TG16 in 1992 EGM Buyer's Guide

[DragonmasterDan]

I had that guide as a child. Seeing those scans brings back a lot of memories.

[vestcoat]

This was my first copy of EGM and it started of my TurboGrafx and SMS commodity fetish.  My town resisted big box stores until the mid-Nineties and my parents rarely drove up to the malls surrounding the Twin Cities, so my awareness of video games prior to this consisted of Nintendo Power, Game Players, the Jeff Rovin books (terrible, but he helped me beat Hydlide and Metal Gear!), and Funcoland (which originally only carried NES, Gameboy, Genesis, and Neo Geo).  I beat the hell out of this issue carrying it around for several weeks and drooling over it with my friends.

Apparently, this whole issue was recently available at retromags, but they hosted it on megaupload and now you get this.

I remember the '93 Buyer's Guide being equally awesome, but a friend bought that one and we shared to conserve our allowances, so I don't have it.  The Duo was out by then and CF2 won RPG of the year.

I wanna see page 76 onwards, does that have more info on the Japanese systems?

No, it goes straight into the strategies section.

I think it was all the negative comments about the turbografx, that actually made me want to try it more..

Ditto.  That and the cheapness.  And the fact that none of my friends had it and there wasn't any hype.

[Joe Redifer]

A lot of Japanese mags got system specs totally wrong (4096 colours on the SuperGrafx) and the US and UK mags just happily copied them.  Not exclusively EGM's fault.

Actually, it is.  They should have researched more.  Even I knew better than they did back then and I was just a lowly reader.  Common sense must also come into play.  The SMS having more resolution than the Genesis (which plays SMS games)?  The Turbo Express having different specs than the TurboGrafx?  Complete ignorance.

[BigusSchmuck]

Now we need that issue with the top 100 games. ^^ BTW, this is very cool.

[Shrapnoid]

Wow! I haven't seen that issue in what seems like for ever! I think I might have had that one or maybe a fiend of mine had it.

Thank you so much for showing this. It really takes me back!

[ccovell]

A lot of Japanese mags got system specs totally wrong (4096 colours on the SuperGrafx) and the US and UK mags just happily copied them.  Not exclusively EGM's fault.

Actually, it is.  They should have researched more.  Even I knew better than they did back then and I was just a lowly reader.  Common sense must also come into play.  The SMS having more resolution than the Genesis (which plays SMS games)?  The Turbo Express having different specs than the TurboGrafx?  Complete ignorance.

Ignorance, true, but perhaps you missed the word "exclusively" in my post, so I bolded it for you.

[Joe Redifer]

Yeah I read it as "exactly" for some reason.  I think one of the qualifications to work for any game mag back then was being an idiot.

[guyjin]

So because I haven't got much better to do on a friday night, I decided to take the score list from that magazine scan, plug it into a spreadsheet, and see if I could find anything interesting. Like maybe bias. One of these days I'd like to compare these scores to square inches of ad space, and see if there's a corelation. I can't do that yet, but I did find something weird.

The average score of games, by platform, was:
(reviewer) Steve Harris; Ed Semard; Martin Alessi; "Sushi X"; EGM overall
NES 6.2352941176*;   6.2352941176*;   5.9803921569;   6.2254901961;   6.1691176471;
SMS 5.35;   6.1;   6;   5.7;   5.7875;
SNES 7;   7.0833333333;   7.25   6.8333333333;   7.0416666667;
Genesis 6.5652173913;   6.9347826087;   6.5869565217;   6.8695652174;   6.7391304348;
TG16 6.3636363636;   6.4242424242*;   6.4545454545*;   6.4545454545*;   6.4242424242*;
GB 7.64*;   7.56;   7.64*;   7.88;   7.68;
LYNX 6.6363636364;   6.3636363636;   6.8181818182;   6.2727272727;   6.5227272727;
All systems (by system) 6.4650852515;   6.6029925857;   6.5800126586;   6.5670546901;   6.5537862965;
All systems (by game) 6.437751004;   6.5582329317;   6.421686747;   6.5301204819;   6.4869477912;

Note the numbers with asterisks. Maybe I don't know enough about statistics, but it seems unlikely to me that, across a platform, two reviewers would have the exact same average between them coincidentally. Also note that this happens twice to the TG16: the average of Semard and EGM overall are identical when it comes to the TG16.

Hastily drawn conclusions: EGM as a whole disfavored the NES, SMS, and TG16(by -0.3178301441,-0.6994477912, and -0.0627053669 points, respectively) and favored the rest, especially the Gameboy(+1.1930522088 above average; everything else was favored by a fraction of a point.)
As for individual reviewers: Martin Alessi favored the TG16, while the rest disfavored it; He was also the biggest Snerd. Steve Harris HATED the SMS (disfavoring it by more than a whole point); "Sushi X" was the hardest reveiwer to please, unless he was playing a Gameboy(favoring it by 1.3498795181 points; the next most favored was the Genesis at 0.3394447355); Besides the TG16, the only system where some favored and others disfavored was the Lynx(Semard and "X" disfavored it, the others favored it).

[roflmao]

Guyjin, you rock.  Really interesting stuff.  Who would have thunk the GameBoy would have been so highly rated back in the day.  While I have a lot of fond memories from the 8- and 16-bit days, there was a TON of crap out there as well.  It's interesting to see that, averaged out, games were rated generally at 6.5 or higher.  Looking back, I bet they would have rated a bunch of that crap as crap.  But I guess when you are one of the hottest magazines around at the time you want your readers to buy as much of the crap you review as possible - for job security.

