Almost every OHRRPGCE-related site has hosted articles in some form or fashion; whether they be reviews on games or thoughts on game design. It's fairly simple to maintain a stream of individual content like that. One of the more difficult tasks is bringing together multiple features under a single roof; like a magazine. Encouraging folks to work together to meet a deadline can be quite a daunting task. This month's issue of HamsterSpeak marks the third year of the HamsterSpeak Magazine; which in itself continues to raise the bar for the longest running OHRRPGCE magazine in history. There were several different OHRRPGCE magazines created in the past, but none have had HamsterSpeak's steady momentum and success. Before taking a brief look back at the history of HamsterSpeak itself, let's look at some of the grandfather magazines that were created years before the thought of HamsterSpeak.

OHRRPGCE Monthly, Rinku's stab at a Nintendo Power-styled magazine, was the first OHRRPGCE feature to follow a magazine format. It debuted in September 2000, ended January 2002, and had a total of six issues during that time period. This magazine was around at the peak of OHRRPGCE activity, and covered some early contests, such as the first two 48 Hour Contests and the Magnus Sequel Contest. Household game names such as The Adventures of Powerstick Man, Walthros, and Fantasy Under a Blue Moon X Version 4 were reviewed during this time as well. One of my favorite things from OHRRPGCE Monthly has to be the massive article on Creating a Game by Rinku (with some additional content from Charbile and Harlock). It had some amazing content that can still be used for game design today.

OHRRPGCE Monthly began as a monthly magazine, but quickly became multi-month issues towards the end. Regardless, the magazines were always packed with content and written well. The only thing that I wasn't a huge fan of was the review format, which generally allowed for only one or two paragraphs of content per game. Some games only need that much, but many could have went into much more detail and been a lot more enjoyable to read that way.

Nine months after the final issue of OHR Monthly, Reasonably Septaweekly came in to take its place. Directed once again by Rinku, the magazine featured some good stuff, but lacked the same passion of OHRRPGCE Monthly. There were fewer reviews, but I think that the majority of them were much longer than the ones written for OHRRPGCE Monthly; quality over quantity I suppose. It also featured some nifty articles, but some of them were way over my hillbilly head (Mathematical Basis of Game Design comes to mind. Good God, what the crap are you talking about in this article, Rinku?). Sadly, Reasonably Septaweekly only lasted two issues, and it would be almost two years until the next magazine-ish feature would emerge from the community.

OHR Weekly started sometime in or around 2004, but I'm not exactly sure when it did. It had more of a newspaper feel to it, but the content is worth noting regardless. Created by Chaos Nyte, this feature aimed at being, you guessed, a weekly article that would focus on the most recent news of the OHRRPGCE Community. Often times, it would just summarize key posts from the forums and link to reviews made on Castle Paradox, but it would also feature some original articles from time to time. OHR Weekly lasted over a dozen issues but eventually came to a halt as well.

Between late 2004 and 2007, the OHRRPGCE community experienced a downfall. Many veterans left and were replaced with clueless newbies. Although some quality games were still being produced, there were a multitude of terrible games being made along side of it. There were hundreds of games on the Castle Paradox list, and many of them were not being reviewed. Don't get me wrong, we all are new at some point, but there's a difference between someone that will try and improve and those who could care less and want to plague the community with constant crap (Gnome's work comes to mind). The morale of the OHRRPGCE community continued to dwindle, and activity came to an all-time low. The OHRRPGCE community was quite stagnant.

Long time OHRRPGCE user and author of the infamous Walthros, Paul Harrington, decided to start a new magazine in early 2007 to help get the community as a whole active again. HamsterSpeak is by far the longest running magazine in OHRRPGCE history, with 35 issues and counting. Content for this magazine has generally been written well, and the vast majority of reviews are quite lengthy. Any member of the OHRRPGCE community is welcome and encouraged to contribute to HamsterSpeak. Although some issues have been larger than others, you can always count on having at least a handful of articles to read each and every month. Over the years, many great articles and features have been written for the magazine. For a complete list of articles contributed to HamsterSpeak, go here.

Although I feel that the OHRRPGCE's "golden age" has long since come and gone, there are still quality games being worked on and released today. James and Co. are frequently releasing amazing updates to the engine itself, contests are still common, and HamsterSpeak is still going strong. Although I yearn for the old days where the message boards were exploding with communication, I think that the community is just as good as ever (even though it is quite small). I can't help but think that the HamsterSpeak Magazine has a lot to play in it as well. For three years, it has been the source for the latest news, previews, reviews, articles and features. Reading the content each month is a great way to maintain motivation on your own projects. In fact, I have HamsterSpeak to thank personally for bringing me back to this community. I had been gone for years, and stumbled upon some of the first issues one day. Seeing some of the new features that the OHRRPGCE had and some new games helped nudge me into finally creating my very first game.

