Allow me to be the first to express our gratitude for your interest in checking out our humble abode on the Internet! Welcome to Let's Play! Magazine, a brand new online gaming publication that I hope you'll find is unlike any other publication in the world. How this site came into existence is something I'd like to share with you, as it will hopefully encourage you to visit more and more as content begins to fill the now-empty caverns of our website.

My name is Ryan Stepalavich, and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of LPM. I've been working off-and-on for various online publications all over the US, doing various tasks such as file management, web administration, and freelance writing for about six years now. I've worked for several video game publications, in particular. Some you may know, some you may not, all of which will remain nameless. I keep them anonymous for one simple reason:

You can't trust any of them.

If you've been an avid reader of online gaming mags, you know that this is true from the media fiasco at GameSpot, and you've heard rumors of it from the boys at Penny-Arcade. It's true. I've known it from firsthand experience. Game developers buy reviews and coverage. It's good media hype for them, so they throw gobs of money at whomever will give them an ear. There came a point in time where my articles began to feel jaded, as I knew that no matter what I said, it was the advertising budget that determined whether or not it got tweaked to favor them, or even published at all.

I came up with the idea for Let's Play! Magazine starting with the "goons" at SomethingAwful. Their forums have a section entitled "Let's Play!", where devout gamers will spend countless hours running through a game, taking pictures along the way, providing for forum readers a humorous video gaming photographic journal. Their slogan is "We play games so you don't have to". I decided to borrow the concept (and the title) for the guys at A Path Beyond, a freeware shooter project community that has quite a few characters in it. My concept of "Let's Play!" was to provide forum articles that highlighted a particular game that everyone could play. In order to be something for everyone, it had to meet certain criteria:

 

• It had to be free to play.

• It had to be entertaining.

• It had to be of high enough quality to generate interest.

• There had to be enough content to generate discussion.

The "Let's Play!" feature at A Path Beyond was born. But I didn't feel that this was enough. Jenelle Capelletti, co-founder and Managing Editor of LPM, found a great number of games that I had never heard of, nor had anyone else at the A Path Beyond forums. This was unfortunate, as all of the games we played, known or unknown, were of excellent quality and, gameplay-wise, better value than anything a multi-million dollar game development house could come up with. I felt that it was unfair that such games fade into obscurity, while really poor games are getting the limelight because of vast advertising budgets and ravenous online publications that salivate at the opportunity to make a quick buck in exchange for a favorable review.

Hence, Let's Play! Magazine. What you see before you is an online publication that makes no revenue from developers' advertising budgets. We do not accept, nor will we publish, advertisements from software developers. Doing so represents a fundamental conflict of interest for those online publications who wish to provide honest, in-depth coverage of video games. By offering to review free-to-play games exclusively, LPM possesses no conflict of interest to its readership. All you get is honest reviews by honest people. Even our reviews, as you will see soon enough, are rated in such a way as to remove any veil of "levels of quality", that is, the traditional mass media numeric "7 to 9" scale, where a majority of games will be rated between 7.0 and 9.0 out of 10. Instead, we have but two ratings. "Recommended" and "Not Recommended", with Pros and Cons in an itemized list to justify our decision. At LPM, we let the reviews speak for themselves, and we don't marginalize the quality (or lack thereof) of titles with an arbitrary number.

Again, thank you for taking the time to take a peek at our magazine. I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as we do writing it.

Let's Play! Magazine: Land of the free, home of the game.

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