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##### Vol. 2, Issue 2
November 15, 1999

#####

From the Mouth of Madness:

Print Me!

by Jason "loonyboi" Bergman

elcome back! We survived our relaunch, which I suppose is a good thing. I had my doubts there. Those of you who attended the IRC launch party, I'm sure can understand why I say that.

We've got some exciting stuff this week for you: first and foremost is the long-awaited relaunch of Birth of a Gamer, with our new columnist Heather Haselkorn. Not only is she a gaming novice, she's a die-hard Mac user (don't worry, she'll have access to PCs to try out non-Mac games). Birth of a Gamer was one of our most controversial columns last year (and on this site, that's a major accomplishment) so be sure to check it out in its new incarnation when it runs tomorrow.

Also premiering this week is Pocket Full o' Love, a spin-off column from our Put a Little Love in Your Pocket cover story. The story, which chronicled the wild and wacky world of handheld gaming, proved so popular (not to mention fun for me to research and write) that we've instituted a bi-weekly handheld gaming column. Because of the relative simplicity of most handheld games, the column will look at several games per issue. It'll be a load of fun, so be sure to check it out.

If that's not enough new stuff for you, we're also kicking off our new online competitive gaming column, Game, Set, Match. Written by Stephanie "Bobbi" Bergman, my fabulous sister, this will look at the emerging world of gaming leagues. Look for it in even numbered issues starting this Wednesday.

In other loony news, in case you haven't noticed yet, there's a little icon in the upper right hand corner that wasn't there last week. That's our new "Print Me!" icon. Click that, and you'll be whisked off to a special, no-graphics version of the article, which is ideal for printing. This has been one of our most requested features since last year, and I'm very pleased to be able to offer it now. The cool thing about the script, is that it'll take the whole article, no matter how many pages it is, and create a printable version of it. This is all thanks to Richard "Bagpuss" Smith, the evil genius behind Webdog, and our resident code monkey.

Regarding the new design, we got a lot of great feedback, with a lot of positive comments. The only real negative comment we received was about our decision to use non-underlined links (or actually, hovering instead of regular underlines). For those of you who aren't into this (truth be told, I really dig it) go into your browser's preferences and disable Cascading Style Sheets support. It's easily done in Netscape, and I know it's possible in Internet Explorer, but I'm not entirely sure how (there's too many damn options in that preferences screen).

Of course, I should probably point out that the redesign was not exactly made for Netscape. Obviously I'm not asking people to switch browsers - the site works just fine in Netscape, but it doesn't look the way it was designed to look. If you want the full effect, switch to Internet Explorer or Opera. Now, before you think that I've flipped, and the site has all kinds of ActiveX and Java, sit back down. We make extensive use of tables, and Netscape has never handled them quite right. The end result, is that you won't see the top and bottom tables the way they were intended to in Netscape. It's no crisis, and hopefully they'll fix the problem (finally) with Netscape 5 when it's released.

Anyway, by the time this goes live, the Quake III: Arena demo should be out…so no doubt you're off playing the heck out of it. So I won't keep you (or myself) any longer…enjoy this week's edition of loonygames, and next week I'll be back with my Playstation 2 'rant.

- Jason "loonyboi" Bergman is the editor in chief here at loonygames.

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Credits: Illustration © 1999 Dan Zalkus. From the Mouth of Madness is © 1999 Jason Bergman. All other content is © 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited, you cartoonish villian, you.