Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. I waited all day for this column to be updated, then realized it was my job. Don't say we didn't warn you.

I've got a guilty secret to tell you people: I never got around to playing Front Mission 3 last night. The fact is, I'm not gonna allow myself to until I at least finish Fear Effect, which I should this weekend. I know games aren't supposed to be work, and I should be able to play or not play as I like. But I remember all too well the lean times, when RPGs were rare and relatively expensive for me, and there would be months between good games. It's kinda like when your mom tells you to finish all the food on your plate because there are kids starving in Africa. Actually, my mom never said that, but you get the idea.

Currently I'm at Disk 3 in Fear Effect, about 10 hours into Suikoden 1, and in the middle of the final chapter in Wil's scenario in Saga Frontier 2. Suikoden will keep, and I screwed up Saga Frontier pretty bad: I saved in the middle of the dungeon with moderate damage to my party. You can't leave the dungeon that I'm aware of, and I'm pretty sure with my guys at the level they're at and in the condition they're in, they can't beat the final boss. I've tried about 6 times so far, and I'm getting discouraged. Normally I have a secondary save trailing a few hours back, but I foolishly wrote that over. So I seem to be stuck for now.

As for Fear Effect, I'm a little let down. There's no question that the game looks great and has some very good ideas from a design standpoint, and I'm even enjoying the plot. But the actual play style is very trial and error, in the vein of the old SNES Out Of This World. Make no mistake, I liked OotW, but I was expecting a little more Metal Gear Solid like from Fear Effect. One possible reason that's not doable is that the environments seem to take up a huge amount of space - about 30 minutes of playtime on each CD. Maybe if they stick FE2 on a PS2 DVD... Ok, enough acronyms. Letter time!

I honestly wouldn't have thought of King's Field as an RPG, more of an FPS without the S (damn, these acronyms keep popping up), although I've never actually played it. But the consensus around here is that it's an action RPG, with KF2 being released before FFT. So congrats, you're the first person to show me up. I weep like a little girl, and you stand triumphant as Nightmare in Soul Calibur. However, I was quite sure this'd happen sooner or later, so I'm afraid you don't get a patented Chris Jones Hagiography. No gratuitous sucking-up for you! Keep trying, though.

My gaming tastes are somewhat schizophrenic, like a lot of gamers I think. I like one type of game when it's just me and the Playstation, and something else entirely when I'm with others. Frex, my Dreamcast has taken up nearly permanent residence in the break room at work, and I manage to get in a bit of NFL2K and Soul Calibur every once in a while. When I go to Dave & Buster's (the only arcade I've been to in years) I generally stick to things I play with my friends - Virtua Fighter 3, Tokyo Wars, and Gunblade LA to name a few.

Frankly, there's so much on the RPG market right now that I can't even get to everything in the genre, let alone look at other stuff. But in the past I've been known to indulge in the occasional action RPG, and I've already said I think The Bouncer on PS2 looks good. I'm gonna save most of this for an opening rant later, but a long, immerse experience with a good story is what I really look for in a solo game. RPGs are generally the only thing around right now that fits the description, but if somebody can make a Gran Turismo game in the future that involves me like Final Fantasy, I'll probably take a look.

I'm a little hesitant to even touch your other question, 'cause there's so many ways you can look at that. But that's why they pay me the non-existent bucks, so here goes. The vast majority of RPGs and other games with actual characters come from Japan, so we gotta look at where Japanese games are coming from, namely anime. And anime characters (at least in the stuff I've seen ) don't match up to any real racial or ethnic groups at all well. Even relatively realistic anime that's set entirely in Japan with only Japanese characters will have people that look "white", for want of a better word, with hair ranging from black and brown to red, yellow, and purple. I'm sure there are aesthetic reasons for this, and you don't need to mail me back and tell me what they are, but my point is that if you have video games coming out of this context the characters will end up looking like white people and this makes perfect sense to Japanese gamers. It's only when the games reach the US that people start worrying about ethnic mixes. And to be fair, when Japanese video game designers start out from scratch to create a realistic game, they end up with something that looks pretty true to life. Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill are two good examples of this.

