Yep, there's a reason why American gamers should be envious of the British

Mar 15, 2007 10:31

I'll get to the subject of my post's title shortly. First off, I had to do a convoluted bit of traveling into the bowels of NJ for some work-related stuff, and took my DS along with me. There's nothing that I'm playing at the moment, and anything new that I did want to play on the train was buried in Jeff's bag at his work, so I decided to pop in AC:WW and see how my town was doing after over two months of neglect. The multiple weeds, filled mailbox, and missing flowers (save for the gold roses) were no surprise, but cockroaches in my living room? Two of my neighbors having wondered where I'd been this whole time? Gardens around certain houses that were kept up (albeit with none of the crossbreeds I'd cultivated)? Nice.

After that check on my town, I had to take another train. With a bit of time to kill, I headed into a nearby bookstore in the hopes of picking up some light reading for the trip. The manga section was the expected disappointment, with the books I was interested in in less-than-acceptable condition or just not there. Browsed the magazines after that, and after going through most of them, remembered that video game mags existed. Among the usual menagerie of Official PlayStation and Electronic Gaming Monthly was the February 2007 issue of British import Edge. I thought, "Hey, Edge. I've heard good things about that one" (also remembered just now that I'd read one of their articles before, a piece which someone offered [and later sent] to me) and picked up the $7.99 (ouch!) issue on a whim.

Holy motherfucking christ on a cracker served on a snake-filled plane. Edge just might be the best damned video game magazine in the entire English language.

One of the first things that struck me about Edge-- that, indeed, told me exactly what kind of video game magazine it was-- as I was flipping through it was the ads. There weren't many of them towards the front (a detail which escaped my notice at the time), but at the back, starting around where the "Studio Profile" column is are around fifteen pages of ads placed by game companies ranging from Free Radical Design to Rockstar to Crytek to Nintendo. And here's the thing-- every single one of them are employment ads. Granted, there are ads for games and whatnot, but just try finding that many help wanted ads in a commercially-available game magazine in the States.

Advertising aside, the content was amazingly good. The cover story on PC gaming was very well done, as were the interview with Valve's Gabe Newell and several of the other articles (well, at least the ones I've read so far). The reviews were, likewise, well-written and contained one, yes, one score for each game (you all might remember when I complained about game scoring systems). Even better was the little box explaining the scoring system. Here I quote: "Edge's scoring system explained: 1 = one, 2 = two, 3 = three..." (you get the idea). The columns-- some written by actual game industry people-- were entertaining, thoughtful, and/or informative, as were the readers' letters, and the overall presentation is high-quality.

Anyway, you get the idea. Edge-- despite the steep price of admission and slight outdatedness (due to the nature of magazine imports)-- is manna from heaven. I'll definately be picking it up again in the future.

Rest of the day went okay. Got that work-related stuff and headed back into the city to pick up some manga and such (wasn't expecting FMA vol. 12 this week! Whoo!).

general gaming, reviews, nintendo

Previous post Next post
Up