Can't believe how underrated MML1 and 2 were during the late 90s and early 2000s. I feel like everyone was retarded besides me because I played the shit out of megaman64 (rented twice from blockbuster before I made my parents buy it for me)
Seems more a case to me of British video game magazines being complete dog shit in the late-90's, not that US mags were much better, but they could actually review games sometimes rather than writing in forced snark.
>but they could actually review games sometimes >100 word reviews in every other magazine
Calls into question whether the readership (and the reviewers) had a clue about anything. >forced snark
As opposed to the tired dudespeak glorified ads you called reviews that were typical of American publications?
I used to talk from an old friend over the phone after I moved out of the city, and we would recommend games to each other. He told me about this one Mega Man game was was in 3D like Doom. That lived rent free in my mind until I got a copy of MML brand new in 1999. To this day it's one of my favorite PS1 games of all time, and I still have to play through it once a year or two.
That review is pretty bad yea. I've never heard or played this game before and after reading that page I still have no idea what this game is about or what it's like to play it. Is there any combat or do you just talk to people and then run away when monsters show up? Do you have to solve puzzles? Do the NPCs give you clues?
It's a survival horror which plays more like an old-school adventure game, finding items and using them in the right places. NPCs either help you out or join you as your partner, so the fact the reviewer thinks there's only one person who joins you shows they probably never played longer than 30 minutes. All the screenshots they used on the page are of the opening cutscene kek. Also there's a big twist in the game around 2/3 in which any genuine review would discuss.
And that was the official Playstation magazine in the UK and other places in Europe too, i used to buy that garbo, they didn't even score a game for the music/sound.
Reminds me how EGM gave Guardian Legend the most middling reviews, said it did nothing original, and the adventure elements were half-baked and better off left out of the game. And nowadays that's why the game fondly remembered and seen as one of the biggest standouts of the console.
It's because how accessible it is compared to other NES games or games of that era. A regular shoot em up would kick their ass much more unlike Guardian Legends.
That's a valid point. Video game magazines loved to emphasize challenge as a good thing (GamePro even having a "Challenge" category in their own reviews). TGL by comparison of other retro shooters is far more forgiving: a life meter that only gets larger during the course of the game, permanent upgrades, generous health drops, a hit box that gets smaller when you're on your last hit, all sorts of stuff. It's two-games nature makes it a big standout in this modern day, but at a time when a shmup fan would want only the most balls out blast anything that moves game, of which there was no shortage.
My understanding of this one isn't that he didn't play the game, but that he got a review version that was unfinished and genuinely only had 5 levels, and there was bad communication between the publisher and the reviewer.
I don't know why you'd make up such a lie otherwise and be so sure of yourself.
[...]
Also, regarding the difficulty, you have to understand that this was from a time when reviewers actually were good at video games and were demanding high difficulty, giving bad reviews to easy games and favourable reviews to harder games. If he indeed got an unfinished version with only 5 levels, it's understandable he'd think it was too easy to beat. Possibly the balancing is different than in the final version we know too.
People tend to forget that reviewers getting unfinished products is not uncommon. The vast majority of reviews of Resident Evil are based on a version that has entirely different balancing than the one we got, with different key/supply item placement and even extra story notes.
That's really not the problem here, it's that all but one of them clearly didn't play past the first stage. Gimmick is famous for having a deceptively easy first stage before it drops all pretense and expects you to pull off precision platforming and mastering the star's physics.
[...]
That's really not the problem here, it's that all but one of them clearly didn't play past the first stage. Gimmick is famous for having a deceptively easy first stage before it drops all pretense and expects you to pull off precision platforming and mastering the star's physics.
If they're guessing, why being so specific as to wrongly claim the number of levels the game has? The level select screen at the start of the game doesn't even show the number of levels. If they were guessing they would have remained vague. I think there is something more going on here.
My understanding of this one isn't that he didn't play the game, but that he got a review version that was unfinished and genuinely only had 5 levels, and there was bad communication between the publisher and the reviewer.
I don't know why you'd make up such a lie otherwise and be so sure of yourself.
Also, regarding the difficulty, you have to understand that this was from a time when reviewers actually were good at video games and were demanding high difficulty, giving bad reviews to easy games and favourable reviews to harder games. If he indeed got an unfinished version with only 5 levels, it's understandable he'd think it was too easy to beat. Possibly the balancing is different than in the final version we know too.
