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Cranberry Publishing’s first digimag on the GamerZines website was 360Zine, an emagazine covering all things XBox 360, which went live last month. Hot on the cyber-heels of that digimag came PCGZine, and as you probably guess, deals with all gaming genres on the computer. The first 42-page issue features articles on World of Warcraft, Command & Conquer 3, and Medieval II, among many others. Not stopping there, PCGZine also covers some geek stuff, like an in depth look at the upcoming DirectX10, and gives those interested in behind-the-scenes gaming news their fix with an interview of David Rutter, a development studio manager responsible for Championship Manager 2007. As is often said about games that have the potential to overthrow an earlier game in their genre: could PCGZine be the PC Gamer killer? The bar has certainly been raised, that much is for sure.

Here’s how PCGZine has done it. Differing from AFK Magazine, this digimag comes as an Adobe download in .pdf format, weighing in at about 26MB. Once opened, the digimag pushes itself up to cover your entire monitor viewing area, laying out the contents in a clear and coloful array before your eyes. Unlike traditional print magazines that have their contents displayed down two pages seperated by the spine of the magazine, PCGZine’s pages are written on and displayed as one page per screen, so to speak. The major advantage being that readers get the full article and large pics both across the width and breadth of their monitors, with no sinking crease hindering the display like in print magazines. If you have a nice (or better) 21" LCD monitor like I do, it’s quite a very nice and welcome sight to behold.

Page manipulation is done simply by clicking on the current page to turn to the next one, or by using the menu bars at top and bottom to zoom in and out, print the current page, or jump to another section. Clicking on website URL’s open up your browser and take you to that page. There’s even a toggle from full-page view to windowed view, in case you need access to your desktop or anything else underneath. But wait, it gets better! Not only does PCGZine also have sound, like AFK Magazine, it also has video! About every third page has a small PIP (picture-in-picture) of some 10-20 second video related to the current page, mainly advertisements in this issue for World of Warcraft, Battlestations Midway, Warhammer Mark of Chaos and others. Simply outstanding! Each video only plays once, with a Replay option available. Each video also loaded up quickly and played flawlessly during my first and subsequent viewing.

As with AFK Magazine, I can only list one very minor itrritation concerning PCGZine. Some of the articles have screenshots with the message ‘Roll over screen for annotations’ above them. I’m guessing there were supposed to be tooltip-like popup to see once the mouse cursor hovered over an item in the screenshot. That didn’t work for me, not on any of the screens. I don’t know if was something with me using Adobe Reader to view the digimag, or if perhaps that function is simply broken. Either way, it took nothing away from my reading, watching and listening pleasure.

So, what do these new forms of media mean to the genre as a whole? I for one cannot say. What I do envision, though, is that there will be some major changes to the way print and online magazines do business from now on. Let’s use the digital version of our beloved Armchair General magazine for example, which I get in lieu of the printed version each issue. Imagine just how groovy it would be if the Editor’s Letter also came in an audio file, so we could read and hear Jerry Morelock’s words. Or, how about a slideshow of John Antal’s Interactive ICS, complete with battle sounds and Simon Pugh-Jones’ fantastic photography in full screen? Quotes from military history made clickable, opening a .wav file of the actual quoter speaking his or her own words? The possibilities are so wide-ranging and far-reaching as to be veritably limitless. I can also see newspaper websites teaming up with their local TV news station websites to provide outstanding written and visual news coverage. What about reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings online, and having a small video available to play from Jackson’s movie version? Comic books, graphic novels, National Geographic, Playboy – well, you see what I mean?

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