I actually liked Nintendo Power way back in the day...in the days of the NES and Super NES, I thought it had a real "club" vibe to it...like I was part of something. It felt like a publication by Nintendo fans for Nintendo fans.
But slowly and surely it made itself more and more commercial and I lost interest. Advertisements filled the pages, original comics were replaced by still-frames of the cartoons, and the strategies which had once seemed so cool to me stopped being cool because I learned that playing games without them was usually more fun. To some degree I just outgrew NP, but to some degree it lost what made it fun to read even though it was basically a big, biased advertisement for Nintendo. When they didn't have any renewal offer that interested me around the time the Cube came out, I quit.
But hey, free magazines, can't beat that! I'm interested to see what the "new" NP is like...I kind of doubt that it will appeal to me, but I have to agree that it's a good thing for them to at least try to change.