Letters

Congratulations on the first issue -- it looks really good (it was a great idea to distribute it in .PDF format).
All the best,
Dave
h0142kdd@rz.hu-berlin.de

To: XYZZYnews
I like your new magazine!! I have been a fan of text based adventures for years now, but I didn't know that people were still fans of them. Thanx for a great magazine!!!

jtmc1@aol.com

Hi, Eileen!

Just thought I'd drop a brief line... I think you've done a really impressive job of your magazine! Don't know how you're going to follow that one up. :) It looks particularly good in .PDF. Look forward to future issues! Who knows? Maybe I'll have something to contribute someday, though the way my game in progress is going right now perhaps I'm being excessively overoptimistic...
Neil K. Guy
neilg@sfu.ca

Any chance of you putting up a postscript version? This would allow many more people to access the pretty version (well, me anyway!)

ct
m92ct@ecs.ox.ac.uk

Hi Eileen,

I finally got Acrobat Reader for unix downloaded in one piece (six megs, slow & unstable link) and managed to print out XYZZYnews #1, and I'm really impressed with your work. Interesting interview with Graham Nelson and reviews of numerous games, and what a layout!
I still find the .PDF format a nuisance though, not to mention the Acrobat Reader which uses almost eight megs of my disk quota :-( If your 'zine wasn't so pretty I'd go for the ascii version, but alas... Don't you think a gzip'ed (or whatever) PostScript file would be just as small as a .PDF file?
Thanks for a truly splendid magazine,

Mads Haahr
haahr@cs.ubc.ca

Mads, First, let me applaud your perseverance in downloading Acrobat Reader in spite of your connection woes. I really want as many readers as possible to be able to see the layout, and I think the .PDF format is the best way to do that cross- platform electronically.
I thought about posting the PostScript format but I went with the .PDF version (which is just a modified PostScript file anyway) so that you can view it on-screen, and use links to go from article to article. Acrobat also has very impressive cross-platform support, and the file size is much, much smaller than PostScript files. The PS file didn't compress that well either, probably because of the fonts. But as I experienced firsthand with issue #1, compressing the files for specific platforms defeated the purpose of making the 'zine available in a format that could be read on a variety of platforms.
Let me also take this opportunity to also remind readers that if the Adobe Acrobat software isn't available on your computer platform of choice (I think the Acorn users are out of luck on this one, for example), don't forget that print subscriptions are always available.--EM

Dear XYZZYnews,

I saw a review of the game Odieus' Quest for the Magic Flingshot in issue 1 of XYZZYnews. Mr. Meckler, the reviewer, states that he completed the AGT version of the game but was unable to complete the Inform version due to a bug that prevented him from cooling the hot springs.
I too noticed the same problem. In the AGT version you can simply throw the beans (any colour) into the spring, but if you try this in the Inform version you get the strange message "Alas, it is closed." But I fiddled around with it for a while and finally discovered that the command "PLANT BLUE BEAN" will do the trick. As a result I finished the game, but only got 148 out of 150 points, and haven't bothered to track down the other 2 yet.

Graeme Cree
72630.304@compuserve.com

Graeme,
Thanks for tracking down the elusive wording. If you're really hung up on those two points, I can see what I can do about getting together a walkthrough and listing how points are accumulated.
-- Lauren Meckler

Dear Madame,
Greetings to you from Japan! I got your XYZZYnews from CompuServe/MACFUN and found it very interesting. I still keep disks of Zork for CP/M. I remember I was just stunned by having noticed how smart the program (the parser) was and how much richness of story and description was condensed into at most 150 KB.
My best IF experiment was "Planetfall". Many years have passed since then and it came to appear a bit corny and gushing, however I think what we can only do is tell the old stories over and over again, and what's important is how well.
Sincerely yours,

Yoichiro Itose
71070.2252@compuserve.com

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