An Ode to GameFan

As a founding member of the Nintendo Generation growing up in the barren era before the Internet, we relied SOLELY on magazines to whet our appetites for upcoming games. It still, to this day, blows my mind that people nowadays can load up video and gameplay previews on their computers in the comfort of their own homes. This is a travesty. You kids don't know how good you've got it - when we were that age, we would masturbate furiously over a 1-inch screenshot of Mortal Kombat II. Now get off my lawn!

So my favorite magazine, bar none, was GameFan. Now don't get me wrong; this magazine was a piece of shit. They apparently had no copy editor on staff (actual line, errors intact: "...if you're looking for some arcade style fun, Chiki Chiki boys comes highly recommended.!!") and every page looked like a blind high school student's first time using Photoshop:

But the paper...oh the paper. While competitors essentially used colored newsprint for their rags, GameFan was thick and glossy and the colors just popped out at you. It smelled wonderful. Most importantly, GF was special because it had a special focus on import games. There was something so appealingly exotic about Japanese games, and the snobby tone of the magazine (most of the later issues were nothing but complaints about how the pure Japanese software got mangled by American localization teams) made you feel like you were part of the cognoscenti, sort of like the jackass who always has to remind you that he was listening to Coldplay while they were still called Starfish and oh my god they are such corporate sellouts blah blah blah.

I was reminded of GameFan because today I bought a copy of Lunar: Eternal Blue for Sega CD. I had opened up an issue of the magazine 16 (!) years ago with a review of the game and decided that this was one I really wanted to play, only at the time I didn't have any of the necessary hardware. Or the money to buy the hardware. Or the money to buy the game, for that matter. I thought it would be a cool idea today to close the loop, so to speak, and track down a scan of that particular magazine and read the review again:

"The reason I harped so long on the translation is because I was a huge fan of the Japanese original, and I'm a hyper-purist. Even so, I can't think of a better way to end the Sega CD's brief, uneventful foray into the gaming world than with Lunar: Eternal Blue."

Ah, GameFan. You were written straight from the Purist Snob Mad Libs book, but I still love you.