NHL 07

I've spent some of my precious, precious spring break time playing EA's NHL 07 on my 360. So far, I've developed gamepad thumb. The nasty little bumps on the 360's analog sticks, so comforting when using it for a little, have managed to blister my thumb. Ow.

It's been quite a while since the last time I played an installment of NHL, so I was shocked when I won my first game. Mind you, I was playing on the easiest difficulty. Then I lost three in a row. Oops.

EA's status as a behemoth is often derided, but people who deride it are also derided. I would think, though, that our largest game publisher could afford to include a real manual. One that, for example, helped me figure out what to do at faceoffs. I searched EA's increasingly juvenile and unpoliced forums to find out. All I discovered was that button mashing was for losers...of course a coarse word was used in place of losers. Nicely done EA.

I wimped out and turned off offsides penalties, that's improved my gameplay nicely! It's not a bad implementation, but, arguably, EA continues to not be innovative. Still, that shouldn't surprise anyone. The last time it was innovative was in the 1980s. Ahhhh..Starflight, MULE, Seven Cities of Gold, Earl Weaver Baseball, Lords of Conquest, Adventure Construction Set, etc. Heck, I'll even throw in Keef the Thief and Hard Nova.

Farewell

Back in the olden days, magazines had consumer response cards. You circled numbers on these cards corresponding to the magazine’s advertisers. They would send you—via snail mail, mind you; the interweb was but a gleam in Al Gore’s eye!—product information. A mail-order firm called Chips & Bits regularly advertised in magazines like Computer Gaming World. I circled their number hoping for a real catalog. Well, such a beast never existed, but I did get multiple copies of an imported British magazine called Strategy Plus. It was everything CGW` wasn’t. British magazines at the time had a reputation of being overly colorful and not overly literate. Today, that could be said to be true of most computer magazines. I had seen some British magazines in the dying days of the Atari ST and Amiga that I liked, but Strategy Plus, I’m sorry to say, was not one of them. It was a shoddy magazine most notable for reviews that were really just rewritten press releases.

If I would then have known that nearly two decades later, I would be mourning the death of what that magazine morphed into, Computer Games Magazine, even more than the death of Computer Gaming World (i.e., by becoming Games for Windows: The Official Magazine), I would not have believed you. Sadly, it’s true. CGM has finally been undone by the financial shenanigans of its corporate overlords TheGlobe.com. TheGlobe never really survived the dotcom bust, so this isn’t unexpected, but it’s still sad.

For well over the past decade, CGM has been a voice of reason in the industry. It is as close to a modern CGW as could be found, as close to an American Edge as well. It was trying to be a place for intelligent discourse on the state of gaming. Now it’s gone. It will be truly, truly missed.

As a note of disclosure, I was a freelance reviewer for the magazine around 1999-2000. Those reviews and previews were among my proudest moments. I feel honored to have been a small part of CGM’s past. It has been a while since a magazine I truly loved truly died. Yes, Computer Gaming World has been dying for a decade, now, but I’ve become more or less inured to that.

There is a Periodical Section in the sky. It houses COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!’s Atari ST Disk and Magazine, ST-Log, QuestBusters, Amiga Resource, INFO, BYTE, Creative Computing, and, now, Computer Games Magazine. (And many, many others, of course!) You deserved better. You will be missed missed missed.