GameSpite Quarterly 7 seems to be warmly received around the Internet so far; or at the very least, no one has been inspired to send me death threats and angry missives about how much they hate me. I was a little worried, because it’s so closely paired to GSQ3, which has easily gone down as the most polarizing book we’ve done to date. Some people really loved it, some hated it. I guess the haters gave up on the site/publication, which is an unusually sensible turn of events for the Internet.

You may notice that GSQ7 is quite a bit shorter in length than GSQ3 — like, on the order of 100 pages or so. This is a good thing (and not just because it means the book costs less) and is actually the result of a combination of factors. For starters, issue 3 was the last book I put together in Blurb’s absolutely terrible BookSmart program, a clumsy and highly inefficient layout program that wasted tons of page space on oversized borders and imprecise kerning and leading. GSQ7‘s entries are much more compact and attractively designed, and what stands as a single-page entry in issue seven would have encompassed two pages in BookSmart.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is that we were a lot less expansive in terms of coverage, drafting 90-ish entries versus the other book’s 130-ish. With the Heroes volume, we endeavored to be as comprehensive as possible, writing up every 8-bit protagonist we could think of. Ultimately, though, this proved to be a disservice to a lot of the more obscure characters, whom we wrote about without any real knowledge of them (I was especially guilty of this, being the “fill in the gaps” guy). This time, we stuck to what we knew, and the results are much stronger. There is one entry in particular in this book that brought tears to my eyes with its beauty, which is not really the sort of thing I expect write about a collection of droll synopses of old video game characters.

So, I hope you will not be disappointed.

Incidentally, if for some reason you’d like a larger version of the cover art (for what purpose I can’t imagine), I sent Eric at Tiny Cartridge the full-sized original art, which he’s posted at a respectably hefty size. I now send you there to eat up their bandwidth as my way of saying thanks for the promotion.