Editorial

Welcome to Issue 67 of SynTax. After being so terribly late with
the last issue, I was determined that this one would be on time,
which I always think of being around the middle of the month. All
was proceeding according to plan until July 3rd when the computer,
which had been throwing minor wobblies for a while, decided that
it was going to crash and not even boot into safe mode.  I snarled
at it for a while, then reinstalled Windows ...  which of course
made me lose all my programs and settings etc. I went on for a day
like this, knowing that I'd done a bit of a 'make do' job, with
loads of rubbish still left on the system after 18 months of
installing, uninstalling and reinstalling 100s of programs.

The next day, I took a deep breath, made sure everything I could
think of was safely backed up, and reformatted C. Since then I've
reinstalled Windows ... again ... and started putting my programs
back. Of course I did lose an odd thing - don't we always? - in my
case about 300 fonts and the style file for my labels program. I
thought I'd backed up all the fonts, but I'd only done half. Never
mind. The PC is running nice and quickly, and I'm enjoying seeing
all that free disk space; it'll last about 3 months if I'm lucky!

However, I still have hopes for the mag being *roughly* on time, 
but now you know why it's running a bit late.

On the 'plus' side of adventuring, I finished Callahan's Crosstime
Salloon just before going on holiday (yes, the second one in a
month, down to West Wales this time). It's a great game, and I've
bought a couple of the books that it was based on. I installed
Clandestiny, but couldn't get into it, so I've gone back to Swords
of Xeen. That was an add-on in the M&M universe which was given
with the M&M trilogy pack. When I played it first, I found a
serious bug in that one of the magic shops didn't appear for me,
though it did for other people. It made the game much harder,
trying to survive the earlier stages with only minor spells. I'm
hoping that this time I'll do the thing that makes it appear -
whatever that is! (OR, conversely, not do the thing that stops it
appearing).

I've picked up a few unusual cheap adventures at Makro recently,
so if Swords doesn't work, I may start one of those. Otherwise
Menzoberranzan looks a possible choice. I've got the urge to play
an RPG and Menzo got very good write-ups when it was released
several years ago.

I hope that you're all enjoying the summer, not that the weather
has been too good so far. Thanks as always to those of you who
have found the time to send in contributions.  They are very much
appreciated. See you in September ...

                                                    Sue







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