124pp (7 ads, plus 6 house ads)

First off, respect has to go to the N64 team for searching out things to review at a very barren time for the Nintendo console, managing two to three times as many games reviews as most of their competitors (and even outscoring one of the Dreamcast mags, alarmingly). It’s also good to see it recover from the lengthy period of insanity a while back that saw it become the least reliable reviews mag of all time (an average of 81% for the three universally-derided South Park games, for example). In design terms (both graphic and content) N64 is in a totally different league to its competitors, and the completeness of their coverage of every aspect of owning a games console is still something that every mag in the country could learn from. If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that the strictly-adhered to comprehensive content template still leaves little room for feature content or real invention (one issue of N64 is much like another, more so even than most games mags), but that’s a fairly small price to pay for a magazine this good.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 72

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 5

GAMEBOY CONTENT: 12 pages, of which 5 are features

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 74% (6 games)

GOOD FOR: Reader interaction, warmth.

BAD FOR: Novelty.

VERDICT: It’s pretty hard to imagine how you could make a much better N64 magazine than this.

64 MAGAZINE (Paragon, £3.99 with tips book)

100pp (6 ads, plus 4 house ads)

Conversely, you never know quite what you’re going to get next in 64 Magazine. The issue reviewed was heavy on feature content, but that content ranged from on-the-road Goldeneye contests (fine) to PC network gaming (huh?) and clearance sales of old Atari VCS games (eh?). Another four pages get devoted later on to a section unapologetically called "Not Nintendo" and filled with plastic tat and movie reviews. Still, their apparent dislike of talking about N64 games aside, 64 Magazine is actually a pretty decent read. It’s written to an older audience than any of the other N64 mags, with a welcome intelligence and a healthy blend of enthusiasm and cynicism, although the ever-annoying overpreponderance of exclamation marks consistently undermines all the good work – I counted 10, for example, in two typical news stories with a combined total of just 12 short sentences, none of which warranted shouting about. (The news that was so astoundingly thrilling? The special Pokemon N64, and a Pokemon musical being made.) Ignore that, and this isn’t a bad effort at all.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 68

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 11 (though only 4 of those are even vaguely N64-related)

GAMEBOY CONTENT: 0

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 83.75% (4 games)

GOOD FOR: Over-13s.

BAD FOR: Wow! Totally amazing! Some grass! On the ground!! Incredible!!!

VERDICT: A little further distant from third place than it is from first.

NINTENDO PRO (Paragon, £2.99)

84pp (7 ads, plus 2 house ads)

Blimey, this must take up hours and hours of someone’s month. Just 32 real pages, and even those are doing well if they have more than 100 words of copy on them. (Most of which could have been taken straight from the back of the game’s box.) Which means that an entire issue of Nintendo Pro contains slightly fewer than twice as many words of real editorial as this feature you’re reading now, but apparently requires the efforts of no fewer than 11 writers to produce. I’m definitely not getting paid enough.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 32

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 0

GAMEBOY CONTENT: 13 pages, 0 features

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 81% (3 games)

GOOD FOR: The next time you’ve got eight minutes spare.

BAD FOR: Reading while boiling more than two eggs.

VERDICT: Did trees have to die for this?

NINTENDO OFFICIAL MAGAZINE (EMAP, £2.95 with 16-page Game Boy supplement)

100pp (15 ads)

Times are pretty desperate for an official Nintendo mag in summer, and it shows here, with just a feeble two games up for review. You might imagine, then, that NOM would go to town on those two games, with N64-style super-in-depth breakdowns to the molecular level, but in fact they get a total of just seven pages of extremely superficial coverage, with no body copy at all – the entire review is told in captions, which themselves contain only information straight from the instruction manual. The parts of the two reviews containing the entirety of the actual criticism and analysis of the games are just 34 words long each, crammed into the tiny little score boxes right at the end. (The sentence you’ve just read, for reference purposes, was 35 words.) The rest of the space is mostly taken up with tips and previews, but the pull-out Game Boy supplement is worth a mention, packing more info and criticism into its little pages than the entire magazine proper does.

REAL EDITORIAL PAGES: 59

PAGES OF FEATURE CONTENT: 6 (though 5 of those are about Pokemon in general, not any Pokemon games)

GAMEBOY CONTENT: 0 (but see supplement)

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE: 88% (2 games)

GOOD FOR: Game Boy owners.

BAD FOR: Game reviews, obviously. But "bad" doesn’t even begin to do justice to it.

READ-ME-FIRST NOTES:

"Real editorial pages" means just that – pages which contain new original content. Not included, then, are ads (obviously), directory sections (vastly the same every month), or tips (lazy-arsed space-filling as often as not nicked off the Internet or sent out to everyone by the publisher).

"Feature content" means real features about some actual subject, ie not previews by another name.

WHO’S THE BEST?

No alarms and no surprises here.

1. N64 – as good for you today as it’s always been

2. 64 MAGAZINE – scandalous cover price, but a respectable second place overall.

3. NINTENDO OFFICIAL MAGAZINE – the average game-shop freebie magazine has more critical content than NOM.