Dear Sir,

$59.00 is a lot of money to spend on a magazine such as yours. I would be willing if things would work properly, but your latest issue #5 has some problems. Your interactive interview would not run on my Gateway2000 486/66 with 16meg RAM. Also, I could not get your patches to work. I went to the D: drive and accessed the PK204G.EXE file but it did not create anything to allow decompression of the ZIP files. There were no instructions on what to do, so no matter what I tried, nothing would happen. If you are going to use compressed files you need to adequately describe how to use them. You need to put out a defect free product to get people to spend the $59.00 subscription price. A magazine in paper format is easy to use, you come close but aren't there there yet. When you get there, I might spend the $59.00 for a subscription. Hopefully, your next issue will work better.

J.M.K.
(by fax)

That's funny. We often use that phrase ourselves when we get the early pressings of our latest episode: "Ooops. Hope the next one works better."

You're lucky I used up my yearly supply of venom in last month's letters section. With your video problems, I'd recommend giving us a call at 802 767 9145 and asking for tech support. I don't know if our tech support guys have managed to solve EVERY problem people have thrown at them, but nobody's mail-bombed us yet, so I guess most of them get fixed.

As far as the patches thing goes, I've got mixed feelings. Originally, since we generally come within 10-20 MB of filling the disc, we thought this was just a great way of topping off the tank. It would give those of our viewers who don't have a modem, or easy access to one, a way to get the patches they needed. Well, we caught some flak (and, I guess, rightfully so) because we zipped all our patches, and didn't put PKUNZIP on the disc.

Our goal was never to be the Help Desk for the entire computer entertainment industry, but I guess we've put ourselves in that spot. Oh well. I can't tell you how to apply every individual patch that we put on the disc, since, honestly, we have only a small fraction of the games we have patches for actually installed on any of the machines here at the office. In general, however, if you copy the aforementioned PK204G.EXE file onto your hard drive and run it, it will explode into the files comprising the shareware version of PK's popular archiving tools. Read the file called MANUAL.DOC that will appear; it will tell you everything you need to know about unzipping files. One last word of warning: don't try to run PK204G.EXE from the CD; it will try to create these files on your CD drive, which will fail.

Once you have a working understanding of PKUNZIP, most patches require you to either unzip them into the directory where you installed the game or unzip them into a separate directory and run a program which will actually install the patch for you. I recommend unzipping a patch into a separate directory, then looking for a file called README.TXT (or something similar). Most patches come with such a file; this should tell you exactly how to apply that specific patch. If no instructions exist, try running any executable created by unzipping the patch file. If it crashes, you probably need to unzip the files into the directory where the game is located.

CAVEAT: this is what we mean by "all liability for using patches and upgrades is assumed by you, the user." If you mess up installing a patch and wipe out your saved game which you've been playing for nine months, too bad. If you really have no clue what you're doing, PLEASE, ask a more computer-literate friend or call the company that makes the game before you do anything for which you're not willing to accept the consequences.

Finally, patches that are EXE files on IE are self-extracting archives. Copy these into a directory on your hard drive and run 'em, and they automatically extract the archived files into that directory. Otherwise, they should work just like ZIP files.

T.K.