DEADLOCK


Producer            -      Dimension-X 
Issue Reviewed      -      #1
 
Presentation & Design
"Deadlock"  is  a new magazine, and as
such  it's  always quite intruiging to
take  a  first  look.   Well  as first
impressions  go,  this magazine seemed
as if it had a lot to offer.  A fairly
pretty  title picture apeared within a
few  seconds  of  inserting  the disk,
in fact  all  disk access  was  fairly
rapid  due  to  hardware loading.  The
general  look of the magazine is good,
but  the  control  icons  are a little
confusing,    I   couldn't   see   the
conection  between a  magnifying glass 
and the  menu page somehow! Colourwise


everything is quite pleasant, a choice
of   backing   tunes   are  available.
Sometimes  the  text colour mixes very
badly  with  the background, dark blue
on  grey  doesn't go together fella's!
I  found  the  magazine  very  hard to
control, at times I didn't have a clue
what  the consequenses of an impending
keypress  would  be.   The actual text
pages   scroll  verticaly  by  use  of
gadgets  or cursors, but each  article
is  spilt  into  several  pages  which
follow  each  other while ever you are
holding  the  "down-cursor",  when you
reach  the  end of a page the next (of
that  article)  will appear.  When you
reach  the  end  of an article it then
restarts,  often  causing  confusion.
All control icons are based at the top
of the screen.  Hmmmmmm.        60/100

Content
You  can  never expect too much from a
"First-Issue",    but    even   giving
Deadlock  this  benefit  I  was  still
pretty  disapointed.  The main problem
with  the  content  is  that  sometime
during  making this magazine they seem
to   have  forgotten  that  they  were
making a magazine for "the scene", and
as  such  most  its  readers  will  be
primarily  interested  in      exactly
that.  Well, Deadlock hardly looks  at
the  scene at all, and if it does then
it  turns  it into something completly
useless.   There's no interviews, demo
reviews,  charts,  or  party  reports.
One  of  the only sections which comes
close  to  being  slightly interesting
or  scene  related  is  "The Important
News"  section,  an  alternative  news
section  that  has  the  intention  to

amuse  rather than inform.  One of the
headlines  read  "Crusaders  have just
released Eurochart No.2", That says it
all really!                      30/100

Overall
After  pleasant  first  impressions of
Deadlock  I  was  quicky dismayed.  To
look  at, the magazine is fine, except
the  bad choice of text and background
colours  here  and there, the hardware
loading  (the  coder or  which  really
likes to let you know how good it is),
is  fast  and smooth.  Its basicly the
handling  and  contents of the magzine
thats  the  problem, you have a really
hard  time  finding  out how to get to
where  you want to be and when you get
there  you  see it's not worth reading
anyway!   However,  it  is  the  first
issue  and as such a certain amount of

tolerance  must be exersized.  There's
the   basics   of   a   good  magazine
structure  to work on, but I feel that
changes  must  be  made to the control
and improvments in article quality and
relevance to the scene are needed.
                                49/100