Thursday, December 29, 2005

Gaming Magazine of the Year

Well, they're crap, mostly. Almost all of the gaming print magazines are totally irrelevant now--in the United States, at least.

However, the debut of The Escapist this year was a breath of fresh air. It has more interesting content in its weekly online issue than the other computer magazines have in three months.

Three good months.

So The Escapist is my choice for gaming magazine of the year.

Play is also worth reading, but I think it must be in deep financial trouble. I just received the January issue today--78 freaking pages. Including back cover, etc., there were 21 pages of advertising.

What the hell?

Play makes every effort to have relevant content--they have tons of interviews with developers and do a far lower percentage of preview pages than any other magazine out there. And the layout of the magazine is freaking fantastic.

To the best of my knowledge, though, the amount of content that a magazine produces each month is directly related to how many advertising pages they can attract, and apparently Play is getting killed. I hope this is a one-month aberration, because if it's not, they're in the death spiral.

For PC hardware, there's Maximum PC, which is always an enjoyable read.

Anything else worth reading? Computer Games magazine, on a good month.

Anything else? Not really.

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