That Rising Zan preview from Playstation Magazine

King of Posters
#1

My mom made me throw out all of my magazines when we moved one time so I can’t go back and look at this with older eyes, but there was this one bit in Playstation Magazine (PSM) that always confused as a child. Tucked into the middle of their preview for the PSX action game Rising Zan, samurai gunman and johnny no more, was a small bit about them hitting the streets and asking random women if they thought Zan was sexy. It featured some small pictures of who they talked to and a sentence or two from each about how they thought Zan was fairly attractive.

Was this real?

As a child I always assumed this was made up. Why would you walk around asking random people if they thought a video game character was sexy? Sure it was the 1990s, when video game magazines could get very horny, but why Rising Zan of all things? It was not by anyone notable at the time and even its preview was fairly small if I remember correctly. Maybe PSM knew so little of the game that they needed to fill up space but who even cared if Zan was sexy? Was that something in the marketing?

Does anyone remember this? I’m kind of curious what this would read like now that I’m older.

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#2

That rings a bell! I might have that issue packed away.

#3

i guess official playstation magaine was weird in every country. in the uk one, i remember a “feature” that must have been like 8 pages that was just about the clothes the characters were wearing in the borderline unplayable hoverboard game that no-one bought psybadek

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#4

I don’t even know what Rising Zan is. At first glance I thought this was a thread about Billy Corgan’s band Zwan

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#5

I’m not sure that a more 90s name could exist

It’s just too perfect

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#6

I was obsessed with it back when, even though I was terrible at it (those “press every button” QTEs were rough!)

The intro is still fantastic.

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#7

I threw it on testing trade-ins at Gamestop circa '03 and was blown away by that intro, somebody picked the copy up over the next week and I never got to really try it out. Amazing flavor.

#8

That’s awesome. Is the game any good?

#9

No. It is garbage that’s only remembered for its radical theme song and goofiness. It reminds me of God Hand, but not in how it plays, just the vibe.

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#10

That’s too bad but yeah it’s got that proto God Hand vibe for sure

#11

September 1999 issue of PlayStation Magazine (distinct from Official PlayStation Magazine). I had a few issues of PSM back in the day but not this one. I always gravitated towards PSM first when browsing the magazine racks because they always got good comic book artists to draw their covers.

PSM remarks in response to a reader who is worried that game developers might charge full retail prices for games and then charge additional money for downloadable updates, “That probably won’t be the case […] The publishers can still make a profit selling downloads online.”

Ha!

Can’t find any scans off the cuff here but archive.org is always a good place to start.

https://archive.org/details/gamemagazines

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#12

It was always battle between PSM with the cool memory card/lid sticker sheets from the aforementioned Image/Wildstorm artists, and OPM’s demo discs.

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#13

I had always thought Rising Zan looked dumb in the magazines and didn’t care for it until around a decade later when I saw someone at college play the opening and realized it’s actually like what Japanese game devs might think American people might think a Japanese anime about the wild west would be like.

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