|
Nintendo Magazine System was the official Nintendo magazine of Australia. In publication for for seven years until 2000, the magazine was a branch of Nintendo Official Magazine, the UK's official Nintendo magazine, which was also called Nintendo Magazine System at the time. No publisher has picked up the licence in the Australian region since the last issue of the magazine. The Australian version of NMS was originally published by Trielle Corporation as a 68-page magazine, with a cover price of $4.95. The first issue appeared in April 1993, and featured Super Mario Land 2 on the cover. It was an Australia's official Nintendo magazine, and was very critical to poorly made videogame software, with scores for such games often in the low thirties. The magazine often included news and articles not relating to Nintendo products, from information on the idea of virtual reality, to the highest selling coin-operated arcade games at the time. The mail section held feedback from the editors, who at one time, for example, cited multiple reasons why upcoming consoles such as the 3D0 were superior to the SNES, possibly showing a lack of bias found in many "Official" magazines today. The cheat section included GameShark and Action Replay codes, something Nintendo, at the time, was heavily against. The first 100 subscribers of Nintendo Magazine System received a free bonus Snake Rattle 'n' Roll game for the NES, and later in Issue 4 all subscribers could, for a reduced cost of $30, buy a copy of Probotector, the PAL version of Contra. Starting with Issue 34 in January 1996, Catalyst Publishing took control of the magazine, but retained the issue numbering. The most noticeable change was the lack of advertisements in the magazine, with almost every issue only having two in the last page and back cover. Less noticeable was the polar opposite swing in attitude towards any unliscenced third party periphiral for Nintendo consoles, being cited in the mail section as "bad" and having the ability to void the warranty on such machines. At Issue 54 the cover price increased to $5.95 with the page count increased to 84 (this later increased again at Issue 69 to 100 pages). Perhaps to boost sales, or to simply cash in on the craze of South Park, Issue 82 featured four different covers, with the choice of Stan, Cartman, Kyle or Kenny. The magazine at this time created a minor controversy when it awarded the N64 game Turok 2: Seeds of Evil a perfect score of 10 in Issue 68, another being when the cover price was increased in the June 2000 issue to $6.95 and having the "This product includes G.S.T" text next to the price, which at the time was set to come in at the first of July in Australia. Ironically after being forced to apologise in the next issue (the July issue) by the ACCC about the printing error, by making a fullpage notice and stating it was nothing more than a cover price increase, the issue of the magazine in question retained its release date of June 28, making it the second issue to break the law. Surprisingly the price of the magazine did not increase by ten percent to $7.70 due to the goods and service tax (GST) but stayed at $6.95. The last issue of the Australian Nintendo magazine system was Issue 89, the August 2000 issue, which featured Lara Croft on the cover. The cancellation was abrupt, ending without any announcements in previous issues that had hinted toward this. Issue 90 was to have Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion as the feature review.
Front Cover Headers See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| |