Would you like to take part in the content of an MSX magazine?
On paper, the idea sounds nice (no pun intended). In reality, though, in these days of "I want information now"-internet, the concept of a magazine is somewhat dated. As in: as soon as the magazine hits the virtual streets, the news is already old. It's basically all the daily news, but collected and hold-back, to be released on a specific day, (bi-)monthly.
But let's say that a group of people gets together to form a new MSX magazine. No idea whether it's to be paper or virtual... let's just say they're going to commit to filling up 32 (virtual) A4-pages (for the Dutch, that was only half of MCCM). That will work for the first edition, and after that, there's less news to find (less of a backlog), less to talk about, all the original ideas a crew brings have already been put in the first edition. In short: I predict problems with continuity. I'm certainly not saying no-one wants a new magazine, I'm also not saying it can't be fun. But it'd be a miracle to see such a magazine reach double digits (or anywhere near).
In the old days, you read a magazine for news, as such editorial crews had sneaky phonelines to all kinds of news sources the reader didn't have. These days, everyone sees news the day it appears. It's everywhere. MRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. So, news in itself might be less useful. What remains are reviews, opinions and tutorials. These may be interesting, but: reviews depend on content, and if there's nothing to review then this corner of the magazine quickly hibernates. Opinions, well, could be. One might wonder whether opinions differ from reviews, and often you just read a review to see what someone thinks about a game you've already played, but alas. Still it would rather feel like a forum post uplifted to a format with DTP and fancy colors/images. Tutorials then, fine. Who's going to write them? And puh-leaze no tutorials about the Print command. Such articles, combined with retro-reviews of old games (yay, let's replay Nemesis 2) are a sign a magazine has ended without telling so. We all saw it in the 90's already, when paper magazines, and eventually disk magazines, went out of juice.
I'd rather see people join current retro-style PDF-magazines instead. Yes, the magazine will be shared with other systems that are equally old. So what? We're all old and way past the classic system wars. And pixel work on an MSX isn't much different from pixel work on an Amiga, apart from palettes, so any graphical tutorials can be interesting for either party. Sharing with other systems at least means there's more content and there's tapping into a broader audience.
Anyway, don't let me stop anything. I just donated my two cents, and one can ignore them as usual. 
On paper, the idea sounds nice (no pun intended). In reality, though, in these days of "I want information now"-internet, the concept of a magazine is somewhat dated. As in: as soon as the magazine hits the virtual streets, the news is already old. It's basically all the daily news, but collected and hold-back, to be released on a specific day, (bi-)monthly.
But let's say that a group of people gets together to form a new MSX magazine. No idea whether it's to be paper or virtual... let's just say they're going to commit to filling up 32 (virtual) A4-pages (for the Dutch, that was only half of MCCM). That will work for the first edition, and after that, there's less news to find (less of a backlog), less to talk about, all the original ideas a crew brings have already been put in the first edition. In short: I predict problems with continuity. I'm certainly not saying no-one wants a new magazine, I'm also not saying it can't be fun. But it'd be a miracle to see such a magazine reach double digits (or anywhere near).
In the old days, you read a magazine for news, as such editorial crews had sneaky phonelines to all kinds of news sources the reader didn't have. These days, everyone sees news the day it appears. It's everywhere. MRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. So, news in itself might be less useful. What remains are reviews, opinions and tutorials. These may be interesting, but: reviews depend on content, and if there's nothing to review then this corner of the magazine quickly hibernates. Opinions, well, could be. One might wonder whether opinions differ from reviews, and often you just read a review to see what someone thinks about a game you've already played, but alas. Still it would rather feel like a forum post uplifted to a format with DTP and fancy colors/images. Tutorials then, fine. Who's going to write them? And puh-leaze no tutorials about the Print command. Such articles, combined with retro-reviews of old games (yay, let's replay Nemesis 2) are a sign a magazine has ended without telling so. We all saw it in the 90's already, when paper magazines, and eventually disk magazines, went out of juice.
I'd rather see people join current retro-style PDF-magazines instead. Yes, the magazine will be shared with other systems that are equally old. So what? We're all old and way past the classic system wars. And pixel work on an MSX isn't much different from pixel work on an Amiga, apart from palettes, so any graphical tutorials can be interesting for either party. Sharing with other systems at least means there's more content and there's tapping into a broader audience.
Anyway, don't let me stop anything. I just donated my two cents, and one can ignore them as usual.
Nice article for a magazine! With some pictures, it could even fill up 2 pages!
