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. Third day of class, still not registered! Boo-yah! Don't say we didn't warn you.

I was quite pleased with the thoughtful and constructive nature of the letters I got about gaming journalism, especially considering that this is my last guest hosting day, as Chris is now fighting the third form of the flu (the one with the angel wings) and should return by tomorrow.

I was even more pleased that my free Vivi from PlayOnline.com arrived! Vivi is easily one of my favorite characters in RPG history, and takes his place proudly among my other character-based swag, minus my missing Psyduck. Oh well. Time for one gigantic column!

The fact your name is "BeerGoggles_FromMARS" made up for the extra length in your letter, and you hit the general nail right on the head: independent does not need to equal amateur. You can quit reading the column now if you expect me to shy away from saying that the GIA is the most professional video game site out there. Sometimes people take the whole "intelligent" moniker as being egotistical, but we take this stuff seriously - and that perception is a price we're easily willing to pay.

In terms of layout, I wholeheartedly agree that those like GameSpot's try to compensate for the inability to design a decent navigation system by trying to link to everything from the front page. The funny thing is that GameSpot's navigation system isn't half-bad; it's just surrounded by crap nobody has any use for.

Certain companies and media outlets have noticed that we try really, really hard to treat gaming like it deserves to be treated instead of a joke or a throwaway hobby that doesn't even merit somebody...

This is THE number one pathetic thing about gaming journalism today. Staffers at web sites and magazines are so fascinated at their own jobs that they create an entire new persona to go along with their work. The normal ones just make a variation on their own name, but the truly insane claim they become gaming characters, ninja warriors, sorcerers, or that they don't belong to either gender.

The author is the prism through which many readers see a site's work, and if that writer is some cartoon character of their own creation, how the hell am can I take what they write seriously? It's great that you can get your own anime persona and graphic signature, but I wonder if these people have ever considered that it just may be time to grow up in what is a maturing industry.

I'm in my last year of college and the top thing on my resumé at the moment is the site you're reading right now. I guess the standard I use at the moment is that if I worked at most any other gaming site, I'd be embarrased to have a potential employer visit, fearful they would stumble across some rambling article that treated the industry like one big in-joke.

1) If sites try to replace words with numbers, they will fail, and be forced to tack on things like "not an average" on the end of their reviews. I think numbers have zero place in a review (haha), but I accept that a five-point scale is useful as quick reference to give the reader an idea of the game's quality. If they don't take the time to read the text before buying, then they deserve to waste their money and will hopefully learn in the future.

2) This is part of the same problem that the silly nom de plumes and alter egos cause - it makes gaming seem like an enthusiast-only activity. It promotes an entire underground which turns off anyone who isn't already a dedicated gamer or follower of Japanese culture. Hell, I've watched something like four animes in my life. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a subculture, but it shouldn't outweigh everything else.

3) I hate to disagree, but it must be remembered that this is a letters column and has (for today) my name at the top - the perfect venue for bashing. Nothing like this belongs in the disclaimer-free editorial portion of the page. We've been guilty of letting bias bleed through into the occasional story before, and it's something we've tried to notice and curb. Don't attack for the sake of attacking, attack because you want to draw attention to something you see as wrong or harmful.

When a certain large corporate gaming site posted some reviews that were shoddy to the point of insulting anyone in the business, I e-mailed their Editor in Chief and, after I got over myself a bit, we discussed the issues at hand like colleagues. It feels good to vent, but more venting is certainly not the solution to anything outside being entertaining in a letters column.

This might be the best point made today and was the only letter that raised it. Entertainment is more personality-driven than ever -- and so are things like politics for that matter -- but gaming's very nature precludes the kind of personalities that draw in casual fans. I'm tempted to say things are best left to those of us who know about gaming, but I can't help but say that the industry deserves mainstream respect, if only because it isn't built expressly to cater to it outside a few pathetic franchises. There has been progress in recognizable franchises that have mainstream appeal (think Resident Evil), but the lack of celebrity is often crippling.

First of all, tanks to Xenon for going the extra mile and including the requisite HTML in the letter himself. Talk about making it easy to choose a letter to print!

As for your question, the staff all has their own opinion, but here we go anyway:

IGN: knowledgable, their updates are regular, and their layout fairly friendly. Even so, the pages for each console are ridiculously biased towards their machine, most notably the fanaticism of IGN DC. It leaves a balanced perspective nowhere to be found and is like having two sections of a newspaper for wildly skewed articles from each political party.

IGN also has a minimum word requirement for every story, which means basic announcement stories get packed with inane crap. Witness this epic love poem of a story, ostensibly about Tecmo doing GBA games, yet somehow ending up as an eight paragraph monster that runs over a thousand words! The same bloated format applies to their reviews, which often devolve into hyperspecific comments on areas of the game best summarized in a few sentences. All this while year-old screens that are often still in Japanese line the margins. Many lessons here can be learned from print media, especially that brevity is the soul of wit.

