msprange said:
That has nothing to do with JPEG compression. The (very minor) fuzziness is from the printing.
Oh, come on, printing causes pixels to appear, following a blocky pattern exactly like JPEG compression? Take a look at the outside edge of the computer screen; there's a sawtooth pattern along the diagonal line; if it was fuzziness from printing, it would follow the line, but now it forms a sawtooth pattern due to how the line falls on the JPEG compression blocks.
And even if this were fuzziness from (obviously digital) printing, it's still a blemish on the cover. Perhaps everyone isn't as nitpicky as I am, but it was the first thing I noticed when I held the book in my hands.
(For the record, the same problem is not present in either Black Missions or Blue Line. Shame that it happened on White Washes; it would have been much less evident against a dark background.)
msprange said:
Arkku said:
It's not only this, but it seems to me that every book of this 25th Anniversary Edition has very few pages without some kind of error in layout, typography, or the text itself.
You'll have to be more specific - as far as we are aware, there are no such issues. . .
Well, glancing over almost any page reveals minor (one might say, tiny) errors in typography, e.g. taking the first “real” page of White Washes, the lowest paragraph in the middle column has “The Computer's paranoia about” spread out with way too much space between the letters—certainly this is a side-effect of justifying both sides, but in my opinion it would be far preferable to hyphenate in cases such as this. Likewise the first paragraph under “Complex Security Directive” has
apparently no space after the period in “citizens.A watched citizen is…” although this, too, may be due to the simple method used for justifying the text. In any case, as I said, these types of cosmetic errors are on essentially every page; it's quite hard to open any of these books to a page without such problems.
(For a worse example of this same problem in the same book, look at the VIOLET paragraph on page 37, e.g. at “d i n n e r p a r t i e s cateredbyaGREEN”, “f l y b o t s a n d”, “f r o m I N D I G O”, etc. Or the GREEN paragraph on the preceeding page: “Food:Realfood each meal,supplemented”. But, again, almost every page has at least one such error so they are far too numerous to list.)
Now, if we look for more serious cosmetic errors, leafing through to page 26 and 27 reveals pixellated low-resolution illustrations that seem out of place in the badges of PLC and Power Services (and a ridiculously simple illustration for Technical Services, but in my opinion some of these new badges are a bit too “humorous” instead of something I would imagine being actually present in Alpha Complex).
There are also plain inconsistencies like on page 112: under “Computer Care Specialists” it says “INDIGO 6 Access” while every other similar place leaves more space between the clearance and “X Access”. (Which, frankly, looks very “busy” with the “X Access” aligned to the middle of the column and the following line being in the same font and weight.)
I also dislike the fact that the same font and style is used for the Alpha Complex forms and messages, instead of making them less “modern” and more “bureaucratic”, e.g. on page 160 the ALL CAPS messages end up being just unreadable although I guess the intent was to convey the idea of computerised message e.g. by teletype. There don't seem to be many (or any?) forms in White Washes, but overall comparing the WEG Forms Pack to the Mongoose forms (and, indeed, Forms Pack) is like comparing night and day.
Note that I only just got the book today and there are only the errors that immediately jumped out by leafing through it without actually reading it. Now, I have read through the previous 25th Anniversary books and found them quite riddled with typos (apart from having more the cosmetic errors I discussed above). For example, Termination Quota Exceeded says “Wheres the Beef?” in the table of contents, and “Termination Quota Exceeded” in the same list seems to have two spaces between “Quota” and “Exceeded”. At least “Quote” on the pre-release cover image on the website was fixed before printing…
Note that despite all this criticism, I'm not saying that these are deadly serious issues, but as someone who owns an essentially complete collection of printed Paranoia RPG materials from WEG, GW, and Mongoose alike, I find the decline in aesthetic quality painfully obvious, especially with the 25th Anniversary edition books. (Although there were prominent slips in the XP line as well, e.g. that book with placeholder text in place of missing illustrations…) Even the horrendous 5th Edition got the basic layout and typography mostly right, if we accept that the zany “style” was intentional.
(Part of the reason may be that I very much dislike the overall font choices and layout decisions in these books, but this, of course, is a matter of personal preference.)
While I'm still buying these books for their content and to support my favourite RPG, I can't help but feel that Paranoia line is being treated as something of a second-class Citizen in the line-up, with the layout and illustrations thrown together in a haphazard manner and not even properly proofed before going to print. Of course, I don't know if this is actually the case, or perhaps these are all just issues no-one at Mongoose considers serious enough to warrant attention. Still, if I wasn't a Paranoia fan from the WEG days, I would be hesitant to buy something that looks so “cheap” but isn't.
