Average Rating: 
Rating: - My personal favorite video game magazine
I have gotten this magazine for years now, and I love it. There is very little that is extraordinary, but it does everything right and it has a personal touch from the people who make it that can be hard to find nowadays. It is also not affiliated with Sony, so you know their reviews are not at all biased. (I have honestly seen good reviews for bad games by Sony in the Official Playstation Magazine. Not cool.) It also doesn't fill up pages with articles irrelevant to gaming (something else that OPM does), which annoys me. To sum it up, perfect at what it does but not mind-blowing. Still, get it.
Rating: - Great Playstation 1/2 Magazine
This mag is an all around great magazines from their letters to their reviews, it has helped me make many decisions on what games to buy. I haven't even been subscribed for a year i'm only 8 months into it but I knew I was going to to renew my subscription after reading my first issue. Their reviews are unbaised and provide plenty of information likewise with their previews. The best thing is that they are sponsored by Sony so they can mention and compare with other games from other systems.
Rating: - Lightweight reviews, juvenile content
First the good news: PSM is cheap!... They are also a big-selling magazine and so tend to have information way in advance of other sources. You often see reviews for games months before they are available in the stores (actually this is also a neagtive point: by the time you get round to being able to buy a game, you've already read about it to death...)However, there's a big downside to PSM, and that is the quality of the reviews. Many games recieve high scores, but get tiny amounts of text devoted to them. Glancing at my latest copy, Sega Tennis scored 8/10 (a PSM "Must Buy"), yet gets a mere one SIXTH of a page devoted to it, including a tiny screenshot. Only the big-hype (but not necessarily high-scoring) games get any amount of space devoted to them, but even then you're lucky to get a full page. Finally, the actual review content leaves a lot to be desired - I often find I've read a bunch of text with vague opinions like "gameplay is good, graphics are reasonable", but with no real feeling as to what the game is really like. I appreciate that the magazine has a limited amount of space available for reviews, but unfortunately it doesn't use what space it has very efficiently. Oodles of space every month is devoted to previews of forthcoming games. These contain essentially no useful information since they are entirely based on the game publisher's prelaunch hype. When the final review comes out it often completely contradicts the over the top enthusiasm lavishly applied during the previews appearing over the previous months. My final gripe is that the magazine seems to be aimed at 12 year olds. For the older reader, there's a lot here that will make you cringe - I mean a video game swimsuit issue? Puh-leese...
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