Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine: Premiere Issue (Summer 1990)

When I posted about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in July 2019, I thought I had included everything I had related to them. However, I forgot that I own the premiere issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine. It was published in summer 1990, a few months after the first live-action film debuted. The magazine features a variety of columns and articles, such as a letters page, a puzzle, coverage of activities the turtles enjoy, such as martial arts and skateboarding, a 4-page comic, and a couple stories about the movie with behind-the-scenes photos and an interview with Elias Koteas, the actor who played Casey Jones. 

You'll also see a partial Cheetos ad with Chester Cheetah that's part of a foldout poster, but I didn't remove the staples and pull it out. I did scan everything else though, and here it is, complete with ads:

E3: The Show That Was (Next Generation #44 - August 1998)

While the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled the past few years, last December the Entertainment Software Association not only announced that E3 would not happen in 2024, but that it was gone for good. Had there been an E3 2024, this would have been the week for it and many game companies are still using this time to hold presentations, as yesterday was the Xbox Showcase and earlier today there was Ubisoft Forward. I've always enjoyed the week of E3 and have written or posted about E3 many times since I started the blog in 2017. I'm not sure if this week will be my final posts in regards to E3 as I've got a stack of E3 show dailies that I could one day scan, and I might do at least something with some of them later this week. In any case, I think I am running out of E3-related magazine articles to scan. This article, appropriately (for 2024 at least) titled, "E3: The Show That Was," is part of Next Generation magazine's "Intelligence" column from issue #44 and it's not 100% E3, though I did scan all nine pages of the section. 

It's always interesting to see if games that made a good showing actually ended up being successful. Next Generation thought the 1998 exhibition had a lot of promising games and not too many disappointments. It viewed Trespasser, a Jurassic Park game, as one of the best of the show but when it came time to review the game, the magazine only gave it two stars out of five. 

A system likely long forgotten by now, there is a page about VM Labs' "Project X" which would not release until 2000 as Nuon. It also isn't exactly a platform per se, instead it is a technology that was incorporated into select DVD players that added game functionality. The company's CEO thought things were going quite well in 1998 with some strong interest from third-party developers. However, only eight games officially released for Nuon. Also, this issue was published a few months before the Dreamcast released in Japan, and there are a couple spots where an unnamed shooter is mentioned, even stating that it could possibly be a pack-in for the console. That shooter, later titled Geist Force, never released.