Reading Old Game Magazines: Tips and Tricks

Something I like to do is go to the Internet Archive and read scans of old magazines. Usually ones I read as a kid, and often old gaming magazines. I do this because, holy fuck, games writing is in the fucking toilet right now. I mean, it kind of has been for over a decade now. At risk of sounding conceited, it really just me and a handful of other people keeping it all from being irredeemable. It's all just contempt for the medium, racistly implying that all Asians are pedophiles, harassing trans people for spurious reasons, and bravely breaking a BDS boycott to buy a Microsoft game because b1g0t3d_gamer_420 on X Dot Com The Everything App said it was woke.

So I read old magazines to see just how badly we've lost it. Admittedly, it wasn't too much better back then. However, today I will be covering an exception to that rule; a magazine that was fucking great back then, and is a publication we can all be learning a lesson from.

Back during the COVID lockdown, I briefly wrote about a magazine called Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine. It was a pretty darn good magazine! However, it had an off-shoot called Tips and Tricks, which was dedicated to strategy guides and codes and what-not. Essentially GameFAQs before the internet was as widespread as it is now. Eventually, Video Games magazine would be absorbed into T&T, making that the main publication.

Now, you would think that a magazine full of maps and cheat codes would be pretty dry and boring, right? A magazine for utility, rather than cultural enrichment or entertainment. And yet, there is so much personality packed into this thing. Going back and reading the issues I had as a kid, and looking at some of the issues after I stopped reading in the late 90s, I might have to supplant Halverson-era GameFan as my favorite gaming mag now.

For example, in the August 1996 issue, there is a guide for International Track and Field for the Playstation. The Track and Field games have one strategy: mash buttons as fast as humanly possible. How the fuck are you going to make a guide for that?

Easy: you dedicate a whole section to creating an apparatus to help you mash the buttons faster!

Wow, that is a genuinely unique idea! They're something that could've been really dull and easily skipped over is now something interesting. Like, I almost want to play a Track and Field game just so I can put a contraption on my controller, just because it seems like that would be a fun project.

Let's check out a different issue: April 1997. There's a strategy guide for Crypt Killer, a not particularly great light gun shooter by Konami. While the guide does cover all the secret items you can find, alternate paths you can take, and how to get the multiple endings the game has, it also has something else: a history lesson. The graphics and animation style in Crypt Killer are somewhat reminiscent of movies made by Ray Harryhausen, so at least half of the guide is dedicated to a brief history of Harryhausen and his filmography. There are young people (like me) who learned a little bit of culture here!

The same issue has something else I should bring up. A lot of magazines will obviously want to focus on covering new releases, whether for guides like this, or reviews or whatever else. This issue has a guide for a ten year old arcade game: Rabio Lepus. Granted, it's April, and they needed something vaguely Easter themed. But still, having an older and obscure title? That's awesome. You better believe this is where I first heard about Rabio Lepus, and why it was one of the first games I played once I started getting into MAME and PC-Engine emulation years later.

Taking a moment here to cover a segment of the magazine that lasted for a short while (March 1996-November 1997): Betty's Index. The final page of every issue during this period existed for magazine contributor Betty Hallock to essentially post whatever she wanted. Luckily for us, the readers, she actually had taste and would show off candy she's eaten or some import she had played.

Later on, she would leave the offices and move to New York, where this page would then become the Letter From Betty section. This is where she would post a short letter about life in New York, alongside the usual nice collage of cool stuff that would have been way too culturally refined for the tastes of any other gaming magazine of the mid-90s (and beyond, let's be real). In a lot of ways, this feels like a precursor to personal web pages, solely from a layout and design standpoint.

Anyways, I don't know if Betty is still involved in the industry, or even what she's doing now, but I sure hope she's living a great life. She greatly contributed to this magazine's personality, and this section alone brought a feminine energy that was so severely lacking during this time period. I would suggest more publications do this now, but I'm sure the modern games writer's monthly life update would be something like, "saw the word 'anime' scribbled on a legal pad, and now I am checking my bank account to see how much money I should donate to the IDF in response."

I'm going to fast forward a bit to 2002. Mostly this bit here in a short two-page article on the additions made to the Gamecube port of Capcom vs SNK 2:

That's right, folks. There is an entire dedicated section teaching you how to do a roll cancel in CvS2. Roll cancelling is the technique a player has to master if they have even the slightest interest in playing the game competitively. It was true in 2002, and it's true now in 2026. I started thinking about this little write-up here; this was a period of time where magazines, web sites, TV review shows, all complained about fighting games being nothing more than "mindless button mashers" that has had little innovation since the days of the first edition of Street Fighter 2. Obviously, that's a bunch of bull shit by people who should have known better, or people who should have fucked off long ago (hi, X-Play, how you doing?). It's just really cool that there was at least one outlet with some sense out there.

It should also be noted that T&T was probably the only major magazine covering fighting game tournaments on a regular basis. I'm going to post this page because I saw the phrase "15 year old Justin Wong" and realized that we are all so fucking old.

Going back to '96-'97, someone had the great idea of taking the reams and reams of printed out passwords and cheats in the back of the magazine, and adding small articles at the bottom, giving you a reason to actually flip through that section.

This is starting to run a little long, and I also haven't read past the early 2000s yet, so I'll just give a few more thoughts here. Tips and Tricks ruled. One of the only magazines that didn't seem to exist in a bubble of games and nothing but. Talking about film (not just the Harryhausen piece from earlier), and randomly recommending mid-90s House music in-between the expected game talk and otaku stuff. Like, this is so fucking cool.

At risk of sounding backhanded, I didn't come across anything weirdly racist! There was no poorly aged homophobia! I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that T&T had an actually diverse staff. Not just a group of crusty white dudes that I'll have to mute 95% of on social media in two decades. People from multiple backgrounds all worked there, that could bring their own perspectives to the table, and it led to a fantastic publication. The only thing that didn't age well was anything involving Tommy Tallarico, and it wasn't like they would have known about his bull shit back then.

I mentioned at the beginning of this that games has really lost its way. This isn't just me being bitter at an industry that did some fucked up shit to me and several friends for many years. I took a look at Aftermath recently because I hate myself. Anyways, within the last few days or so, at least two of their articles are nothing more than, "right-wingers are angry about something because you can monetize that shit on the internet now," embedding a bunch of X Dot Com The Everything App posts, and calling it a day. Cool, great, thanks to giving more oxygen to manufactured outrage! It's all tabloid bull shit. I guess it's just easier to platform hate than it is to treat games with any respect, or treat them like the art form that they are.

Ahem. What I'm getting at here is that we can all learn a lesson from Tips and Tricks magazine. Games are a fantastic medium. I 100% believe that games are as important and valuable as any other medium out there. They can bring people together in really cool ways. I just don't know if I've been good about promoting that message as of late. I realize the irony of saying this after shit talking Aftermath, but you know, tolerance of intolerance and all that. Having taste and life experience and treating games like cultural artifacts instead of expensive toys or catalysts to sling mud at a Twitch streamer, that's what's missing. Also just having cool people writer about games, we don't really have that anymore, either.

That all being said, you can check out the Tips and Tricks archive right here. It is not a complete collection, but it's still quite a sizeable one.