MekTek 3: Letter's of Comment Explode

The final piece of artwork generously donated by Steve Kyte adorns the cover of issue three.

Again all uncredited articles and artwork for issue three were me, while Alex and an article by Helen McCarthy. 

 

Mechs at Large editorial rant about shenanigans in the media and how not to inflame opinions, and an announcement of the 1990 Eastercon having a Japanese anime stream run by Helen McCarthy (it was great).

Japanima Helen McCarthy talking about what animation was available to buy and watch on video cassettes. Titles available included Robotech, World of Taisman, Speed Racer, Once Upon a Time, Crushers aka Crusher Joe, Warriors of the Wind a cut of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Space Cruiser: Guardians of the Galaxy a cut version Space Cruise Yamato.

Manga, Manga  Me talking about Akira, Appleseed, Grey, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Cyber 7, and Outlanders by Johi Manabe, which has nothing to do with Sean Connery, or Scottish romance. I covered a lot of comics this time, including Dirty Pair by Toren Smith, not Japanese but a homage to Japanese manga, Dark Horses Aliens, and Alien Legion, which all interested me.

Adepticus Titanicus reviewed by Alex Stewart, praising the big box of toys, and the introduction of mecha-on-mecha action in the WH40K universe.

Not listed in the contents was a one page cartoon by me called Saucer Story. 

Little Big Mechs was me taking the BattleTech rules and showing how to convert them for playing on the tabletop with terrain etc. Today that would be unnecessary, but this was the early days of BattleTech, and we had to make do with home made rules. I discussed the problems of converting an area based ground scale hex game into a free-form movement.

Snapshots by me looked at some wargame fanzines that were available in the UK. 

Mech Force was a long article by me about how to expand the game by converting the BattleForce rules into representing single mechs rather than a platoon. Think of this as Alpha Strike done thirty years ago. It was running games using these house rules that spurred me to go on and write Oversized Heavy Mechanized Units aka OHMU War Machine.

PBM Campaign I wrote up the rules I'd written for a campaign game that I had run for the wargame club I was a member of when I lived in Southend-on-Sea.

MekTek LOCs Ten pages of letters from the readers of the previous issue of MekTek. My readers had opinions, and were largely enthusiastic about what they'd read. The next issue would showcase a lot of the ideas discussed here.

Anyway, hope that brief glance of the past has been of interest.

Catch you all on the bounce.