Hey, Aiden, I have ever play any games by the company called art Dink Art.

I have played art dink games.

You have good stuff?

Yeah, So which one is your favorite?

A train, kowloons Gate.

You're gonna make me Wikipedia during the cold open.

No, I'll just tell you the one that has the best title, Double Eagle, Tricky Hole.

Yeah, I'm familiar with a college.

You've got fun Factor Two old gamers reviewing old video game magazine reviews.

I'm Ty Shelter, He's Aiden Moher, and we're two professional writers who grew up loving the video games and video game magazines of the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, and two thousands.

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As we record this in September twenty twenty five, I feel like, and I hope we are at the tail end of what might be the most risk averse, anti creative era of major studio game publishing since nineteen eighty three.

From what I'm seeing, game devs and media say, maybe the hardest project in the world to convince people with money to give money to lately has been like a small to mid budget video game with a unique concept made by gifted creatives.

We picked this first season's time frame up from sixteen bit to thirty two and sixty four bit consoles for a lot of reasons.

You know, video games were getting cool for arguably the very first time.

Magazines were leveling up artistically and editorially to match major global consumer product brands were pumping money into the sector.

And oh yeah, we were young and impressionable teens consuming artistic and cultural critique of our shit for like the very first time, and as we've reexperienced, these magazines dramatically reinventing themselves.

From mid ninety five to early ninety seven, we were also seeing the industry begin to realign itself in almost every possible way at once.

The introduction of and staggering hype around real time three D graphics, compact disc based media providing massive storage at dirt cheap costs, the globalization and cross pollenization of regional genres and styles, and unprecedented level of cross platform playability between you know, Bigger Boulder arcade units and home consoles, and for that matter, home PCs and home consoles.

And while the first wave of PlayStation and Saturn games looked a lot like the launch libraries of you know, every console ever, some big first party titles, some noble failures, some retreads, some clunkers, by March nineteen ninety seven, we're starting to see what the hard work can really do, and to a level far greater than I appreciated at the time.

The stars were aligning perfectly for exactly the kind of game it's currently so hard to make.

Innovative, visionary, maybe flawed, in some ways and clearly not for everyone, but resonating deeply with a significant slice of the game playing audience.

Since PlayStation and Saturn games could be slapped onto CDs and put into stores at lightning speed for a couple of bucks, the risk around under or overprinting a risky game on costly licensed DRM ROM cartridges it disappeared, so that kind of made it things perfect for some incredible experiments that we can't believe got made.

Do you have any favorite looking back?

I can't believe they made this titles.

I want to go to some deep cuts, right, Like that's my instinct.

But when I was thinking about this topic, like I always come back to what Square was doing in the aftermath of Final Fantasy, Sevin, when they were green lighting Xeno Gears and Legend of Mana and Saga Frontier one and two and Vagrant Story.

Yes, like all of these like wild sort of like exploratory and innovative takes on familiar games and genres, right, whether that was Zeno Gears going nuts with its story that could never come out now like you'd never see Zeno Gears come out now, right, whether it's Vagrant Story, like you know, Matts and now and his team going, hey, we've never made a three D game before.

Let's make a fully three D game, three D environments, three D like characters, and let's make it the best game of all time, like the most cinematic, craziest game of all time.

And then and then pulling it off Legend of Mana going hey, Secret of Mona was really popular.

Trial's Mona was really great.

Let's do something that's completely different where you build out a world with these lush, beautiful, hand drawn, pre rendered backgrounds.

You know, you just had an industry or like a fandom, an audience that was so eager for more RPGs that Square just said yes to everybody.

Everybody who was pitching something internally, they were like, yeah, go for it, let's do it.

And then they would sell a million copies, right, Vagrant Story like sold a million copies, which is just crazy.

Yeah.

The flip side of that, though, is I think the best place to look for the answer to this is on the Saturn.

We just don't see it in the United States or Canada where we live because it was such a failure of a console here.

We didn't get a lot of the experimental interesting, weird stuff.

But like you know, Panzer Dragoon Saga is like they took yes, a rail shooter that was like an hour long, and a sequel that was like also an hour long, and they were great for what they were and turned it into this like expansive, innovative RPG that still feels unique in the field.

That was just the peak of what the Saturn did.

And there's so much over in Japan.

When I got my Saturn and put an optical drive emulator in it a couple of years ago, started downloading Japanese games, I was like, man, this console is incredible.

Like it was just there were so many interesting games that people were, you know, looking at just exploring what games can do now that we had space, now that we could take risks financially, Like people weren't afraid to make failures.

I was seeing somebody say they were talking about baseball as an analogy for games and how games need to go forward, and it's like, you win baseball by hitting singles and doubles, Right, you don't unless you're the Yankees, the twenty twenty five Yankees.

You don't win games by hitting homers every single time.

Right, You'll never win a game if you're just trying to hit homers every time.

This this period of gaming just feels like they were hitting singles and doubles, and sometimes those singles were like in the park home runs yeah never expected, right yeah.

And it's so fascinating.

And I think the reason I go back to this era like over and over and over again is because you never run out of new concepts, new experiences, or like the seeds of things that would become popular.

You know, you had stuff like Twisted Metal, which felt wholly unique at the time, right car combat.

You had stuff like thrill Kill that technically never came out until it was like the Wutang game, Oh yeah, you know, or Dostraga, like all of these like arena battlers, four player arena battlers like that stuff was just Nowadays, it doesn't necessarily feel interesting or unique, but at the time it was.

And that was because I think risk aversion was just not part of the vision for the industry.

It was really like creator driven.

At that time, there was big money, and now there's like really big money, and that's why I think we're getting a lot of this like you know, really small c conservative approach to games.

Yeah, absolutely, And you know it's not we talk about, you know, some of those singles turning inside of park home runs.

You know, when we did that one Next Generation issue that had the pre PlayStation launch interview with Sony Steve Race, he talked about the company being able to leverage its connections with musicians and other creatives.

But even at the time, I had no idea they were actually actively doing that, like connecting Japanese electronic musician and game dev Massaiah Matsura and American illustrator Rodney Greenblatt to make per Rappa the Rapper, giving us not only one of the weirdest first party releases of all time, but also one of the best and most influential.

They did not need abtely one hundred people, They did not need two hundred million dollars, They did not need five years, you know, and they did not need to make it for the lowest common denominator.

They just let two creatives go nuts on what couldn't have been very much money and invented not only only like a game and an IP, but a genre and like several other subgenres since then, you.

Know, And it makes me think also skipping forward to like the Nintendo DS era with all these experimental games on their elite beat agents and stuff like that.

And it also brings to mind like E Toy's work on the Mother series and earth Bound, Yes, bringing in like a novelist, and I mean he was everything, right, he was a voice actor, he did so much, and then he made Mother and earth Bound and Mother three, and like those games are still so influential and important.

Like you look at this successive undertail and how massive Undertail became sort of as like a progeny of what A Toy was doing with Mother back in the day, and how like you need to let people like that step back and make something that they're making for kind of passion reasons and like unfettered like joy, you know.

And I think we see so much that in the indie space.

Right, Blotro was obviously a game that wasn't made for a mass market, right, Right Blueprints not made for a mass market.

Right.

These are hugely successful games that were made because a developer or creative person had an idea, right, right, and they just went with it and it worked and there was success there.

And that's not always going to happen.

But I think you saw big companies allowing those things to flourish, Whereas now that has to happen in that indie space, and the creators have to take on all the risk, monetary risk, and some of them become millionaires, most of them don't.

Yeah, And instead of you know, the new Spider Man game, financing a ten million dollar budget for all of your Blatros and Blue Princes, it's financing more DLC for more Spider Man.

It's it's you know, it's just financing finance, keeping the whole rest of all the executive salaries, all the stock buybacks, keeping the whole rest of the company the float while they wait for the next Spider Man.

And I mean, like, ultimately, that's why art can never coincide, can never stand hand in hand with capitalism, right, because art cannot be motivated by profit, and so like, if you have something that's motivated solely by profit and making profit for people who aren't involved in the creative process, you're always going to end up in a place like we've ended up now, where it's like so heavily geared towards monetization and profit that like little projects that present not even like risk but not enough payoff.

Right, you know, it's not good enough to make ten million dollars anymore, right, you have to make five hundred million dollars.

Yes, and you know, and it's not even that you know, Games' is like, oh well, it might not pay for itself.

It's like, you know, the return on investments just not high enough, so they don't do it.

And that kind of thing cannot have healthy relationship with art.

But when big company like Sony comes in and goes, hey, let's spend a bazillion dollars, you know Quibi, the the you know DreamWorks.

Guys, Hey, we're going to raise two billion dollars and just get a bunch of artists and animators and actors and directors lined their wallets with Quibi money.

And that financed, if not projects they cared about on Quibi, them doing their actual own work that they really cared about.

Right, But Sony, at this time, Sony Computer Entertainment is going out.

We talked about Jumping Flash and Jumping Flash Too when we reviewed Intelligent Gamers review of Jumping Flash Too Sentient a game I actually I was so fascinated by.

I devoured all the previews for Centient, a signosis game that was a space station bottle mystery game, which there's tons of now, you know, since then and beyond you know, dead space, mouthwashing, you know.

I mean there's a million right now of these.

And it's a branching path dialogue puzzle solving type game with month multiple endings, and like on the PS one, this was new and I was super, super super excited about it, and then it got crushed in reviews, mostly because the graphics were heinously ugly, and then partly because of you know, hey, this is a new game style.

There's they don't have the kinks worked out.

You know, there's a ton of rough edges.

It doesn't work the way they thought it would, et cetera, et cetera.

Oh that's too bad.

It sounds like I shouldn't spend my you know, forty fifty bucks on it.

But now, just rereading some of this stuff for this episode, I'm like, why did I never play that?

I gotta go play that.

I did buy and play Discworld point and click adventure game released simultaneously on PlayStation PC and Mac, which was an incredibly faithful and wholly for the sickos adaptation of some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

You know, mainly I think it's Guards.

