1)The little bits at the top of the page: why do they still say Novatech, and why can't we ever get full-sized pics of the interesting snippets?

2)Is it just me, or do the recent sidebar-type thingies in Sprawl Survival Guide (under the title "Livewire") look like a Mac product? Why?

3)Why do deckers no longer have sigs!? "In Kibo Ee Trust!", "Greed IS Good", "SMiling Bandit Strikes Again!"

1: A) Why not novatech? The person who drew the top-bars probably just wanted to spice it up by putting an in-game name on it.
B) very often any time you see a little snippet without a full-blown pic it means that there was an interesting part of the picture but the rest wasn't of the same quality. That's what I'd do.

2: Novatech bought macintosh?

3: Fanpro just ain't FASA. They probably remembered the names but forgot the sigs...

[edit]Added a t. Can you tell where?[/edit]

The mac titlebars on the sidebar's in SSG are a little out of place. I don't really mind them, but it's odd seeing them in a Shadowrun sourcebook.

On the decker sig's, I always figured they got rid of them to save some space. The old decker layout was quite nifty, but it used up a lot of space and they probably figured they could squeeze in more text if they got rid of all the extra stuff like that.

*Sniff* I miss it...

"#9 on the FBI's most wanted list...and dropping!"

My only real problem is that all of the sourcebooks look more like data dumps now. That's fine for books like New Seattle, but I liked the way the old gear books, like ShadowTech and Fields of Fire, came off as catalogs for runners.

And I miss the pics of gear, too.

I missed it at first [ damn psychotopic IC ] , but since it's come up . Yeh miss it and the lack of art for gear . I think the game lost and little of it's color when they dropped it . Us veterans may remember , but many newbie never get the same flavor .

Hope you chummers are paying attention here 'cause your consumers , fans , and friends are tell'in yah something important .

As the other guy would say "choice, the problem is choice".

The people who write, draw and print the books make choice. Artist with an attitude call that a "graphical chart". At some point, somebody decided it would be nice to put a brand name on the drawing that is supposed to represent the casing of the computer 'you' are using to read Shadowland content. I guess 'you' could change 'your' computer, but if the model change, so do the casing (except if you pick a Cyberdynamix clone of the same Novatech product...). The same goes for the way the sidebar look, which is also probably tied to the fact that as said above most graphic designers use Mac. However according to Corporate Download, Apple was in 2061 a subsidiary of Ares and not of Novatech.

For the sig blocks, from what I heard in the middle of Dragons of the Sixth World's post-production, Rob Boyle got sick of reading again and again and again "Ha! Fraggin Ha!" He entered frenzy, killed a freelancer or two, asked the other to stop putting those quotes, and added at the bottom of the List of The Shadowrun Line Developper's Prerogatives and Powers©® that from now he will be the only one to decide when Shadowland posts will have their sig blocks attached. And he killed two other freelancers to make the point.

EDIT: on the catalogue topic, this is different. Cost, the problem is cost...

Something like that, but minus the killing. (It was maiming. )

More seriously, it was definitely for space reasons. A sig line might pop up now and then, but I wouldn't count on it.

As for the rest, like pictures and catalogues -- the topic's been done to death. Like the sig lines, I wouldn't count on it, not until there's a heck of a lot more money to make it worthwhile.