An open letter to the editor of the Official Nintendo Magazine and the MD of Nintendo Europe

Dear Chandra, or whoever.

I won't say I'm a fan of ONM but I am a regular buyer as the free gifts are sometimes good and you do get the lowdown on games that your Future Publishing colleagues gloss over because they have real games to review like GTA and Dead Rising. In addition I have been diagnosed with the deliberating (UPDATE: I totally meant deliberating and not debillitating) condition GFP (Gay for Pokemon). Sadly this means that I often pick up a copy of your magazine.

Monthly your magazine offends me. You seem to be stuck in a 1990s time warp where you OMG! in the magazine when you get a female member of staff and you think that comments about your hair and staff member's real lives are of interest to the reader. Frankly I don't care if Chris or Martin or some other office monkey is looking after a new born baby. Furthermore you really have to stop making captions about curries every time you use a screenshot with fire coming out of a characters mouth or anus. As far as I am aware (and I've checked) that never really was funny.

However, until now ONM has been an innocuous piece of fluff to pick up and read when EDGE gets too pretentious or previews yet another game that is never going to leave Japan. But I was particularly offended when I picked up your second "pokemon "special" issue", note how I put speech marks around all three words and then again around "special". I picked up the first issue and it was okay. You cheekily padded it out by reprinting the reviews of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl and Pokemon Ranger but at the time it seemed a sensible thing to do and it made the issue a nice summary of the new gen of pokemon games designed to line the pockets of Nintendo so they can crank out another awful Mario spin off which you contractually give an 8+ to in a review. The other content wasn't anything that you couldn't get off the internet. In fact it was much much less than you could get from the internet. Pointless almost spoilers about new evolution methods and a redundant pokedex that listed scant information that is of no use to anything but the recently postnatal of players. But the game was new (well in Europe), so maybe you didn't want to spoil it for anyone and as no doubt your marketing people have told you, your main consumer is twelve years old, so to them your special issue may have been an insight that they themselves can't find on the internet, without giving too much away. It appears that you didn't use your leverage as the "Official magazine" to provide any information that wasn't already out there. In fact you could have written the whole issue without playing the games (Ctrl + V reviews included) at all.

It was then, with some great surprise, I saw that a second pokemon special issue was published. Aha! I thought. Maybe this will be where Chris? or is it Martin?, the one who you mentioned was obsessed with pokemon in every issue for four months, would write an exceptional issue providing hints and info that you held back in the first one. Maybe a guide to getting some of those FAQ'd items (such as the second Dawn Stone) as well as a proper pokedex with info on where and how you get some pokemon such as Jirachi, Ho-oh or Lugia. Maybe even a really comprehensive volume touching on some of the "deeper" aspects of the game such as EV training, breeding, the importance of natures and even IVs. Because lets face it, it's annoying having to copy everythng down from Serebii.net so a hard copy version would have been welcomed.

So it was with mild interest that I picked up the second (and rather thin) special issue. But upon opening it and looking at the contents page I thought there had been some kind of error. That you reprinted the first one again by accident. Imagine my surprise at seeing the review for Pokemon Diamond/Peark and Pokemon Ranger reprinted yet again! Pay that reviewer overtime because that's the third time you've used those reviews and yet in a previous ONM issue you complained that Chris, or is it Martin?, was working extra hard on putting the second special issue together! Yes I bet he had to work very hard finding the old files yet again. And is a one year old review of Pokemon Ranger really worth it? And so I thumbed through the "rest" of the issue to see more of the same, a few more "almost-spoilers" like if you go to the old Chateau "you might see something". And there it all was or wasn't. No daily things-to-do guide, no contest guide, no advance tech, no useful pokedex or how-to-get guide. Most of the content isn't useful or unknown by the average pokemon player either. Even if people don't have the internet there was still very little they could actually get from your issue in terms of completing the pokedex or getting into the game. Pretty inexscusable really but then again you know that all the hard work Chris/Martin or is it Lewis? puts in is only going to be wasted on young children who get their parents to buy it for them without actually questioning the content or comparing it to previous works.

So well done you. Big pat on the back because for all intents you probably got away with such lazy lazy "journalism" but be aware that some of us are onto you hacks. So the next time I open your mediocre magazine I don't want to read about how hard you've been working on a new special issues because in reality it's all useless lazy copy and pasted fluff which makes you the butt of future publishing's game magazines and why no-one in the wider games journalism circles even takes you bunch of jokers seriously enough to write about how much they hate you a la EDGE.

Regards*

Cunzy1 1

*We're watching you http://thatguys.co.uk