Guards is most of the events that are depicted in it, you know, like a from but like it.

It's wild to see a Sony first party release in the US where ninety percent of the people that saw this on the shelves, maybe even higher, had ever heard of Discworld, bought it, put it in the drive, and went, wow, this is an old school point and click adventure game, just like straight up on console.

I'm doing this with my OG PlayStation one dpad with the holes, with the missing diagonal bits.

You know, I'm pointing and clicking with my mouse.

It's wild.

I remember seeing the previews for Princess Maker two, supposed to be coming to the US, and you know, they're all the previews just being like this is so Japanese and so weird.

You're like a steward of a raising an anime princess and she's got like stats and skill trees, and like how you like raise her in dialogue options?

Is how good of a princess?

This is wild.

It didn't actually end up coming over here, but it was so alien that they were even considering that, and then it was released as a f party title by Sony, and then Princess Maker three did also get released.

One of my favorites was No One Can Stop Mister Domino.

My wife bought a PlayStation when we were still dating, and she was like, I want games for me, but three D games, especially early three D games, made her viciously motion sick.

And so this one was kind of polygonal, but it was like an infinite Runner isometric where you're a domino and you're like running through the dominoes right like, so it's like this, you have to adodge all these obstacles and end up back at the beginning, like close the Loop of Dominoes.

And I discovered it was published by arc Diinc.

Which is the company that developed unpublished the game whose review we will be reviewing today, Carnage Heart.

I cannot wait to get to this because this one, again, if you talk about for the sickos, this game was for a whole group of sickos that didn't even exist yet, And I cannot wait to open the cover.

The cover.

By the way of Game Informer issue forty seven, we've not done a Game Informer yet and I'm super excited.

I hope you are to you stick around if you haven't subscribed yet, become a fun Factor ultra a member to share a couple of ads.

Hang tight through the ad break.

When we come back, we will flip through game Informer issue forty seven, and eventually they review of Karna Charge.

Welcome back to fun Factor, where two old gamers review old video game magazine reviews.

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Aiden last episode, we looked at an issue of PC Gamer and realized while promoting it on socials, it's the first time we've covered a magazine that's not only still a going concern, it has an active Blue Sky account and we could just they did not reach as in the promo read, yeah, they didn't.

What we're gonna do.

We're gonna fix this.

I'm gonna I'm gonna bug them, I'm gonna make it.

I'm sending hostile emails and dms daily.

All right, all right, well today we're gonna do it again.

H and aiden, I feel like I am honestly unqualified to attempt to answer your inevitable question, what's the deal with Game Informer?

So before we go any further, what is your history with the mag I wrote a feature for them?

Okay that callan Yeah, Like, that's my history with them, because so I wrote a feature for them a couple of years ago before they written like the OG version of the magazine was shut down, which I'm sure we'll get into.

I wrote it about like, uh, creators who make like D makes of modern games, so like you making Bloodborne in the style of PlayStation game or Mass Effect in the style of a sixteen bit game, and uh, and it was.

It was awesome, and it was the type of place that, like, I would never be able to sell that anywhere else, but it was perfect for a physical magazine with lots of screenshots and layout options, and it was very visual.

It was fabulous.

Working with them was great, but of course, as a Canadian it was not part of my library growing up.

Eventually I could get them through eb games or game Stop, but even then it was like I could go into game Stop a couple of years ago and I might find an issue, but it would be like four months old.

At that point.

There was no way to get a subscription, like I tried getting a subscription like it just it was one of those things where like if I got lucky, I might find a copy, but otherwise it just was not something that I was able to experience as a Canadian.

I want to be clear before I go into this Game Informer as it exists today, even that it exists today, is an incredible story of creative willpower and audience support overcoming and defeating our souless anti creative digital media overlords.

Please read them, support them, subscribe to them, et cetera.

Game Informer as it existed in nineteen ninety five to me was a jumped up funk co Land catalog as the in house publication of a major national retail chain.

I just sort of found it inherently untrustworthy and like flipping through the odd issue, I just wasn't drawn to the art designer editorial.

So, being a fourteen year old idiot, I just wrote it off.

Where did you place it next to like Nintendo Power or Game Fan, which were no less sort of like below both you know, tied to financial yeah, below both because it was it was, you know, kind of sitting there on the counter at the register right at like fun Co Land, And as we'll talk about, you know, various points, it was kind of tied into oh, you know, if you sign up for our rewards program, you can subscribe to the magazine.

You get the magazine Nintendo Power.

As we talked about, you know, when we.

Reviewed a Nintendo Powers review of Super Mario sixty four, was like, okay, you know this is a first party publication.

You know, Nintendo of America is deeply tied in with this, but you know that comes with just unrivaled access, right and really high quality work.

Game Fan, as we talked about, like, yeah, there's a catalog.

I didn't even know that the Diehard Game Fan of that one page per issue that is like or two pages per issue that is their catalog was even related to the magazine Game Fan that I was buying on the stands at the time.

I wasn't even thinking about that as a catalog for the import game store Diehard Game Fan.

So for me, it was like this is just just inescapably a sales document more than anything else.

And as we'll talk about in a second, I also thought it kind of looked like that, so I just kind of wrote it off, And basically I missed out on like two decades of excellence.

And I know that some of the people throughout its peak and glory years we're still we're working on the magazine at the time it was being made, but I just didn't pay attention to it.

It was founded in nineteen ninety one when the owner of Funk Coland decided founding a magazine was a better way to spend advertising dollars.

It's a quote from doctor Ashley P.

Jones, a professor at Georgia Southwestern State, writing in Mark J.

P.

Wils Encyclopedia of Video Games.

The founding editor in chief was Elizabeth Olson, who's now director of Marketing Communications at Telltale Games.

Besides being a pr and bisdos good in Marvel?

Huh she was good in Marvel?

Oh?

Yes she was.

Yes, she has like not the scarlet Witch in her Facebook profile.

Andy McNamara started off right at the beginning as her editorial assistant.

They became co editors in chief in ninety three.

McNamara took over in ninety four spoiler Alert.

He would remain in that chair until June twenty twenty, leaving one month before completing his twenty ninth year at the company.

Last November, he told the story of how he decided to jump to the other side of the table and electronic arts to Simon Parkin on My Perfect Console.

I'm gonna link that in the show notes because there's just so much detail in perspective that's absolutely worth hearing firsthand.

If you're liking this, you will like that.

But back in the day, Game Informer was an absolutely wild mix of everything you've and I have been talking about in terms of like editorial independence, journalistic integrity, financial incentives.

There were ads, of course, but because they were being underwritten by a retail store, they weren't dependent on game publishers for revenue, you know, so that kind of gave them latitude what they could do with covers.

You know, they didn't have to trade Oh well, you know, can we talk to someone, You'll put them on the cover.

You know, they didn't care.

But then what they actually put on covers at this time was just stock assets.

So how cool the magazine looked was kind of a function of how cool the asset looks.

I'm I'm pretty sure the first issue of Game Informer I saw was the January ninety five issue featuring the box art of deeply forgettable mascot Platform or Rise Star.

Hey, that's unfair, right, Okay, I'm sure Rye Star is good, but like a smiling star, like with attitude or whatever.

Just like again, cut from the box, just blown up to magazine size is like, I okay, same thing with this GEX cover that I think was just a GEX ad like a print ad stripped of other text and then blown up and then they put the logo back on it.

It really like, so I'm flipping through covers right now.

It really does depend on the asset used.

Like Rite.

The issue before the Rye Star issue was Doom Yes, and so it has the classic like you know, Doom guy standing on the pile of demons shooting like the Yeah, the kind of iconic art and it looks awesome.

It looks so good.

The one before that is like Sonic and Knuckles, and it's just that logo on a black background with text over.

It's so warring.

Yeah, I see, and I liked.

Here we have Walt Weiss from my temporarily beloved Florida Marlins with all the MLB logos photoshopped off just a picture of a baseball was just an action shot of Major League Baseball.

Here's Lunar Lunar Eternal Blue.

Yeah, that's a banger cover.

I need you, though, to go to June nineteen ninety six and flash this up.

Sorry, audio listeners, flash this up on the YouTube feed.

Yes, go check out fun Factor's YouTube channel to see this three D render of Paul from Keeking.

Oh my god, dude, it's so.

It's so funny.

It's like a driver's like a super super super close up render and I'm oh god, it's his.

Hair just looks like it was like clones.

Yes, like in photoshop, straight stretched straight up to the sky.

There's so many things so hilarious.

There's also this super sick tomb Raider cover that's like a comic book page I found.

I desperately tried to find the an artist for this.

I couldn't because it honestly looks like it might have been a major It looks like Jen thirteen.

Do you remember that comic?

I thought it was Gen thirteen.

To me, like, I exactly thought the same thing.

The only thing I found was the full size promotional asset that IDAs used on some super weird random website, and so I found the original poster the artist taken from, but that had no more information on who drew it or what context.

But yeah, so they wasn't unique for the magazine, right.

No, No, there's promo that you know, anybody could have used.

But hey, one of the many awesome things about Game Informer dot com is they have a gallery of every cover of every issue they've ever published at Game Informer dot com slash covers, so you can go look like, like I said, if if I had seen one of these as my first issue of Game Informer, I might have go ooh interested, you know, but it just wildly depended.

And I I saw that Game Informer, you know, that rye Star one, and then again that was a little while later, that GEX one, and I just went, Okay, this just looks like advertorial.

Basically, right around this time is when the first funk ho land opened near me, and that's right around the time that Game Informer switched from bi monthly to monthly publication started seriously competing with the big boys of game mags.

In two thousand, Barnes and Noble bought and merged several game store chains, including funk Co Land, and formed game Stop and Doctor Jones wrote that after Barnes and Noble acquired both funk Co Land and Game Informer, Kathy Preston was promoted from the magazine's production team to publisher.

Under Preston, game Informer was like rolled up into Gamestop's Power Up rewards program, and the circulation numbers went stratospheric.

