The Saturday Scan - A Series of Tubes
We forget so quickly when it comes to new technology. Just the other day I was reading a list of the best music videos ever made. Every entry was accompanied by an embedded YouTube file of the video in question, each streaming with almost no buffer time on a decent high bandwidth connection. That's pretty impressive compared to even just a few years ago. But it really would've seemed amazing in 1995, when the mainstream population was just beginning to stumble bleary-eyed into the realm of the world wide web.
Being a haven for nerds, gaming information was on the Internet pretty much from the beginning. Today scans are from a feature in the "In Other News" section of Game Players in the last few months of 1995, that pointed out the best of the web for gamers.
Ah, for the days that you could create a site with as generic a title as "the Nintendo Ultra64 unofficial homepage" and that would be enough for magazine coverage. Most of these sites don't exist anymore -- even Sega's www.segaoa.com now goes to a simplistic fansite. It still manages to look better than that screenshot of Sega's official site, which is only missing a rotating skull animated gif and the phrase "Under Construction!" in 90 point font.
Okay, so anime isn't gaming, but if it's related enough to be mentioned in Game Players, it's good enough for here. Just for frame of reference on the time period here, the page opposite this one described Bjork's impending new album Post as being from "that ex-Sugarcubes front woman."
Gamex still exists, kind of, but it's now a wimpy collection of links that hasn't been updated in two years. The other sites are dead, but if you search for their names (not just the ones on this page, but all of them), you can find a few lingering reminders of their existence, like this message board post from July 1995 advertising Intelligent Gamer Online. "If your the least bit interested in video games, IGO is a must see." Well I'm convinced!
Andrew Vestal's Unofficial SquareSoft Page has a long history. Two years after its creation it became Square.net and was actually hosted on Square's servers for a time, before closing down and later re-emerging as the still going strong RPGamer. There's all sorts of horrible drama relating to Vestal and RPGamer and The GIA and moogle suits that I won't bother to get into here, but there may still be accounts of it online somewhere. I thought Thor had one, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
The lesson to be learned here is, you should probably not ask a guy who's run Square fansites since 1995 to review Square games, at least not without expecting a slight bias.