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RE: Electronic Gaming Monthly (February 1995)
While I bought as many gaming publications as I could back in the day, if it was a tight on funds purchase, I would go with Gamefan over EGM every time. EGM was a staple, like the Simpsons are to animated sitcoms today, but Gamefan just delivered more of what I was into at the time (what was hot in Japan and could be coming our way).
VideoGames & Computer Entertainment was my first go to and then EGM. But this was really in the late 80s to mid 90s. By the time the PS2 came around, I wasn't really buying magazines as much.
VG&CE was great. It was no fluff coverage. Things were grounded there. Quite the opposite of Gamefan, though I liked Gamefan for the import coverage, not so much their writing. They simply covered games that no one else was covering.
Fun fact, the gaming publication I started with a friend was to be a three way partnership with Bill Kunkel, The Game Doctor in old VG&CE issues (and Electronic Games).
He passed before we could get anything off the ground so we went ahead and pushed forward anyhow.
Bill is also the catalyst to me starting a PR company.
Dude was a straight shooter.
I loved VG&CE for its in depth coverage and they also covered retro stuff before it was really thought of as such. They would publish history type articles on a fairly regular basis. I also loved that they gave computer games equal coverage. While it wasn't uncommon for video game magazines to cover computer games, it was usually an afterthought or at least seemed that way. But they weren't big on publishing the latest rumors nor, as you mention, did they do much in the way of import coverage.
It must have been pretty neat getting to know Bill Kunkel. Reminds me of my own story (though not nearly as interesting). Back in the days before sites like Retromags came into existence, I started scanning and putting some of my own magazine collection online. This would have been starting in 1999. These were primarily my Commodore 64 related magazines and VG&CE. Scanning was enough work for me and I didn't really put any work into post processing but I had a decent scanner and my magazines were in pretty much mint condition so the results were good enough for my purposes. Anyway, I got an e-mail from Andy Eddy one day. He had ran across the VG&CE scans and offered to see if he could find any of his back issues to send me to scan. Nothing ever came of it. Either I had moved on to other things and never got back to him or he never found them, I can't remember now. It was definitely a surprise to hear form him in any context but the internet was much smaller then and there was no telling who you might run across...