Super Play Game

[Janne Desir]

Foundedin 2019 by gaming industry veterans from Playtika, Rovio, PlayStudios and the film industry, we set out to create a billion-dollar company that delivers world-class, delightful games and has fun making them. We gathered a core team and soft launched our first title, Dice Dreams, within 6 months. Since then, the team has grown to include dozens of super-talented, dedicated and driven individuals, Dice Dreams has become a global hit, and our plans for the future make us even more excited.

Super Play covered in great detail the role-playing video game genre. Many of these games were never released officially in the UK or European games market, and therefore the magazine concentrated much effort in covering aspects of the American, and moreover the Japanese games markets.

Given the close ties between the world of Japanese console RPGs and animation, the magazine also heavily featured information about manga and anime by noted UK-based writer Helen McCarthy. It can be said that Super Play was one of the magazines that helped to push forward what was at the time a nascent market for anime in the UK. In this vein, the magazine itself was also notable as its cover illustrations (and many illustrations between the covers) were done in manga-influenced style by artist Wil Overton.[4] Overton also caricatured many of the staff in chibi form, wearing various types of anime-related costumes - sci-fi armour, flying gear, RPG-style armour etc. The cover even had the name "Super Play" written in katakana.

The logo for the magazine was designed by Jez Bridgeman in his first week on the magazine before the Art Editor arrived in the September before launch and at the last minute the 'PLAY' part of the logo was switched for a sans serif font and then stretched to fit the space.

The magazine was published monthly, and would regularly feature a monthly Fantasy Quest column about Japanese console RPGs in their native market. In the second half of the publication's life, there was a monthly Final Fantasy Forum dedicated to playing tips and secrets for Square games, even despite the fact that none of the Final Fantasy game series had been released in Europe at that point.

The magazine was based in Bath, England and published by Future Publishing. Despite its fairly short run (47 issues, just short of 4 years, and a one-off "Gold" special in 1993), and many years since its demise, it still enjoys a fan following on the internet.

Its end came with the declining popularity of the SNES itself, both among games publishers and the game-buying public, as the Nintendo 64 was on the cusp of release, making way for the next generation of video game consoles. Super Play was succeeded in March 1997 by N64 Magazine, which was initially edited by Jonathan Davies with Wil Overton as Art Editor, and frequent contributions by former Super Play writers, although the magazine was much less focused on import gaming and RPGs than its forebear. N64 Magazine in turn was renamed NGC Magazine to coincide with the launch of the GameCube, and after closure of NGC in 2006 the publication was relaunched as NGamer.

In September 2017, inspired by the announcement of a Super NES Classic Edition, original staff, including Jason Brookes, Jonathan Davies, Tony Mott and Zy Nicholson, along with seasoned Nintendo experts Nathan Brown, Keza MacDonald, Damien McFerran, Jeremy Parish and Chris Schilling, produced a one-off issue 48 of Super Play, which came bundled with Retro Gamer issue 172. Featuring all-new content it consists of the regular sections Super Express, Helen McCarthy's Anime World and a What Cart? guide. Also inside are new reviews of the games included on the SNES Classic, a Star Fox 2 preview and an interview with Dylan Cuthbert, one of the key developers behind the game. Cover art was created by Wil Overton, illustrator of all 48 Super Play covers, with the internal visual style resurrected by Future's senior art editor Warren Brown, who ensured the design will be immediately familiar to fans of the '90s magazine.[1][2]

Shigeru Miyamoto: Yes, I remember that we were very nervous, because The Legend of Zelda was our first game that forced the players to think about what they should do next. We were afraid that gamers would become bored and stressed by the new concept.

Shigeru Miyamoto: We started to work on The Legend of Zelda at the same time as Super Mario Bros, and since the same teams did both games, we tried to separate the different ideas. Super Mario Bros should be linear, The Legend of Zelda should be the total opposite.