Aiden, We've talked about many times my oft mentioned personal media hole where I stopped engaging with a lot of my favorite creative works and like basically all of the fandom and culture around them due to fathering three children between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight.

And this dovetail's almost exactly with Game Informer becoming not just the biggest games magazine in the US, but one of the largest magazines period in the US.

In twenty eleven, according to Forbes, game Informers sold eight million copies, third most in the country.

Time Sports illustrated Playboy Rookie numbers compared to Game Informer at this time, Aiden, could you read this excerpt from Paul Tassi's Forbes piece.

Game Informer has its parent company Game Stop to thank for that.

It's practically impossible to buy a game there without managing to get a subscription to Game Informer, and one was given away this past year with the power Up Rewards program.

In fact, it's about fifteen dollars for an entire year subscription.

And Game Informer is such a powerhouse that, even in this digital age, they managed to break news with their covers nearly every month.

So here we have a physical magazine, and you know, obviously they head in the companying website at that time.

That is dominant commercially, creatively and journalistically throughout the twenty tens, specifically because it's directly tied into how everyone at the time was buying the video games it covers.

This is and remains wild to me, not least because I missed all of it.

You know, during the stories of the twenty nineteen layoffs, Preston's and McNamara's subsequent departures, the twenty twenty four closure of the magazine, in twenty twenty five rebirth, you know, those have all been covered very very well elsewhere, especially by many of the people involved, and we'll find ways to talk about them now and later.

But you know, for me, who only got back into seriously consuming games media around like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen ish, like the mournful outcry from all the cool new critics and writers I just started following on Twitter about the death of the greatest gaming mag ever made me be like a Game Informer, you guys talking about the like the fun coland rag I once subscribe to and then didn't read just to get better trade in rates on might use games like as this Game Informer, that Game Informer great, like the best the great, like you all beloved it.

Okay, damn, I must have really, I must have missed that.

I was like, And that was very similar to my response whenever I would see Game and Former brought up as like you know, the Pinnacle and I would see it sales numbers, or I'd be on Neo gaff and you know, someone would post a thread with whatever was going to be on the Game and Former cover, and it was like always big news, Like isn't it they?

You know the quote I read from Paul Passy's piece like he wasn't kidding, Like they would break news, they would reveal new games on the cover of their magazine.

I'm like, man, like, what is this that I'm missing?

Like I can't really get my hands on this?

Is it really as good as as it was?

And it is very good.

It's a fabulous magazine.

Yes, it was boy to the levels of success it found because of the delivery method, because it was basically free.

It was maybe better than free because of you know, the way that they tied it incentives to having a subscription and then you know, like whether that was giving you ten percent more on your trade ends or whatever.

You you know, you're basically being paid to get it.

But I just couldn't do that.

And so it was always puzzling to me when there were the EGMs and they're the game players, and they were all the ones that I love seeing game informers sort of propped up there, and I think to that extent, similar to you, maybe as a defense mechanism, I sort of brushed it off as like you know, advertorial content.

You know, it's just like, oh, it's by game stop.

It's like, you know, they're just trying to sell games.

It can't be worthwhile.

And that like very much was not the case leading up to its you know, closure in twenty twenty four, Like it was one of the best places to find fabulous long form content about games writing because it wasn't tied to the news cycle, right, it didn't have to bring in like SEO numbers.

They could just hire great writers to write great stories.

But even going back and looking at these old issues, like, there was so much there that I'm out on over my you know, childhood and teenage years and twenties as a game fan.

It's funny that we both ended up basically missing this considering how much we care about this stuff.

So let's get into it.

Issue forty seven March nineteen ninety seven, sixty three numbered pages, which is really really slim.

Sure, I mentioned they had just recently switched from bi monthly to monthly, and I feel like this is kind of an artifact of that, right number of game also again though not that many ads.

There's ads, but like you know, there's there's a good bit of content in this sixty three pages, especially when you're paying you know, eighty nine cents a month or whatever.

Like EGM might have had like two hundred and twenty one pages, but it's like forty of those were the same, like cheat and strategy pages from the previous six issues.

Yes, you know, yes, seventy of those were ads.

So how much like real content?

What were like density wise?

How much difference really was there?

I'd be curious to go look at.

That number of games.

I put twenty one asterisk.

I tried to count several times, and I came up with different numbers every time, which is where we're about to get this.

Okay, so number of systems reviewed for, well, now I guess it's four.

Arguably maybe PlayStation Saturn and PC that's three.

Yeah, that is three.

Well, again, we're gonna get there.

This is this whole thing is so wild to me.

So Aiden, we're here, We're at the table of contents, got the masthead the next page.

We usually go, you know, at least through the masthead before we do the full flip through.

So I not sure we have departments.

There's like letter from the editor, back issues, dear Game, informer envelope, art, GI News Game, all these different departments, right, all of these are basically one page.

But then there's three main sections listed features, reviews and previews, and at a glene as reviews and previews.

Aiden, does that sound like an unusual phrase?

It would have before we started doing a podcast about old video game magazines, but we've run across a few instances.

Now we're reviews and previews were sort of mixed together in a weird way.

I think that also happens more when you have these sort of, you know, sales incentive driven magazine.

So you're going to see that more in Game Fan and Nintendo Power and Game Reformer.

So yeah, is it weird.

Sure?

Do I understand why they're doing it, absolutely, But yeah, I'm curious to see how they find that balance here in Game Informer Buckle up compared to the other magazines.

Buckle up.

Let's flip one more page.

We'll get to the masthead.

Here at the top of the masthead, we have Richard A.

Seahawk c I Hak, who was a Twin Cities based stockbroker before becoming controller and then CFO of the Twin Cities based fun Co inc.

In nineteen ninety three, they made him VP of Publications Running Game Informer Aiden Can you read Sea fact summing up for LinkedIn his eight years of running Game Informer.

Assumed responsibility for Troubled magazine, losing one million dollars annually produced one point five million annual profits by increasing sales six hundred and twenty four percent and revenues six hundred and forty three percent while slashing costs twenty percent, resolved complex issues, and saw fun Co through sale to Babbage's et cetera for outstanding efforts.

Sole executive retained following acquisition.

Wow did I read that right?

There is so much there, so much there.

Funco was burning one million dollars a year running game informer as an advertising expense as a loss leader.

Seahawk turned it into an even bigger profit center by simply running it like a magazine basically, like, hey, let's put out an issue every month, you know, let's trim some fat, let's get some ads in here, you know, and multiplied sales and revenues sixfold and just flipped everything around.

And then when Funko got bought, he was the only executive not to immediately get the ziggy.

Yeah.

Wow, you know, like I'm the last one to defend capitalism, right, But isn't this a lesson in sort of like free market capitalism that like, it was not made to serve market need, it was made to serve the need of the company as an advertising thing.

Yes, and he came in and he said, no, there's a market here.

Let's make this what the market wants it to be.

And that brought in all this success, and that's sort of you know how all of this is supposed to work.

Make things to fill that hole in the market, Make things that people want rather than kind of trapping them in ecosystems that they just don't care about because they end up, like you said, he had a subscription.

He didn't read it anyway, right, Yeah, Yeah.

Afterwards, he kept being a stock analyst more or less continuously, but bounced between occasional day jobs in various industries in the Upper Midwest, from like logistics to oil oil drilling North Dakota.

But yeah, like just this eight years of his life he was a games magazine publisher and you know, did good at the metrics he was asked to do good at.

We go down the list, there's editor Andrew McNamara and no job Hopper Heat because he has stayed at EA ever since leaving Game Informer.

He's currently their global Senior Director of Integrated Communications for Battlefield the next Day, and down the list, unfortunately is a sad story.

Senior Associate editor Paul Anderson.

He joined the GI staff as a brand new writer and issue five quickly worked his way up to this post senior associate editor to multiple articles I found he was a key part of leveling up the magazine's content.

Then moved to the circulation department in two thousand and one and helped maximize that relationship with Game Stop and building out those gigantic numbers.

But he was diagnosed with ALS and battled the disease until two thousand and seven, when he died at age thirty eight.

Anderson was also shouted out by Andrew Reiner in Reiner's twenty twenty two goodbye post at GameInformer dot com.

Reiner here is also listed as an associate editor, and he was the one that actually took over for McNamara as editor in chief in twenty twenty, but then Reiner also followed McNamara into game dev, joining Gearbox as global creative executive officer.

Just last week, Runner was interviewed in Rolling Stone for the release of the new Borderlands game and Rolling Stone, for you kids out there, that was another magazine that could not hold a candle to Game Informer in terms of sales at its peak not until Matt Miller replaced Reiner.

Wait, sorry, in twenty twenty two, two four, sorry, okay, well, okay.

Matt Miller joined the staff in two thousand and four.

He took over for Reiner when Reiner left in twenty twenty two.

So it's twenty twenty two where Game Informer gets its first editor in chief that wasn't either there at the very beginning or on this masthead in March nineteen ninety seven, and that like.

Honestly probably tells you why it was able to maintain equality and the readership, yes, and success that it had because my understanding is even when it was closed last year that it was still profitable.

Yes, that it's.

Still like it was.

It wasn't closed for monetary reasons.

And to have that level of success in media or that span of time, like that's when you have a group of people assembled who know what they're doing and love what they're doing and are just experts and you have that institutional knowledge, it's pretty remarkable and unique in like where else can say that.

Yeah, anywhere nowhere, I don't think, not as a continuous concern.

You know what else is incredible?

The fact that we are this deep in the episode and haven't made time for the flip through.

I'm gonna try and go quick, because gosh, this episode is going to be way too long if I don't.

Right here on page four, okay, we have this funny little bit separated at birth, where picks of main staffers are compared to various celebrities and or cartoon characters.

McNamara gives us a letter from the editor, and so do all five associate editors, Paul Reiner, John, Eric and Andy.

I didn't ever see a magazine where they let all the associate editors also, you know, get a couple of paragraphs in there.

Mcnamaras was crushingly relevant, and it's something that we've seen echoed.

