The latest issue of ChoiceBeat, a quarterly zine for fans of visual novels and interactive fiction, released today. This issue includes a review of The Midnight Saga: The Monster and a coupon for 35% off if you decide you want to buy it. In addition to reviews, the zine includes a number of articles, from developer spotlights and retrospectives to thoughts on game design. There’s also an exclusive interactive microstory, Rebellion at the Billionaire Bunker, that you can access from a link in the zine itself; it has four possible endings, and tracking them all down is a pleasant way to kill ten or fifteen minutes.
You can download the zine or read it online at Issues – ChoiceBeat
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Wonderful! I really enjoy the zine (need to catch up with the earliest issues actually!) and it’s so fun expanding my IF knowledge and hearing from people who are so passionate about it!
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Clicked the link and looked at it. Really puzzled why it is made into something that looks like a two page spread which is sort of like a PDF but isn’t? Then after reading the synopsis, clicked through to read the actual review in a normal HTML webpage.
Can see that the quality of the articles seem to be pretty good. Just a bit annoyed by the faux PDF setup, which is too small and have to zoom in and deal with panning it all over to read the synopsis or articles in the initial two page spreads. It really looks like they were typesetting it for print, not for screen.
If this was a print magazine back in the early 2000s, I would have bought it every month from the newsagent together with other magazines like Retro, Retro Gamer and Edge. As it is, the default view is too tiny for me to read comfortably on my 1080p 42" tv, but zooming in and turning the page results in it going back into the default tiny view.
I don’t know much about that - layout and design is probably the area of publishing I know the least about - but you could write to the editor at choicebeateditor@gmail.com and let him know how you feel.
@HarrisPS - If you ever wanted to contribute an article I’m sure that could be arranged!
