GameFan's Beautiful DK Desk

The recently relaunched GameFan magazine got its website up a few days ago. What I want to point you to is the header to their review of Donkey Kong Country Returns, and more specifically their Donkey Kong timeline. This looks to be the only instance of them posting pages directly out of the magazine onto their site as opposed to just the text, and good god. I'm thinking of tracking down the back issue just for a nice full-sized spread to hold in my very own hands, and if the art design of every review looked this good I would subscribe in no time.

Because this is terrific. This is layout that goes beyond presentation to become an individual work of art, not just information on the DKC series but a wonderful supplement worth owning irrespective of the game itself. It's saying something in its own right about the series, a commentary about its nostalgia and scope and the enthusiasm of its fans. It just oozes passion. It's mostly official Nintendo art and pictures of its consoles, boxes, carts, and so on, but... the way the artist used them to say what he or she wanted to say instead of what Nintendo intended those assets to say... "This is what DKC is, this is the series, to me," he or she says. This is absolutely as it should be. I've seen pretty layouts before, but layouts that themselves say something... nothing that's struck me like this has.

Heh, okay, not to get too deeply into it. But stuff like this makes me want to read print over iPad magazines just so I can get big, beautiful, 2-page spreads. Also, I want a poster version. Chop chop.

EDIT: Okay, I went out and bought the issue. Have only read the DK review so far; it's 8 pages, not counting the 2 page DK timeline at the end, so smothered in screenshots and concept art and little doodles and stickers that there's only about a paragraph of text per page. From flipping through, it looks like GameFan's strategy for dealing with the hard times print magazines find themselves in is to give you humongous, glossy pages and just go nuts all over them. I'm down. Oddly, for seven bucks you get about as many pages as GamePro with much better paper quality and a much bigger landscape. It makes me think that GamePro's cheaping out on us over here.