I'd have to say Die Hard. I love how crappy and amateur and hardcore they were. I love how they'd devote three pages to a game that was already long out of print and unobtainable by the time the magazine was printed. Good old E Storm loved Sega and shitty anime way way too much, but it gave the magazine a personality.
Honestly I prefer system specific mags. The way EGM handled the Gamecube during 2002, the "mature gamer" era when they were riding Halo's dick and shitting on anything that wasn't M and swearing and stuff...pathetic sophomoric crap. When only one OEM is covered the bias is clear, they don't even mention the existence of other machines so they can focus purely on what's there. The best "everything" mag was probably GMR, during that brief period when it actually existed.
I believe without question that, all things considered, Nintendo Power was the best English game mag. Sure the ratings were super inflated numerically speaking, but they gave Nintendo fans what they wanted. They reviewed a lot of games a multi-platform magazine wouldn't have space for. The screen shots were always good (those SMB and Metroid maps back in the day blew my mind, I think they actually originated from a Japanese mag) and they had cool contests and stuff. They were pretty much always good too, where as EGM has gone through entire year long periods of being almost unreadably bad.
Then there was the weird era when Dengeki PC Engine did Neo Geo reviews in the back...
Topic: Favorite "system neutral" magazine (Read 418 times)
