Also, the lateness itself caused a lot of issues as some parts I'd written (like the news) was hopelessly outdated and had to be rewritten.
What is an obvious space-filler (the CPC Retro Dev screens on Page 30-31) was originally a feature on upcoming games, but the problem was that most of them had been released by the time the rest of the fanzine was ready for print! This time I'm focusing on getting the main features written first, and then more time-specific things like news and previews will get done at the end.
I think it will be extremely difficult to have a news section in any kind of magazine nowadays. For news stories we have the Internet. And news stories on the Internet will disappear.
A magazine (be it a diskmag or paper version) is better suitable to contain "stories that won't get old". Like, a review of an existing game, won't get old. Not in a retro-computer community anyway. The magazines will thus be interesting many years later, while Internet news are only interesting for a few days.
Instead of "Upcoming releases", a magazine could have "What's stirring", or "Current activity", thus referring only to what's going on at the moment, which can cover both upcoming releases and recently released stuff.
For future reading (10 years later) such a section serves as a historical reminder.
(Meanwhile, the Internet version has been long gone due to various hosting issues, server-updates that kills the site, disagreements between owners etc etc).
Regarding the competition (the one on page 34, not Eight-Bit magazine), I'll have a think about how I can do it differently next time!
Why can't people figure out to take a picture of the competition with their phone, and then solve it on their computer? Or is it really difficult to make a copy at work? Come on guys.
