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. Non temetis messor. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Finally got around to getting Majora's Mask last night, but I only had a chance to play a bit of it. Still, I really liked what I saw - it has a much richer feel to it, looks much more complex both graphically and gameplay-wise, than OoT. I know pointing all this out now is akin to saying, "Hey, I found this really cool game called 'Metal Gear Solid' the other day..." but what are you gonna do? I just hope I can put a major dent in this thing before FF9 comes out... not bloody likely tho. Still, thought it might be appropriate to lead off with a game with masks on Halloween night.

Onward.

Given that I got to rave all I wanted about Silent Hill in my vault on the game, I guess I shouldn't get to talk about it here too, but who said life was fair? For the most part, I agree with you - I rarely find books or movies particularly frightening, since most of them are going for shock or disgust value, while rarely really getting into the 'endless nightmare' feel that I really need to get creeped out. Heck, when I was in Jr. High I read just about every Stephen King book available in about a month and burst out laughing every couple of minutes. Good horror fiction is really hard to do.

But the fact is, I did get pretty freaked out by Silent Hill. I think it's because, unlike a movie, the scares aren't used up in a few cathartic axe-wielding moments, and unlike a book, the environment is far more immerseive. Wandering around the alternate school house and hospitals, I only got the vaguest sense of what it must be like to really be in that situation - but given the severity of the situation, a vague sense was all I really needed. Also, Silent hill did a great job of stretching out the weirdness over most of the game's running time, and that's really rare. Looking back, the only other seriously scary book or movie I can think of that did something similar was Kubrick's The Shining, which probably has a lot to do with that film's power as well.

Serious evil all around... although I can almost (not quite, but almost) see where your employers are coming from. The PS2 may have shipped in miniscule quantities, but there are more PS2 games out there than you can shake a stick at. I stopped by the local Best Buy and Electronics Boutique last night, and both were overflowing with everything from TTT to Madden. And besides, if someone won't buy a PS2 because they don't want a copy of Fantavision, there are plenty of other people who will. Just the market in action, my friend.

Actually, this might be in addition to the $480 selling price, not the cause of it. The core of the PS2, the "Emotion Engine" chip, is a cutting edge piece of hardware that Sony's had to push itself hard to manufacture in anything like the type of quantities it needs. The chips on the PS2 probably run $200, easy. Factor in the cost of a DVD drive and you could easily be looking at a couple hundred bucks before you even consider paying people to actually put it together, distribution, etc. But if you can get 10 million of these things into people's houses in a reasonable time frame, and figure on average that the owners might buy two or three games a year, you're looking at some pretty decent cash flow, which makes the loss worthwhile.

I know transparency functions exist in emulators - I just thought the letter last night said as much until I just now reread it. But I still stand by my original claim that emulation, for the most part, is not as good as the original. Yes, as of late computers have gotten fast enough to run things with no problems and all the features engaged, but as recently as a year ago I saw people trying to run the translated SD3 ROM on a pretty decent P2 and failing miserably. (Yeah I know that the original SD3 cart also ran slowly, but not this badly.) And these were computer engineering people, not exactly a demographic that's too dumb to know which VESA driver to use.

And besides, computers rob console gaming of one of their main strengths, plug and play. With the exception of having an old or damaged system that jumps at key points, the experience I get from my copy of Zelda MM is the same experience that anyone else does, and nobody has to be a rocket scientist to make it work. If I wanted to mess around with patches, different frame rates, new sound cards, etc., I'd be running Quake 3 on a non-standard Linux box, thanks all the same.

And now we get into the economic aspect of emulation. You've all heard me talk about the ethics of ROMS, so I won't go there, but I will point out that gaming's an expensive hobby, always has been. $60 is nothing - I paid nearly $90 on sight for Chrono Trigger brand new, and I still think it was worth it. Besides, at some point not too long ago Nintendo was still selling SNESs in some odd new form factor for like $40 bucks. This may not still be true, but you shouldn't have that much trouble picking up a system for fairly small change.

Still, I suppose in an odd way the emulation quality many people experience is a way of balancing things out - most people get what they pay for, when all's said and done.

Don't have much to say here, but I thought the "OOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOOooooo", which I assume is some sort of spooky ghost noise, was kinda cool.

Sounds good to me. Still, it's not really complete without random monster encounters... dang it, where's those hapless kids inadvertently opeing portals to the underworld when you need them?

Interesting about the PS2. And as for Summoner, you must have a much higher tolerance for pain than I, sir. I'll quite happily finish off the back load of PSX games I've got before getting too deep into that particular experience.

I never played Beyond the Beyond, which I suppose is just as well. I almost got it once, during the empty time between when I first got my PSX and finished FF, and when Square released FFT in early 1998. "Surely it can't be that bad," I remember thinking. But indeed it appears to have been, and I can only thank the kind clerk at Babbage's who warned me away from it. May your Dual Shock controller never spontaneously switch off analog controls, sir.

Excellent call - obscure, really awful game that even has sort of a goth feel to it. Indeed, a heady reminder of the scary, glorious days where every half assed Japanese developer in the world wanted to publish in the US, and the Nintendo Seal of Quality was an ironclad guarantee that nothing would prevent NoA from collecting licensing fees from such garbage. I commend you, s. c., for putting that all important chill down my spine on this Halloween night.

Closing Comments:

Well, we've been getting some good response to Mr. Parish's recent retrospective on Castlevania: SotN. Which leads me back to thinking about something I said about Castlevania II some time ago, and from there to Link's Adventure, and so on and so forth: namely, at what point does a game stop being an action game and start being an RPG? It might be argued that anything without EXP isn't a true RPG, but really, what's EXP for except linking the amount of ground you've covered with your character's fighting abilities? And don't even games like the original Zelda pull that off, by having characters gradually find more life containers and better weapons? Is there anything in particular that leads us to say, "SotN is an RPG, but Super Metroid is not?" Blasphemy, to be sure, but it should be fun to talk about. See you tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, wonders why no one mentioned Ghosts 'n Goblins for the NES. Man that game was lame.