Several of the issues we've talked about recently have brought up this fad and I just couldn't help but clip it, so Aidan.

This one's a little bit longer.

Can you read this section of aner Rekhmer's letter from the editor.

But now I hear a new rumbling in the video game universe.

It is a monster known to its supporters as the acronym RPG.

It stands for role playing game, and to some it is more important than food or water.

They need RPG, They want RPG, but companies have never been able to satisfy this group's tenacious appetite.

Let alone make any money off this group of cult like devotees.

That is until now, games like sweek it In from Konami and Persona from Atlas have been flying off the shelves, and the hysteria that is surrounded Final Fantasy seven is getting to the point of frenzy.

Could nineteen ninety seven be a new dawn for the RPG here in the States?

Will companies finally support this much maligned and underestimated group with a continuous line up of software?

Yes?

No, Maybe?

I say yes because quote the man can only hold us back for so long, and the world of video games can only get stronger and more diverse with more RPG.

Somebody should write a book about this.

Somebody should write it would be a great book.

You could call it Fight Magic Items.

You could find it at Fightmagic Items Dot rocks on the internet.

If it existed, I'd have a handsome guy on the back cover as well.

But no, he was like, he was spot on about that, And I wonder how being closely tied to like sales data from GameStop also let him maybe understand what was happening sooner than others.

You know, what's interesting is in the West, RPGs, console ARPGs like Final Fantasy, you know, Crono Trigger, all of those, they could sell about six hundred thousand copies, give or take ye the good ones would they'd sell six hundred thousand copies.

There were six hundred thousand people in North America, the Life arbges.

That was it.

So it wasn't even about like, you know, how to make more money off of this, you know, quote cult like Devotee group.

But the market at that point just wasn't big enough because there wasn't money put into helping it grow.

And it kind of hit like it's you know, its plateau, and it was there and it was fine.

Selling six hundred thousand copies was fine.

Fino Nancy six was made in a year.

I'm sure they made money off of six hundred thousand copies in the States, right well.

And also they had, as I hinted that before, right the Square had to buy six hundred thousand, twenty four yes, wrong, Megavi ram carts from Nintendo, so like they couldn't possibly just go, hey, well, let's see how many this sells.

They had to go, let's figure out how many this is gonna sell.

Buy a little less than that many, because if it sells three hundred thousand, we don't want to be eating three hundred thousand cartridge it, you know.

Yeah.

And what's interesting too is that, in a sense, because of this plateau in the West, they went into Final Fantasy seven.

And here in Obasaka Kucci, the Final Fantasy creator and the director of director of Fantasi seven producer exactly, but in any case, as he was making Final Fantasy seven, he he and Square looked at it as like a game for Japan and not you know, like their business execs and obviously like people in the North America were looking at marketing it heavily.

It got a lot of marketing money, but in terms of actually making the game, they said, you know what, Japanese people like these games.

We're going to make this game for Japanese people.

And so they were not really like trying to make a game for the West as well.

But because of Optical Media's affordability, because of Sony's aggressive entrance into the games console space, they were able to like get out there and take risks on printing a ton of it for the West, you know, improving it for the West, because they made a lot of improvements which I think we talk about in this issue or maybe that's a later issue of Game and Former, but they actually, like the West, United States, Canada, we got a better version of Foul Fancy than Japan did.

And it's the sort of risk where they went, hey, if we can sell we can print five hundred thousand of these.

If they sell out right away, we can print another five hundred thousand, right and before the interest.

Drive said, by the way, which yeah, not necessar exactly the case with cartridges.

Yes, and so like you know, they didn't have to play the guessing game quite as much and the risk was lower with you know, trying to like aggressively move this into a lot of hands.

And of course Foule Fancy seven went on to sell ten million copies or something like that, so like just astronomically more than any RPG consul ARPG from Japan had had done to that point in the West, and he was probably seen trends picking up.

You know, we certainly were into stuff like sweek it in in Persona Wild Arms as we like waited for Foul Fancy seven because we knew it was going to be the one, but we needed other games.

We were just so thirsty for RPGs.

Me and my friends, well me and my friends too.

But we got to keep moving.

Let's go past the basically standard letters and envelope art sections.

I just sorry, can I interpt listeners?

I want you to know that Ty literally wrote in our script quote, but we've got to keep moving.

I knew it because he knew I was gonna go along and not just it.

We could do this.

We have done this, you know.

I this is There's so much to get to here in this issue.

There's so much to talk about.

I knew we were gonna have a big discussion about game informers, so I'm like, let's I like have to remind myself.

Got to keep it moving.

So we go.

We moved to page eight.

The feature listed under features one of the three features in the magazine.

The cover story Turok Dinosaur Hunter.

And what do you see here?

I see a lot of dinosaurs, yeah, which is cool.

I see a lot of fog, and I see a lot of Xbox three sixty esque like grays and browns and clays in a lot of the screenshots.

But this is a cover story about to Rock Dinosaur Hunter.

It also appears to be a review Rock Dinosaur Hunter.

So it's a feature, it's a preview, it's a cover story, and it's a review.

Yeah, which is those who are not watching the YouTube version.

With the slide of this, we have a two page spread, a nicely atmospheric written column on the left hand side kind of setting up the story and hook and the concept of the game.

A couple of graphs on the games graphics and gameplay being impressive, and a step forward for end sixty four, big old slew of like twenty screenshots, many of them captioned.

And then in the middle of that we have the small insect box with cover story in white block capital letters laid over red and black diagonal stripes.

And then on the right hand side of the second page there are scores.

We get a rundown of like oh yeah, cart size like ninety six megabit, the one player first person action shooter, different special features, different modes develop published available March fourth for an inintennas at bottom line nine point five, and then we get three capsule reviews from Andy, Paul and Reiner, each of which go on a scale ten point scale concept, graphics, sound, playability, entertainment, their own overall.

And then you know, a healthy sized paragraph, I'd say, in extremely small type reviewing the game also, and I kept going back and forth to the table of contents where this is listed as a cover story.

There's a reviews and previews section that is not for several pages.

Yet they list where to find intended where to find PlayStation reviews, where to find PlayStation and Saturn reviews, so games that came out on both platforms, and just Saturn reviews.

They did not list where you can find Nintendo sixty four reviews.

And yet here on the right edge of this cover story, in faded gradient like faded transparency, opacity gold stripe, with vertical white text that is barely readable, it says Nintendo sixty four reviews.

And here is an unbylined editorial board review plus three capsule reviews by three different reviewers.

This is just absolutely wild.

And then you flip flip page there's a two page complete walkthrough of the entire game with screenshots and captions, and again this is tiny, tiny, tiny text and some itsy bitsy bitsy screenshots trying to cram a complete walkthrough of Turok Dinosaur Hunter into two printed pages.

I was just agog at this entire thing.

I don't think I've ever seen anything like this.

Have you no?

But I also would have probably loved this.

Yeah, at the time, like I really liked Turok.

I played a lot of it, and I probably would have been really into this.

This would have been the type of thing that if I had my hands on, I would have like had you know, these pages would have been worn out from the walk through stuff, like reading the previews, like the screenshots are great and varied, like I'm gonna have to think about it from just sort of like a critical perspective and like you know, bias and incentive and all that kind of stuff, But at the same time, like the capsule reviews are pretty good, like McNamara's is like spot on, and like why not have a big feature that's also like, I don't know, it.

Would not be unusual to find all of these three things in the same issue or spread out across across a couple issues.

Right, You'd have a preview, you'd have a feature story about its innovation and its development.

You would have a review sometimes with a panel of interviewers, and then you'd have a strategy walk through guide.

You wouldn't have them put all in one place at the same time and just called cover story.

Right.

Yeah, but there's there's lots to recommend.

I really enjoyed, you know, when we talked about Tips and Tricks a couple episodes ago, and they're kind of strategy guide for tomb Raider, and we talked about how difficult it was to have a big, expansive, groundbreaking adventure action game and do a walk through without spoilers, or do a walk through without you know what, being effective.

You know, I think this one does a little bit better job of balancing all of those things and level eight eighth chronoceptor piece.

It's just this this one's easy.

It's in the same room as the safe point right after you defeat the t Rex.

That is, if you can beat the t Rex.

Like there you go, okay, great, Like that sums it up.

So yeah, I like everything I'm seeing.

I appreciate everything that's here.

But again, at the time, it's just so contrary to what we expect from Like here's a preview, here's a review, here's a feature story with reporting and journalism, here's a strategy guy to help you through the game.

And it's it's different.

And I have some concerns again, especially considering the magazine that we're looking at and knowing that it's funded by selling copies of Tuak amongst other things.

But yeah, I think so far I'm on board.

Yeah, yeah, like you know, like within the context of what the magazine was as well, right, Like they were a publication tied to a store, and that is just what it is, the same way I wouldn't have gone to Nintendo Power for you know, objective content, you know, knowing that about Game Informer, I don't mind this idea of like a cover story that's just like, hey, here's everything to rock.

Honestly, it could have been long cover stories, and other magazines were longer than just four pages, right, this is a DNSE four pages, but like, let's go eight.

Let's just make it a big banger, like if you're basically in the marketing game, like making good content, making like desirable content, like let's go even further, Like let's stretch this out and make this something that like, you know, resonates and sticks with people for you know, for a long time if they love Dinosaur Hunter.

Sure, let's skip ahead to page eighteen.

There's actually sorry, I'm going to add something to the script here.

Can we go?

Can we skip to page fifteen?

Something stuck out at me?

Sure on this page?

So on page fifteen, so this is this section is called gi News and it's just about you know, industry news sort of.

So it talks about game works opening in Seattle, which is a you know, arcade.

But on page fifteen, the second story here is Square brings fan site online.

And so this is a little cutout news story.

It says Square La, the US branch of the Japanese RPG giant Square, has given notice to a site on the Worldwide Web designed by a loyal fan, incorporating it into Square la site.

The unofficial Squaresoft homepage, a website devoted exclusively to Square products, is the work of Texas native Andrew Wessel.

