Dear Future Gamer

Hey there, thanks for a superb weekly mag! The website has improved too (a lot), and the only thing I really miss is the Stream Lounge. Why is it out? It was a really neat idea to let gamers have a sneak peak at characters in the games to come. Why not reopen it and maybe add some of the most famous sprites in a kind of retro section? Over the year we'd have a pretty cool character archive. Are developers really having problems with letting people see in-game characters in advance? I mean, they don't have to offer you their new-super-secret-mega-awesome-hyper-diper (sorry, lost it) main characters, right?

Anyway, please bring it back.

David

FG: For newer readers, the Stream Lounge was a section of the website where you could play around with 3D characters from games in real-time. It was cutting edge stuff and I thought it was absolutely excellent. The problem was, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't persuade developers or publishers to spend 10 minutes sending us some 3D Studio Max models. Electronic Arts sent us a character from DK2 which was excellent, and Pumpkin Studios sent us some models from their lovely Warzone 2100 game, but after 6 months nobody else had bothered.

I don't understand it myself - it's a perfect way to get your game a bit of free publicity, it gives our readers something extra to play around with and everyone's a winner. but when you've only got two people supporting you it starts to look a bit sad, so eventually I pulled it. I don't know how many software houses and developers said, "Yeah, I've seen it and it's great, we'll get something sent over," and then didn't bother, but it was more than just a few. If that sounds like a bit of rant, then it is. At the time we were the only website in the UK with the technology from MetaCreations to do this and I just got empty promises. End of explanation and rant.