The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Wow!

I've been buying gaming stuff for well, a pretty long time now and I have never been so impressed with a product. I am flat-out-nailed-to-the-floor-stunned. And I have not been a TSR fan since the day they renounced demons and devils from their product line, so I came into this with a fairly hostile eye. I am not a fan of the rules system, nor am I even in a fantasy game of any sort right now. After ten minutes of seeing this program in action on my friend's computer. . . I knew I HAD to own this program.

It installed easily with no hitches and I was browsing and searching for articles in minutes. (Okay, I confess, the first thing I did was read those early Wormy strips that I missed.)

The search index is fast, powerful and simple. The "browser" is a modified and enhanced pdf reader that works better then my "generic" Acrobat Reader program. It is also a full featured program - the Goto menu has the Next Page, Previous Page, Jump to Page X, Next Article, Previous Article options. (Nice touch those last two). You can "bookmark" your favorite locations or articles just like any web browser.

Any huge collection of data is useless if you can not get to it, making the index and search routines absolutely essential. While at this time I have not done an extensive test of the search capabilities, the few dozen I have tried have all been fast and AFAIK complete.

I also have not tested the printing capability, something I am eager to do since my King of The Tabletop game has been long since mutilated beyond playability. Given the quality of the rest of the program, I highly doubt that I will be disappointed.

Of course, the real reason for the program is the data. At your fingertips you have every Tom Wham game, adventure, review, magazine cover, Fineous Fingers strip, letter to the editor, trap, trick, monster, NPC, etc. etc. AD INFINIUTUM that has been published in Dragon magazine prior to issue 251.

It's like that spaghetti sauce. . . it's all in there. That one short story you read years ago and still sticks in your head? It's in there. The cut rules to Awful Green Things from Outer Space - it's in there. (I didn't even know that any rules were cut - they deal with travelling around on the hull of the ship. :-)

I did see two highly trivial flaws. The first is that the text within the browser is small with my current graphics settings (1024x768) and I did not see any way to increase their size from within the program. This does not apply to the articles where a zoom feature can make the text as large as you like. The second is that the program interacts funnily with the Win9x toolbar when set to full screen mode. It usually hides the toolbar, but a couple of times it didn't, leaving the bottom menu stuck behind the toolbar until you alt-tab out and back into the program. (At least that's what I did to correct it.) Also, the Win9x toolbar would not pop up when the program is in full screen mode. Like I said - trivial.

I'll say it again. A phenomenal bargain at TWICE the price.

FYI - The program was installed on a PII-266 with 128meg of ram, a 128 Rage video card and a 32x CD-Rom. The OS was Win98.2.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Dragon Magazine Archive
Author: N/A Category: game Company/Publisher: TSR Line: Dragon Cost: 49.99 Page count: N/A ISBN: 0-7869-1448-3 SKU: Unknown Capsule Review by Allan Seyberth on 11/13/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Modern_day Historical Horror Far_Future Space Comedy Espionage Conspiracy Post-apocalypse Old_West Asian/Far_East Superhero Generic	Wow! I've been buying gaming stuff for well, a pretty long time now and I have never been so impressed with a product. I am flat-out-nailed-to-the-floor-stunned. And I have not been a TSR fan since the day they renounced demons and devils from their product line, so I came into this with a fairly hostile eye. I am not a fan of the rules system, nor am I even in a fantasy game of any sort right now. After ten minutes of seeing this program in action on my friend's computer. . . I knew I HAD to own this program. It installed easily with no hitches and I was browsing and searching for articles in minutes. (Okay, I confess, the first thing I did was read those early Wormy strips that I missed.) The search index is fast, powerful and simple. The "browser" is a modified and enhanced pdf reader that works better then my "generic" Acrobat Reader program. It is also a full featured program - the Goto menu has the Next Page, Previous Page, Jump to Page X, Next Article, Previous Article options. (Nice touch those last two). You can "bookmark" your favorite locations or articles just like any web browser. Any huge collection of data is useless if you can not get to it, making the index and search routines absolutely essential. While at this time I have not done an extensive test of the search capabilities, the few dozen I have tried have all been fast and AFAIK complete. I also have not tested the printing capability, something I am eager to do since my King of The Tabletop game has been long since mutilated beyond playability. Given the quality of the rest of the program, I highly doubt that I will be disappointed. Of course, the real reason for the program is the data. At your fingertips you have every Tom Wham game, adventure, review, magazine cover, Fineous Fingers strip, letter to the editor, trap, trick, monster, NPC, etc. etc. AD INFINIUTUM that has been published in Dragon magazine prior to issue 251. It's like that spaghetti sauce. . . it's all in there. That one short story you read years ago and still sticks in your head? It's in there. The cut rules to Awful Green Things from Outer Space - it's in there. (I didn't even know that any rules were cut - they deal with travelling around on the hull of the ship. :-) I did see two highly trivial flaws. The first is that the text within the browser is small with my current graphics settings (1024x768) and I did not see any way to increase their size from within the program. This does not apply to the articles where a zoom feature can make the text as large as you like. The second is that the program interacts funnily with the Win9x toolbar when set to full screen mode. It usually hides the toolbar, but a couple of times it didn't, leaving the bottom menu stuck behind the toolbar until you alt-tab out and back into the program. (At least that's what I did to correct it.) Also, the Win9x toolbar would not pop up when the program is in full screen mode. Like I said - trivial. I'll say it again. A phenomenal bargain at TWICE the price. FYI - The program was installed on a PII-266 with 128meg of ram, a 128 Rage video card and a 32x CD-Rom. The OS was Win98.2. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Dragon Magazine Archive