When I was a little boy gamer I would spend a bit of my allowance on Electronic Gaming Monthly a great little gaming magazine. Unfortunately, young gamers will never understand what the industry was like twenty years ago. In a time before the Internet, the only place to get gaming news for a young kid was a glossy magazine. Today, EGM closes its doors and we’re losing a historic piece of gaming history.
Granted, there were other glossy magazines prized by young boys too, but we were old enough to purchase Electronic Gaming Monthly, now known as EGM by the hip and cool. Although EGM was founded in 1989, many adults between the age of 29 and 35 probably spent their youth flipping through the pages reading the reviews and editorials.
The days of the magazine are drawing to an end for many industries, with video game websites covering everything from truly hardcore to highly niche, we all demand our information as soon as possible. If a company like Ziff Davis is selling its properties, we want to know the minute it is announced, when 1UP is purchased by UGO we want to know the minute the ink dries. Why? Because we can.
January 2009 marks the last issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. After Hearst Corporation (owner of UGO) purchased 1UP from Ziff Davis it was announced that EGM would be seeing its last issue. Sure, there was a chance this would occur without the acquisition as well but the sadness wouldn’t be any different. We’re sure the staff will find a great home writing for another publication or in the online world, but it is sad just the same.
Along with the sad news of EGM closing, we’ve heard a number of folks at 1UP have also been effected by Hearst Corporations purchase of 1UP which has many people out of a job during tough economic times. There has been rumor the 1UP podcasts being ditched as well, but we have heard nothing official yet (please comment with official stories if you hear).
Of course, 1UP is “officially” rejoicing at the news but we know this is part of the “smoke and mirrors” that is an acquisition. A few, now former, 1UP folks have been using twitter and game forums to voice their own “opinions” of the purchase.
This is a rough economic time for many people, printed magazines, online publications and others. The only shining light is knowing many of these individuals will find new places to call home or start brand new online publications to compete against their old company. Talent will not go restricted, they will no doubt group together to form new aged publications to show off why the big boys are flailing in the dark.
We wish them all well in their efforts to find success.
From the horses mouth, Home producer Martijn Van der Meulen “
The undeniable rumor, as expected, has come to be true and Microsoft’s Major Nelson has revealed September 5th as the day the Xbox 360 shall drop in price. Although not surprising, this is really the first good price drop for the 360 hardware which does not involve phasing out an old product line.
You know why I hate Windows sometimes? Because it decides to do a reboot and a system update while I’m in the middle of writing a comment on a podcast episode…
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. I will keep it brief because I don’t feel like writing an elaborate post again after what just happened.
1. I got the T-shirt, thanks a lot! It fits perfectly and the cotton quality is excellent. Great gift.
2. X-bone launch date. It will not launch in Poland and some of the neighboring countries so it makes me care even less about the console that I did previously. Because of the limited launch range, the date hase everything to do with Black Friday and nothing to do with the PS4 double release date. We sort of have some sales like this before Christmas and people do get trampled over in stores but still it’s not as crazy as over there. Thankfully, there’s always Amazon and Cyber Monday so I’m going to stock up on stuff then. Also, we didn’t have labor weekend or anything like that last week 😉
3. PS4 controllers. Do they mean 4 Dualshock 4s or 4 controller of any kind? Maybe it’s the former which would mean that the console will support more RockBand or Buzz controllers? That would make little sense, though. Still, I don’t care that much. The last time I played couch co-op was maybe two years ago when I played NHL 3-on-3 Arcade with two of my friends. Other than that, I don’t remember what else I played. I use my second controller while the other one is charging and that’s it.
For move games you usually don’t have enough space in the room to fit 3 or 4 people playing so it’s 2 people time 2 controllers = 4 total and that’s enough.
4. External hard drives. This is unclear to me. Do they mean media storage as well, i.e. movies and music on an external hard drive? This wouldn’t make sense, again. It shouldn’t be that hard to support an external USB drive in the OS so maybe they do mean games and game data.
500 GB is not that much if you count all the games you download with PS+. I own a 120 GB PS3 and I need to cycle my games constantly, which is not convenient. I’m getting a 1 TB disk soon and I wanted to put it in the PS4 and move the 500 GB into the PS3. I’m not sure the warranty is void if you do it, to be honest, since Sony encourages the disks to be exchanged (see, the 12 GB Flash iteration of the PS3)
5. FF XIV – I believe the only reason they’re continuing to realease new games is to learn the Roman numerals…
6. QOTW – If it ain’t broke, I’m not getting a new one – that’s my way of thinking. And since I’ve never had a console break, I’ve never exchanged one. To be fair, I only owned an NES, a PS3 and a Vita (I’m not counting some old, old TV consoles that played Pong…), so my experience is limited. Maybe it will change with the PS4 which I will get at launch. The chances that it will last for 6-8 years are slim, I guess but hopefully I’m wrong.
7. @Jordan – have you played Killzone: Mercenary on your Vita? That’s a AAA exclusive you’ve been waiting for. I’m not a huge FPS fan and I’m not that good at them, especially online, but I really like this game and it plays extremely well on the handheld.
8. I’m going off the grid for over a week so I will miss the next episode. You will probably talk about the new Vita model. Have you noticed that the mysterious connector has disappeared from it? The one next to the game slot on top of the device? Any ideas what that was supposed to do anyway? 🙂