Back in 1994, I was a rabid consumer of any and all information about the Virtual Boy (in my defense, I was a 12-year-old Nintendo Power subscriber). That summer I picked up every magazine that had even a morsel of Virtual Boy information in it. This included an unfamiliar magazine that I found sitting nearly forgotten on a back table at the Lakeforest Mall EBX—a magazine that featured an odd red and black cover that had a weird screen-headed man looking into a Virtual Boy, with a red-tinted Mario looking on.

In that issue of Diehard GameFan I found a lot of familiar Virtual Boy information, but I also found some things I had never seen in a magazine before: pages filled with dozens of screenshots; reviews of Japanese games I had never heard of; references to obscure gaming arcana. One thing was clear; these people knew and loved video games.

That same feeling comes through in GameFan's spiritual successor, Play magazine. With Play, editor-in-chief Dave Halverson has taken the enthusiasm and charm he brought to GameFan and added some much needed polish and focus. The result is a magazine that is truly enthusiast and truly unique in the modern American game magazine market.

Cover

Play consistently has the best covers on this side of the Atlantic, hands down. This issue is no exception, with a huge, beautifully hand drawn mage from Odin Sphere stretching across literally the entire length of the printable space. The text promoting the cover feature is nice and big and the bar code box is nice and small, as it should be. A small teaser for the new Crash Bandicoot game entices readers with a familiar face without distracting too much from the main focal point.

This cover is an illustration of Play's inspiring tendency to pick cover subjects based on editor interest, not on marketing hype. While some other magazine covers this month featured the super-hyped Grand Theft Auto IV and the almost equally super-hyped Heavenly Sword, Play promotes a game from Atlus that most American gamers have never heard of (well, had never heard of at press time) just because they believed it deserved it. Huzzah!

Opening Matter

Halverson's editorial this month is actually just a series of questions to the readers. You want us to do your work for you, huh Dave? The letters section is both blessed and cursed with exceptionally long, well-thought out letters. On the one hand, these are nicer than the short, infantile questions and complaints that clog most letters pages. On the other hand, would it kill them to include a couple of pictures? That's a lot of text!

The "Ink" section wastes two pages rehashing six-week-old information on PlayStation Home, but wisely decides to cut the news short after that. The database page has some concise, cogent insight into February's NPD numbers, but where are the PS3 and Xbox 360 rankings? There's definitely room – just move that huge picture of Link.

Previews

Well, a review first, actually. The cover feature on Odin Sphere is actually a 10/10 review hidden at the start of the previews section. Awkward. The review is accompanied by a sprawling six-page interview with two of the developers that gets sidetracked in minutiae way too often. I'd have preferred to see some choice quotes pulled from the interview and integrated into more descriptive text, rather than a rambling Q&A format. Same deal with the three-page Crash Bandicoot interview later on – pick out what's good and chop off the rest.

For the most part, Play's previews are set apart by their personality. The concise text goes past the dry recitation of story and features (though it does include that) to include personal anecdotes from the writers and contextual, historical information that puts the game in its proper place. It's enough to make you feel like a person is writing these previews, not some sort of marketing-bot. Take this line, from one of Greg Orlando's ridiculous eight previews this issue: "Forza Motorsport 2 delicately balances the fine line between fanatical devotion to all things automotive and, to put it delicately, barking insanity." Really, that's all you need to know right there.