Re: Gaming Magazine Goodness

On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 08:17:34 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 04/06/2025 18:23, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
If you've a nostalgia for old-timey video-gaming magazines, there's a
great archive of the things at Retromags https://www.retromags.com/
 
While there are partial collections elsewhere (archive.org has a
bunch) they tend to be scattered about and not well organized. The
collections at Retromags aren't complete (yet) but their offerings are
fuller than I've seen anywhere else. I find it an incredibly useful
resource for researching old games and video-gaming hardware. Plus,
it's just fun to read some of the reviews of the beloved (and
forgotten) games of yesteryear. Sometimes the games we cherish today
weren't well received at all back when they were released.
 
Maybe some of you will find this as interesting as I do. Or not. But
either way, now you know the place exists. ;-)
 

I did have a quick look around but the problem for me is that my
interest is for the nostalgia part and to me that means the Specky 48k.
The two magazines (Sinclair User and Crash) I did look at were both just
placeholders with no actual content. Looks like it's still
https://worldofspectrum.org for me.

Yeah, it definitely leans towards mid-to-late 90s and beyond for a lot
of the magazines, but that's probably an issue of access rather than
desire. It's all volunteer work, and if they don't have the
hard-copies to scan, there's only so much they can do.

    [They are a bit fastidious about only using their own scans,
     which is something I think they could ease up on. I get
     that they're striving for a certain level of quality --and a
     lot of the PDFs available on archive.org are pretty bad--
     but they could use those until better scans become available.]

Since I'm mainly interested in DOS-era stuff, though, their selection
is pretty much perfect for me. And it reminds me that --as much as we
bitch about modern gaming websites and their flawed journalism-- it
used to be SO much worse back when print magazines dominated. ;-P

Mostly, though, I use the resource to discover old DOS games I've
never heard of.