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My anticipation for the return of Electronic Gaming Monthly has been so ostensible it's not even funny. The term giddy comes to mind, actually. The minute I caught wind that it was on it's way, I turned into Ralphie — perpetually searching for that Little Orphan Annie decoder ring in the mailbox like it was my life's mission. Seeing it out in the wild at a Safeway didn't help matters any.
I owe a lot to EGM; if I hadn't unassumingly picked up a copy twenty years ago, I probably wouldn't be writing this right now. To an ingenuous eleven-year old, it was like a gaming bible. That so happened to be updated every thirty days or so. I poured over back issues endlessly, giving them that appealingly worn look usually reserved for magazines that sit in a bathroom stall rack forever. After EGM, I never needed a Sears catalog again.
But the longer I waited for it, the more I began to wonder what my expectations actually where and whether there was any possible way they could be met. Having finally read the thing cover to cover, I can say that it completely circumvented said expectations and became something I didn't realize I wanted.
There was just no plausible way that it was going to everything to everyone — but I didn't think it would go so far as to not be anything I'd probably call familiar. Sure, there's well-worn tenets to be found: Sushi-X, reviews before previews, multiple points of view, Street Fighter on the cover, Dan Hsu, "Rest of the Crap". Other than being stalwarts by name, none of it distilled any kind of nostalgia from me. It was a little jarring and confusing at first; but like I said, I had no idea what my expectations where going to be, yet at the same time I didn't think my opaque ideals were being satisfied either. Even though it was called Electronic Gaming Monthly, it didn't feel like it.
But like a lot of things that revolve around gaming, once you remove the stigma that's attached to a name and begin to see it for what it is, you can begin to appreciate it.
Barring my infatuation with Elephant Sak and disheartening April Fools jokes and instead looking at it as if it where a new magazine, I began to find that it filled that sweet spot of gaming journalism I didn't realize I was looking for. It's somewhere in the middle; not as conventional as a Game Informer, but not as pretentious as a Play.
It hearkens back to a time when we used to call people who played and wrote about games the enthusiast press. Every article, preview and review rang with the same sentiment: that we play games — not consume them. Our opinions shouldn't be dictated by graphical fidelity, the number of hours it takes to play through or whether it has multi-player shoehorned in. They should be subjective, based on how much fun we did or didn't have. That's the impression Electronic Gaming Monthly gave me.
It's very refreshing to read something that isn't filled with so much hyperbole.
There's one thing I really miss from print publications, and that's the lost art of layout and design. Sure, anyone can start a blog and write to their heart's content, but there's something to be said for doing so with a visual flair that helps convey what your trying to get at. That's why I enjoy the idea of EGMi. I've noticed a lot of disdain for it; part of me wonders if that's because we've trained ourselves to ignore actual content in articles in lieu of just gobbling up a headline or opening paragraph and being done with it. No one writes in long form anymore, most articles and news posts are your basic copy-and-paste info dumps anymore.
My biggest worry was that EGM would be content with regurgitating their articles back and forth between their online and print versions. While I've noticed it once or twice, it's not egregious nor is it lazily transferred over. There's usually some addendum's that at least gets you to glance at them again like video, interviews or downloadable mp3's. I think EGMi is solid; something that, dare I say it, would be the kind of thing that would make me contemplate getting a tablet.
As I keep writing this article, it dawned on me what exactly it is that is so different that I haven't been willing to jump on board immediately: the new writing staff. A lot of us have read the book for so long that we've built an affinity for the personalities that molded Electronic Gaming Monthly into what it is. And seeing only a few of those familiar faces is a little scary. But just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad. Looking at it now, the writers looks like a gaming journo all-star team: John Keefer, Heather Campbell, Eli Hodapp, Area5, Casey Loe and the aforementioned "Shoe" and the Bitmob crew. Although I'm still a little unsure, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. More than likely, I'll warm up to them.
Regardless of what I was expecting, I'm glad to see Electronic Gaming Monthly going in the direction that it is. Print isn't dead; it just needs to find it's place in the grand scheme of things. Strangely, it also has a belongs in the online realm. Because yes, Dorothy, there are those of us who do like to read things that are as artistically appealing to the eye as they are informative.
More importantly, there are those of us who like to know more about gaming other than what shows up in bullet points on the back of a box.