The VC Advantage: A TurboPlay Holiday
The internet has made it easy to find cheats for games, but we miss the tips pages from game magazines, when the discovery of a new code could inspire you to go back to an old game. These codes aren't exactly new, but oldness is the essence of the Virtual Console! We're bringing back the classic codes every week on The VC Advantage.
The stated purpose of this column (see above) is to explore the nostalgia of video game magazines via their cheat columns. We've imitated those columns in style, but we've never done the most obvious thing when it comes to magazine nostalgia: link actual old magazines. When we happened upon this archive of TurboPlay magazine, we knew we had to share it. TurboPlay, published by Larry Flynt Publications (who also published the cheat-focused Tips & Tricks), was the longest-lasting TG16-specific magazine in the U.S., and featured a who's-who of game writers, including Andy Eddy, Chris Bieniek, and even Working Designs' Victor Ireland. (As a young pre-blogger, I had a subscription to TurboPlay, and also devoured all four issues of TurboForce and the three TurboEdge newsletters from NEC. You probably could have guessed that.)
We encourage you to browse the entire TurboPlay archives, as well as the other two magazines' brief collections, to see what the world was like when NEC was still involved with the TurboGrafx-16 (all of that stuff has since been handed off to their partner Hudson) and was goofily optimistic about the future of their ultimately doomed, yet still beloved, console. We've provided the entirety of TurboPlay issue 7's "Turbo Tips" columns for you after the break, so you can get a taste of retro-cheatery.
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