Dragon Magazine Archive

Furthermore, the seven issues of "The Strategic Review" give gamers today a perspective on the state of the hobby as it was before many of them even thought of Dungeons and Dragons or indeed RPGs in general.

Containing short "adventure modules", quick one-off stand alone games, fiction, art ranging from David Trampier's "Wormy" to Phil Foglio's "What's New With Phil N' Dixie", the Dragon Magazine CD-ROM archive is a must-have for anyone who's serious about (Advanced)Dungeons and Dragons.


Takes up less shelf space than the magazines   December 12, 2001
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

I have/had a large collection of Dragon Magazines from my junior high school and high school days. On the one hand, I never wanted to get rid of this little bit of my history, with its invaluable cache of articles, ideas, and comics. They are a veritable time capsule of RPG gaming during the golden age of the hobby. Fun memories of my nerdy youth.

On the other hand, I never wanted to keep the magazines so badly that I felt like "going to bat" with my wife over keeping them in the limited shelf space in our small urban condo. So the magazines continued to sit alone, in cardboard boxes in the basement of my parents' house. Enter the Dragon Magazine archive.

How often do I use this software? Frankly, not often. But that isn't the point. To me, the Archive is a safety blanket. If and when I want to look at an old article, magic spell list, "Giants In The Earth" column, old ads, or old editions of "Wormy" or "What's New," then I can do so at any time. The issues are well-scanned, the detail is great, and the ease of use is high. A fine product considering the volume of content and low price.

Most importantly (I will re-emphasize), it takes up a heck of a lot less shelf space than the magazines. Which means that the WAF (wife acceptance factor) goes way up, which is worth the negligible cost of this software.


Takes Up Less Shelf-Space than 250 Magazines   April 13, 2001
 13 out of 16 found this review helpful

What else can you say about a new product which is just a compilation of old, out-of-print issues of a magazine? Of course, unless you have a laptop, you can't take out an old issue and flop onto the couch to skim through any given issue, which makes it slightly less convenient than having the physical magazines. But the searchability makes up for that shortcoming.

It's a good thing to have. In this archive is every page of every issue from 1 to 250, even the ads, on 5 CDs. These are bundled together in a gimmicky user interface that leaves a little to be desired, but is not that bad. The search feature is not as good as it could be. I tested it with some search targets which I knew the location of, and some of my tests produced false or no results. The interface allows a bookmark feature to mark particular sections in the archive, but I haven't really had much use for this. Some people may find it invaluable.

The interface also ran very slowly on my old machine, which exceeded the minimum system requirements in all regards. The documentation that came with the product suggests copying the individual issues onto your hard drive to improve speed. So it's best to use this interface if you have a very fast system or a very large hard drive. Fortunately, if you have no time or patience for the user interface, the individual magazines are readable as .pdf files in Acrobat Reader. Problem solved.

Personally, I like having 250 issues of Dragon to read through. And at 16 cents an issue, the price is right.


Solid content with poor delivery   November 1, 2000
 26 out of 28 found this review helpful

It would be asking a lot to have 250+ issues of a magazine delivered in the most high tech framework, one that would meet future standards seamlessly. (Crying about the program not working on niche platforms like UNIX is a little odd, given that this is a consumer product.) But TSR's choice to go with a proprietary interface that doesn't work as well as the shareware Acrobat Reader is just odd. As a result, less tech-savvy users will find this product frustrating, trying to navigate using TSR's "kewl" interface, when instead they should just download the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe.com. Having said that, once users have made the leap to using Acrobat, this product is a treasure. With a good printer -- or simply a monitor that's comfortable enough to read on -- this would be a bargain at twice the price. I've already spent many, many hours reading reprints of articles I never saw before, and haven't even gone digging for fondly remembered stories and comic strips. This is a must for any D&D fan, from any era. (And now that D&D and "Dragon" magazine are owned by Wizards of the Coast, hopefully they'll learn from the mistakes made here and do better with their electronic products.)