I guess I just don't get the point. If you domesticate it, does it give you eggs, or milk? Can you breed it with other Sexalicious Awards to make more, and thus increase the species? If you had lots of SAs, could you sell them for their meat or skin? Of course not! The little bastards are good for one thing, and one thing only, and that's killin'. I thoroughly enjoyed hunting mine down in a closed environment, and then blowin' its brains out with a large bore shotgun. Like I said, it's mounted above my fireplace right now, along side my rhino head and my great-great-grandfather's dodo bird. And good riddance.

THE HUNT IS ON. [cue violent "Most Dangerous Game" showdown]

Well, that's why I'm trying this freeform thing out for a bit, to try and get a feel for what the base state of Double Agent actually looks like. If it turns out to be a workable deal, then we'll stay with people sending in whatever.

But I think topics are useful because they keep things focused and moderated, believe it or not. Without a topic I suspect you'd get two kinds of letters: quick non-sequiturs and long ponderous rants about RPG philosophy. The non-sequiturs are great in small doses, but a column full of that kind of humor would probably get old pretty quickly. The rants are useful to a point, but after a while they tend to be the same thing, over and over.

Topics are usually based off of what's current in the gaming news, which is good because the GIA is a gaming news site, and letters about the latest news are thus highly relevant. News by definition is constantly changing, so to an extent we can stay away from the ancient, inscrutable debates of "2D vs. 3D", "Old vs. New school", and of course, "The MAN vs. THE MAN vs. THE man." (I mean, come on, everyone knows it's THE MAN, and that THE MAN in question isn't Gilgamesh, but Pikachu.) [Chris immediately hides in atomic bomb shelter to hide from the wrath this unleashes.]

I think you're looking at this the wrong way. "The Rememberizer" works in the context of other lame inventions, like "The Salad Shooter" and "The Turnip Twadler." Of course, it's understandably difficult for you to see it in that light, because Working Designs decided at the last minute to cut the short FMV where Ramus goes into pitch mode and sells the Rememberizer to Alex. You should have seen that, it was great...

"The Rememberizer, it slices, it dices, it turns me into a useful character, it lets you avoid the Grindery battle completely and all for only $19.95! But wait there's more! The Rememberizer also fixes Nall's voice and restores the original Japanese soundtrack! The Rememberizer can be used to make every other Working Designs game ship on time, and retroactively makes Grandia an uncensored translation done by Working Designs! Last but not least The Rememberizer lets you see the completely nude Bromides, all by following these simple instructions..."

...but unfortunately that's as much as I got to see.

Your guess seems to be as good as mine, amigo. The game was released in Japan earlier this year to mixed reviews, and was supposed to be out around April in the US. But now it seems to have vanished from everyone's release lists. My own guess is that the game wasn't quite as good as hoped, so the plans were nixed. It happens.

Sonic Adventure was the first game I've ever seen to offer the multi-lingual options, and I think it's a great feature. True, the characters sounded as lame to me in Japanese as in English, but I was home for the holidays at the time and when I had the Japanese vocals on, my family couldn't understand it, and I didn't have to be embarrassed over how incredibly stupid the dialog was. I'd like to see Shen Mue do something similar - it's like a good DVD, where you have the option of hearing it in the original language with subtitles, or the English dub. Of course, having the option doesn't excuse the producers from having to put out a good translation, in dub or in writing.

*SNIFF* That was beautiful, man...

Closing Comments:

I'd like to make a quick comment here that I'm always open to criticism. All the letters I've been receiving so far have been positive, and that's great, but if you become disenchanted with something I'm doing, by all means tell me what it is. (Man, I know I'm gonna regret saying that.) I won't respond to obvious flames, but if you want to calmly, reasonably tell me how I'm screwing up, by all means, beam it this way. That's all for now folks, have a good weekend and see you tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, going into a mutex lock