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Silent Hill Archive is doing Excelent

29/11/2018

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Pretty straightforward. But if you insist I'll elaborate.
What you see here is (my first attempt at) an overview of The Official UK Playstation Magazine (one of the many as displayed at the bottom). In the top right you will find the most prominent Silent Hill issue (hence the SH cover) and underneath a little colour legend. When you hover over issue 48 (digitally archived), you will see the magazine cover and the relevant material (missing from the photo), which will include a link to the actual scanned (hi-res) content.

Below the issues are the most relevant details about the magazine itself and underneath you fill find photos of the Specials.

This way it is easy to spot which magazine is missing from the archive. And while searching for content, I do take in the fact that Silent Hill 1 was released in the beginning of 1999, so it's most likely to find content around that period, although some games have had an extensive (pre) production process, so you really never know what to find in which issue!
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How to obtain the magazine content

28/11/2018

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Obtaining SH1 material from the magazines is the hardest part of the archive process. You have to locate the correct issue, buy it and then scan it. Even I am not particularly keen on doing this as it takes a lot of time, effort and equipment I don't have. It is much easier to

---Copy what someone else has already done or have someone else do it---

Dont get me wrong, I am not lazy (undertaking this project is enough proof), its just that other people are way better at these things then I am. One person that springs to mind is the administrator of Kiwisworld.
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A quick calculation makes that over four and a half thousand full magazine scans,
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with over 400 individual hi-res scanned Playstation issues. I think this is a good place to start. The site works fully on donations; sending magazines to be scanned or making a monetary contribution gives you unlimited access to all the files.
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Then there are those individuals who already scanned some of the Silent Hill material and put it on a website. Thanks goes out to Amy, Giromancy and Whitney.

Next step is to come up with some sort of Excel-overview-structure, put all things into perspective somehow. (so I dont lose the plot)


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What are the magazines?

27/11/2018

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The magazines that can contain SH1 material are to be categorised into physical and digital. Not sure if there are any digital ones, so lets start with physical. They are:

- PS1 specific (most likely)
- Multi-Format
(likely)
- Other
(less likely) (EG non-video game mags)

PS1 specific can be further categorized into Country specific. The country I have investigated so far is the United Kingdom (UK). Here are the results in numeral-alphabetical order:

100% Playstation Tips 'n tactics
Essential Playstation
Extreme Playstation
Mean Machines: Playstation
Official UK PlayStation Magazine, The
Official UK PlayStation Tips
Planet Playstation
Play
The Player Playstation 24-7
PlayNation
Playstation Max
Playstation Plus
Playstation Power
Playstation Pro
Playstation Solutions
Playzone
Power: The Playstation Mag
Powerstation
PSW
PSX-Pro

Station Gamer
TipStation
Total Playstation


As for Station Gamer, I marked it cursive as I could not find an actual photo and consider it therefore as hearsay.

New entries and images will be added once found, but still this is only scratching the surface, as many Silent Hill 1 specials or retro reviews can be found in PS2, PS3, and PS4 magazines. If I can only get my hands on them...

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What's inside a magazine then?

27/11/2018

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The information found in a magazine can pertain to the game itself, its developer, composer, writer, cast, etc. so in (somewhat) chronological order Im looking for:

- Mention: usually just a few words without image(s)
- News: slightly larger segment with or without image(s)
- Release date: mention of the month of (supposed) release (usually incorrect)
- Preview: even larger segment describing some of the gameplay elements
- Advert: a promotional segment for the game, which can have various sizes (sometimes up to 4 pages) and can be game -, release -,  developer - or retailer specific.
- Review: a breakdown of (some of) the game elements (graphics, music, gameplay)  resulting in a grade (sometimes heavily biassed by personal taste). Reviews can be further categorised into mini -, retro -, budget -, compilation - (SH HD Collection), platform specific - (especially for SH2 and onwards), game specific - (in case of a Director's Cut release) and country specific reviews (due to censored content for example)
-Interview: I think you know what an interview is, still some interviews were taken during the release of a certain game, so they need to be archived accordingly.
-Charts: a ranking position  usually presented in a ladder type structure
-Tips, cheats, partial solution or full walkthrough
-Awards:
another ranking, usually an annual event from the magazine itself
-Special:  usually published in retrospect, often in conjunction with other games in the series
- Other: anything not mentioned above

So basically anything remotely related to the game.
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Welcome to the Silent Hill Archive

27/11/2018

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While still working on the Gamecare Project, I decided to venture into archiving a game's magazine exposure. One of my favourite game series is Silent Hill, so why not start with that?

The idea is to archive every single bit of the Silent Hill games ever published in any sort of magazine. As with any (large scale) project, it is important to break it down into parts, so Im starting with Silent Hill 1.

The next important part is the structure; what to look for in what magazine, which magazines are there, how to obtain them, what the scan quality is like and a whole lot of other conundrums. This blog will feature it all and functions as sort of a progressive journal, with the occasional image. For the presentation of the archive content there needs to be a website of sorts, so once I have that you'll be the first to know. (when you keep reading my blogs of course) It will be available free of any charge, as this is a non-commercial project.

I cannot however, accomplish this on my own as reading through 1000+ magazines will take me a few lifetimes, so if you like to join me in this life, please let me know by sending a message or if you have any comments, please leave them below.

Thank you!
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