EMMA IS FIRMLY IN THE ZONE!! (PC Zone)

Name: Emma1973

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Product:	PC Zone
Date:	08/11/03 (96 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, plenty of info

Disadvantages: A few may find some of the humour insulting

Boys (and men) are all excitedly rushing to the letter box, peering down the stairs, peeking into the hallway, hoping the postman has visited. I'm thinking that this isnt for the phone bill (unless they've been phoning sexy ladies in Guatamalea), nope today is the drop date for the latest edition of PC Zone. Ladies, you may actually see your men reading something other than the Sun or Daily Sport!

As you may have guessed PC Zone is a PC magazine but it concentrates mainly on the gaming side rather then loads of geeky technical nonsense! OF course it is primarily designed for male reading abilities, so its in easy to access sections!

First of all we have the bulletins and news. Now girls, dont be upset if you see a tear trickle into his cornflakes. You see, Half Life 2 has had part od its source code illegally hacked and the game illegally released on the internet. This means it wont be released till April 2004 and you have to find another Christmas present, nor are they going to be able to get Breed or Unreal Tournament 2004.
Apart from that cheerfulness we have snippets of developing games, emulation games, rumours, and charts. They also have lists of upcoming games, so just to klet you know Pro Evolution Soccor 3 is out next month, so that may go some way to staunching the pain of Half Life.

I'm sure many of you are aware that far too many boys want to spend their futures sitting on their backsides developing games. Luckily for them, Zone is currently doing a series of the top game developing companies in Britain, just perfect for blagging some work experience from.

The previews are one of the biggest sections of the mag. Each issue they take one major game and preview it to the point of death! Most appropriately the big feature game this month is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It has lovely screenshots and tell you exactly what it consists of and how it is SUPPOSED to be, it does this for a fair few gam
es. It doesnt tell you how it plays, when the game is finally released it gets to go to the reviews section.
24 Games are being reviewed in this section, from Hidden & Dangerous 2 to The Simpsons: Hit and Run. I have to say their reviews have swayed my opinions on several occasions. There's no game developer backside licking in this magazine, any money being passed as a bit of a back hander goes straight in the pub landlords pocket! It tells you exactly what its like, from how it looks, how easy the control are and what the game play is really like. After all, how many of you have been stunned by lovely graphics only to finds its the worse game in the world? Daikatana, anyone? We also get lovely percentage scores and some good and bad points.

Well after reading this section I'm having Prince of Persia 2 and Alan is getting Pro Evolution Soccer 3. And no one is getting Max Payne 2 as its way too violent!
In case you didnt take any notice before, they' let you know what games are being re-released and what readers really thought of the current games.

On to the Online section for the entire world of online gaming. Dont tell Alan, but I'm rather pleased that Half-Life 2 and Unreal have been delayed because I'll now get to see him on regular occasions rather than listening to bangs and boomns as he 'frags' another player in Azerbaijan!.
We get to see the new and different genres of the games on the net, how the major games like Halo match up on multi-player games.

For those who like the more violent of games Zone also runs 'fight clubs', leagues and have lists of different online clubs and guilds.

We're way past the middle mark and this is where things start looking a bit techy and geeky.

Ooh, Zone have done a huge round up of the best graphics cards around, pages of stats and ratings I care nothing about. I've got a brand new dogs testicles pc and as long as it plays Civ
3 and Dungeon Keeper 2 I'm happy!. Of course the only benefit this has for us ladies is that we now know have superspecial to make his Christmas in hope of reducing the disappointment of having to go to our mothers for Christmas dinner, or we can spout useful knowledge when cousin geek starts going on about his new nVidia 67 million!. Err, best buys, silly people writing in because they dont know where the on button is, people moaning about various companies, BT, Freeserve and dabs seem to feature quite often!

There's also readers letters, looks at classic games, a couple of articles on various bit of nonsense and a competition or two.

For our £4.99 a month we also get 2 discs packed with goodies, for those hapless enough to still be using CD players they issue them in CD and DVD form. It has previews and playable demo's of all the top games, patches, add-on's, etc. Rarely is a game bought in our house before we've tried a demo from PC Zone.

So there you go, everything is to found in this magazine, Aside from being packed with info, the articles are very well written and the standard of journalism high. Though I think some may disagree!

There's a huge current of sarcasm within the mag, these chaps dont suffer fools gladly and will gladly tell all when a games crap, companies are behaving like fools, and writers and readers are talking out of their bottoms. Their little ad-libs can also be quite amusing.

Although there is one female writer the magazine is geared strongly towards the chaps, beer, footie, curries and how superior they are to DedFul at Counterstrike feature highly.. Online is definately well within the male domain. I'm not sure I'd let young children read it either, revelling in mindless violence as they do, may not be too constructive for young minds.

In essence this mag has everything you need in knowing what to buy and start a killing sprees!
Life has never be
en good for me since they removed the cheats and walkthrough sections but you cant have everything.

Definately THE magazine for all gamers everywhere.

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