Editorial First of all a very big thanks to those of you who sent contributions following last issue's plea. Several of you sent in reviews but, of course, I've used most of them up for this issue and am now almost out of them again. So, once again, any reviews, short or long, will be very welcome for next issue. Secondly, congratulations to Jenny Perry and Brian who got engaged on Jenny's birthday. Isn't it lovely to get good news?! Best wishes to both of them for the future. I'm writing this issue's editorial extra early, it's only 2nd September. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get this issue sooner than usual. What it means is that we're off on a week's holiday on Saturday 7th September, getting back on the 13th which only leaves me (officially) two days to finish SynTax. So this week I am having a big push to get as much of it finished as possible. Before I get onto adventure related topics, could I remind you all to change your email address books please and delete my MSN address? I get so much junk mail through it now that I can't face checking it very often. I think most of you know to use sue@syntax2000.co.uk instead, or my Freeserve address which is also still current. But if you write via MSN you'll probably wait a long time for a reply and may NEVER get one if I don't notice your genuine message among all the spam. Just after the last issue went out I managed to trash the 2000 partition on my PC by confusing some of its settings. Then through trying to fix it, I killed the XP partition too! In the end, the only thing I could do was reformat and start again. Fortunately I'd done a full backup when I'd sensed things were going wrong but it's still taking ages to get everything back up and running. And I'm learning some of the limitations of XP. The SynTax web site is getting a nice lot of visitors. A few weeks ago I put a short message on there asking people to contact me if there was a particular solution they wanted that wasn't yet up on it. I was pleased to get a few emails, mostly from people wanting more obscure solutions such as Grandad and the Holey Vest, an old ST adventure, and some of the Battune games. I couldn't help with all the Battune games and that got me thinking. I reviewed some of them back in Issue 15. There are eight in all, grouped into two sets of four. Tom Lorimer did solutions for some of them and I did others. But there were some neither of us could do. Getting the email spurred me to have another crack at them. They are very simple looking games but contain a strong random element in terms of the layout of the locations and even which ones are there in each game. This isn't as bad as it sounds! But if does mean that being able to save the game is essential if you're not going to have to redraw maps for the early stages. The problem? When I tried to play one of the games under Me, it wouldn't let me save. I got a fair way into the unfinished games but in the end being unable to save was too much of a disadvantage. So I put the games to one side and went on to something else. Today I thought ... I wonder if I could run it if I boot to the command prompt? But Me doesn't give that option. A final thought - what about using a boot disk? Success! It worked! I was very pleased because I hate being beaten by a computer. Apart from Battune, I've messed about a bit with Hotel Giant and Industry Giant, looked at a demo of an adventure called GAG, and dusted off Caesar 3 to see if I can complete the episode called Lugdunum which is the one that stumped me last time. No success so far. I also downloaded the demo for Emperor (128meg!) and started that. I hope I'll see a lot of you at the Adventure Convention on October 26th at the Allesley Hotel, Birmingham Road, Allesley Village, Coventry CV5 9GP. Full details were in the last issue including a booking form. Enjoy the contents of this issue. Any comments? Do let me know. And if you've got more reviews up your sleeves, PLEASE send them in! All the best, Sue - o -