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As you will find out I’m a big fan of Retro Gamer Magazine (https://www.retrogamer.net) and my quest to create an industry publication like Retro Gamer for the US is how we end up with Old School Gamer Magazine and this website you are reading this on.  I started reading Retro Gamer 10+ years ago by picking it up at my local Barnes and Noble bookstore and have since purchased all of their past DVD’s with past issues and digitally subscribe to it through Apple on my iPad/iPhone.  Because of our strong affinity for Retro Gamer and some of the other magazines we read regularly here at OSG, we will be doing updates on their magazines on this site every month.

This issue of Retro Gamer as always has 3-4 major articles in it with details on games history and the people around it and then a dozen or so other articles that are featured in it.  Going through the issue it starts out talking about the Smart Boy from Hyperkin that was just released this past week (OSG has one in and will have a review coming very soon), the story of someone who paid 3800 British pounds for a genesis game and a cool story on a collector who loves his Game Boy collection!

The first big story is one that we will be working similarly on covering with “The Kings of Kong” talking about the 10 year anniversary of the movie King of Kong and everyone around it.  I got to spend some time with Billy Mitchell and Walter Day recently and the anniversary was brought up as a possible subject for an article in the magazine.  Well… Retro Gamer has it covered nicely, with interviews with more people than I knew were involved in it and some great tips on how to do well on Donkey Kong yourself.

A large feature on Sabateur 2 that I don’t remember ever seeing, or its predecessor, then we move on to Zaxxon.  Now this is a game that constantly frustrated me with its funky perspective on flight and attacking the bases.  Well covered as usual, it goes through the game and its creation for the arcade and talks about its conversions for at home play.  Some nice coverage of the fun basketball game for the arcades, Arch Rivals follows where I found out how arcade operators could customize the teams in the game to do with their local schools.

Most of our readers here has been probably hearing a lot about the SNES mini, and Retro Gamer covers it in details on the games included.  They went into a piece on Introversion Software who I hadn’t heard of before this.  Another thing I didn’t give any attention to was the “Pocket Station,” as it was Digimon and Tamagotchi style stuff.  Some of their standard columns such as “Lost in Translation,” “The Unconverted,” and “License To Thrill” where they cover movie adaptations are always cool to read.  In general, I usually spend about 30 minutes reading it when it first comes down and another 30 minutes over the next week going back to pieces that didn’t interest me as much as the first session’s reading was.

I still have to read an article on Simon Phillips who did a lot of programming of games back in the BBC Micro days (that’s the early 1980s for us yanks) and look through the Homebrew section in the back of the magazine.

Get yourself the magazine at your local Barnes and Noble, through Amazon or go digital like me and get it on your Apple device by going to Retro Gamer Magazine: First for classic videogames on the App Store or your android at Retro Gamer – Newsstand on Google Play.