Vessel, a high school student and Squaresoft fanatic, operates and maintains the unofficial site, which Square hopes to make official.

This site and Andrew Wessel were a big part of my media consumption through the late nineties and in the two thousands, I believe this unofficial Squaresoft site became the GIA, the Gaming Intelligence Agency, Yes, which was a fabulous site for a number of years around the late night or the late nineties early two thousands.

It was the one that posted the leak of all the final Fantasy nine content way before it came out.

Vessel has gone on.

He now works for Sega.

But it's just interesting to see this listed, you know, in the magazine as a piece of news, and to see Andrew Westell as a high school student who would go on to become like, you know, a big player in games media and now working at quite high up at Sega.

Yeah.

He was a senior producer for localization at Blizzard from twenty six to twenty thirteen.

Yeah, I work in World Warcraft and.

Went to Microsoft looks like Skype, worked on Skype, and then moved to Amazon Games, head of localization for Amazon Games and has been Vice president of Global Product Operations at Sega for a year and a half.

Now.

Wow, thanks, So yeah, you.

Know, high schooler, like you know, this is back when he was just doing something for fun and he ended up you know, having a huge impact on me and obviously working for a lot of impressive companies.

So shout out to Andrew Westall.

I emailed him once because of the GA closed on April first.

Oh so I thought.

I was sure it was in April Fool's It was my favorite website.

They closed down April first.

I emailed him and he emailed me back and said, no, sorry, this is for real, and I was sad.

Yeah, the time skip from his high school picture here to his current LinkedIn picture is a whopper.

Also, anti shout out to Brett Farv, who gets highlighted here as signing with the claim for their NFL Quarterback Club ninety eight.

Anyway, Yeah, we've got to get to page eighteen here because sole Blade gets the exact same treatment as Turak.

And again we have big, big, big, big, big two page spread, huge screenshots all bordered the official soul Blade logo with the official character Techan meets weapon Lord.

And again we've got these features here.

And this is a little more clearly, I think this is the start of the reviews, reviews and previews section.

That same bar is now read it Pops Little Morris's PlayStation review.

Okay, it's a review there's a lot more text, and just like the review text the editorial again, the screenshots are given more room to you.

Flip the page and it's another two pages, and we've got the each of the characters, plus all their special moves, plus a bunch more screenshots.

Plus here's hidden characters, here's Edgemaster mode, all this other stuff.

Then the rest of the text of the review, then three more capsule reviews, then the bottom line.

Nine.

So again, their biggest games are getting this gigantic cadillac.

Yeah, four or five page treatment, and you're like, wow, okay, cool.

Flip one page.

Code name Tenka Maniacally Depressive soap opera.

PlayStation review.

It's one page, same basic concept, but much shorter, minute, fewer screen shots, three capsule reviews, plus the group bottom line.

Skip ahead a page.

We've got a review of Dynasty Warriors COI Strategy Crossover.

Six screenshots.

Wait, where's the scores?

Oh, there's no scores because it's not a review.

PlayStation preview.

You notice says available summer for Sony PlayStation in the fax box.

Next page PlayStation review for Carnage Heart four Geek Gamers by Geek Gamers.

It's byline.

Again, it's it's the box art logo and cover, and again we have a bottom line review with a long text review, screenshots and then folks, in a moment, this is where we will lay our scene.

Click forward.

Oh, it's a two page strategy guide for Carnage Heart.

Click forward.

It's a one page preview for Broken Helix one page, Vandal Hearts, a review of Vandal Hearts one page, and it's identical to the Broken Helix one.

Accept their scores at the bottom, and so you just keep going through this and it's like review, preview, review, preview, preview, review.

All of them are using the official logos and box are and official assets.

Right, there's not like a heading at the top that's like review wild Arm review Persona.

It's just there's the logo.

There's the same logo that's on the box.

We put it there, right, and like.

With a made up like subtitle though, like oh yeah, that's wild Arms.

It's like the wild Arms one, which is not the actual wild Arms logo, but it says wild Arms and big like Sarahpont.

And then underneath, in sort of a fat sarahfont it says bitter traditionalism, which.

That would have been a really funny subtitle kind of goes hard, but Wild Arms cold bitter traditionalism.

I mean, like looking at this, what I think I need to look at you know, the actual like the magazine as a whole more.

But I expect there were very like distinct lines that you couldn't couldn't cross when you had your name attached to text.

I think it's stands out to me that a lot of this does not have bylines, Like the Wild Arms piece does not have a byline anywhere, but all the capsule reviews do and they're a little bit more personal.

And I wonder how much the kind of boxy previewe stuff attached to these reviews was directed or limited in scope, and maybe the writers were given a little bit more freedom to you know, express themselves in the reviews.

Perhaps, Yeah.

And it's it's strange because like if you go to page forty one, this forty forty one spread, I have it as two pages where it's Diehard Arcade and then Scud the Disposable Assassin.

This is really stylish stuff.

This is some of the best layout work in the magazine.

This is pretty said like.

This, this looks great.

I'd put these couple pages here up against any page you'd see in any other magazine, right, really cool, But again it's like it's this box art logo and some of the stuff, and so it's like you're flipping through it and it's like it's it's hard to tell the difference between ads on some of these.

You know, you put an ad in between two of these, and like what's a review, what's a preview?

You know, it all kind of blends together for me, and you know at fourteen, obviously, I think that kind of helped me have this like is this paid advertorial?

Right?

And like now I know it's not.

I know it's not.

And you read the you know again you say you read the capsule reviews that every single one is bylined with all of these, and almost all of them are the same three or four you know, associate editor, you know, three of the same four or five six editors and associate editors, right, So like, I don't know it, it comes off, it comes off weird to mean, I think it.

It didn't help my impression that this was somehow advertorial, right.

And I mean I'm always skeptical of anything that doesn't come with a byline because it's written for a purpose that's maybe being o scated, obviouscated, obviouscating affiscated somehow.

I don't mind this stuff though, as long as it's honest, as long as it's honest and not trying to like present itself.

So like Game Informer was like the magazine at Game Stop right or Funkoland or whatever, like, I don't think it's unethical, No, as long as it's honest and not trying to be something that's not right.

And that's where we sort of get into like some things about like the official PlayStation magazine being you know, you know whatever, an unbiased source of news about whatever, right, Like can you be official and unbiased?

Like I can't remember where the actual quote was on that that magazine, but Nintendo Power the same thing.

It was like, yeah, this is like a promotional rag for Nintendo.

But that doesn't mean there wasn't a ton of effort put in and there wasn't value in there for like a young gamer who was just kind of excited about reading about new video games and experiencing games he was never really gonna get to play.

Right, And I looking at this, I don't get the same sense.

Ive you know, we've talked about Nintendo Power and like, you know, there was a read between the lines, like you had to go looking to try and divine some of the real feelings behind some of the corporates speak, because there were hard lines on what they could and couldn't say about their own works and about third party titles, you know, licensees, that kind of thing.

This doesn't seem like that, but it's just the design being and all the lines blurred, where every other magazine on the market is like, these are previews, these are reviews.

Yeah, these are reported feature stories where we sought out information these and this is like one big glom from basically start to finish, and it looks designed to confuse you visually.

But I wonder, even.

Though I don't think the content, I don't think the content is like that.

I don't think the content reads like promotional material.

It reads like really high quality editorial.

But it just looks to me like it's designed to confuse you as to what's a review and what's a preview.

Yeah, Like there's definitely not any visual indicators, and that becomes really like a lot more obvious when we get to the at a section later on where they're looking more similar.

Yes, by the way, folks, the at a glance section because we had feature stories, reviews, and previews at a glance, all of these things are both reviews and previews.

There was never any section.

It's just like, Leah, it's all of it.

It's all just glombed together.

Actually, but they also, like, I wonder how much of this was driven by they clearly want to just keep all the PlayStation stuff together.

They want to keep all the Saturn stuff together.

Like, I wonder how much of it was just like, let's make this easy for people to come into the store and flip through our magazine and they have a PlayStation and they get they immediately find all the PlayStation content and can get excited about a game in the store and walk out with a game they didn't know about before.

Like make it so that people could kind of focus on what they were interested in.

So not even so much like, oh, let's confuse people between a preview and a review, but like let's just jump everything PlayStation related together.

That makes sense.

Let's damp all the Saturn stuff together.

So it's like almost becomes a you know, a little catalog for whatever console you're sort of into at the time.

Cool, But then why are I getting PlayStation right, Like why is it these gradient like transparent color bars.

It's like PlayStation review, PlayStation preview PlayStation and Saturn Review play station, you know, Like I don't know.

There is one section that stands out.

It's just one page, page forty seven.

Aiden I didn't realize how prevalent this was, but this was happening in multiple magazines.

Now we see it Classic Game Informer, and this is very clever and funny.

It's a graphic of a stone tablet, like a gray slate tablet, and it looks like Classic Game Informer gaming from the past to the present has been like etched into the stone.

And then there is a like Egyptian hieroglyphic looking figure holding a hieroglyphic looking controller that has a square like all right angles cord to a TV and a game console, and it is these are in television games.

This is looking back at NFL, you know, the football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer for in television, and we've got these screen caps and just kind of like, hey, this is what it was like, you know, twelve years ago or whatever it was nineteen ninety seven, fifteen, eighteen years ago, whatever, right, And we've seen several magazines now that we've flipped through over the last few episodes have a retro section or a retro feature or something like that.

And I don't even think that clicked with me at the time, because obviously I wasn't looking for retro at that time.

For me, retro was NES and it was way too early to have like that NES nostalgia.

Of course, that would be like coming like four years later when I went to college and brought my anis and everybody had the best I'm in the world busting out multiplayer bass wars.

But yeah, like it's it's fascinating.

I think that we already have that impulse of the twenty and thirty somethings making these magazines are starting to already go, hey, yo, remember Kaliko Vision.

I remember Kaleko Vision.

You know, I looked at a different show this year, mom, I was looking at a different issue of Game Informer.

