QotD: Check the Mailbox!

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

I have subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine since issue 100, which was around the time they started previewing what was then known as Zelda 64. I currently have over 100 issues on my shelf, some missing in the mail and some lost through borrowings to my friends (unfortunately, this includes some of the main strategy issues for Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask).

I subscribe because I have always been a Nintendo fanboy. The only system that came close to rivaling my loyalty was the Sega Genesis, and primarily for the 7-up promotional game, Cool Spot. I scour each issue for news on the Zelda series, even though it is rarely news now, and more often hype.

The magazine has degraded much since I first began subscribing. I first noticed it when they started having advertisement pages after almost every section and article, but the problem has gone deeper than that. I stopped reading Pulse back when it was still Players' Pulse, because the NP Crew has taken on many annoying habits of internet flamers since the Nintendo Power interaction moved to being primarily online. The internet is a wonderful medium of free speech, but it certainly isn't the most professional form of interaction, and certainly not one I want transferred into the news I pay to read.

My most recent quarrel with Nintendo Power is that they recently changed their issue labeling format such that the issue which arrives at the beginning of August is labelled as the September issue. The problem with this is that the news delivered is still on a magazine schedule; that is, the news comes a month late already. With the new system, Nintendo Power delivers to me last month's news in next month's issue.

On top of this complication, there seems to have been a mighty rift in the past few years between Nintendo Power and Nintendo itself. The magazine has been delivering less and less exclusive news, and I can often get ten times more and better information from internet-based gaming spy sites such as GameSpot. Despite NP's claim as an exclusive Nintendo source, they hardly ever seem to have any exclusive information anymore. The closest they seem to come are their developer interviews, which rarely if ever reveal anything about a game the internet didn't already know.

But, I am a loyal fan.