People tend to forget that reviewers getting unfinished products is not uncommon. The vast majority of reviews of Resident Evil are based on a version that has entirely different balancing than the one we got, with different key/supply item placement and even extra story notes.
>be game reviewer during the height of PlayStation, when tons of games were coming out all the time >have to put out a new issue every month >office is absolutely flooded with preview, review, and promo discs, for games ranging from toddler crap to AAA titles... but you have to play, take screenshots, and write something about everything assigned to you >have to cover everything ASAP so your magazine has a good rep for getting out previews and reviews in a timely manner >have to make decisions about which games are "important" and should warrant more in-depth coverage >need to worry about making your writeups engaging and entertaining as much as they are informative
Yeah, it sucks and really should be a mark against the publication and writer, but I get why some reviews/previews were clearly made in a rush by somebody who barely played the game, and might not have even had a chance to fully wrap their head around the gameplay. Sure, it's not a hard job compared to manual labor or whatever the fuck, but time is still time, and I can only imagine that a lot of these reviewers could only pull so many all-nighters to finish multi-hour long review builds (some of which didn't have the courtesy of including an invincibility function) and mind numbingly dull shivelware before they went "yeah, fuck it, I'm just writing my review based on the first two areas."
>What's her name?
Every game ever made, ever.
But since this is the retro vidya board...
Every game ever made before 2007 on 6th gen consoles and before.
PC Guide was a general PC magazine. Even so I still have absolutely no idea what this person played. Obviously the review was so embarrassing nobody at Future Publishing wanted to put their name to it.
This is honestly so rare that someone who actually plays the game to the end is notable, some magazines, like Computer Gaming World and Pelit had people who actually bothered doing it.
Take a look at any modern website reviewing some game getting an emulated rerelease and you'll see people who played a game for 5 minutes and then throw out every cliche you can thing of. "Dated", "pixelated" and whatever. Then you see absolutely nothing that didn't show up within 5 minutes. Play this with any such review and none of them will ever prove you wrong.
https://archive.org/details/AmigaComputingIssue103Sep96/page/n93/mode/2up >I have a gut feeling that Kick Off 96 is going to be a bit like skin on a rice pudding (pardon the analogy) - you'll either love it or hate it. I have to admit that I actually think it's a pretty good game. >This game's real letdown is the sound which, to put it mildly, is duff. >GRAPHICS: 86% >SOUND: 40% >GAMEPLAY: 90% >OVERALL: 86%
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12603/kick-off-96/ >The Amiga version had a rather inexcusable bug, where the game rarely reached half-time - the first half simply continued infinitely, even after a goal was scored. Amiga Power magazine gave the game just 1% on account of this, noting that it only got any marks at all because the people stupid enough to buy it would have £20 less for food and clothing, thus leading to an increase in the world's average IQ.
holly molly they spoke about MAME in a PSX official magazine sanctionated by SONY.
OH, no problem it was the 90s
is ace combat 2 just ok?
I had these issues, the layouts are burnt into my memory. Funny reviews in retrospect, it's not worth getting mad over them, game journalism was never good.
don't get me wrong. I love these magazines and reviews, I love to see it games with less than a 7 out of 10 or a 8 out of ten (which happened in the last 18 years)
it feels refreshing to see reviews with less than a 6/10
>AC2 a 5/10
To be fair, it got good scores on all fronts except longevity, which I can relate to. I had a lot of fun with it but it was over too quickly.
Imagine paying $50 for this back in the day.
>Brits in the mid 90's just shat on everything that was in 2D, huh?
not only brits in Europe after 1994 if your game weren't 3D it wasn't worthy your time according to magazines.
At the time the official PS1 magazine was shitting on computer games for obvious reasons, though they were often right since computer games even at their peak were second rate.
I quite like the Rebel Assault games but it's hard to refute what he said there. If you play on normal or below its way too easy and that makes it so that you can finish it in one run which makes it feel even shorter. You can get a bit more life out of it if you play on hard, good for some rage moments specially in those evade the asteroids/tunnel levels.
I got them in a PC Star Wars collection that had like 6 CDs and they are very neat that way, they nailed the atmosphere and StarWars feel. I can come back whenever to immerse myself for a quit burst of play, but if I was a poor kid that only gets like 1-2 games a year (maybe Birthdays and Christmas) then just having Rebel Assault 2 would be pretty lame.
Shitting on Rebel Assault 2 is one thing, but to drag Dark Forces down? That's fucking heinous.
