Dragon Magazine Archive
PC/Mac (Mac version limited)
TSR, Inc. $59.95
The Dragon Magazine Archive consists of issues 1-250 of the Dragon magazine, plus the original Strategic Review issues, all in digital format on 5 CD ROMs. The collection also includes a program for viewing and searching through the collection for IBM compatible computers. Macintosh user have to use Adobe Acrobat to look through the collection.
At first I was rather pleased to be able to view issues of the Dragon that I’ll probably never be able to see otherwise. However, I found some things to gripe about. The main thing I didn’t like is that the graphics from the magazines were scanned in at screen resolution, meaning that printing any of the graphics contained within will not yield good results. Also because of this, some of the earlier comics were very hard to read due to the small captions used in them. Trying to zoom in on these hard-to-read graphics produced only a larger version of the same fuzzy graphic. I also was a bit agitated by the lack of clean image scans from the magazine. You’d think that in putting together a collection like this, the producers would have made sure that all graphic images were straight, and didn’t have any smudges and other glitches on them.
Another thing that I discovered is that some of the issues will not open properly with Adobe Acrobat version 4 (for the Mac). This made viewing sections of some Dragon issues, such as issues 24, 26, and others, impossible until I dug up an old copy of Acrobat 3.0, which worked just fine with these particular files.
I ran the IBM compatible viewer included with this collection using the trusty PC emulation software on my Power Mac. I found the program rather distasteful for use in viewing the magazine articles. Adobe Acrobat was a much better program for reading through each magazine issue. The user interface in TSR’s Archive program was awkward, and without a large screen, it was hard to navigate from page to page. The only decent thing about the program was its search function, which worked rather well in locating specific things of interest.
All major gripes aside though, I found myself flashing back to the early days of D&D while reading through many of the early issues of Dragon Magazine. While not all of the material would be useful for today’s 2nd Edition games (and upcoming 3rd Edition), this collection is nonetheless a worthy addition to any role-playing gamer.
(review (c) 1999 / David Flemming)