ISSUE LINK: https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/official-xbox-magazine/official-xbox-magazine-issue-2/

XBOX OFFICIAL MAGAZINE: MAGAZINES EVOLVED.

We had to stay in January 2002 for one more episode this season, because we just couldn’t overlook XBox Offical Magazine’s massive walkthrough for Halo: Combat Evolved. We also couldn’t overlook the fact that Imagine Media/Future U.S. Publishing launched this magazine at the same time they were sunsetting NextGen–and there was plenty of overlap between the two staffs.

Goodbye to think-y features for (real and aspiring) grown-ups, hello to world-exclusive previews, reviews, and digital assets obtained via first-party licensing.

For everything XBox Official Magazine did well, though, we were rubbed very much the wrong way by its unholy union of Ultra Game Players’s 100-point review scale and NextGen’s five-star rubric. Even still, we came away (mostly) very impressed with eventual editor-in-chief Francesca Reyes’s review of the idiosyncratic Munch’s Oddysee.

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Sources include the Video Game History Foundation, the Internet Archive, Retromags.com, our original research, and our personal magazine collections. The FunFactor theme, and all other original songs, are composed and performed by Millennium Falck. Check out his work at millenniumfalck.com!