Retro Gamer eMag Review

So, uhm, what's an eMag, eh? Simple really, as it apparently is a collection of digitized magazines in PDF on a disk, which obviously means that a Retro Gamer eMag is a selection of digitized Retro Gamer magazines, or to be more precise 30 issues/3000+ pages of Retro Gamer in PDF on a disk. To be even more precise this particular eMag I'm currently reviewing features the first 30 (now out of print and pretty expensive) issues of said mag and a variety of extras, complete with full search capabilities via an excellent and lovingly animated retro themed interface.

What's more, searching/exploring the brilliant and rich content available can be done in three ways. First of all you can very virtually grab each one of the issues as a whole and read the PDF from -so to say- cover to cover, even though admittedly the PDF quality isn't that great, as all the images (not the text) are too low-res to enjoy. Then, you can search for individual top/printable quality high-definition articles through smartly indexed predefined categories (unfortunately not every single article has been included, which is quite annoying) and finally you can search the PDF documents themselves for any silly keyword you could come up with. All in all, finding what you are looking for or simply browsing is easy and intuitive and, considering the quality of what's on offer, my only true gripe is that I can't seem to find quality scans of the magazines' covers.

Now, for those of you that haven't even heard of Retro Gamer, suffice to say it's my favorite video gaming mag ever. I even prefer it to the early issues of PC Zone. Besides, it covers everything from 8-bit computers and consoles to arcades, game making ofs, retro-remakes, long gone developers, handhelds and even Jeff Minter's ship obsessions. As a prime example of what to generally expect from RG, please do read this excellent Sega MegaDrive Genesis retroinspection, one of the rare RG articles to make it to the web for free, though neither with all it usual bells and whistles nor in its 100% complete form. Oh, and here's Imagine's official Retro Gamer website.

As an added bonus, and probably as an incentive to buy the compilation regardless of the number of RG issues in your possession, Imagine threw in some lovely little extras. These include wallpapers (1024x768 and 1280x1024, 40 each), a couple of rather pointless files to help you create your own RG cover, 6 never before published pages on the magazine's history and impressively all 257 PDF pages of Retro - Micro Games Action, featuring the best retro articles from 24 issues of games TM. This PDF might not be of the highest resolution, but it's easily readable, and one could argue it's enough a reason (besides the obvious collector's obsession) for regular RG readers to grab this eMag, which incidentally is available here.

That's a (nine) out of (ten).

Related @ Gnome's Lair: Wii retro gaming guide, free CPC games, The Lurking Horror by Infocom