Good point. Since you brought it out, I'm also scratching my head wondering too.

Got to ask - does that mean on the yoyogames site they actually state there clearly and provide a link to this magazine?

Personally, I don't really like the yoyogames site too much. It's extremely difficult to navigate, to look through other games and to find people and stuff. It's good for the top few or popular or recent games that stand out on the front, but if you really want to browse through everything or look for particular game designers, it's just clumsy. I still prefer the official gm forums style. GMG also arranges things very nicely.

Personally I think the ratings should be in a review, although not biased - a group vote should do, like what the GMG does, I'm pretty sure of. There are people like Carnivac pointed out who would rather check out the rating and play the game with that point in mind rather than reading a lengthy review. But then people who do read the review usually don't have anything to say about the rating, so it's fine, as long as it's not biased, although this magazine's reviews and ratings seem so.



I also wonder what made this magazine stand out; was it the looks, or the content? Needless to say, the charts provided along with the rating doesn't make it look any better.

Yea, Carnivac is Wolverine, I think he renamed himself recently from what I see on his site.

Neat. I recognise Wolv's style of speaking - it's really characteristic of him.

I'm Eyas, and I'm an editor at MarkUp. Its quite interesting to see that people comment so much on the magazine and I only just found out about this blog post. I've seen a couple of people talk about contacting someone at MarkUp with the criticism, and its quite disappointing that no one did. If I knew that so many people disagree with the current way of writing reviews, then I'd obviously change the way reviews are written.. at least in Issue 7 which is about to come out, and it could be too late to fix that now.



Its also disappointing that reviews make about 10% of the magazine, yet nothing else (which I'm pretty sure is much better than the reviews) goes unnoticed. I guess that might not be the case, but it could be just  because of the topic.



For those wondering why was MarkUp picked 'official' by YYG, then you should probably be looking at the detailed tutorials and other information -- its not the layout.



I'd like to invite the Eo community to help out a bit here, you can e-mail me at [eyas.sharaiha@gmail.com] for your opinions regarding the current way reviews are reviewed, and It'd be amazing to see someone come up with satisfactory reviewing codes of practice. MarkUp is already a valuable resource to developers, (maybe not the reviews :P ), but I would really like to see whoever is interested in the Eo Community to contribute and help us make it better.

Cactus: Very little is written by the staff members?



That is absolutely false. Nearly 100% of the content is written by the staff members, and I find it insulting that you say that.



For issue 1 I wrote ALONE 10,000 words. For Issue 2, I wrote 7,000 words. We now have a good amount of staff members, so I don't write crazy amounts of articles by myself anymore.. but I'm truly seriously offended that all my hard work is not even acknowledged.

I'm quite certaint I heard that somewhere, but there's a slight chance that I'm confusing you with another magazine. Did you guys not advertise for wanting people to submit content a while ago?

For the article submissions, the whole thing was misunderstood. We were encouraging people to join the team about the benefits of writing for MarkUp, including ads for their own sites.



No one really submits an article just like that. We do ask non-staff memebers to write tutorials, but only by direct request to people whom have written impressive tutorials somewhere. These include RhysAndrews with the particle tutorials, and several others across the past issues.

Quoted [Eyas said: Posted on Friday 24th August 2007]: For those wondering why was MarkUp picked 'official' by YYG, then you should probably be looking at the detailed tutorials and other information -- its not the layout.



That?s part of your post further down?



I have looked through this and would like to comment about this endorsement thing - First of all I am from GMTech Magazine - http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=259273 and the reason why Markup are endorsed, is because they were the only ones to ask - that?s right, we didn?t release two issues or whatever and start saying can we be endorsement Sandy, and sweet talking or whatever they did - so Eyas don't say they need to look at the tutorials and other information. Because that has nothing to do with the fact that you asked first, and are the only ones to ask - which has made you get placed on the site.



I hope that clears up this endorsement thing.

I won't even regard the offensive sentences, only because I choose to act in a mature way. I'll only comment on asking first by saying that, Mark checked out the magazine, liked it, forwarded the suggestion to Sandy who was also impressed. Did we ask first? We probably did. But would they have taken any magazine, not really.