Your standard video game player is a shallow bastard who puts fashion above everything else when deciding what games to buy. Now obviously, if you're reading this letter, you're not a standard video game player, so you'll be able to sit here and nod knowingly as I talk about them.

John Q. Gamer has a playstation. Chances are, he owns a number of stylish titles such as Gran Turismo, Mortal Kombat 4, Final Fantasy 7, and a lot of other very standard games that are wrongly considered by the masses to be graphically impressive. He is shallow and conceited about his games, and automatically labels everything with sprite-based graphics as crap. He has seen Final Fantasy Tactics and laughed at it, he has never heard of Tales of Destiny, and he wonders why you like to turn on your SNES every once in a while to play Chrono Trigger.

Then, there are the real gamers -- us. We are able to look beyond graphical impressiveness and see other aspects of a video game: playability, story, music, and overall feel. This is not to say that we don't appreciate graphics either. Games like the aforementioned Chrono Trigger impress us as true graphical works of art ... colorful sprites with personality, rather than some annoying camera view that spins all over the place so you can't tell where the hell anything is.

What all this is leading up to is that, because of a few sneaky tricks and some really bad marketing in the video game industry, we missed out on what could have been a Golden Age for console gamers. Take, for instance, the Sega CD. Only one major RPG series (namely Lunar, which consisted of, to my knowledge, two installemts) was ever released for this marketing disaster. I've never played Lunar myself, but those who have swear by it; some even go so far as to make the blasphemous statement that it's better than Final Fantasy. Why? Lunar is a dream game. It was written for a system that couldn't handle all that 3d crap, but used a storage medium that was sufficient to hold a lot of excellent artwork, and even a few animated sequences. The story and music were both excellent as well, or so I'm told.

Oh, and what about the sneaky tricks? Well, ever wonder why the Sony Playstation is abbreviated PSX? Hopefully I've got my story straight here ... The original Sony Playstation was made on a deal with Nintendo. It was to be able to use both CDs and Cartridges, and be compatible with the SNES. Nintendo, in their never-endigng quest for expensive yet inadequate storage mediums, backed out at the last minute, and decided not to market their own CD reader, the Super CD. The Playstation that we now know and love is actually Sony's second attempt at making a console system -- the Playstation X.

What would Super CD games have been like? Probably a lot like Lunar. Great art, great stories, great music, all without that damn 3d that I love to complain about so much.

As we all know, the standard in the video game industry is to cater to the shallow masses, which is why games that lack 3d graphics rarely get released here. Had the Sega CD and the Super CD had the time in the spotlight that they deserved, we would have gotten a lot more high-quality RPGs.

Sure, 2d is simpler than 3d, but what's wrong with a little simplicity once in a while? And take a good look at our good friend Cloud. Does that weird, angular thing really look better than a well-drawn sprite? I think not.

Bart