I have about 2-3 years of magazines back in Canada. I believe its 2001-2002-2003. it still has the badass posters, of games i didnt care back then( castlevania gba for exemple) I missed on soo much. I couldnt read english, i i bought those for the images and review scores hahah.
now that i can read, its very interesting to look at it and see what i missed on.
What would be a good example of a game you learned about that you can now read through your stock pile of magazines?
What i mean is that there is a lot of games that i wasnt aware of back when I received those magasine, and only started learning about them once i got into game collecting. Then going back to those magasines, i realise that they were widely publicized, it simply didnt appeal to a younger me. Most of the games are now super famous rpg, but keep in mind that at the time, i didnt speak english, so there is no appeal to an rpg if you dont understand the dialogs. Its painful to figure out what to do and you miss on great stories.
Examples would be Golden sun Gba,Castlevania (im the biggest fan now) and other story driven games. Back then, as a unilangual teenager, i would play sports games like nhl/tony hawk, mario games or fps. Legend of zelda was an exeption, i guess the puzzles arent as much hidden in dialogs so i was able to play zelda games.
So even though i had snes growing up, i never played a final fantasy, chrono trigger or mario rpg during that time. I discovered them very late. To give you an example, i rent final fantasy 7 back in the days, and couldnt kill the first boss (scorpion). for some reason he would always kill me. I gave it a shot few years ago, to realise that in the dialogs before the fight, someone tells you his weakness. Exploiting the weakness made the fight easy and i was finally victorious. It seems like a small thing, but its a burden when you cant understand those small things.
Anyway, point is, nintendo power back in the days was a way for me to discover games through pictures, but there is a lot of "complicated" looking games that i skipped, that only today as a collector/gamer i'm aware of how great they are. I learned english by playing WoW, that was the kick in the butt i needed to force myself to learn it. Nowadays, kids in Quebec canada have games in French (new law, games have to be in french with a french manual). Before, you would look at manual and it was moon languages. I rememer going to the rental store and trying to fgure out if the game is worth it base on the terrible small pictures on the box. Nintendo power was conveniant because it gave me bigger pictures and scores
, so i could make a wiser choice based on that.
Sorry the post is dragging way too long.
One last thing. I've been in Japan for 2 years, and i have been doing the same thing. I bought famitsu magasine and tried to make sense of what was written, I avoided text intensive games even though they are great and cheap here. its not all bad because i got way better in Japanese than before, and also i discovered 2 genres that i wasnt a fan of before ; shmups and fighting games. they require no japanese skills and are easy to jump in for small sessions of play. The pc engine became my favorite console, and the saturn, my second.
Before coming to Japan, i had a terrible image of saturn, and i didnt know anything about the pc engine. In a way, i'm glad that the language barrier brought me to discovrt those 2 amazing consoles.
again sorry for that long wall of text. i felt inspired by ur question
