Writing on the GMC administrator KC LC explained the purpose of the Reviewer’s Choice forum as being “devoted to bringing member’s attention to worthwhile games. That doesn’t mean reviews can’t find fault with a game, or suggest improvements. But we won’t allow members to post reviews that bash bad games.”

A discussion is currently underway as to who will have permission to post reviews once it is officially opened.

The launch issue of what appears to be the Game Maker magazine with the least regular release schedule contains brief game reviews and short articles on Game Maker news topics.  Also present are featured resources such as graphics and game engines and a coding tip.

There isn’t a great deal of textual content but the non-complicated design doesn’t feel like it is lacking anything.  There is however a wordsearch.

The pages appear to be made up of images rather than containing actual text which is a minor irritant and I suspect might cause scrolling lag problems for people reading the file on older machines.

A good start but I’m not really a fan of the 6 month wait to read more and I would hope for more content with half a year of writing time.

Download 7.5MB PDF (left click only)

This is the first time that Sandy has commented on YoYo Games’ finances at the YoYoGames.com website.

I haven’t been able to work out a reason for the spike in traffic at the end of October/early November but the drop in August can be appointed to over 24 hours of downtime effecting the main site.

The last figures we had previous to this were “upwards of 10TB a month” in June last year. See also YoYo Games record annual loss of £180,000 which Sandy refers to in one of his Tweets.

The introduction section of the magazine also reveals that the publication is apparently editorless yet this is the best issue so far.

The main review is of the YoYo Games featured Time Still, also present are short reviews of Prototyping the Invaders, Sludge, Wheels of Imagination 2 and Myths.

NAL is the interviewee in a segment which has much improved from the previous release.  He provides information on the games development projects he is currently working on and passes on some game making advice.

Although designer Matt Haigh left the magazine after just one issue the improved two-column layout has been retained and aside from some mysterious background image selections this release is very well presented.

Finally I believe I can look forward to the next issue without expecting to find something wrong.  The reviews could be a little longer – I wouldn’t mind if less games were featured – but overall a very well done issue.

Download GMIndie Magazine Issue 6

• Keith Stuart made a post today in today’s Guardian Games Blog title “How to become an indie developer in eight steps. Developer Rob Fearon recommends Game Maker:
  

  “Personally, I prefer Game Maker which is a whopping $25. Shoddy DRM and lack of regular updates aside, it’s an immense package.”
  -Rob Fearon, Guardian Games Blog

  A number of the developers mentioned in the article may be familiar to you.

• Ubisoft recently revealed how they plan to combat piracy of their titles in the future – by requiring users to create an online account which they can then use to download purchased games on any computer. Something similar for Game Maker someday?

Third place: Flood the Chamber by scoz
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 13,152
Current Public Rating: 4.0
Previous placements: None
Play on Game Jolt

Second place: TowerClimb by Davioware
Created in: Construct
Current Total Plays/Downloads:  3200
Current Public Rating:  4.3
Previous placements: First place in Minimal Contest (with Spectrum Wing)
Play on Game Jolt

First place: Super Space Rogues by rotten_tater
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 173
Current Public Rating: 4.8
Previous placements: Third place in Minimal Contest (with Fetus)
Play on Game Jolt

With a total of 15 entries this was the worst turnout yet for a Game Jolt competition, though some of its entrants gained a large amount of publicity. Flood the Chamber, the third-place winner, was featured on sites including Destructoid and the Indie Games blog (hence its massive play count).

CROS, the administrator and runner of Game Jolt, has announced plans for an interim contest which will be held over a single weekend in February deemed most suitable for those likely to enter.

Regardless of what it says above this is from the Jan-Feb 2010 issue

A serious question this.

Indie Game Magazine is a paid for 6-issues-a-year publication, available both online and in print, that features reviews of Indie games and articles aimed at the creators of such titles.

The cheapest normal subscription price is $19.95 a year (about $3.30 an issue) with an extra $5 on top if you want access to back issues and have access to “insider information” articles on the site. A print subscription costs $40 in the US and $50 in the UK and Canada.

Markup played with the idea of a printed edition long ago (images sadly were hosted elsewhere) and at least one other Game Maker magazine looked at the concept.

Indie Game Magazine are currently holding a “pay what you like” sale on the $24.95 subscription package.  I say “pay what you like” but when I tried to get it for free (you will find out why later) I discovered that wasn’t truly accurate as I was met with an error “product:j_id112: Validation Error: Specified attribute is not between the expected values of 1 and 10,000.”

I have seen issues of the magazine before and decided that it wasn’t worth paying $3.30 an issue for.  Essentially I judged the quality to be below that of GMTech which is available free.  It is also considerably shorter – excluding the cover, contents pages, advert pages etcetera there are 14 pages of material in the January-February 2010 issue.  It is not a bad magazine but I do not feel it merits a price tag when similar material is available on blogs – congratulations to the team behind it if they have been getting more than a handful of sales.

This brings me on to my main point.  At the bottom of the front cover the magazine has the following notice:

“Indie Game Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.“

A link to the license is here which states “You are free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work”.  So I just paid $1 to get something which it is perfectly legal to distribute freely.  I had previously found back issues of the magazine on the Internet freely available to download (although the sites they are uploaded to do also contain obviously illegal material).

I paid my $1 so you don’t have to.  Is there something I am missing here or would I be okay to upload/link to a copy?

Update: I have decided to make a download link available:  Download Indie Game Mag Issue 8 for Jan-Feb 2010 (13.1 MB). Not sure if this is what they intended but it is legally sound.  Please post your opinion of it here!

Listen again:  
Direct link: gmlive-30-jan-2010.mp3

Next show: 13th February.

• GMLive have released the discussion topics for their rescheduled show this Saturday.

• Jack Brockley has created FlashPunked a blog about the new FlashPunk ActionScript library. It appears to be popular to remake Game Maker games using FlashPunk – more about this in GMTalk which was released last weekend.