1. My moonlighting job as Kato Kaelin’s hairdresser keeps me in Los Angeles most of the time.
2. After watching the Beavis & Butthead marathon last weekend all I could write was, “huh...huhuh...huh..huhuhuh...huh.”
3. I couldn’t stop playing Capitalist Pig! Damn that game is good!
4. Prevented a takeover bid of Inside Mac Games by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Seems he can’t get enough of IMG.
5. One word: Newt
6. Got the latest Yanni CD, it rocks!
7. Joined the Hair Club for Men, and now I have hair again! There is a God.
8. Married Cindy Crawford on February 23rd. Got divorced on February 24th. Turns out she’s got a Pentium! Bummer.
9. Got arrested by the mattress police for removing the “Do not remove this” tag from my mattress.
10. There was a sale at Penny’s!
Well, enough at my feeble attempts at humor. You can tell I’m writing this at 3 in the morning, don’t you?
Anyway, one of the questions we get asked most often is when will the next issue ship and why are we always late? I thought I would take this time to explain why the issues sometimes arrive late and what to expect if you are a new subscriber. There are quite a few factors that come into play when publishing on the Mac, and on CD-ROM.
First, publishing in a market that is relatively small often leads to supply problems. In a typical month roughly 10 Macintosh game titles are released. As a magazine that strives to review the latest games released, we tend to review titles that were released just in the prior month. Unlike traditional paper magazines, you won’t have to wait 3 months after the release of a title for a review. However, in certain months the supply of new games dramatically diminishes. During the January and February months, only a few titles were released, making publishing a FULL issue quite a difficult matter. Because of this we decided to publish 10 times a year back when we started the CD-ROM version of the magazine, which allows us to ship 10 full issues a year without sacrificing content.
Second, previews are extremely difficult to obtain, often taking weeks to months to obtain a beta, demo, etc. For some reason, the Macintosh game market tends to be more secretive than the PC game market, making previews hard to get. But we strongly believe our readers look to us to provide them news and previews of upcoming games and will continue to push for the latest and greatest sneak previews, even if they take longer than usual to get. We also believe our readers cherish some of the great exclusive demos we tend to get. We will often delay an issue by a few days if we learn there’s a chance of getting a cool new demo on the CD-ROM. The A-10 Attack demo on this month’s CD-ROM is a perfect example of this.
Other factors this month contributed to our shipping this issue a tad late. I spent a week in February in Austin covering the Apple/Motorola Games Kitchen as well as the DOOM II preview. We are also experimenting with a new CD-ROM manufacturer this month.
But we also know that no one likes excuses, neither do we. As one of our valuable readers we understand that timely delivery is an important factor to you and promise to try to deliver issues on time in the future. We thank you for your patience.
I’d like to close by asking all of our readers to e-mail us regarding their thoughts on this or any other subject. In the coming months we expect to change some of the content in IMG as well as the look and feel of it. Please e-mail us with any of your suggestions.
