G-pinions

Man, PSM is really pissing me off these days. Not only have they long since dropped their comic artist-drawn covers and cool pack-in freebies (like PS1 lid stickers), but they've gotten about as far away from "independent", their whole schtick, as the likes of GamePro. While they get plenty of street cred for prominently featuring five relatively unknown games last issue (God of War, Destroy All Humans, Mercenaries, Viewtiful Joe 2 and Area 51), they just about ran themselves straight into the ground with this months cover story. Besides it being the most generic-looking cover ever (a list of games covering the middle with Snake and Dante on either side, who have both graced their cover in recent months past), it lists ten games for it's Fall Game Preview - all sequels. I understand that it's a reality that there are more sequels and remakes than ever in the industry nowadays, but do they really have to draw attention to them even more? I'm sure some will be great, and I'll be buying at least four of the ten games, but no one really needs to know about them or be informed of their presence. If you need to be told about Gran Turismo 4's release, you probably don't own a Playstation. Plus, only half of the games are exclusive. I can respect an in-depth look at one of these titles as the focus of the magazine, but slightly covering a bunch of well-known titles does not make me want to patronize, nevermind read, your magazine. You want some cover stories? What about Blood Will Tell, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, or 100 Bullets as some nice PS2 exclusives that people should know about? Hell, if you want to cover multi-platform, you could do worse than The Bards Tale, X-Men Legends or even Second Sight. I'm just looking for a bit of coverage I can't find elsewhere, like on the INTERNET. Bah. I remember buying the first issue that came with a great cover story about Final Fantasy 7, probably the single best piece of information on a game I'd ever seen. That is what I want, writing that actually makes me want to buy a game, not a few new screenshots of a game I could acquire buckets of information on with a simple Google search. They'd better step it up, or step off my Playstation's nuts.

P.S. I'm outta town for three days - Cover for me, wouldja?