Yeah the shot at Dark Forces is wierd, I remember everyone praising it at the time, excellent game. Maybe he was blinded by the new and shiny 3D worlds.
I originally wasn't sure if your thread would be interesting enough but this pic convinced me to check out your thread OP. Unbelievable to think there were publications out there crapping on SOTN.
lol this is fucking absurd. Nightmare Creatures was average at best. If you look at some playthroughs of the game you'll even see how poor its combat system really was. I won't say it was completely awful I remember liking it but its far from the game SOTN was.
CD-Action Magazine gave Monster Inc. a 10/10 and featured it on the cover because they thought cutscenes were made specifically for the game and they thought they were funny. the cutscenes were just clips from the movie. And the game was pooparse. Not the brighest moment of Polish journalism. But I guess it's not as bad as the Chip magazine article about child porn illustrated with actual child porn which they printed and sold at stores.
Can't believe how underrated MML1 and 2 were during the late 90s and early 2000s. I feel like everyone was retarded besides me because I played the shit out of megaman64 (rented twice from blockbuster before I made my parents buy it for me)
This is a magazine that was half "lads mag" aka, as much smut and toilet humour as they could include without being banished to the top shelf.
who ever hired a prostitute to watch you play video games
do you have scans for that magazine I am looking for those 104 issues plus 22 special issues.
Thanks in advance.
It's on internet archive. There's not many though.
https://datassette.org/revistas/playstation-plus
Seems more a case to me of British video game magazines being complete dog shit in the late-90's, not that US mags were much better, but they could actually review games sometimes rather than writing in forced snark.
>but they could actually review games sometimes
>100 word reviews in every other magazine
Calls into question whether the readership (and the reviewers) had a clue about anything.
>forced snark
As opposed to the tired dudespeak glorified ads you called reviews that were typical of American publications?
Shouldn't Britfags like eye-searing colors, given how much they want to fuck their ZX Spectrum?
I used to talk from an old friend over the phone after I moved out of the city, and we would recommend games to each other. He told me about this one Mega Man game was was in 3D like Doom. That lived rent free in my mind until I got a copy of MML brand new in 1999. To this day it's one of my favorite PS1 games of all time, and I still have to play through it once a year or two.
This game really is embarrassingly kiddie. Also, it sucks.
go to bed Nigel
I love how this review just upsets people here lol
I don't understand why this review would upset anyone. 99% of the games worth playing were made by Western studios.
Blatant bait.
why do you hate Japan, Deano? even the Americans got over Pearl Harbor
Absolutely based
MML is the most overrated game ever
Typical britshart magazine
Cry more.
I don’t even like MML, but goddamn, Brit gaming mags really seem to have been the absolute bottom of the barrel.
That review is pretty bad yea. I've never heard or played this game before and after reading that page I still have no idea what this game is about or what it's like to play it. Is there any combat or do you just talk to people and then run away when monsters show up? Do you have to solve puzzles? Do the NPCs give you clues?
It's a survival horror which plays more like an old-school adventure game, finding items and using them in the right places. NPCs either help you out or join you as your partner, so the fact the reviewer thinks there's only one person who joins you shows they probably never played longer than 30 minutes. All the screenshots they used on the page are of the opening cutscene kek. Also there's a big twist in the game around 2/3 in which any genuine review would discuss.
I posted that in a previous thread about bad reviews kek. He played 10 minutes and then turned that in.
And that was the official Playstation magazine in the UK and other places in Europe too, i used to buy that garbo, they didn't even score a game for the music/sound.
They used to, then stopped. Early issues featured a whole bunch of categories they included ratings for:
the only reason to buy the PSM was the free demos
Reminds me how EGM gave Guardian Legend the most middling reviews, said it did nothing original, and the adventure elements were half-baked and better off left out of the game. And nowadays that's why the game fondly remembered and seen as one of the biggest standouts of the console.
Easy? Even the intro shmup part is hard as hell
There is nothing wrong with that review, it's pretty spot on.
You must not have played many NES shmups. The SHMUPs parts in guardian legend are easy (and boring) by NES standards. Try Hector 87
It's because how accessible it is compared to other NES games or games of that era. A regular shoot em up would kick their ass much more unlike Guardian Legends.