Videogames.com: uses a cryptic five category formula that is a severely lacking way to decide review scores. If you're going to weigh reviewer tilt so heavily, why not just have them assign a score outright? The features are fine, I just picked them at random as something to bring comment, though their previews are out of date unless about the highest profile titles. The layout is an absolute nightmare, and the search engine is bordering on useless. Their news has recovered well from most of the staff leaving, but not quite yet, and reader reviews are often one paragraph challenging other gamers who live in the same town.

Daily Radar: not worth my time, though they managed to teach IGN a lesson in brevity by showcasing their best reviewer on Link's Awakening - remember, helpful signs will point you in the right direction.

Gamers.com is a decent layout away from being a fantastic site. They drained talent from the best sites and resources from venture capitalists when they were still gullible, and despite a rocky beginning, the site is now doing a bang-up job. They seem to value balance, and the unified structure prevents the pointless infighting of IGN or DR. The layout, however, continues to suck mightily despite redesigns - once they decide on having a readable news site instead of a portal, things should improve. And major kudos for Thresh to building a real gaming site instead of a monument to his Quake fame.

Game Informer isn't half-bad at all, and they don't take themselves too seriously either.

Gamefan: Try them for... oh wait, Gamefan.com is dead! (snicker) The print version even went after us in their FFIX review, veering out of their way to bash FFVIII and stating that "...as for all those intelligent gamers [emphasis theirs] that labeled this game as the best RPG of all time, well, how do those words sit in light of an RPG that is 10x the game the previous chapter was." Despite not liking FFVIII at all, but I got FFIX, didn't I? So there's no real need to be bitter, is there? I wonder how they lasted so long in the first place.

Your letter largely got printed because it was the only one with a single word of complaint, and it didn't even arrive until I was midway through the column. It's simple: we don't cover everything because everything doesn't need more coverage.

Are you lacking in football game analysis or wrestling game news? Do you really need a preview to figure out what Mega Man X5 is going to be like? Here's a hint - try Mega Man X4, Mega Man X3, Mega Man X2, and Mega Man X. If you haven't gotten it yet, you might try Mega Man 8, Mega Man 7, Mega Man 6, Mega Man 5, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 3, Mega Man 2, or Mega Man. Oh, and it isn't much like Mega Man Soccer.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that we cover what we find interesting and we think gets overlooked elsewhere. We've mulled covering games from Jet Grind Radio to Perfect Dark, but instead devote resources to thing people might miss otherwise - the Persona series, or Ogre Battle 64. We aren't here to be a small-scale IGN or their affiliate.

What happened to Sega in the post-E3 mainstream press was a shocking example of just how aloof supposed professional journalists can be. They walked in knowing what story they were going to write, wrote it, then left. Sega deserved so much better after putting one one hell of a show that featured one hell of a line-up. (sigh) is right.

And remember, kids, don't buy Summoner either.

Former GIA Agent and game soundtrack expert Arpad Korossy with the answer:

Howdy.

Final Fantasy bootlegs, like most bootleg CDs, are usually inferior to the originals in packaging, and occasionally in sound quality. Although I could go into greater specifics if I knew which albums you purchased in particular, virtually all bootlegs will feature different CD art and liner notes, and in some cases a different packaging setup as well. The legit Final Fantasy VI OSV comes in a small box large enough to accomodate the double CD jewel and thick liner notes. All three CDs are contained in the one package. In the bootleg EverAnime version, presumably to milk more money from buyers, the three CDs are individually packaged in single jewels and sold separately.

As for sound quality, I can't really promise you that you'll be able to tell a difference. I've only owned one bootleg album, and I couldn't tell the difference when I bought the legit version. Of course, I'm no audiophile; I listen to most of my music on $15 headphones and I really can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD sound quality.

Issues of quality aside, a surefire way to tell originals and bootlegs apart is the serial number. Any album that has a serial that starts with G, A&G, GAME, or GM is bootleg. In the case of Final Fantasy soundtracks, all legit CDs will have a serial beginning with PSCN (for NTT Publishing) or SSCX (for DigiCube). I hope this answers any questions you may have.

Much appreciated, though I wonder why can't somebody ask the man in Japanese. Gamers.com easily has the most competent translators on the web by far (led by Nao Higo), so we should probably hope for them to break through before anyone else does. At least Uemtasu's making the choice on purpose, even if his music isn't terribly dynamic compared to games like Rare's Banjo series.

I hadn't printed a single goofy letter. So there.

Closing Comments:

I'm sure Chris will enjoy responding to this - wouldn't you? Don't deny him the pleasure, send him a letter!

-Ed McGlothlin, the Godzilla to your Tokyo