[Tatsujin]

i still find that ghouls 'n ghosts rating one of the most hilarious ever. they must have shit bricks, after they had seen the SGFX version just a couple of month later.

not that i hate the MD G'n'G, i still liked it and i had played that a very lot back in the days. and i also think that it has the greatest musics of all home ports back then (yaya, peke excluded).

[Bonknuts]

So because I haven't got much better to do on a friday night, I decided to take the score list from that magazine scan, plug it into a spreadsheet, and see if I could find anything interesting. Like maybe bias. One of these days I'd like to compare these scores to square inches of ad space, and see if there's a corelation. I can't do that yet, but I did find something weird.

The average score of games, by platform, was:
(reviewer) Steve Harris; Ed Semard; Martin Alessi; "Sushi X"; EGM overall
NES 6.2352941176*;   6.2352941176*;   5.9803921569;   6.2254901961;   6.1691176471;
SMS 5.35;   6.1;   6;   5.7;   5.7875;
SNES 7;   7.0833333333;   7.25   6.8333333333;   7.0416666667;
Genesis 6.5652173913;   6.9347826087;   6.5869565217;   6.8695652174;   6.7391304348;
TG16 6.3636363636;   6.4242424242*;   6.4545454545*;   6.4545454545*;   6.4242424242*;
GB 7.64*;   7.56;   7.64*;   7.88;   7.68;
LYNX 6.6363636364;   6.3636363636;   6.8181818182;   6.2727272727;   6.5227272727;
All systems (by system) 6.4650852515;   6.6029925857;   6.5800126586;   6.5670546901;   6.5537862965;
All systems (by game) 6.437751004;   6.5582329317;   6.421686747;   6.5301204819;   6.4869477912;

Note the numbers with asterisks. Maybe I don't know enough about statistics, but it seems unlikely to me that, across a platform, two reviewers would have the exact same average between them coincidentally. Also note that this happens twice to the TG16: the average of Semard and EGM overall are identical when it comes to the TG16.

Hastily drawn conclusions: EGM as a whole disfavored the NES, SMS, and TG16(by -0.3178301441,-0.6994477912, and -0.0627053669 points, respectively) and favored the rest, especially the Gameboy(+1.1930522088 above average; everything else was favored by a fraction of a point.)
As for individual reviewers: Martin Alessi favored the TG16, while the rest disfavored it; He was also the biggest Snerd. Steve Harris HATED the SMS (disfavoring it by more than a whole point); "Sushi X" was the hardest reveiwer to please, unless he was playing a Gameboy(favoring it by 1.3498795181 points; the next most favored was the Genesis at 0.3394447355); Besides the TG16, the only system where some favored and others disfavored was the Lynx(Semard and "X" disfavored it, the others favored it).

 Hahaha - awesome. Thank you for that

[ccovell]

Sushi-X was a persona that was written by rotating staff members, and Ed Semrad has been noted to be a non-gaming suit such that sometimes other staff members wrote his reviews.

See: http://blog.radd.tv/2011/01/my-time-at-sendai-former-egm-editor.html
 and http://forums.lostlevels.org/viewtopic.php?t=1664&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=20

Though EGM always claimed their shit didn't stink, it seems the grumbles by other game mag writers at the time had some legitimacy to them.

[SignOfZeta]

A lot of Japanese mags got system specs totally wrong (4096 colours on the SuperGrafx) and the US and UK mags just happily copied them.  Not exclusively EGM's fault.

Actually, it is.  They should have researched more.  Even I knew better than they did back then and I was just a lowly reader.  Common sense must also come into play.  The SMS having more resolution than the Genesis (which plays SMS games)?  The Turbo Express having different specs than the TurboGrafx?  Complete ignorance.

Exactly what sort of research would you have done in 1992 with no www, no Wikipedia, no emulators, none of that stuff? The only info they have is whatever the console makers give them, and these companies would lie like mad back then, or sometimes just not even really know WTF they manufactured. Truth was the first casualty of early 90s console wars, with Atari and Sega carpet bombing the shit out of everything, NEC choosing isolationist tactics, with Nintendo to pick up the left overs and claim a massive victory (as measured by cash anyway).

And the Express does have different resolution than the TG-16, in a way. Since the shitty built in screen is the only display it has, its actual resolution isn't really used.

[Joe Redifer]

Well, looking at one's own past issues and issues of other magazines to corroborate common information, for one.  How did I know the proper specs of everything back then?  One of the only things I didn't know was that the Genesis had 4 PSG channels and an FM channel doubled for PCM.  I always thought it was 6 FM, 3 PSG and 1 PCM.  Just because there was no internets which you are so used to using doesn't mean that the information wasn't there.  If that was the case we'd have no facts at all before the internet existed.  Because without Wikipedia, we can't do research!  Good call on that one.  I'm not sure where you're going with the Atari carpet-bombing nonsense or what that really has to do with anything.

And yes, the Turbo Express screen is a different resolution but I'm going to go with LESS than an actual TurboGrafx and not nearly twice as much.  It was one of the shittiest screens ever, rather embarrassing to look at.  But still, the hardware graphics internally would be the same as a real TurboGrafx.

[esteban]

I remember the '93 Buyer's Guide being equally awesome, but a friend bought that one and we shared to conserve our allowances, so I don't have it.  The Duo was out by then and CF2 won RPG of the year.

Ha! I have the '93 Buyer's Guide already scanned (6 years ago, sadly, sitting on my harddrive). I'll process it tonight and have it for you folks tomorrow