Nintendo Power

Nintendo Power

I'm sure that many of you are familiar with Nintendo Power. It is the monthly magazine that is published and owned by Nintendo. I am ashamed to admit it, but I subscribed to Nintendo Power for two years. I paid $40 to have propaganda and advertising delivered to my mailbox. I realize that all three of the console companies have a propaganda magazine, but I find Nintendo Power to be the most read and the most egrigious.

Reviews

Every issue of Nintendo Power reviews games coming out on Nintendo systems. As someone who had only Nintendo consoles, I thought that these reviews were really good and objective. I actually based some purchasing decisions on the reviews in Nintendo Power. If you thought that the Gamespot scandal a few weeks ago was bad, then you'd be astonished to see Nintendo Power. In the 24 issues of Nintendo Power at my house, there has never been a game, developed by Nintendo, that has received lower than 4.5/5. Exclusives also get good ratings, since Nintendo wants to make their exclusives sound better.

When I was a little kid I didn't know any better so I took Nintendo Power reviews for face value, but the truth is that they are really bad reviews. If you look at the way they're done you'll notice that every reviewer reviews about a dozen games each month. Compare that to somewhere like GT or Gamespot where each reviewer will do at most a game a week. How can someone really get a good, accurate picture of a game after playing it for a day or two? The answer is that they can't, so they just don't try. Nintendo Power Reviews for most games are little tiny paragraphs about the games.

Hyping

Part of the goal that Nintendo has with Nintendo Power is to build hype for games. I remember that Nintendo Power would make a list of the most wanted games along with the sales charts and it turned out that it was decided by Nintendo Power staff. Sites like Gamespot have their most wanted/popular section decided by what users are actually looking at. Nintendo Power used that section to hype exclusives. I couldn't find a single non-exclusive in it.

Breeds Ignorance

Having a magazine that talks only about one viewpoint breeds ignorance. If you only read Nintendo Power then you are very unlikely to play any of the good games on other systems, which would be a shame since most of the top rated games this year were not on a Nintendo system.

I subscribed to Nintendo Power during the Gamecube days, which was arguably the lowest point in Nintendo's history. Nintendo really didn't have the best hardware and they really didn't have many good third party exclusives. The truth was that Nintendo didn't have anything to show that they were better than the other two consoles, so they just ignored them. In fact, it wasn't until about a year and a half into my Nintendo Power readings that they even mentioned the Xbox and PS2.

Yesterday's News

With gaming news being published on the Internet these days, it's hard to explain buying a periodical for gaming news. Most of the news about a game comes in the form of video, which magazines are bad at showing. Also, by the time you get your next issue of Nintendo Power, what you are reading will have been online for about a month. Furthermore, Nintendo doesn't really save anything special for Nintendo Power. There are a lot of things that are new information when they are written, but by the time it actually reaches your doorstep the news is quite stale.

Price

So if you're getting yesterday's news in the form of a propaganda page, why should you have to pay $20 a year for it? The answer is, and will be for most of this series, because Nintendo can charge people for it. There are enough Nintendo fans out there, who will blindly subscribe, to make it profitable to charge $20 a year for the magazine.

I stopped getting Nintendo Power when I realized that all the gaming news I needed was online. The bias only became clear to me after I had stopped reading it for a while. Nintendo should give the magazine away because it is in fact a propaganda magazine. People who read it are more likely to buy Nintendo games, so why doesn't Nintendo just give it to everyone to increase readership?

Conclusions

There are more first party magazines than Nintendo Power, but Nintendo Power is by far the worst. Their propaganda is so blatant and their reviews so horrible that it makes me ashamed to admit that I subscribed to it for two years. I wish that I hadn't, but I can't take it back now. If you subscribe to Nintendo Power, I'd encourage you not to renew because you are being both brainwashed and ripped off at the same time.