You know, I really wanted to do Game informast sooner rather than later.

And I found one way.

They brought up some old NYS games and I was like, okay, all right, eh, look look back and then aiden we're basically at the end of the magazine.

We've only got like we've got like two big strategy guides for Legacy K and then we'd have these capsule reviews like we talked about these reviews and previews that at a glance where again it's like a paragraph and four screenshots three games per page.

Whip right through them and it just says preview, preview, review, review, preview, preview.

You know, you're just flipping through them and it all looks the same PlayStation PlayStation center in et cetera.

And then boom, you're done.

We haven't gotten to a review yet.

But before we do, we have to realize you skipped the whole review section of this magazine and wait.

Where, oh where which one page forty six?

Oh oh the PCs?

Is that what it was?

Yeah?

Yeah, yea, yea yeah.

You know, Game of Former PC is written by Eric so it all has a byline a single page, and it has yes I missed.

The one for one person.

Yeah, it has reviews of Star General and Dall Blow, which they only gave an eight point five.

It's got some news about Command and Conquer and Accolade a preview of x Com Apocalypse, and it also has little tiny capsule reviews of three games, recent Power Slave, which was a pretty fun Egyptian themed like First Person Shooter, A ROBERTA.

Williams Anthology nine point nine point two, Diablo, and Obsidian, which I'm not familiar with.

It's an fmv oh.

I missed Clone and I actually like it all.

Right, But then these are in an entirely different uh you know layout for it just looks like yeah, yeah, it's just like headers and it says preview or it has a score, and it's just like almost written like a feature in a newspaper.

Yes, it looks looks it looks almost like one page from a different magazine's news section, right, but then.

It's it's it's this.

It's it's all of the PC content on one page.

There's even like, uh line height differences between the sections.

It's great, it's fabulous.

Yeah wow, all right, And I'm trying desperately to keep us on some sort of track here because there's so much.

Got a different co host Yeah no, well and me too.

Honestly, it's it's I keep saying, it's it's my lack of discipline as much as anybody else's.

There's so much to get to you, and I know everybody loves it.

We have a question, reader question that we want to get to.

We love your guys' reviews of our reviews, and we love talking with you on a discord channel.

We will do that when we get back right here.

On Fun Factors, we've got mail.

As promised, we always review the best, funniest, kindness and most entertaining five star Apple podcast reviews on the air.

Bonus points if you say who your favorite host is and why, Double bonus points if it's Aidan.

Guys, We've said it.

Last couple episodes, we have run out of five star reviews.

Thankfully, they are all five star reviews.

Twenty two reviews on at least the US it Apple podcast site all five stars.

We love it.

We are super thankful that you guys are enjoying that.

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Right, we look at the numbers.

We know there's more than twenty two of you listening.

We would love to boost our mojo up in the iTunes charts.

Also, you know you're listening to some of you on overcast pocket casts, so you were watching the visual version on YouTube.

The numbers keep going up there.

That's fantastic.

We've got a couple of you who are regular commenters on there and that's outstanding.

Please keep doing it because we will answer right here on the show that you like to listen to and or watch.

Andrew Blewett, who is a fun Factor ultra subscriber, fellow games historian and content creator a super cool guy, had a question for us.

I thought we would answer it here in the letter section today, and do you want to read this one?

So Andrew says, when birding a CD or DVD, what right speed do you typically use to achieve a healthy equilibrium between a quick right and lowest possibility of a failed right Do you bring your discs rare, medium or well done?

Ghost Pepper, Jlapino Baby max right speed every time?

Yeah, there's no question.

By coaster for CDs, O the way to do it?

Who cares?

Who cares?

I got a stack of one hundred of these things?

Yeah, that's the thing.

Once.

Once you can give that stack of one hundred, all you're losing was time.

And if you were doing the fastest speed thirty two x man or whatever whatever the max is for your writer.

For sure, when I got a Dreamcast few years ago.

You can just like burn discs and play them on like a Dreamcast.

And so I was like, yeah, I had to buy an external CD burner, like I didn't have.

It was a CD burner, so it took me back, but yeah, no, I was blasting that at top speed.

For me and all my friends would do the fifty X reader with whatever the fastest writer we could afford, and we would just you know, we would you would rent from you know, a Blockbuster or wherever we had a family video.

We would all rent games from all the different places in town, and then we'd just come over and just copy, copy copy every game we rented, just copy, copy, copy, and we just have binders full of burn PlayStation CDs.

Hey, if you burn one or two extra CDs, it don't work whatever.

And like you know, for music, music was mostly what I was burning to play my car, and there was so much that could go wrong, like wasting a disc on a slow like on a fast burden.

Speed was not nearly as impactful as burning that perfect mixtape, spreading around your friends and then finally listening to it and then like Girls by the Beastie Boys cuts off like thirty four seconds in or whatever because you didn't listen to the full track.

When you download or best yet, thirty four seconds into Girls by the Beastie Boys, it turns into like porno sounds or whatever.

Yes, yes, so so much could go wrong, so much could go wrong, and those are the harmless wrong things that LimeWire could do to your computer.

So yeah, no, I was blasting those out as fast as I could.

Absolutely, for me, it's the only way to fly, and look like, there are many things in my life that I will tin cup right.

There are things that I am incredibly meticulous about and I will not even do if I can't do right, And then there are many other things that I do wrong fifty times before I do it right once.

And yeah, burning a CD absolutely falls into a lot of category for me.

Yep, all right, Andrew, thank you for the question.

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Right here on fun Factor.

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Yes, And you know, as our studios behind us are festooned with fetish objects of side projects current, past and future, it does help the family to know, hey, there's a reason why daddy has locked himself into the weird project caves again, and it's not just because he likes his weird projects.

So we do appreciate that.

Speaking of weird projects and locking yourself in the weirdo hole, it is time to review the review.

All right, Aiden, what do you know about Carnage Heart Right?

So, I know it sizes one CD ROM, Its style is one player, icon programming MECHS, strategy and up to four player in memory card battles.

It's got special features like four mech types, optimizations, icon programming interface made by Art Dank on PlayStation and like true, innovation is a rare and exciting phenomenon in the gaming industry, and when a game like Carnage Heart comes out, we can't help but wonder if we are witnessing the beginning of a new genre or the bold but misinformed attempt to reach a crowd that doesn't exist.

Like we hope the former wins out.

Yeah, I'm just reading, he is.

Reading, have no idea.

I've never heard of this game in my life.

What are you doing to me?

Tired?

Oh my god, yeah, yes, yes, bandalhearts, Yes, what are you doing to me?

I'm so happy you're going in a blind to this, going and cold this game.

This game is just a masterpiece for absolute degenerates.

Carna's Heart is a tactics game takes place in space.

There's different like moons.

I think it's all the moons of Jupiter.

I think it's a kspa Io Calisto those and it is a combat game might be recognized as a mech combat game.

They refer to them as overkill engines or Okase.

But it's so it's like mining and resources.

Right, You've got like a map, and you're moving, and you're building and you're crafting, and you are upgrading your facilities to make better mechs.

And then you are taking the parts that you're building and you're combining them into different you know, you've got your frame and your weapon and your heat sink and all that kind of stuff.

Right.

They go out in teams of three and they help you get more teary to mine more stuff and that kind of thing, and they face off against other teams of three.

So it's like this tactics thing, and then it's the battles and the battles.

You are not piloting the mex You are not controlling the mechs in any way.

You are programming the mes.

So you are given you have CPUs that are defined by tiles in a square of different sizes.

Right, but let's say like ten by ten, right, okay, and then the outside edge loops you back to the start.

It's like a universal go to And what this is is a flow chart, and there's different tiles and you get more as you develop.

Right, but it'll be like move forward.

Look forward, if an enemy sensed, if you take damage, if heat is over fifty percent, if an ally is detected within a certain range.

Right, and so you can set these parameters to go okay, if an enemy is detected directly in front of you, then and you create a little arrow shoot up back to the frame, and we'll go back to the start.

Okay, and then just loop over and over.

If an enemy is detected, shoot forward, left, right, you choose, and you can start building out these logic flows right where you're able to sense and have what's going on around you on the battlefield, and you walk forward, walk back.

There's a like a tank frame, and then like a bipedal frame, and then like a multi legged like three legged or four legged frame.

Then there's even a flying frame like a drone, right, and they all have balances in terms of armor capability, weapons capability, that kind of thing, right, And so then that also gives them mobility, right like how fast can the tank move versus the quadruped versus the flying thing.

And you are debugging these routines, basically you're coming up with them.

There's all these if then statements, right, but unlike any other you know, programming game I've played before or since.

It really just it just made so much intuitive sense of like, okay, I understand if this, then this, Okay, if that do that.

A few sins and I saw previews for this game, and I was like, yes, I need this, I must have this.

This is going to just light up all the weird, little itchy parts of my brain all the same time.

I was absolutely right.

I was evangelicalizing.

I was proselytizing to my friends.

And we spent months.

There are two or three weekends where like five, six, seven of us we're over at my one rich friend's house and we just spent all weekend just like round the clock in shifts with PlayStations and TVs programming and debugging and deathmatching against each other, just our mechs over and over, you know, and someone would come up with a ridiculous design.

I think one got like a good missile.

I think it was the homing missile, right, and so it's like, all right, cool, I'm just gonna put as many as the flying mech can carry, and then have two flying mechs and a tank, and then it'll just be like one chip that's like fire missile looped back to the frame, and so the two flying mechs at the instant the battle started would just unload like five homing missiles, overheat and explode, and then the homing missiles would all decimate the opposition, and if any survived, then there was just one tank mech left over to mop up.

And so we're like, oh my god, how are we go?

Okay, so we have to okay, detect if incoming missile, then jump left.

Oh whoops, they can't all jump left.

Okay, fifty to fifty jump left and right.

Okay.

They they jumped into each other, Okay, you know, like like over and over.

It was just absolutely brilliant, totally for sickohs.

Was there jank?

Hell yes there was Jank.

Were the graphics amazing?