That's a valid point. Video game magazines loved to emphasize challenge as a good thing (GamePro even having a "Challenge" category in their own reviews). TGL by comparison of other retro shooters is far more forgiving: a life meter that only gets larger during the course of the game, permanent upgrades, generous health drops, a hit box that gets smaller when you're on your last hit, all sorts of stuff. It's two-games nature makes it a big standout in this modern day, but at a time when a shmup fan would want only the most balls out blast anything that moves game, of which there was no shortage.
My understanding of this one isn't that he didn't play the game, but that he got a review version that was unfinished and genuinely only had 5 levels, and there was bad communication between the publisher and the reviewer.
I don't know why you'd make up such a lie otherwise and be so sure of yourself.
That's really not the problem here, it's that all but one of them clearly didn't play past the first stage. Gimmick is famous for having a deceptively easy first stage before it drops all pretense and expects you to pull off precision platforming and mastering the star's physics.
>I don't know why you'd make up such a lie otherwise and be so sure of yourself.
When magazines like this get caught, they'll just tell you that it wasn't a lie but an "educated guess."
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/03/educated-guess-reviews/218879/
If they're guessing, why being so specific as to wrongly claim the number of levels the game has? The level select screen at the start of the game doesn't even show the number of levels. If they were guessing they would have remained vague. I think there is something more going on here.
Also, regarding the difficulty, you have to understand that this was from a time when reviewers actually were good at video games and were demanding high difficulty, giving bad reviews to easy games and favourable reviews to harder games. If he indeed got an unfinished version with only 5 levels, it's understandable he'd think it was too easy to beat. Possibly the balancing is different than in the final version we know too.
People tend to forget that reviewers getting unfinished products is not uncommon. The vast majority of reviews of Resident Evil are based on a version that has entirely different balancing than the one we got, with different key/supply item placement and even extra story notes.
>be game reviewer during the height of PlayStation, when tons of games were coming out all the time
>have to put out a new issue every month
>office is absolutely flooded with preview, review, and promo discs, for games ranging from toddler crap to AAA titles... but you have to play, take screenshots, and write something about everything assigned to you
>have to cover everything ASAP so your magazine has a good rep for getting out previews and reviews in a timely manner
>have to make decisions about which games are "important" and should warrant more in-depth coverage
>need to worry about making your writeups engaging and entertaining as much as they are informative
Yeah, it sucks and really should be a mark against the publication and writer, but I get why some reviews/previews were clearly made in a rush by somebody who barely played the game, and might not have even had a chance to fully wrap their head around the gameplay. Sure, it's not a hard job compared to manual labor or whatever the fuck, but time is still time, and I can only imagine that a lot of these reviewers could only pull so many all-nighters to finish multi-hour long review builds (some of which didn't have the courtesy of including an invincibility function) and mind numbingly dull shivelware before they went "yeah, fuck it, I'm just writing my review based on the first two areas."
fair enough but I’m still gonna laugh and talk shit 25 years later
>What's her name?
Every game ever made, ever.
But since this is the retro vidya board...
Every game ever made before 2007 on 6th gen consoles and before.
PC Guide was a general PC magazine. Even so I still have absolutely no idea what this person played. Obviously the review was so embarrassing nobody at Future Publishing wanted to put their name to it.
>The graphics here are, if anything, worse than BullFrog's 1988 title
For me it's
>Cries Sawyer
>Theme Park was released in 1988
Honestly I agree with him there.
You must be blind.
I like the more stylized graphics.
It looks like shit.
Theme Park doesn't look bad but RCT's graphics make the game capable of much more complex parks.
I can't find an image of it, but Game Player's review of Yoshi's Island. It was basically
>what is this crayon shit?
I have a feeling the Game Players crew was smoking some serious dope, especially Bill
>Looks like a first generation SNES title
This takes it a step further, this homosexual didn't even take a look at the game.
>yoshis new mechanics add a lot to the classic formula is listed as a negative
>"hit-tech visuals"
This wasn't even proofread
Again, gaming journalism was never good.
British Gen X writers, Jesus Christ.
Notice how nothing in that review tells you that Hellnight is a HotD rip-off
Hellnight is a light gun game?
This is honestly so rare that someone who actually plays the game to the end is notable, some magazines, like Computer Gaming World and Pelit had people who actually bothered doing it.
Take a look at any modern website reviewing some game getting an emulated rerelease and you'll see people who played a game for 5 minutes and then throw out every cliche you can thing of. "Dated", "pixelated" and whatever. Then you see absolutely nothing that didn't show up within 5 minutes. Play this with any such review and none of them will ever prove you wrong.
https://archive.org/details/AmigaComputingIssue103Sep96/page/n93/mode/2up
>I have a gut feeling that Kick Off 96 is going to be a bit like skin on a rice pudding (pardon the analogy) - you'll either love it or hate it. I have to admit that I actually think it's a pretty good game.
