Our neighbor kid came over to play SC2 the other night, and he kicked my ass. He even cranked down his life % and he still beat me around. Ah well, he has a Dreamcast, so he's probably well-versed in mad Soul Calibur skills. Plus his part time job is to haunt the store game kiosks whenever his mom takes him shopping.

He cracks me up with his views and opinions on video games, and I often wonder if I was that way when I was 10. I guess he gets these ideas from school friends and crappy magazines, but he always has some crazy notion about the best way to beat a game. Months ago we played a lot of Lord of the Rings: Two Towers together; he finished off the last couple levels of my saved game and unlocked the Orthanc bonus level. This week he decides he wants to play TT again to beat Saruman (we never did beat him back when we first unlocked it.) But he's convinced that Legolas is the best character to do it, so he starts a new game to train up Legolas since I had concentrated mainly on Aragorn in my file.

All those younger-skewing game rags feed into that: BEST CHEATS INSIDE! UNLOCK SECRETS NOW! UNBEATABLE MOVES! And schoolyard legend bolsters it up. It reminds me of when he knowledgeably informed me that my best chance of getting a Charizard card was to buy only boosters with a picture of Blastoise on the wrapper.

Here's the staff of the first video game magazine I ever read:

These guys are from Game Informer Magazine circa 1992, although it sure feels like more than a scant decade separates the magazines of today from those chumps. Who knows how I even subscribed to this mag, since I didn't even own a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis. And anyway, it was produced by FuncoLand, so it was primarily a means to encourage kids to buy games. It was basically a catalog dressed up with articles and reviews.

From an article on "The History of the CD-ROM": Only time will reveal the winner between CDTV and The Imagination Machine. ... Already waiting in the wings is Sony's Play Action Station CD-based system. ... Nintendo is also in discussions with Sony to make their CDs compatible on the Play Station.

From an interview with Bart Simpson: Anything you'd like to say to your fans? "Stay cool and don't have a cow, man."

The highest reviewed game in this particular issue is Kid Chameleon, a Genesis game, with an overall score of 9 out of 10. No game reviewed scored less than 6.25 (Super Golf for Sega Game Gear, and that's only because Ross the Rebel Gamer gave it a withering 4.75. Ah, the days when games were graded to the hundredths column!) The cynic in me suggests that all these high scores are simply to keep FuncoLand in business, but perhaps I'm forgetting the innocent, exciting, every-game-is-cool times.