Love the header art.

Can't recall specifically, sorry.

And @jparish.bsky.social!

I think about this a lot.

The thing I always come back to when I think about this, though, is we ended up doing a five-page preview of the game that issue instead, and we ended up doing four pages of reviews the next issue. So Konami ended up getting more coverage than it would have otherwise.

I remember calling @milkman.bsky.social and talking through this, and we ultimately decided to punt the review. We got to feel good about ourselves, and we even threw a little stink about it in the magazine.

(I think I recall hearing later than the NDA wasn't universal and some other outlets or territories weren't asked to agree to the same conditions, so I'm still not clear on whether we just got the wrong forms.)

That seemed like something that should be in a preview agreement rather than a review one, so I flagged it, but it was apparently what they wanted.

Reading through the agreement, I noticed that it said we couldn't mention anything after a certain point. I forget the exact cutoff, but it was early in the game, after the first chapter or something.

This was a little awkward on its own, because we'd already played a bunch of the game and they should have sent these out before we got in the building, but sometimes things were more casual back then.