Benkyo!
Amiga back in the Real World

Hy, dear readers. I guess that what I've to tell you will make you surely happy. All the rumors about a dead Amiga with no more software, no more games and so on, aren't so true. Infact in the last days Amiga is flooding the Internet with so exciting news to resuscitate a dead.
Why I'm telling you this? Because Amiga is back also in Magazines, and not only in the ones we in Italy know very well like The Games Machine (that never abandoned Amiga, thanks to Maxime) or Enigma Amiga Run with his CD-Rom. Now slowly also other publications start again to consider our beloved platform.

This is also the case of BENKYO! Maybe the name is a little too original (Japanese?) and the magazine itself does't deal with computers but with comics, cartoons and reated tradeshows, the fact is that AMIGA gets a remarkable consideration. The magazine is fortnightly, its price is approximately 10.000 Lire (5.2 USD / 5 Euro) and includes a very nice CD-Rom; 50 very interesting pages for comics collectors and video freaks (like me, Spawn) but, most important, all best known computer platforms are supported including Amiga, Macintosh and Pc. The magazine features news, previews, reviews and ratings, a lot of pics, info on motion pictures music CD-roms, on OAVs, on TV series, on various gadgets like keyrings, posters, T-shirts, on tradeshows and internet sites about comics and cartoons. In short, it's really complete and you have plenty of everithing...
The CD is also well done. Inside you'll find, well sorted in their own directories, MPEG Video Clips, MP3 song clips, pictures and drawings, more articles and all the needed software for the supported platforms: Three drawers: Amiga, Mac and Windows. In the Amiga folder you'll find AMP and IsisPPC for MPEG video replay, Play16 for audio files, Visage for pictures, LHEX for decompression (all programs are compressed and therefore not directly executable) and PlayFKiss for the KISS format. All this should run on any AMIGA model (better if an enhanced one, like a RISC based! Spawn).

I'm astonished and I decided that this magazine will be part of my collections (I got all 4 the issues published by now and I'm impatient to get nr.5 spawn). At last, the package is very weel done and you get also some sheets in every issue to build a comic-style calendar...

I believe it's worth to give a good rating, what do you think about

I suggest you run to your Newsagent and get the current issue, if you are a comocs fan, and of course if you own an AMIGA!!!!

by Spawn

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Contact: petty@amiworld.it