Absolutely not, Nothing like it existed before or since really as far as I can tell, And it was.

It was just so addictive and and it's an example to me of the kind of thing that was happening in this time where Sony was hooking up with Art Dink again who also was publishing No One Can Stop Mister Domino, right, and just went yeah cool, and Art Dink actually was founded.

They were just selling microprocessor assemblers, and we're like, hey, let's you know this is back in the mid eighties, and they're, hey, how can we how can we branch out from our true love of microprocessor code?

Well, we can make video games, I guess, And here we have, you know, almost twenty years later.

Carnich art.

H listener, I am making so many faces while I'm listening to it.

He is, I have no idea how he feels at this moment.

I'm holding my breath.

Hmm it I yeah, man, it's like Final Fantasy twelves combat system like Gambit system, but virtual on and like the controller is like a C sharp terminal with a guy I don't even know, like wild man.

I had no idea this game existed.

I'm intrigued.

I probably would not have liked it at the time, but I feel like it's something that i'd be like.

I feel like there'd be a cool like into the breach style like puzzle game.

It almost feels like a tower defense game to me, or something where it's like about pre planning and kind of executing on on pre planned I don't know, it's so weird.

I've never seen anything like this.

Yeah, and it was on PlayStation.

Yeah, it seems like the most sicko like a game that it seems like a game that would only be available on Linux, like you know, it does not seem like a PlayStation game.

Amazing.

Yeah, and so okay, so like, yeah, one of the things I'm looking at is like, so the breakdowns and the capsule reviews they have like a breakdown of the score, so graphic, sound, playability, entertainment.

But this is like the first game where I felt like their individual score for quote unquote concept feels like it was like made for this game, because often I look at like you know, tech and concept, like how do you rank that it's a fighting game?

But this is like legit, like a unique take on something that like I didn't create a genre, but it was absolutely forward thinking.

The idea of using like macros and like programming logic it's cool.

Yeah.

And and the the CPU design and the physical design were separate.

Yeah, you're often made with them in mind, but it was like, okay, cool, you could put this same CPU and you could upgrade the cputigger and bigger grids with faster and faster speeds.

Something that was funny that we found out then is that some of the routines that worked really well at the slower speeds didn't work at faster speeds because we put in of course loops or checks that it like right, yeah, and so all that kind of stuff is like, oh, when you up the clock speed, like that changes the behavior, right and so yeah, and it's it's worth noting the three scores from Paul John and Andy concept was nine, nine point seventy five and ten.

And you can see a world where this became a whole different subgenre.

You know, you could see a world where like Final Fantasy Tactics, even if it's a kind of a micro genre, people even still today are going, yeah, let me make them like, you know, a Final Fantasy Tactics alike right there.

There's no like Carnage Heart alike.

No, no, this looks like a version of Armored Corps.

I would play with the MIDI controllers sitting beside my desk, like with all the like the like the like pads for like programming music and stuff.

Everybody listening to this is gonna have some different picture in their head.

But I can't really believe this game exists.

Yeah, and they walk you through the strategy guide is great, they s She'll like, okay, figure one one chip.

It's like enemy radartish seventy meters and you can change the range right, seventy, ten hundred whatever.

So it's a check is there an enemy within seventy feet?

Yes or no?

If yes, shoot it with your rifle.

Go back to frame right.

So by default it's standing there and going.

Anytime an enemy comes within seventy meters of me, I will shoot it.

Okay, great, now we add okay if no.

Originally it was just then go back to frame and wait.

Now if no, walk forward.

So it goes and walks forward, and then it loops back around, and as it's walking forward, it's okay, now is it enemy within seventy meters?

Now?

Is there an enemy within seventy meters now?

And if you thought that, maybe you would watch a battle where all of your mechs walk to the other end of the frame just keep walking forward, or they all end up walking into the same corner of the map, waiting for waiting to find enemies that aren't going to come or are shooting them from behind.

Absolutely, there's all sorts of weird little emergent behaviors, you know, you can do gating and if then statements based on any kind of detection of enemies within a certain range, you know, like forward forty five meters or forward forty five degrees back for one hundred and eighty three sixty anything like that.

And again temperature checks right, Hey, you just fighted your weapon.

What's your mech frame?

Temperature?

Right?

Is it too much?

Go in a loop?

Just put in a loop for however long check again, put it in an infinite loop until it cools down to where you can go on fire again.

Right, Like all these sorts of little things, There's so many things to think about on top of again, the strategy and tactics layer of the map and going out and getting resources and building your tech tree and building your skill tree and your manufacturing capability and everything else.

It is sad that all three of these reviews, the capsule reviews plus the main you know, non bylined editorial review.

I'll have some variation on Damn.

I don't know if this is going to find an audience.

I don't know if regular gamers will buy this.

I don't know if what they've done is going to work.

In the non byline group editorial our first impression when we were told about this game was that Sony and Art Dank had gone insane up on playing the game.

However, we discovered Carnachar offers a gaming high on an entirely new level.

It's hard to imagine someone screaming bloody murder as their oka quote unquote bugs out and starts turning around in circles while enemies approach, or cheering as their latest prototype finishes an enemy off with a melee attack.

But it happens, and I promise you, me and my friends with our mountain dew absolutely marking out and freaking out over that you know, and nitpicking each other's code and all this other stuff.

It was so cool and such a big step ahead.

And again it's the kind of big swing that you only see in the indie space.

I'm thrilled to see again.

We have an eight point five overall from the group.

The bottom line an eight from Paul.

I couldn't help but get a little addicted to the game.

The possibilities are endless.

It's actually very enjoyable to design to test your mex against the enemy.

It can also be very frustrating, but the accompany guy can really be helpful.

I forgot to mention the instruction booklet.

That thing is a puppy killer.

It is.

It is I think as beefy an instruction booklet as I ever saw in the CD jewel case era.

I think it was a two disc jewel case, not because the game came with two discs, but because they couldn't fit the instruction booklet in a standard jewel case.

So there's one disc and then the whole instruction manual had to get stuffed in in the space for the other disc.

Yeah, and that was like save for like sickoh mode RBGS back then.

Yes, like yes, this is yeah, And I mean like eight point five kind of seems to be under selling it looking at like the actual scores being handed out, like per category.

You know, I got a six for sound from Paul, they got seven for sound from Andy, but like there's a lot of nines and tens and nine point seven five is being thrown around two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a brain game somewhat similar to chess in that you must reason through multiple logic branchings.

I recommend writing out a flow chart before tackling the programming.

As you can see, my score reflects the genius of the concept behind ch This game is for the select few programming fans and logic heads who are looking for a little more from their console.

That says John.

That's from John, And I think my experience with the game was was not that because the grid ultimately it is a flow chart like like it just is.

It's a very simple and you can change the direction of the arrows.

Like you're given a grid, you're given the tiles you're putting there, and the game kind of walks you through.

I don't want to say the game walks you through.

The instruction booklet walks you through, but it's just as intuitive an idea of it's going to start here, it's going to go to this tile, and based on what you do, it's gonna and it lights up when it executes.

You see a light like a blink people, you know, like like like the tile lights up as it processes, right, so you can you can see what it's doing.

You're like, okay, run do do do do okay, cool cool cool okay do do Oh it's getting stuck there.

Oh okay.

You know, and my kids, because you know, learn to code was this whole thing and my kids were tweens and teens, uh, fifteen years after this, right, and there are a couple of them.

There're a thing called Osmo.

Kids in the late two thousands, early to mid twenty tens were drowning in like learning to code things that used abstractions like this, that were so abstracted.

I don't think they were meaningful, right, Like I like kids, Oh yeah, cool, this is a programming game.

Here's a bunch of like magnetics, lots of those.

Now for little kids.

Yeah, here are these little you know, magnetic circles and squares and you can lay them on a grid and like stuff happens, or like it controls a toy, and like you're learning to code.

But like, yeah, I don't.

My kids didn't find them fun, and I didn't find them useful in terms of programming.

As someone who is a shitty coder but has done programming for money, yeah, I found this a very good representation of what coding actually is like.

And I also found it as intuitive as I've seen, you know, for a stand in for for programming.

And logic loops, right right, yeah, and like logic loops and stuff like that, y yeah, And so we kind of come to the process of upgrading, reprogramming, and experimenting.

Could have people playing this game for years.

How well Carnage Heart will do is uncertain, but we are sure that it will develop a cult following among the people who do get into it.

Man, let me tell you it worked for me.

And ever since thinking about doing this issue, I've been like, I gotta go see, and I'm sure there is I know just from reading some of this there were sequels or remakes or reports, at least to other systems, probably a bunch of stuff that was Japan only right.

I never saw a.

Sequel in the US there was a sequel, was there?

Give me a second here, let me let me Carnage Heart came out on the PlayStation.

So this Carnage Heart, Carnage Heart Easy easy Zapping, it's just called easy zapping and improved Carnage Okay per second, Zeus to Carnage Heart, Carnage Art portable for the PSP, Carnage Heart EXA for the ps.

PS Okay, sp okay.

So it wasn't until Okay Zeus Connage Hurricane, Yeah, Zeus Carnage Heart second and Zeus Too Carnage Heart were both Japanese PlayStation network.

It looks like Carnage Heart Portable for PSP, improved graphics, updated chips, interfacing, okay et types.

Carnage Heart exa PSP released in North America in twenty thirteen.

Yeah, so Carna Art XA I did not have a PlayStation portable.

Uh, that's fascinating.

I would I would love to play that.

I still do have my original CD behind.

I know it is beat up because some of those sleepovers got rowdy and then my PlayStation of course melted, so you know, I did a lot of like wriggling with the CD and that kind of thing.

I'm not sure current art even boots my copy of it even boots reliably.

We can get that working for you.

Oh yeah.

They're also like not a sequel, but sort of like an expansion of the idea in Carnage Heart.

