I've subscribed to the Swedish one since around 1998 or 1999. I think there have been two years where I haven't been subscribed, but I don't think I've missed an issue since #21, with my first issue being #16 when Final Fantasy VII was reviewed and got 93%, as well as the first Fallout, which got 87%. Unfortunately my mom insisted I throw out everything every few years. Now, I realise Svenska PC Gamer is an independent entity, but a lot of articles are translated from the UK and US magazines, so it's still a relevant query.

These days I don't read everything in them, but every so often there'll be an exclusive article on an upcoming game that gaming news sites weren't given access to, and they have a nice sense of humour. Their reviews do tend to deviate from the norm, though, to the point that at best they'll be used to indicate games I should research closer, and they've had some really horrible reviewers over the years. I'm not talking about bias or bad taste - I'm talking about not being a writer.

One in particular stood out: at one point - for maybe half a year, I don't know - one of their layout artists did about half the reviews, and aside from the fact that she gave all the Sims 2 expansions good scores (maybe they really were that good, I don't know), she simply had no idea how to write a review. All of her reviews simply listed all the major features of the game, with no opinion about whether it worked or not, then tacked on a score at the end that never got motivated. The Burning Crusade was the worst of the lot: four pages of preview text and an 84% at the end with a completely ambiguous summary.

I don't really remember what happened to her; I think her reviews did get better, and then she moved on. Huh. Anyway, apologies for the tangent. I don't have a lot of experience with the UK and US publications, aside from knowing the names of a few of the journalists who are famous.

I subscribed from 1997 or so to the beginning of last year. But in recent years I've only been reading it in the bathroom, and I became almost a full year behind. So when it came time to renew, I called them to see if I can get a discount, especially since they just stopped sending demo CDs/DVDs, and they refused so I didn't renew. Still have 5 issues left for bathroom reading, when they run out I might consider resubscribing.

For me it was never about news but about game reviews. The bad ones are actually the best.

I'm currently re-reading my collection of gaming mags from the early 90s. And I'm having a blast! I'm in '93 now. They're telling me how great those new 486-SX are. And tests of Strike Commander, Space Hulk, Dune, Unlimited Adventures, Lemmings 2 and El-Fish! Even the ads are funny from today's perspective.

My dad used to have a subscription to PC Gamer. I loved it. Coconut Monkey, the little blurbs at the very end in the corner of the last page, the silly articles, the bad reviews, the demo discs... It was amazing. He eventually switched to CGW, which I also loved, but I missed Coconut Monkey. It had some pretty awesome stuff too. I loved the bits at the end where the two guys would play games, one of them competent, the other not. Eventually CGW became GFWL:TOM, and we still got it, it didn't really diminish in quality too much, but it still didn't last.

After GFWL:TOM died, my dad never resubscribed. He's picked up a few individual issues since, but only very rarely, maybe once every few years.

I used to read PC gamer and CGW. I loved greenspeak on CGW, and the articles in both magazines. After PC gamer discontinued the articles where certain people gave their thoughts about a subject, I stopped reading it.

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lol


edit: typo

I absolutely adored PC Gamer way back in 1998 and Computer Gaming World as well. I still have copies with reviews of Might and Magic vi:Mandate of Heaven, Sanitarium, Forsaken, Unreal,, Starcraft etc and the edition that had an in-depth exclusive look at thief:the dark project. That was my first foray into a pc gaming magazine and I absolutely fell in love with it. The writing was absolutely outstanding and you could actually see that it was a far cry from the hastily written reviews on websites like gamespot.

Mostly I remember coconut monkey and Tom Green's scathing review of the mass obsession with Deer Hunter.

However I don't subscribe anymore. There is no time to go through the tomes of writing now and the newer magazines are shoddily written that really don't make them worth subscribing to; not talking about pc gamer or cgw since those are no longer published in my country.

I lost all my faith in this publication after they gave Diablo 3 a 90% rating, while they gave Torchlight 2 a 83%. If it isn't a AAA tilte from a major publisher they tend to score better games lower.

Or, you know, the Diablo 3 reviewer liked that game better than the Torchlight 2 reviewer liked his. Crazy, I know.

Yeah, I've actually been trying to find some old gaming mags from the early 90s too, but the oldest I can find in ads are from the turn of the century. I remember how they lauded games for having "photo-realistic" graphics, whereas the same games look ridiculous by today's standards. And the reviews of hardware components... They said that 12 MB VRAM on a graphics card was a serious overkill.

The other day I visited Tom's website and was pleasantly surprised to find out they are still doing these: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/12/27/unity-of-command-red-turn-tim-vs-bruce/

Apparently, they had a kickstarter to make them happen. Didn't find out until much later.

By the way, you know you can read the old Tom vs Bruce in 1Up, right? http://www.1up.com/features/tom-bruce-archive

One of my favourites was where they were playing an FPS, I think it was BF:Vietnam or 1942, and one of them kept getting killed and eventually settled on just crawling around everywhere. There was a great bit where they were grouped together, and the guy walking got killed. "I expected him to see my death and decide to avenge me, like some kind of South Pacific (?) Batman, but instead he looked at my corpse, then turned around and crawled the opposite direction."

Oh sweet. Many thanks for linking those.