Dear Readers,
I don’t know about you guys, but I sure haven’t been playing many video games lately. (Is it just me, or is this not the first time I’ve started off a “Dear Readers” with those words? Crazy.) What with schoolwork, transferring to another college, saving money for and purchasing Christmas gifts, and just being an all around loaf, it seems like I’ve gone an entire month without saving the world. Oh sure, I’ve died a few times in Way of the Samurai, rediscovered how annoying Legend of Mana is, punched a few deserving small children in Fable (honestly, can’t they just quit making fun of me for not breaking the barrels?), and started to play the new GoldenEye (I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far — look for a review next issue), but most of this month has been spent on things much less important than video games. For this, I am sorry.
By the time work on the February issue starts to wrap up, I’ll be attending classes at my new school, the University of Maryland in College Park. And if you’ve any matter of luck, I’ll be rooming with GameCola’s own Executive Editor Matt Gardner, because with that particular state of housing, I’ll be all but forced to partake in the delights of gaming, which means more content for you. Of course, there’s also the chance that I’ll be randomly assigned to live with yet another drunken fool whose idea of a gamer is someone he played Halo with once at a frat party, but he’s not really sure if that actually happened or not because he was “wasted”, in which case GameCola will be no more, because it’s hard to run a newsletter when you’re taking a bath with the toaster.
Many thanks to the readers who have supported us in 2004, be it with e-mails, fan art, or IMs at the beginning of the month saying “the latest issue rocks, man”. Every once in a while I get myself in this mood where I wonder why I’m even doing all of this, but then I get a forward in my inbox from Matt’s mom saying how proud she proud she is of her baby boy, and it all becomes perfectly clear:
I’m out of my goddamn mind.
Paul Franzen
Editor-in-Chief
e-mail: pfranzen@gamecola.net
P.S. Our hearts and prayers go out to Neal Iannone and his family, due to the recent passing of his mother. I’m about a month late with this, but Neal’s contributions over the years have been far too great for me to not say anything at all. We’re all here for you, man. If you have any good thoughts you’d like to send to the genius behind “Loafy Carl” and “Neal is Awesomer Than You”, send them on over to tocksik@comcast.net.