ianinthefuture

There's also this https://www.economist.com/business/2021/11/06/soaring-newsprint-costs-make-life-even-harder-for-newspapers

This is a very good idea and I love it.

Ugh. Don't Gamefly up the design and keep it so I can easily access a huge amount of gaming information and it'll be fine, I guess. I use Mobygames a hell of a lot for research (and box art) so it's a resource I rely on massively, and I don't want that turned into some marketing frontend for streaming retro games and selling NTFs NFTs or whatever Atari wants to be into this week.

The UK did the same on stuff from anywhere outside the UK, apparently on anything costing £135 or less. Though from what I see most outlets just slap an extra 20% on the purchase price regardless of how much it costs (or to circumvent that they don't take orders on anything costing less than £135). It does mean if things cost £135 or less there's no tax to pay, as you've - theoretically, with that added 20% - already paid it.

I can get people not liking God Hand. I love it, but I can see it being an acquired taste. The most perfect Alien game ever made, though? Yeah, they're genuinely stupid reviews. Can people be retroactively fired

Nah, people liked it in the late 90s: https://web.archive.org/web/20191206034524/https://www.gamerankings.com/n64/199127-turok-2-seeds-of-evil/articles.html

yeah code listings would be a good idea wouldn't they... cough

Mags were still selling 10s of thousands of copies a month - even 100s of thousands in the case of Official PlayStation. That balance of power hadn't quite shifted until a few years later; the vast majority of people (I'm talking in the UK) didn't have internet access at home, so print still had a big role in the hype-and-info machine. As for WWF/E games - the one that came out in 2001 was Just Bring It, which sold just shy of 3 million copies worldwide, with over a million of those being in Europe. The Smackdown series (and WWE/2K series it morphed into) has always been a big-seller.

It was a good feature, it looked nice, and it suited the mag. YEEEEEAH

I still remember the (mild) fury (from some quarters) when I did the split Half-Life/Black Mesa piece for Retro Gamer years ago. Not only was Half-Life 'not retro enough' to be retro, but Black Mesa was a brand new game. How dare I, etc etc.

Exactly this. GTA was massive, but GTA London and GTA 2 were damp squibs by comparison. Plus an existing franchise 'going 3D' was actually more something to worry about than be excited by, given how many things had stumbled in the transition over the previous five or so years. So people heard about it, there was lukewarm hype, but it wasn't anything near what you'd expect for a game that literally changed gaming.

Or Wireframe *cough*

I'm going to assume that's just the unfortunate result of a 'play this recent game' page being in a retro-headed section rather than anybody thinking something from 2017 is retro in 2021... but at the same time that made me shudder a bit.

You could try a magic eraser on those scuffs, they worked wonders on the haul of foisty DCs I picked up earlier this year.