Can you recall a day when Rise of the Robots seemed hype-worthy? It's back there, somewhere. Sure it was a terrible game, but let's remember, it was rendered with computers! That may make it one of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind.

Speaking of being blinded with new technology. Up until the last few system releases which have kinda harshed my buzz, I loved launch time. Launch games provided you with your first glimpses of what the next generation had in store, and it was always exciting to see what new frontiers awaited you. It was this excitement that could be blamed for a temporary hysteria in America around 1995, when everyone suddenly believed Battle Arena Toshinden was a great game. I admit, it affected me too. But it was so pretty.

Elsewhere on the cover, we see a bad movie, a Star Fox sequel that never came out, and a poster for bloody Pitfall. So this kind of fails all around.

I bought some of these older Nintendo Powers off Ebay, so I have no idea what kind of storage conditions lead to this white crap all over the place.

The cover itself is not bad, but choosing this particular image for a publication like NP wasn't such a smart idea. They would later name this cover as having generated the highest number of complaints they ever received, which should illustrate why Nintendo was always so keen on removing violent and occult content from games in those days.

Seems kind of simple, doesn't it? That's because it's not the cover. It's a full page ad glued over the cover, a (hopefully failed) experiment Ziff Davis ran for a few issues on some of their magazines. This one wasn't even placed very well, as you can see the crooked magazine underneath, with something pedestrian and uninteresting like Zelda on the front.

We could get philisophical here and start questioning exactly what makes a cover. Journalistic integrity dictates that a magazine never sell placement in its pages, or a favorable preview or review -- EGM editor Dan Hsu even wrote an angry editorial about a magazine that was selling its cover to the highest bidder. EGM, of course, would never do such a thing -- they'll just sell the thing on the front of the magazine that has their name on it and, I suppose you could say, covers the rest of the magazine. But selling a cover, that's just immoral.

This is the video game equivolent of the automotive magazine cliche of a woman in a bikini front and center with a car somewhere in the distance. Although even those people had the common courtesy to not bury their poor innocent car in sand. :(

I can't begin to imagine why this magazine only lasted for ten issues.

I prefer NP's old commissioned photos and artwork over their current look, which just uses production art like any other magazine. Some of those old photos weren't entirely polished (though I'd say that was part of their charm), and this is an example. In case it isn't perfectly clear to you in the scan..

Who needs a model to play dead when you can just get a store mannequin that is dead. ..Probably. Link's Bon Jovi hair really completes the scene.

Ah, GameFan. Despite giving it multipage coverage every month for half a year and huge review scores, Final Fantasy VII never graced a cover of the magazine. But Quest 64 did. Maybe you have to cut them some slack; the N64 was so starved for RPGs that people really had to start grasping at straws. Just in case the question they pose left you hanging: No, no it wasn't better than Zelda.

The pig in this image reminds me a little too much of Handre de Jager's disturbing re-envisionings of classic games.