>This game's real letdown is the sound which, to put it mildly, is duff.
>GRAPHICS: 86%
>SOUND: 40%
>GAMEPLAY: 90%
>OVERALL: 86%
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12603/kick-off-96/
>The Amiga version had a rather inexcusable bug, where the game rarely reached half-time - the first half simply continued infinitely, even after a goal was scored. Amiga Power magazine gave the game just 1% on account of this, noting that it only got any marks at all because the people stupid enough to buy it would have £20 less for food and clothing, thus leading to an increase in the world's average IQ.
Amiga Computing clearly bribed by the publisher
That Amiga Power review is fucking superb
they hated them because they spoke the truth.
I had these issues, the layouts are burnt into my memory. Funny reviews in retrospect, it's not worth getting mad over them, game journalism was never good.
don't get me wrong. I love these magazines and reviews, I love to see it games with less than a 7 out of 10 or a 8 out of ten (which happened in the last 18 years)
it feels refreshing to see reviews with less than a 6/10
>game journalism was never good.
100% false.
Some was shocking bad, some was way too good.
Therefore, never good.
clock tower bros....
>Complains about linearity and then says the game should just tell him where to go.
holly molly they spoke about MAME in a PSX official magazine sanctionated by SONY.
OH, no problem it was the 90s
is ace combat 2 just ok?
>AC2 a 5/10
To be fair, it got good scores on all fronts except longevity, which I can relate to. I had a lot of fun with it but it was over too quickly.
Imagine paying $50 for this back in the day.
Brits in the mid 90's just shat on everything that was in 2D, huh?
41 of 60, or .68 = 5 out of 10? Is lifespan the most weighted or something?
>Brits in the mid 90's just shat on everything that was in 2D, huh?
not only brits in Europe after 1994 if your game weren't 3D it wasn't worthy your time according to magazines.
they also shitted on licensed games.
Shitting on Rebel Assault 2 is one thing, but to drag Dark Forces down? That's fucking heinous.
At the time the official PS1 magazine was shitting on computer games for obvious reasons, though they were often right since computer games even at their peak were second rate.
I quite like the Rebel Assault games but it's hard to refute what he said there. If you play on normal or below its way too easy and that makes it so that you can finish it in one run which makes it feel even shorter. You can get a bit more life out of it if you play on hard, good for some rage moments specially in those evade the asteroids/tunnel levels.
I got them in a PC Star Wars collection that had like 6 CDs and they are very neat that way, they nailed the atmosphere and StarWars feel. I can come back whenever to immerse myself for a quit burst of play, but if I was a poor kid that only gets like 1-2 games a year (maybe Birthdays and Christmas) then just having Rebel Assault 2 would be pretty lame.
Yeah the shot at Dark Forces is wierd, I remember everyone praising it at the time, excellent game. Maybe he was blinded by the new and shiny 3D worlds.
Videogame journalists were always retarded
Who can blame him? This game is a MAJOR snooze.
And here comes a homosexual defending them
I originally wasn't sure if your thread would be interesting enough but this pic convinced me to check out your thread OP. Unbelievable to think there were publications out there crapping on SOTN.
The narrative of the time was GUD GRAFIX above all else, and only 3D was allowed to be called GUD GRAFIX because it was new.
lol this is fucking absurd. Nightmare Creatures was average at best. If you look at some playthroughs of the game you'll even see how poor its combat system really was. I won't say it was completely awful I remember liking it but its far from the game SOTN was.
Nightmare Creatures is a bad game if only because the controls and framerate are godawful
It did have some pretty neat creature designs and a good atmosphere though.
CD-Action Magazine gave Monster Inc. a 10/10 and featured it on the cover because they thought cutscenes were made specifically for the game and they thought they were funny. the cutscenes were just clips from the movie. And the game was pooparse. Not the brighest moment of Polish journalism. But I guess it's not as bad as the Chip magazine article about child porn illustrated with actual child porn which they printed and sold at stores.
The UK is such a shithole.
/vr/ calls X3 a shit game regularly.
/vr/ is also a shithole, your point being?
These reviewers are better than most posters on /vr/ who admit they never played the games they shit talk.