storyline involves nazis in some capacity (the review is further down). At worst it's tasteless. However, there are a couple European countries where the symbol is banned. It would be so stupid to have my site blacklisted over something like this. You win this round censorship.

A very ambitious welcome letter from the editor. Looking at his resume, he sounds overqualified to run a video game magazine. Then again, what the hell am I doing writing about him writing for a game magazine? I should be doing technology whitepapers or another AI thesis. How screwed-up are my priorities? Let's just move on..

So if this was the premiere issue, where did they get these letters? They either stole a sack of mail from GamePro or had some contact information in their previously published Nintendo Strategy Guides.

The next two pages are basically explaining how much better gaming is in Japan. The internet certainly has been an equalizing force in this regard. With a limited flow of information most American gamers didn't realize how badly we were getting the shaft back then.

I don't care what anyone says, I prefer the US release of Super Mario Bros. 2 over the Japanese version. If I ever make a list of "Top 10 most annoying classic gamers" the "SMB2 purist" will be right up there with the guy lecuturing about how "Final Fantasy III for the SNES isn't the real Final Fantasy III".

No reference to these commercials in his IMDB page.

Preview of Bionic Commando. I said all I had to last time.

Over to the preview for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I'm not which was worse, the game or the movie? I never bought the Indiana Jones DVD set because I knew I'd never watch Temple of Doom (roughly the same reason why I never bought the Back to the Future set).

More Indiana Jones, I can't tell the difference between screenshots 2 and 3 here.

Rampage turned out pretty good on the NES, one of the better arcade conversions.

One sign of a bad game.. it contains "Bandai" in the title.

There are two really awesome mistakes on this page. And I don't include referring to Alf as "popular".

Once again, American gamers got the shaft in the late 80s. This page teases the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) which had been in Japan for months at this point.

This page is all Power Strike coverage. I don't recall ever playing this game, that third screenshot sure looks an awful lot like Xevious.

"Big news: The Atari 7800 Pro System is making a comeback!" I think for it to be a "comeback" you have to have been on top at some point. George Foreman made a comeback, Peter McNeeley can't. See how that works? Don't get me wrong, the Atari 7800 is a fun system but it never stood a chance against the NES. From a play control standpoint, the 7800 version of Double Dragon was debatably better than the NES or SMS versions making it a bright spot in the otherwise mediocre library. Graphically, it's pretty obvious why it tanked though.

Some coverage of After Burner in the arcade.

Cyberball was a great arcade game - keep in mind it was not produced by the same "Atari" as the one trying to keep the 7800 on life-support.

I used to have an Amiga 500 and Dragon's Lair but I ebayed it all last year. It's not that I didn't like the Amiga, I hadn't played it in close to 10 years and it took up a lot of space. Having room for video games took priority over keeping an old dusty computer around. This was a really good version of Dragon's Lair though, the Amiga looked so much better than the rival computing platforms at the time.

Seriously, compare these screens to the PC and Mac ones below. Not even close.

"The Manhole" is a terrible game title for reasons I won't go into. Score another round for voluntary censorship.

I just noticed that they put the game developer's address on these reviews. This address is now a carpet distributor.

The last place listed at this former Tecmo address is a photocopier servicing company.

Can't seem to track down who's in the former Vic Tokai office. Looks to be in an office park that has high turnover.

I had no idea Sega had an office in Minnesota. It now houses and agricultural risk management firm. I wonder if there was a time when one of the new occupants stumbled across a rare prototype cartridge while going through an old file cabinet. Hmmm, this sounds like an ideal plot for a terrible web comic.

Alright, enough looking up old addresses. This one is in King of Prussia so I'll just assume it's a Coach store now. This Twilight Zone game is either great or a complete disaster, I'll have to find a copy and try.

I played Ultima III and liked it quite a bit, never managed to try the other ones though except part IV on NES & SMS. The old Ultima games would be perfect for a mobile device.. which means we'll never see it happen.

Here's the game with the offending nazi imagery. The plot sounds like an unorganized mess, the last episode of Twin Peaks made more sense.

I thought it was great how the old Infocom games included extras in the box that were involved in the actual game play. It was such a great way to submerge the player into the story. Star Saga seems to multiply that by 20 and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

That "Search for the Titanic" game sounds like something that would fit in perfectly with the CD-i library. That's not a compliment to the game or the CD-i.

How can they write a piece called "Hand-Held Games are Back!" and not mention the Game Boy which was months away from its US release? It was hot off the assembly line in Japan and would make these other crappy LCD games obsolete.

Hey, is that "Hostage" game the same as "Rescue: The Embassy Mission"?

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