I am full of righteous fanboy anger over Lunar being pushed back a week! Oh wait, no, I’m just a little irked. I’m a drooling Lunar fan, however. The series represents what was so good about 16-bit RPGs, while at the same time still reminds why they were not so good. Ignoring the latter and embracing the former works for me. I’m hoping that this DS update will streamline the gameplay and make it less chore-like than the PS remakes.

This week though, I’ve got magazines! I used to buy magazines off the rack from the local grocery store at five bucks an issue, back just before the demise of the 16-bit era. I think I was between 13 and 15 and I read GameFan religiously, nothing else would do. Hardcore Gamer, the magazine’s spiritual successor, is one of my favorites now. Unfortunately, being a magazine in this Internet age means that you get to publish stuff that happened months ago and that everyone already knows about. They go above and beyond though. For instance, this month, they have features on Treasure and Katamari. Nice ones, but I think that the Treasure article missed a few games. No Mischief Makers, no Advance Guardian Heroes? Piffle. I just got into AGH for earnest, and I was hoping for a mention of it.

Also, my free three-month ’scription to Nintendo Power started coming. It’s… full of Pokemon references. That’s okay though. The blantant enjoyment of Nintendo drips from each page. I like NP better than the generic game magazine (let’s say Game Informer. can’t get more generic than that. XD), because of the extra stuff they’ll throw in, like strategies and character guides and maps. The extra features mean that you get more than the standard screenshots and review that everyone else does, whetting your appetite for a game just a little more. They did it to me on Trace Memory and Fire Emblem, the bastards. I approve of it as a piece of fanboy propaganda, because I need that every once in a while, despite not really being able to call myself a Nintendo fanboy. Gotta feed that side of myself every now and then.

Aaaaaaand, saving the best for last, the new Gamer’s Quarter is out at newsstands nowhere! It has an awesome Makai Kingdom/Phantom Brave/Disgaea/Nippon Ichi theme. I cracked into “Life, non-warp,” a huge (read: tim rogers) article on SMB3, and the Nippon Ichi articles before I realized I’d been reading text from a computer screen for an hour. There’s a reason this thing only comes out every quarter, and it’s not just to be clever with the title. It’s huge, full of text with only minimal illustrations. I’m going to make myself a print version sometime, because I really can’t read something of that magnitude from a screen without my eyes trying to explode. Trying not to sound pretentious, it’s hard to describe the whole thing. It’s also hard to tell someone to go read it without sounding pretentious, because you might say something like, “Go and read it, except you’ll probably get bored because it’s really long and you have a tiny attention span.” Whatever, go read it.