Martins Medens OF LATVIA writes...

Hi there!

GB: What's Latvian for 'Howdy'?? ;-)

It's about two months now since I discovered existance of Game Bytes magazine (GB) and I have downloaded every issue available and read (almost) all of them as well. So now there is something I want to say. Well, I didn't intend to write at first, but when I saw your remark in TIN that you "almost don't get mail from readers anymore " I thought, I should gather my courage and speak out.

GB: And it didn't really take that much courage either, did it??

Above all I must admit that you're doing great and useful work making available information about newest/hottest PC games around the world. GB is the only reliable and fully illustrated source of gaming information for me that is cheap enough (actually it costs me nothing :), so keep it coming and thank you very much!

GB: A hearty, "you're welcome!"

Now a couple of things I didn't like in GB #17. Number one was that letter from Slovenia (I hope I remember the place right). It was pretty much meaningless. I think you published it only because of the place it came

GB: Sheesh! I thought it was pretty cool! I had to go to the map to go *find* Slovenia....then again, I had to do the same for Latvia too!

from and that's not a global problem worth of publishing if a guy somewhere, let's say, even in Somalia, doesn't know where to get latest GB issue. I have other idea how to tell everybody where GB are receiving their letter from. You should make a readers' map of the world marked with dots and names of places from where you have got even a single e-mail or post mail letter. That would be much more interesting than announcing every "letter-form-far-far-away". BTW I myself are from place you definitely haven't received any letters before. Know where Latvia is? If you don't, look across Baltic sea form Sweden.

GB: Ah the true challenge of Game Bytes! Find a reader in Somalia! Seriously, I just think its interesting to note now and then how global Game Bytes has become.

Another thing which annoys me in GB is that it requires VESA driver. I didn't know or need any till GB. If I got it right, in GB #12, when this requirement appeared, it was said to be only temporary. Actually, the pain about that driver is that it was hard to find one. I hadn't it on my PC and had no idea where to look. So, the best way to help would be to put some most popular ftp sites' paths where one would be able to find VESA drivers for most common SVGA cards in the readme file (or, remove that VESA requirement from GB at all). After all, I found a suitable VESA driver on a local BBS :).

GB: It's also *extremely* difficult to deal with all the variety of this so-called SVGA standard. Count on this - if we didn't have a VESA driver implementation right now, I'd be flooded with mail about how "Game Bytes doesn't run on my machine with weaky/wacky/funky graphics card". For now, this is as good as we can do. If the high-res games themselves require VESA, I don't see that it's a big deal for us either.

That's it for now. Wishing all the best, a great fan of yours.

GB: Here's hoping that there are tons of Game Bytes readers in Latvia.