So like, this makes me wonder if it started as some sort of R and D project, because in two thousand and one, Art Dink released a game on the PlayStation two called Basic Studio Powerful Game Kobu, and it's a game creation title, so it's like making games, and one of example games in there was based on Carnage Heart and so they must have presumably I've never played it, but taken the idea and the concepts and you know, UI and the logic based like game programming from Carnage Heart and expanded that into a whole like build your own game, build your own simple game, which is interesting.

So yeah, and it's great running down here.

Wikipedia has a round up game rankings aggregate scorers sixty nine percent.

All game has a three and a half out of five.

Famitsu hit it with a twenty eight out of forty, game Pro three out of five, a c from Game Revolution, six out of ten from Game Spot nine point two out of ten for IGN, almost as good as Jade Empire.

And then I actually pulled this up because of course I was a next generation Siko Next Generation gave this four stars out of five under their strict rubric next Generation.

At this point, it either needed to be a step forward for an existing genre or a successful attempt at creating a new one, and uh yeah.

In the slow trickle of more cerebral games in a PlayStation's action heavy library, Carnachart stands out, bringing an unprecedented level of complexity and depth to the strategy genre.

It's called pulse pounding carnatart requires a serious commitment from the player, but as a commitment well worth making.

So again we see this from magazine to magazine eight to nine, or like Season d's based on whether you were willing to give it the time and get hooked by the concept.

And I think it speaks very well to Game Informer that both as an editorial board and all three independent byline reviews here from the editors, they put it at eight point five and listed very clearly and specifically what this did well and what the barriers of entry would be, and that they came in completely unsold on the concept and absolutely mystified and came out going, Yeah, I was cheering on my couch when my weird little robots did the things that I wanted them to do, and losing my mind when they did their own weird things.

I didn't think I'd programmed into them, you know.

So yeah, I think they did a really good job.

What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, you've sold me more on the game than these the actual review does.

This is a review I would have at the time glazed over, or if I read it, would have probably been turned off from But I think it is good, and I do think that like it shows a group of reviewers in an interesting space where they were sort of like retailed focused, being willing to put their like neck out on the line for a strange game that doesn't fit easily in the boxes and that does not probably sell very easily in like a mainstream store like Game Stop or fun Go In or whatever it was at the time.

So like, I like the kind of guts of the review, and I think a point five for the game is probably a good source for this review as well.

I think the like you know it loses points for me for having the weird, like non bylined like editorial review, but I think the you know the three capsule reviews are as good as anything you'd have seen in EGM at the time or whatever.

Yeah, yep, I'm in a similar neighborhood, especially for a one pager with seven screenshots of small to decent size and then again these three pull out capsule reviews that doesn't leave a lot of time, and again there they're best friend in this issue small text.

This is for young eyes for sure, because this this looks like it must have been like eight point font or six point font somehow they squeeze like three four hundred words into thirty forty percent of a page.

Yes, you know what I'm I think I'm with you.

The format is as much a byproduct of what the magazine is doing as anything else.

And given a game where everyone was so hot and cold on it and they were mostly hot, I'm trying not to review the review format because it is weird to have this editorial voice.

But Next Generation did that as well.

Other other companies did that as well, having alongside the three individual reviewers who necessarily made up like three sixths of all the editors, were probably the only three.

I don't know if they're the only three people who play this game for the review.

Did you have two the other two also play this game and contribute to this review but not write castle reviews, or did these three work together to make this review that is weird?

That is weird to me, And I think this like is totally an issue of like layout in proximity.

Like if we had this preview section without a byline earlier in a previews area of the magazine, and then at the end in the review section, we'd had these three capsle reviews, what it felt totally natural, and so a lot of like where I'm docking some points is like I think that this set up feels a little dodgy having the reviews and the previews, Like what am I reading here?

And how can I contextualize the text of the unbylined material to understand like if this is a game that I want or should be interested in or whatever.

It's hard for me because I don't think that reviews like I don't like non like reviews without bylines because I think reviewing is just and critical work is just inherently subjective, and it's really important to know who it is that's passing along this opinion, which the capsule reviews do great, but it can't be alongside something that's sort of, you know, blandly I'm byelined, even if that text matches up with the general tone and feel of the three caps Yeah, so.

I don't know if one of these three wrote it and everybody else kind of chipped in their opinion.

I don't know if I see wrote this based on a synthesis of the other.

You know, I just don't know.

And like you said, like the diehard game fans structure of we had three people take a crack at this, and then we had an unbylined overall review at in the reviews section of the magazine, Like I'm trying to unpack how much I should give my score based on how much I don't like this aglom together everything is a review and a preview and a strategy guide, uh, you know, versus just how well did they do with covering this game?

Because coverage like this and next you know, Next Generation's review, some of the igns, some of these other previews and reviews that I saw leading up to the game's release sold me on, Yes, this game is going to have a hard time finding an audience, but I'm audience.

And then it was it was all right, And then it made me be the guy who went to all my friends and went, this is worth playing.

We need to play this, and that also was right, you know.

So it's like, if it weren't for coverage like this, I wouldn't have found this game.

But also it's it is it is weird that this coverage is like this, So I think I'm gonna give it nine okaes out of ten.

Again, that's overkill engines.

I don't know why we're this was This was a time in anime and video games where we had to call Mex anything but Max.

Like everything was Max, and then we had to come up with new names for Max.

Everything had to be you know, gears or whatever else.

It kind of came back around together.

They're all Max, These are just Max.

We know what they are.

Eggs.

I forgot about eggs, I forgots.

Oh my god.

Yeah, I'm gonna stick with my eight point five icon programming interfaces.

Out of there you go?

There you go.

Yeah, Like, you know, it's hard to review a weird game and to do so with like enthusiasm and say, hey, this is a weird game.

I don't know what to do with it, but I love my time with it.

Like those are some of the best reviews to write, but also some of the hardest, and I think they did a good job with it.

And this may have been one of the better magazines to read and review and also one of the hardest.

I hope you all enjoyed.

We went very very long and very very deep.

But I knew our first take on a game Informer Magazine had to be a deep one and a good one, and I knew the game had to be one that at least one of us cared about and offered a challenge to us into the format.

And I think we got there.

I think we got there.

Yeah, it's I'm so curious to read more about this game and just to dive deeper into these old game informers.

Yeah, yeah, I want to see how much this You know, what did this magazine look like a year ago when they were bi monthly still right, What did this magazine look like a year later?

What did it look like in two thousand after Barnes and Noble bought it?

Right?

What it looked like in two thousand and one once they were really leveraging those synergies with the game Stop this stuff?

So you know, I'm fascinated to catch up on thirty years of this magazine and thirty years apparently of what's been happening in the Carnage Heart scene.

I suspect that, just like Virtual Boy, I am going to be blown over by, like, I don't know, the competitive homebrew Carnage Heart scene where people are playing the exa version on PSP emulators and having weird cons that I don't I had no idea existed something like that.

I don't know, it'll happen.

I you know, the DS era, I think again, Like I'm curious to get get into that, Like, I love.

These experimental areas are the most interesting for critics because new language is being developed and new ways of thinking about and compare and games against one each other, against each other, you know, requires critics to really understand what they're writing about and how to like communicate that.

Yeah, when we talk about the personal media hole in coming back to games media coverage in twenty sixteen, and I'm reading and I'm like, what the fuck is a rogue?

Like?

And why is every game one?

What are you people talking about?

I have never what are you?

What is this?

I don't know?

Because yeah, language develops, tools evolve.

All right, this is it.

We have to stop.

We will keep going all day and all night like me and my friends used to do with Carnage Heart itself.

That is our review of Game Informers' review of Carnage Heart.

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But also sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Sorry what were you just saying?

They're connecting artists and you know, Sony was going, okay, outing people to connect like NDI Dev's and other creatives.

It'd be weird if you had.

It'd be weird if hey, h.

Sorry, my wife and daughter needed something from the crush.

Okay, I was just saying, okay, it is weird to have the disembodied editorial double bonus points if it's aiden excuse me, I had to burn.

Okay, so ty this can be for the outtakes.

But I'm looking at art Dinks Wikipedia now, and like, have I played some art Dink games, like absolutely, and I know you pick them And it's funny to say art Dink, I know what you picked them because it's a funny name.

But like they got some bangers, like how many robot big banger, But like really in the nineties they hit their stride.

And when we're talking about, you know, earlier in this episode, like weird genre pushing games like Aquanatt's Holiday Tale of the Sun, which where he played as a cave man.

It was like weird like open world e game stuff you just were not seen at that time.

Colony Wars was like, you know, a sci fi shooter.

They were doing some crazy stuff at that time.

They did Ogre Battle on the PlayStation.

They did the PlayStation pour of that, and they're like still around, right, They're the ones doing the Dragon Quest one and two HD remake that's coming out in like a few weeks.

They did Triangle Strategy, you know, they but now, okay, impressive games, and they have a lot of range.

You know, a train express, they're making train simulators, and they're making you know, Triangle Strategy.

You know, they're making Wonder and Monster World.

So like a great like RPG, side scroller, a lot of golf games.

Yeah, and so you know, like it's it's a game.

It's one of those companies, like even if people don't know them, you've played their games.

Fossil Fighter on the DS, speaking of weird, because that was sort of like a monster huntery game right where you could one Anyway, this is this is too rambling even for the outtakes.

But yeah, oh they made a Medoka Magic game for PlayStation Vita.

Oh wow, okay, dang yeah uh.

Also, I love the art I'll say, I'll say when we get to the actual part.

The acronym how they got the name art dink is hilarious to me.

Sorry, I have the world's most codependent cat ah Aiden.

Could you read this excerpt from Paul Tassi's Forbes piece.

Game Informer, Did you have.

Something you wanted to jump in right there with?

Okay, I'm seeing Mario Kart on page eight.

I was a eight boop uh one rating ship.

Oh, I'm out looking at the wrong issue.

So okay forty seven, yeah, okay forty seven yeah.

I don't know how that opened up.

I was looking at a different one.

Okay, A jere a little boom amazing.

That was a good one.

Woo.

Yeah that is two hours.

We were chatting a little bit.

Before we were we were there might be were some trimming we can do.