NGamer Issue 80

Introduction

All good things must come to an end, and unfortunately October 2012 brought the final final issue within Future’s great Nintendo legacy. Having learnt of the magazine’s demise only shortly earlier, there were a few features based on the fact they wouldn’t be there to commentate on the future of nintendo.

First things first, though and the magazine came full circle with a fantastic cover drawn by the legendary Wil Overton. A second cover was also penned to be exclusive to subscribers. Inside the issue they also interviewed Wil, found out his opinion on the state of Nintendo and what he was up to now.

They looked at everything they knew about Wii U so far, with the launch only a couple of months away speculated on the future of the console. There was the usual column from Greener and his thoughts about more games in space and all the usual features were here, such as Ganon’s gallery looking at someone cosplaying as Rydia from Final Fantasy 4.

Within previews, they looked at some of the third-party games to be launched on the Wii U, including the ZombiU, Mass Effect and Dragon Quest. Despite the uniqueness of the console, it seemed to be gaining some traction with third-party developers at this point.

The second part of the future of Nintendo looked at their big three franchises, Mario, Zelda and Metroid - they covered the next steps they thought the franchise’s stars would take. They even created mock-up covers (as they did in issue 50 of N64) with humorous headlines as to what they thought might be in the news those months.

25 greatest partnerships looked at some of the best Nintendo partnerships to ever grace video games from the past 25 years of Nintendo gaming, but perhaps they missed a trick - surely the greatest partnership is the magazine and the reader?

The magazine dedicated over 20 pages looking at a retrospective of the magazine's history, and showcased the covers of (most of) the issues that had come previously alongside commentary from some of the staff that helped make the magazine what it was. Unfortunately they missed out the final 7 issues of NGC, although perhaps they were trying to forget about those shrinking issues.

With the Wii running out of games, there were only two reviews this month - Kirby’s Collection - containing a number of repackaged classic games, scoring 79% and One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP2 scoring a pretty bad 27%. At the front of the magazine they branded it the ‘worst reviews section ever’.