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So...yeah. We promised in the FAQ that our site would be up before the end of 2007, but now we have a hard launch date: Monday, November 12. Point your browser to www.oxmonline.com at the beginning of next week and we will finally be able to show you what we've been up to.
I know some forum posters have been really looking forward to us having a functioning website again. (Let's just leave it politely there and not mention the people who threaten to cancel their magazine subscription because we don't have a free website to go along with it.) And we've gotten a lot of "what's taking so long?" with it, too. I think I tried to explain this earlier, but it's not like snapping your fingers. We wanted to do a site that would be representative of the magazine and give you what you would expect, yet let us do new creative things too, and not just be a dumping ground for print content.
We will launch with a sampling of reviews, for instance, but eventually we do want to have all of them archived and searchable. All of them, back to 2001. But that will take a while, so we just did a handful to get started. Ryan also posted recent and newsworthy preview content, but we realize nobody wants to read a ton of old previews for games that are already out. :)
You will also see a lot of features archived from the past year or so. I would ask that anybody who said "I can read everything in OXM on the web" to check those stories out, because I'm calling your bluff. I think you probably don't realize what you've missed, but here's your opportunity to catch up. Some features, like the Epic Journey, have alternate photos that didn't run in the magazine. In fact, almost all the pictures in that online feature are different from the print edition. Just the last handful are repeats.
You will also be able to find archived Message Center, 3X Power-Up, Ask Dr Gamer, 2000 Pennies, and other departments online over time, though right now, they are also in various states of completion. Like, 2000 Pennies will be up in full, but Ask Dr Gamer is just getting archived. And there's a few extra 3X Power-Ups online that didn't appear in print, too.
For other original stuff, we have some cool plans for the first week, and we will be blogging as well. The forums will remain here -- we just link to them and have a nice plug for them on the home page -- and the podcast will eventually move to live on our main site, but oxmpodcast.com is the plan for launch and a little while after. Again, we just don't have infinite resources and the maintenance joins our daily magazine duties, so we can't do everything we want to do right away. It'll take time to develop.
Right now we're ironing out last-minute bugs over the weekend. But Monday November 12 is the solid launch date.
Dan Amrich, Official Xbox Magazine's Chief Retrologist
New free shows every Friday at www.oxmpodcast.com
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