In conclusion, I think that HamsterSpeak has played a very important part of the community for the past three years. I feel that we would be in a degenerative state as a whole if it weren't for the magazine. There were times where content was slim, but it always worked out in the end. The hard work put into each and every issue may not always be given enough recognition, but it is always much appreciated nonetheless. Here's to hoping for the continued success in both the OHRRPGCE community and HamsterSpeak magazine.

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"Around 3 or 4 years ago, I stumbled upon an article from OHRRPGCE Monthly; Rinku Hero's "Creating a Game" trilogy, and it very probably changed the way I look at game design forever.

Believe it or not, I actually printed the entire thing out and read it at school when I could (alongside the Grand List of Console RPG Cliches, but that's another story). I thought studying such an article would strengthen my game-makin' skills.
And it did! Not immediately, of course. The fact of the matter is that game design and everything that comes with it are skills that take lots and lots of practice to understand and perfect. What the article taught me was the importance of planning and infrastructure.
Now that I have concrete maps of my games' layouts, I know exactly how and when they're going to end. Which means that they will eventually end. This somehow makes everything else easier to work on.

So kudos to old man Rinku, wherever he is.

Also, Hamsterspeak. Every time I see someone I know (or better yet, myself) get featured, I get incredibly giddy and excitable about game-making. This is felt even stronger if the issue includes informative articles with nifty info I never knew before, like a sprite or plotscripting tutorial.
Pretty pictures are awesome too, we have some great artists here." -Baconlabs

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"Back in the day, any time I released a game I used to wait (and wait and wait) for the next issue of Monthly/Septaweekly to see a review of
my game. There was no pleasing Haggard, but one would always wonder how close he could come to trying.

Towards the end of Weekly v2, I found myself in the same position, covering the At A Glance column, and I could certainly appreciate how
playing through all the dreck would lend itself to misanthropy. When the magazine tapered off into oblivion, I think I'd collected a number
of these mini-reviews should the next issue ever go up. Better yet, I apparently still have them!

I wrote too many ill-advised articles for that thing, but a few alright ones too." -Uncommon

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"I occasionally would take a look at one of the older ones, but the first one I've really consistently paid much attention to is Hamsterspeak.

There was one thing in one of the older magazines (Reasonably Septaweekly if I remember right) that I remember... somehow, my old junk game The Kirby Lands ended up on their Top 30 list once.

*goes and checks the issue*

Yeah, it was the October 2002 issue. I still don't understand how that ever happened, especially since I didn't join Castle Paradox and upload TKL there until almost a full year later. How did people even know about the game back then?" -FnrrfYgmSchnish

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"I've always found the idea of the OHR magazines fascinating. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have started this one, would I? For the most part, the content of OHR Monthly and Septaweekly was solid, but I still can't get over how garish their design was, especially Septaweekly. I know HamsterSpeak won't win any prizes for web design, but god almighty did that pink and black color scheme grate on the eyes. I remember being confused by whether "Rinku/Rydia/Raft/Rell" referred to a person or a group, and I still don't really get it.

To get into specific content: The Release Date Calendar in OHR:M is pretty funny to me, because outside of contests, almost no one in this community ever has or ever will release games when they expect to. Everything gets delayed, understandably, but I do know the value of setting a good deadline. Making that deadline public can lead to embarrassing situations, though.

The Monterey Penguin cover is one of my favorite pieces of OHR magazine art. It looks great, and it would make an awesome box for the game, if it were ever finished. I love the Walthros one too, but I've got a bit of a bias there.

The walkthroughs that showed up in Monthly from time to time were a great idea, and I'd love to see something done like that, with plenty of screenshots/artwork, in HamsterSpeak. Pepsi's Okedoke review has sort of followed that mould, in a way. This sort of thing would be best saved for full, completed games, but I guess we don't have a ton of those to choose from.

While, in general, Septaweekly was good, some parts of it never sat right with me. Some of the articles really felt like their authors had just taken a Philosophy 101 course and wanted to namedrop as many topics as they could while sort of reviewing games. Others just felt pretentious and embarrassing.

There were some pieces in OHR Weekly that I really liked, but honestly, it was kind of doomed from the start. Even at its most active, there wasn't enough of a constant flow of content in the OHR community to justify a weekly magazine, and it ended up having way too many forum drama stories (that no one would remember or care about in a month) and IRC chat logs, like this absolute disaster. I still feel like saluting Camdog for calling it out, even if I didn't realize quite how right he was at the time. At the time he'd written that, I hadn't even read that chatlog, because look at it, how in the hell can anyone read that? If those were the golden days, you can keep them. I like today." -Paul Harrington