Maps for games where you could only go 1 direction... Gotta love old magazines!

[cwpab]

In the 80s, the Spanish game magazine Micromania offered Spanish computer players a bit of everything: good reviews, bad reviews, admitedly overrated Spanish games because they wanted to support the local industry, lots of images, always the speccy screenshots for multi-system games, music album reviews, lists of hundreds of games to buy from shops in ads... and the thing had a huge newspaper-like format that made it stand out in the shops.

Some of the people writing on it were ultra-nerdy teenagers, devoted readers they had hired after a writing test, and they really hyped the games using often 4/5 of the space to describe the plot and a final sentence to talk about the gameplay, if they remembered it at that point.

All very fun, and one of the things I noticed is how they sometimes included maps for games where you could only go 1 direction. Not that it's bad, because it was pretty cool seeing all screens from a game you would probably never play. By the late 80s, these were either pictures of the screen or printed screens, not drawings.

These are 2 examples of these maps, for Red Heat and The Spy Who Loved Me:





Sources:
https://www.amstrad.es/doku.php?id=foraneos:red_heat
https://www.amstrad.es/doku.php?id=foraneos:007_la_espia_que_me_amo

[Shaun M. Neary]

I remember reading that Crash did the same for Wonder Boy! You could only walk/run from left to right in that one as well!

[Gryzor]

Heh, the phenomenon of spending most of the review discussing the plot only to talk about the technical aspects in the last paragraph or two was not a uniquely Spanish one

[Shaun M. Neary]

Heh, the phenomenon of spending most of the review discussing the plot only to talk about the technical aspects in the last paragraph or two was not a uniquely Spanish one

Amstrad Action spent several years doing it! Trenton Webb and Bob Wade were infamous for it.
At least when Simon Forrester joined towards the end of the mags life, he was able to offer some insight and humour into the equation.

[dodogildo]

I loved maps on gaming magazines. Especially hand-drawn ones. They were, and still are, true artworks.

[eto]

Kieran Hawken is still doing it today in his books. Lots of bla bla about  the game but not much relevant information.