Shigeru Miyamoto: During the development of Legend of Zelda we were actually able to include more ideas than we first thought was possible. And with the technical improvements that have been made through the years, we are able to include more of our original plans. During the past years many new faces has worked on Zelda and brought new ideas to the field.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Exactly. We actually see A link to the Past as the real sequel to Legend of Zelda. Zelda II was more of a side story about what happened to Link after the events in Legend of Zelda.

Shigeru Miyamoto: The most important thing for me, is that the player get sucked into the game. I want the games to be easy to understand, and that the people appreciate the games content, its core. I will never deny the importance of a great story, but the plot should never get that important that it becomes unclear.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Link always looked like the same person, even though different techniques changed some details. But in Ocarina of Time 2 sides were created in him. 1 younger and 1 older. As you see now, the younger Link is the main character in Zelda the Wind Waker. He blended in better in the surroundings than older Link. Adult Link is in Super Smash Bros Melee and Soul Calibur 2. And we started with him as the main character in the new GameCube game before we changed direction and made The Wind Waker.

Shigeru Miyamoto: We were limited time-wise, in the development of The Wind Waker, and were forced to leave some things out of it, but when I look at the finished product, I think we have created something unique, both graphically and content wise.

I strive to create communication and relationships in my games. Both socially with several people gathering in front of the TV to play together and relations with the controller and characters on the screen.

Like many people my age, video games were instrumental in growing my love of football. You didn't have to wait for Saturdays or Sundays to get your fill, and you could also just keep running that one play over and over again because the computer couldn't stop it. It was the early 1990s, and we delighted in the simple things like trying to get triple digit points.

The first football video game I ever got was Super Play Action Football for Super Nintendo. It was Christmas, 1992. I was seven, and my older brother and I got the Super Nintendo and a couple games as a joint present. I'll never forget too, I got my hopes up for it so bad and thought we didn't get it, and then our dad brought it out after I had resigned myself to playing with like, an actual basketball instead. Needless to say, I freaked the entire hell out like the Nintendo 64 kid.

This was before the Madden franchise really took root as the football video game of record, so this game was Nintendo's own shot at putting together a football game. And, my God, was it terrible. You could play as NFL, college, and high school teams, which is to say you could play as NFL, college, and completely made up teams. While they did go to the length of at least securing the NFL licensing agreement, they did no such thing for college teams. This led to the greatest naming chicanery I've ever witnessed in my life.

The longer you look at the team select screens, the more incredible stuff you find. Even ignoring the ridiculous substitute names for private colleges not named after states, there's absurdity on every line. There's the silly "St of" naming convention. We have some throwback conference groupings in here too, such as what appears to be the SWC and a gaggle of independents like Miami, Penn State, Pitt, and Florida State that joined conferences like, a month after the game was made. Then there's the strange inclusion of Division I-AA teams, but only some of them. Like, we got half the Ivy League, Big Sky, and a dotting of other teams like North Dakota State, a team whose inclusions was far ahead of its time. Unless they're talking about some other "State of ND".

Once you had selected your teams, it was time to get to the actual gameplay, which was... well, it was real bad. For whatever reason, the game designers thought it necessary to make this game a diagonal scroller.

There's nothing inherently wrong with setting up a football field like this, though I always found it intensely disorienting that by pressing up on the directional pad, the players would actually diagonally up and to the right. But worse than the spacial oreintation of the game was the actual gameplay. It was just brutal.

There were approximately four fast players in the entire game. One was the kick returner for BYU, errrhm, "Salt Lk, UT", which, figure that out. But nearly every player in the game was just so slow. If you were able to return a kickoff for a touchdown, it would genuinely take about a minute to go from end zone to end zone. The camera was zoomed too far in to see every player on the field, too, so it was pretty easy to have about 20 of the 22 players on the field off screen at any given time. All you had to do was throw a screen pass or have your tight end stay on his block on a toss sweep.

The one wildly unrealistic part of this game that turned out to be a positive was the stiff arm action. It wasn't so much a stiff arm as a savage punch. Rather than holding the defensive player at bay for a few yards before being tackled, a properly-timed stiff arm in this game would just level the defender. It was so brutally effective and unfair that it was the only juke move you needed.

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