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December Magazine Releases

Game Maker Magazines

  • Download GMTech Issue 9
  • Download MarkUp Issue 10 (December)

The past few days have seen both Game Maker magazines releasing their latest issues, one considerably more seasonal than the other.

MarkUp have switched to a two column layout, which I think is a big improvement over the previously favoured three-column option. But that isn’t the only presentational change, the whole magazine looks considerably ‘cleaner’ and less cluttered than it has been in previous months.

GMTech have fixed the font issue that made their recent releases so hard for some people to read, and have stuck with the same layout which, I must admit, is begining to get a little boring. Gone are the puzzles that made their first appearance in the last issue.

Content wise this has certainly been a strong month. There are 9 game reviews or previous between the magazines, and once again MarkUp have provided us with some (rather short) book reviews. A relatively recent addition to MarkUp, Development Journals continue and there are also two “The making of…” articles – real up-to-date content from developers using Game Maker.

GameMakerTech has some strong editorials, although I really expected more from the “Reasons to Upgrade Game Maker” article which at just 276 words was disappointing. The User Opinion question this months is “How Much Would You Pay For GM?” which I think could have been presented in a much better way – reading the comments is boring and there is no conclusion, just a collection of quotes offering nothing of merit – this could easily have been a GMC topic.

The “What’s Going On” pages at the start of GMTech give us some news about the magazine, Game Maker and the community although it does appear as if it is turning into a message board for promoting new projects. Still MarkUp does not have anything like this which I consider to be a valuable place to catch up on the latest goings on (if you don’t regularly check GameMakerBlog that is!).

The layout of MarkUp is superior and I think on content it is just ahead this month but there is not much between the two magazines at the moment. Neither magazine provides much information about the release of their next issue, most notable is the absence of a release date from both publications. I guess we will just have to wait and see how the magazines continue in the new year…

N.B: The next issue of MarkUp will be a New Year Mini-Special released on Jan 1st 2008.

What do you think?

3 Comments

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  1. Well yeah.. we should probably provide a more defined release schedule.

    We should probably work on the new issue now.. but meh I’m so lazy 😛 [don’t kill me Phil, it’ll be there on time!]

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