> Your Episode 4 CD-ROM is a great concept. I enjoyed what LITTLE
> there was on it. However, CD's will hold up to 680 Meg of
> material and you stop short at 127 Meg. For me, to be truly
> worth an investment, you need to add the bug fixes,
> advertisements, product recommendations, etc. Make it truly a
> magazine on CD. Also, the price is way out of line. My Computer
> Gaming World subscription is only $29.00 for 12 months. Yes, I
> have to read paper, but then, I can take it anywhere I go. CDs'
> material is cheap, and far less equipment is used to produce
> them than a full color paper production. Get the price down to
> a normal magazine subscription, put the rest of the magazine on
> it and you'll have something I would truly be interested in
> buying.
>
> J.M.K.
> by fax

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I hate to say this about a fan, but almost everything you have to say is wrong.

127 Meg? Dude, I don't know what version of Episode 4 YOU have (I THOUGHT there was only one . . . ), but my copy has 2,502 files totaling 651,670,290 bytes of information. If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself by changing to the root of your CD ROM drive and typing "dir /s" (DOS 6.x). Needless to say, this abundance of editorial is why we had to omit the patches and ads that month. Incidentally, it's 660 MB a CD-ROM holds, not 680.

As far as the price goes, reliably informed sources tell me the cost of producing a CD-ROM is comparable to the cost of producing a paper magazine . . . if you don't count the cost of the flip case it comes in or what it costs to pay someone to put the discs in the flip case before shipping them. With these added expenses, the cost of producing an individual piece shoots up to more than double what it costs to print a magazine. Also, your assertion that it takes more equipment to make a paper mag than a CD is also false. Paper mags really only require a powerful PC to do the layout, probably with a SyQuest to send color separations out to be filmed. Throw in flatbed and slide scanners for photos, screen shots etc. as necessary. We use all of those here at IE, plus CD-ROM burners, video capture boards, audio equipment, countless videotape players and every software package known to man.

What your complaint really seems to come down to is that you don't feel IE is a comparable value, for the money, to a paper magazine like CGW. Well, let's take a look. In the CES issue of CGW (which appeared a month after Episode 4 of IE, incidentally), there are 115 screen shots (not counting the Table of Contents or ads, but otherwise being VERY generous). These are spread out among the CES coverage, 17 additional articles about games and a few columns and hardware reviews. To be honest, CGW also has a few text-only columns, such as the rumor bag, that add another couple of pages of editorial. IE is comparable, with 21 game previews, reviews and hints and tips in addition to our CES coverage. HOWEVER, Episode 4 had 780 screen shots for all those articles. Granted, some of them WERE of pretty poor quality, but even if half of them sucked (which they didn't), that would still be THREE TIMES as many screen shots as a comparable issue of CGW. Add to this the 75 video clips on the disc (of which, 45 were included in articles, while the other 30 comprised the interactive interview) which you will NEVER see in a paper mag, and I think that IE's value becomes crystal clear.

Honestly, I'm a little disappointed in your letter. We're proud of what we do here. Though we haven't honed IE to perfection yet, we're working on it. Given that nobody's ever done anything like this and come close to succeeding before, we feel that we're doing a decent job. And while we're thrilled and delighted to hear our viewers' opinions - we may not always agree with them, but that's life - if you insist on trying to slam us with facts, please get your facts straight first.

T.K.