This issue has been highly amusing, to put it mildly, to produce. My old computer showed advancing signs of decrepitude, and was replaced posthaste by a new, modern machine with 20 times the speed, 20 times the hard drive, several gigs of RAM memory, sound cards, speech recognition gadgets, sound bars… Then I tried to persuade the old software to run on the new machine, in that the old machine was bound for rational disposal. Game! is produced using Microsoft Publisher, which may be described as being like Word, but with all the annoying presets turned off, so that it almost always does what you type in, as opposed to doing what someone someplace else thought you should be doing. Also, Publisher has considerable greater facility at doing complex layout. Unfortunately, we then had to convert Game! from Publisher format, which few of you can read, to our conventional .PDF Format, which subscribers see, and matters went downhill from there. I did finally find a POSTSCRIPT printer that I could install-the choice may be poor-installed WINEDT and MIKTEX (these are LaTeX processor and program) to do part of the Postscript to PDF conversion, and GhostView to do the rest, but color handling is not very good. If I have a working PDF printer, I cannot find it. The change also swallowed whole my mail files. I am using Mozilla. I have the old file (I can read it using WordPad, all 300megs of it) but I am working on persuading Mozilla to notice that it has been presented with a mail file. Your clever or amusing ideas are of course welcome. On the bright side, while hunting for things I found Greg Schloesser's most excellent review of the Essen convention, so instead of a normal length issue we have for a change a really huge issue. Pleas do not expect this issue to be the normal size. We continue to look for regular contributors, particularly for miniatures, figure reviews, computer games, role game reviews and articles, and articles on wargames of all sorts. Perhaps our articles simply reflect the current taste in the hobby, in which European Game styles are dominant, and wargames of the modern sort with 40 page rule books are going the way of the dinosaur. Perhaps older games will reappear. Until next issue, remember our most important lesson: Gamers! To Your Tables! Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 4 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com