MAD MONTH

Every year, the June/July period is something of a nightmare here. Whereas many other businesses have their craziness towards the Christmas period, our craziness comes from the close temporal proximity of Computex and E3. Both shows are extremely important events as they are the key avenues for major announcements in the tech and gaming sector. There are other games shows throughout the year, with the multiple PAXes (PAXi?), GamesCom, Blizzcon and the growing presence of games at various big comic conventions, but even so, E3 is still the big one. Likewise, there are other tech shows, but none of them are as focussed on PC as Computex. Because of the importance of these events, we run specials dedicated to each, as well as our usual magazines, so what that basically means is that we have four magazines to send in a five week period rather than one every four weeks or so.

This isn’t a complaint, though you may have heard some definite whinging if you were a fly on the wall in the office. Life may be sidelined for a month and a bit around this time every year, but it’s worth it. No other industry moves as fast as gaming, on both the hardware and software side. Blink and you’ll miss a new idea or new technology. There’s always something new and interesting to discover, and writing about something so fast paced is a joy, even when it’s a royal pain in the arse due to deadlines. Magazine people are a little crazy, but we like it that way.

Welcome to issue 264, the last issue in the month of madness (the others being issue 263, the PCPP Tech Special 2017 [on sale now] and the Hyper Games and Tech of the Future Special 2017 [also on sale now]). It’s chock full of goodies. Our favourite games from E3, a look at the multi-core monster CPUs from Intel and a whole lot more. Heading back to our regular schedule is going to be something of a shock to the system, but next issue is already shaping up to be a doozy. 2017 has flashed by very fast so far, but when it comes to PC gaming it is a hell of a year.