GameSpite Quarterly 8 Now Available

It’s not May 1 yet, or even April 20…. but eh, what the heck. GameSpite Quarterly 8 is now live and ready for purchase. As usual, it comes in both a paperback edition and a hardcover version, both available indefinitely directly on demand through Blurb.com. As usual, the contents of both versions are the same; the only difference is that the hardcover version is, well, hardcover, and made with a super-classy printing process that always looks really great. The innards of both editions are the same, though! You are no less wonderful if you opt for the less expensive version, or if in fact you choose to read these articles strictly online, for free, as they’re posted. Words is words, regardless of how they’re wrapped.

As for discounts, the coupon code NEWBLURB appears to be good for 20% off a purchase, but you may need to buy two books for it to work. Poke around the web a little and you’ll probably be able to find other price breaks as well. It’s really quite rare for Blurb not to have some sort of active promo floating around.

I’ve pimped this issue a bit already, but in case you don’t remember and can’t tell from the image above, this is a robust look at the PlayStation. I wouldn’t necessarily say “comprehensive,” but we’ve tried to touch on everything important, rather than just the things that interest us. I will reserve judgment until I have the finished product in hand, but this just might be the best book we’ve ever produced. It is also much denser, content-wise, than even the NES issue. So please, bury yourself in our avalanche of words.

As usual, here is a starter pack for the next three months’ postings from this here book. Please enjoy!

  • Chapter I: Sony’s Big Ploy: An introduction!
  • Sony Before PlayStation: When the PlayStation launched, I was not at all excited for it. That’s not because I was an obsessive Nintendo fanboy or anything; I’d just played too many Sony-published games to trust them to get it right. Spoiler: This article is arranged in order from worst to best.
  • Chapter II: Sony Delivers: A little piece on the launch.
  • Jumping Flash! – First-Person Hopper: Ben Langberg recounts tales of one of my favorite PlayStation titles. The funny thing is, I don’t think I played Jumping Flash! for the first time until 2001, a good six years after its debut. And I still loved it. That is a testament either to its quality, or to the fact that I’m easily suckered by boxy polygons arranged in simple shapes.
  • Ridge Racer – We’ll Always Have Rotterdam Nation: Another piece by Ben, who seems to be our PlayStation launch expert. Here he dares to look beyond Kaz Hirai’s silliness and a legacy of crummy sequels to see why the prospect of Ridge Racer as a launch title used to be exciting.
  • Battle Arena Toshinden: Newcomer Brad Allison makes his debut, and I feel kind of bad because his freshman GameSpite effort has been graced with some terribly non-work-safe artwork. Sorry, there just isn’t much art of Toshinden out there besides Sophia (or whatever her name was) jigglin’ it up.

23 thoughts on “GameSpite Quarterly 8 Now Available”

  1. Purchased the hardcover version and the NEWBLURB coupon worked just fine. Savings of $8.80.

    Thanks Jeremy

  2. I just used NEWBLURB too and saved myself $17 off the price of GS #7 and #8.

    I guess I’d better finish off this copy of “The Haynes Space Shuttle Owners’ Manual” before 600+ pages of new games journalism lands on my doorstep….

  3. I’m surprised the Sony Imagesoft SNES version of Hook didn’t make the Sony before Playstation list. I don’t remember much from it, but I do remember it being both nice looking and a surprisingly competent movie tie-in from that era. The design I think reminded me a lot of the SNES Mickey games.

    • I haven’t played enough Sony games to do a comprehensive list. I just touched on the ones I know (and Sensible Soccer).

      • Imagesoft published Flashback (or at least, they did over here in Europe), surely that deserves some love, right? I still go back to it from time to time, and obviously the likelihood of it appearing on Virtual Console is slightly less than zero.

  4. Unless I’m entered into some parallel world , pretty sure this is a typo?

    “Sony handled the system’s U.S. launch with calculated ease. At E3 2005, Sega infamously announced an immediate debut for their console in a bid to undermine Sony”

    Question for everybody: Do we know of any super famicom games besides Secret of Mana that originally were planned to be cd games?

  5. ordering now.
    the playstation was my childhood, and its library is still extremely near and dear to me. just looking at the outline of this issue made my nostalgia glands water.
    cannot wait for it to arrive. c:

  6. Jeremy, I ordered my softcover copy as soon as I saw the link. I hope you keep doing these historical looks at retro-consoles. I’d love to see a Sega edition some time in the future. Thanks for all of your hard work.

  7. Jeremy – Around the time the first version of the iPad was released you mentioned that you were considering selling a PDF version for use on iPads, Kindles, etc. What ever happened with this?

    • I’m still waiting for Blurb to get with the program and figure out their ePub solution. There’s been talk of this, but no action as of yet.

  8. This seems like only yesterday, but Sony has been a console maker for almost 20 years now.

    Secondly I remember Gear Works being a decent Sony published game for the Game Boy and Game Gear.

  9. I used NEWBLURB1 to get it to work in GBP for the Sumo copy, still cost a lot afterwards, but it’s always worth it

  11. Speaking of typos and chronology:

    “The 16-bit sequel to NES isometric adventure Solstice, this one presumably took six months later.”

    First: took ‘place’?

    Second: solstices (solsti?) aren’t six months from equinoxes (equinocks… :?) they’re three (or three plus some multiple of six).

    • You guys just keep pointing out my typos. I can file them away as evidence that I should just shoot myself in my stupid head.

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