Re: Goodbye Game Informer

On Wed, 07 Aug 2024 09:20:27 -0400, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

On Tue, 06 Aug 2024 15:21:48 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Congratulations. You can now read like its 1991 again! ;-)

>
I kept all of my old issues of PC gaming magazines because they really
are important to me. Thank you for the links.

For the longest time, I hung onto my old magazines. And it wasn't just
hoarding (well, maybe a little bit), since I enjoyed visiting the
stacks, picking an issue at random, and reading about the exciting new
games of the time. Heck, I loved looking at the ADVERTISING (it's a
great reflection of the zeitgeist of that era).

But magazines take up A LOT of space, and eventually I recycled the
lot of them. Still, online archives mitigated a lot of the pain of
that decision. While it's not QUITE the same tactile nostalgia as
snuggling up with a curled up magazine, reading a PDF at least allows
me to revisit that old material without devoting an entire room to
storing the damn things. ;-)

I completely forgot about IE or Interactive Entertainment. I own a lot
of those CDs. I think they were $10 back in the day. A silly waste of
money of course, but my teenage self did not think so at the time.

I loved IE; it felt so MODERN and high-tech. A magazine on a CD-ROM?
One with voice-actors reading the reviews, complete with actual
screenshots and videos of the game? And free games as an added bonus?
What wasn't to like? The reviews weren't extra-ordinary, but they were
about on par with their competitors (which is to say, overly praising
of all games, even the terrible ones, because you dare not offend the
publishers lest they stop advertising!).  The price of each issue was
high (I also recall $10, or about 3x the cost of the average paper
magazine), but I felt it was worth the cost. And I guess it must be,
since I /still/ 'read' them to this day (although I long ago ripped my
CD-ROMs to image files, and I have to use DOSBox to run the program).

No, the biggest problem was that the issues were just so damned
inconvenient to acquire; there was only the one store I knew that
carried them, and it was close to an hour's drive away.