- NAG has announced that the NAG Magazine: The Annual will include a DVD with demos, applications, and drivers.
- The choice of optical media is rather odd given that few, if any manufacturers include an optical drive in their PCs and notebooks.
- The folks at NAG will be livestreaming the expo thanks to a few key partnerships so anybody can experience rAge.
At rAge this year, local publication NAG will re-launch its iconic magazine as a collector’s item tugging on the nostalgia of local gamers. However, we suspect the publication may have gone a bit far in that nostaligia.
According to a press release sent to Hypertext this morning, the NAG Magazine: The Annual being made available at rAge will be limited to 10 000 numbered copies and will include the iconic cover DVD.
The DVD will feature three game demos from South African developers, drivers, applications and “hidden Easter Eggs”. These Easter Eggs “include hidden Steam vouchers and a secret time-limited message that will unlock a fantastic prize for the person who cracks it.”
The question we have to ask is how many South Africans still have a PC with an optical drive in 2023. Optical drives haven’t been available in notebooks for many years. It’s tough finding an exact date that manufacturers ditched optical drives, but according to Wikipedia the move away from fitting notebooks with disc readers occurred in the mid-2010s as USB drives became cheaper and more reliable.
The inclusion of drivers is rather humourous to us given that NVIDIA and AMD issue updates so regularly, the drivers on that DVD could be outdated by the time you access them.
We’re sure that some folks have a notebook or PC with an optical drive, but we have to wonder why NAG didn’t simply opt for a USB thumb drive to share this content with locals. Perhaps printing a DVD is cheaper and it definitely does tug on the nostalgia strings, but it’s a bizarre choice.
One rather exciting announcement from NAG is that it will be livestreaming the expo online.
“We want to bring rAge closer to the fans this year,” editor at NAG, Regardt van der Berg said in a press release. “We’ve partnered with a number of high-end brands, such as Outdoor Photo, Canon, Rode, and Blackmagic, to put cameras all around the event and to boost our livestreaming capabilities.”
This means that even if you can’t be at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand from December 8th to December 10th, you can still see whats happening at the expo which is rather nifty.
For those who can attend, NAG will be giving away a range of prizes including a gaming PC worth R120 000, a gaming PC worth R40 000, and many other prizes.
As for those who have a PC manufactured in the last five years, you may want to shop around for an external DVD reader – which retail for as little as R300 and as much as R800 – in order to get the full NAG magazine experience.
A DVD in 2023. What a bizarre choice.
What isn’t a bizarre choice is entering our competition to win a Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 hamper by telling us what you’re looking forward to at rAge.
[Image – Cameron Bunney on Unsplash]
