ONM Remembered – #02 – an introduction
So, what the heck is this all about?
Last month, I figured it’d make sense to start cleaning out stuff I haven’t any need for. I’ve got a broken Dreamcast that needs fixed and disposed of; I’ve a cupboard full of action figures that a charity shop would love; I still haven’t budged my old dead computer…
Evidently, I decided my ancient catalogue of Nintendo magazines (spanning 1997 to 2005!) need to go.
Somewhere along the line, “let’s get rid of these!” turned into “let’s read all of these and scan all the interesting bits!”… and a week and a half later, I’d gone through my entire collection and had made around six hundred scans. I, uh, think my reasoning was, “if I get rid of these, at least I can still look back at the worthwhile content,” though I think it was just a desperate craving for something to do, no matter how stupid.
Like, I could have looked for something a bit more productive to do, but that would’ve required searching for work. And a minute searching for work is a minute that could have been spent doing work. Quick, what’s the most accessible thing to work on? A shitload of Nintendo magazines need scanning? LET’S GET CRACKIN’
So, um, there we are. While looking through the mags there were lots of interesting little snippets here and there – old news that I’d forgotten about, amusing reviews, entertaining features, or just plain ol’ mid-90s magazine madness. And I thought, “you know, if I play up my one redeeming trait and be a snarky git over these highlights, that could make an interesting feature!” Riff then, critique them, commentate on them, whatever makes for an amusing column. I can’t guarantee any of it will be any good, but what the heck, it’ll give me something to do and it’ll give the website some scheduled updates for once!
ONM Remembered will run every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday if this WordPress schedule thing works for me. I hope you enjoy it! (and I most certainly hope the magazine’s legal team take it it in good humour!)
Ooo, lucky! It seems like scans of pictures about video games are much more popular (on tumblr anyway) than anything else about video games.
Like, for example, its much more popular than articles or reviews; the thinking being, I guess, anyone can WRITE about video games today, but being able to scan what someone wrote about video games from 10 years ago? RARE!
Haha, when I was planning this I toyed with the idea of making it a Tumblr, but I figured my dumb ol’ blog was in more need of having junk dumped on it. Tumblr’s got enough junk as it is! (that’s actually a compliment)
Folks always seem to be intrigued by old magazine scans; I guess there’s a certain novelty to hearing the opinion of a bozo from ten years ago who got paid for those words, rather than a regular old internet user. An opinion from before a popular consensus was made, I guess?
Like, popular opinion now says that Symphony of the Night rocks socks like nothing else, while back in the day not a lot of so-called professional reviewers gave it much thought. You’d be hard-pressed to find brand-new opinions from 1997’s world view!
(also i’m enjoying this feature because it’s basically a springboard to talk about rubbish nobody cares about. if it were anything else i’d need to go on some crazy tangents to find an excuse to ask “what was the deal with the crazy letters pages from the Nintendo magazines, huh?”, but we’ll get to those eventually)
Eh, I made a tumblr page because I just decided that if I was going to spend 3 hours sweating over an article, I could spend 30 seconds trying to get anyone else on earth to glance at my webpage.
Subsequently I’ve realized that people just want screenprints of the title screen of video games and not articles, so I think I’m going to be cutting back on the latter to work on something else.