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| The Mean Machines Cover Artwork by Gary Harrod was always stunning |
Mean Machines Magazine -
The Greatest Video Games Magazine Of All Time?
I've just been through the process of moving home and i've had the unenviable task of sifting through all of the junk in my loft.
As
I was toiling away separating the junk I wanted to keep from the junk
that I wanted to throw away, I stumbled upon on a sellotaped up
heavy box.
As
I opened the sealed box I saw the unmistakable cover of my favourite
games magazine ever.....MEAN MACHINES!
As
a young GamesGeek I religiously bought Mean Machines on a monthly
basis as it was both fun to read and always honest in its Reviews.
Mean
Machines covered all console formats around at the time. This
was the time of the Master System, NES, Megadrive, Super Nintendo,
Neo Geo, Game Gear, Gameboy, Atari Lynx.....etc etc. So what a great
time it was for games journalism.
As
I flicked through reviews of Wrestlemania on the SNES and Toe Jam &
Earl on the Megadrive I was instantly transported back to the glory
days of the early 90's!
The
thing with Mean Machines is that I hung on every review that they
published and totally based my buying habits on their
recommendations. Anything under 90% was not worth me spending my hard
earned pocket money on. So to find a treasure of a game in a pre
internet era was like discovering a Nintendo R.O.B !
I'd
always read Mean Machines from cover to cover and even read the
reviews on machines that I didn't own. That £2 per month was well
spent. Even after I'd finished reading it, I would normally go back
to it and paw over the latest screenshots of a game that hadn't been
reviewed yet, always hoping it would be in next months issue.
Eventually
Mean Machines was no more as the SEGA Megadrive & Super Nintendo war raged on ,
the magazine split into 2 and also split its editorial team into two
camps.
Nintendo
Magazine System (NMS) concentrated solely on Nintendo consoles and
mainly on the Super Nintendo at the time and the Mean Machines SEGA
magazine concentrated solely on ... you guessed it, SEGA and in
particular the Megadrive. At this point both Magazines lost their way
a bit and even though I still bought the Nintendo version for its
Super Nintendo content, it was never the same
Fast
forward to 2011 and there I was in the loft reading Issue 10 of Mean
Machines when my wife shouts up "How you getting on with
clearing that loft out !!??"
At
this point I decided that Mean Machines was definitely not junk and
that I would have to explain to my wife that we would be taking 2
boxes of 20 year old Games magazines to our new home with us.
This didn't go down too well and the aforementioned Magazines are
currently in "Storage" in our new loft!!
Hopefully
one day I will be able to convince her that they deserve to be
released from the loft but for now that's where they will stay (until
next time!)
Who
out there remembers Mean Machines?
What
video games magazines did you buy?
What
video games mags did you avoid?
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