Dear IE,

As an avid computer and video gamer, I really enjoy your product. It is well worth the subscription price, and hopefully with experience, you guys will only improve. Enough brownnosing . . . onto my comments.

The front end is one of the better interfaces I've seen in this kind of product (possibly unfairly comparing your product with the slew of cover disks I see each month from print magazines) and I only have a few minor suggestions for improvement:

1. There should be an option to have the sub-menu appear automatically after any review, preview, etc., where there is further info on the product. It's really distracting to have to click in the middle of a story to access it or have to restart a story to go back and check out the sub-menu.

2. The interactive interview is a great idea but doesn't really work in practice. Perhaps you could set it up like the letters page and give the user access to all of the questions at once. This way you can avoid the inevitable replaying of questions when your choices are all repeats.

3. How about a numerical rating system for games? You could list the score next to the game in the menu so we can see at a glance which ones are worth checking out for their quality or to get a good laugh at the wisecracks your witty staff will poke at a real stinker. As we can all attest to, time is short and it's impossible to check out every piece in each issue. I'd hate to miss a good game in a genre I don't normally play because I didn't check out your review.

Random thoughts:

1. I love the dual reviews.

2. Definitely expand the letters page (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).

3. Commercials will be fine if not force-fed (as in issue # 1) to us. Perhaps one every half-hour or something along those lines.

4. The video quality has been steadily improving in past issues. How about an option to resize the video window (this program is operating in Windows after all!). This would have to be designed differently from the current interactive interview but try to keep it in mind for future revisions to the interface.

5. More reviews of console games. I understand that to run this disc, you have to have a PC, but the name of the disc is Interactive Entertainment, not Interactive PC Entertainment. I'm really looking forward to the next wave of home consoles and would love to see this type of coverage for games for the Sony Playstation and Nintendo's Ultra 64.

6. Let's see the reviewers! It's nice to put a voice to a face and a name.

7. If you ever in the market for a new reviewers, I've been told I have a voice for radio (and a face to match . . . ha, ha). I've been playing games of all kinds for more than 20 years and don't see myself giving it up anytime in the future. May your product last as long as I continue to play games.

B.S. (Smoke)
Staten Island, NY