Editorial

It's that time of year again when the contributors' prizes are
awarded. I am very grateful to everyone who contributes, and I
wish SynTax could stretch to more prizes. However, this year, the
top contributor was James Judge, runner up was The Bitmap Kid,
third Brian Burke, fourth Alex van Kaam and fifth Roy Sims. Full
details are in the Contributions section but I'd like to
congratulate them all again here, especially JJ.

I still have some contributions in hand, from the winners as well
as the rest of you. Largely, they wouldn't make any difference to
the placings. The exception is Alex, who recently started a
solution, with maps, to World of Xeen; since I only started
serialising it last issue, it just wasn't feasible that I could
fit more of it into the mag than I have done, both due to space
and also the balance of the contents. Luckily he hadn't expected
me to, and was happy for me to hold some of it back.

I know I did talk of doing a double issue this time to use up more
contributions but this idea fell by the wayside for various
reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I've had some
health problems lately. I started headaches and pains in my left
eye before Xmas, which new glasses haven't helped, and now it
looks as though the problem is high blood pressure. I'm writing
this on Tues March 8th having had my BP checked again on Monday
(still up), blood tests today (ouch) and have yet another
appointment tomorrow.  The eye pain has been the main problem and
has meant I've had to cut back the time spent on the computer
(dammit); I've even had to stop doing some of the columns for PC
Mart until I get it sorted out. Using a WP is a strain on the eyes
anyway and as a result I couldn't physically cope with doing two
disks for this issue.

So, in order to give a true result for the year, giving priority
to contributions that affect the final result, and also use a fair
selection of other readers' reviews etc, a few regular features
(adverts and index, four big files) have been dropped this issue
due to lack of space and will be back next time.  I would say that
this is the hardest issue I've put together in 5 years in terms of
jiggling the contents about!  My apologies to anyone whose
contributions haven't appeared this issue as expected; I had to
make some tricky decisions at the last minute.  Normal service
will be resumed next issue!

I've got an apology to make to Alex too - I'll admit it, I'm an
idiot! There's invariably something that goes wrong with each
issue of SynTax, thankfully it's usually something small. Last
issue, after making a big point about Alex's maps and the control
codes used in them ... what did I do? Save 'em as ASCII - force of
habit! Alex rang and told me and I couldn't believe what I'd done.
So, I've (hopefully) done them correctly this time and I've also
repeated last issue's first set of Clouds of Xeen maps.

Now, we all start games but are unable to complete them for one
reason or another. Maybe we just run out of steam! But we'd like
to know what happens at the end. Roy had the brilliant idea
of sending me some save games from the end of a variety of PC
adventures and RPGs complete with instructions for how to finish
them. I'd like to add to this disk and will be sifting through my
own save games but if you can add some saves of your own, please
contact me. Remember to add an ASCII doc telling the player what
to do too in order to see the final section of the game.

You'll notice many files this issue have the symbols - o - at the
end of them. This is a new idea (thanks, Alan!) to force the
paging at the end of the files in the PC version which doesn't use
strict paging like the ST and Amiga versions. It also makes it
clearer to PC readers when they have reached the end of a file.

Well, I think that's it for another issue. Thanks again to all of
you for your help and support in putting the mag together each
issue and well done again to the top five contributors.

                                                  Sue



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