Double Agent
Reach out and crush someone - January 24, 2001 - Chris Jones

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. And here I was saving the last of my strength to bite off that damn woman's head... Don't say we didn't warn you.

Ok, so I was kinda wrong yesterday - Sega's announcement today, while not quite as much fun as Square's announcement earlier this week, is still pretty cool. I'm not sure how well Sega'll be able to maintain their inventive, original attitude if they're working under another company, but I guess we'll all find out together when the time comes.

Onward.

Gloating is unbecoming, philistine
CJ,

"We are currently in negotiations with Sony and Nintendo to provide our game titles to PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Advance."

-Ding dong, the witch is dead. The wicked witch...-

*cough*

Um, back to...uh...the subject, unless Nintendo comes out with a real killer app for the GBA, I don't see it taking off. Sure, all those billions of Pokémon players would always have someone to battle with, but that market of 6-12 year olds doesn't have easy access to cell phones. I would predict they'd have to come up with something really innovative to hit the teenage/adult market to justify making some kind of network to play through.

Gotta admit though, the fact that Sega will be lending their considerable software force to the GBA, it might not be as hard as it looks to deliver a genuine killer app.

-Red Raven, just glad he won't have to buy a Dreamcast too

Let me get this straight: we're talking about the successor to the most popular gaming system of all time, over one hundred MILLION units sold, and home of the most popular RPG series ever, and you're not sure it'll be a success? Ok...

I'm not real worried about cell phones not being prevalent enough as the GBA expands - those things are like cockroaches, filling every available ecological niche. I think I can pretty much guarantee that by the time the GBA hits its prime, there won't be a first grade classroom in the country where less than half the kids have some sort of portable communication. The real question here is one of standards - Japan is already centered around a much more advanced wireless technology infrastructure, and it'll take the US years to catch up in comparison. In other words, many of the new cellular-based games that come out for the GBA may never make it over here to the US, in which case, yes, the GBA could be stillborn over here.

Metal Gear Distributed
Here's a costly and unwieldy idea for a GameBoy cell phone game. Metal Gear. Rather than having just text or trying to fit sound samples into the game, though, when you're supposed to be communicating with Snake's Little Helpers, it dials a Konami number, and you listen in on the cell phone.

Actually, come to think of it, one of Sega's new "portable device" games seems to be playing Samba de Amigo while listening to music over the cell phone, so maybe things like this aren't QUITE as far out as I first thought.

Or ooh... what about Phantasy Star Online or FF XI? I know they'd have to be drastically different, but hey. It'd beat Pokemon for building up characters portably and continuing at home.

Joshua Slone

You might want to take a portable, wireless Metal Gear game in an entirely different direction: joint tactical espionage, where you have to work in teams with other people from all over the country to infiltrate a base. I don't think I'd want to spend a lot of time reading the gobs of text an online RPG would have off of a tiny GBA screen, but coordinating an action game with voice commands could work really well. Now we just need to get Kojima to start work...

Man, what a complete... no, wait, it's just Drew.
Hey Chris,

To make sure the tone of my letter is in accordance with the rest of the column, I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a dissenting prick. Relatively few console gamers care about Bungie or Halo. In fact, the people most familiar with the game are PC fanatics, and PC fanatics tend to fall into one of two groups:

1.) Die-hard PC nuts who would never purchase a console anyway, or...
2.) ...gaming nuts who have not only enough expendable cashflow to constantly upgrade a PC, but certainly the means and the desire to get every console that comes out anyhow.

If the X Box is gonna fly, Microsoft needs some titles the average consumer cares about. Frankly, it don't have those titles; at least not yet. And if MS doesn't have at least one of those titles ready for launch, it could be shooting itself in the foot.

Of course, you could just point out that I'm a Nintendo whore, so of course I'm going to say that. And you could also point out that people who assume the PS2 is going to be the only worthwhile DVD system on the block are just Sony whores. Which brings up another interesting point: so where are the Microsoft whores?

-Drew Cosner, amazing pedant

Mr. Cosner, sir, I respectfully submit that you are viewing Halo's value completely ass backwards. Halo is not a well-known title, and Bungie is not a well-known company, except, as you suggest, outside a fairly limited group of people. But Halo's strength lies less in a brand name, and more in the basic quality of the game itself: if Bungie can follow through on even half the claims they've made (and get it out the door before others encroach on that potential) then Halo will be an absolutely amazing freakin' game. Very much in the same killer app category as Zelda and Mario, I think. True, nobody's much excited about it yet, because nobody's played it and the hype campaign hasn't started yet... but when it does, look out.

Meantime, Microsoft may well be able to fit in some titles the average consumer cares about, like ports of Metal Gear Solid 2 and perhaps some Square stuff. True, it won't be exclusive, but if you want to play FFX and can't get a PS2, but can get an X-Box, will you honestly care that much?

It's always darkest...

You used the phrase "if you gotta go, go out with a bang" in response to a letter about Square's financial straits vs. their obscenely large release list, and something hit me...

Isn't that how Final Fantasy got its name in the first place? Last time Square was looking at the bottom of their bank account, we got FF1. Beaujolais to Square's money problems!

- Zen, as he walks he's thinking of a new way to walk.

But will lightning strike twice? I'm dubious, personally, but perhaps it's somewhat like FF8, where you keep your characters purposely on the brink of death in order to use their limit breaks. Hmm.

"Omnislush! Wait, I mean..."
Toy Story type out-takes? Yeah, I'd love to see that in FFVII for the PS2. I could just see it now; Sepheroth coming down for the kill, Aeris about to die...and suddenly Cloud lets one rip, and they all loose it. Or even better, the sword goes through Aries' chest, and out comes her still-beating heart! Yeah, I'd bet they'd be laughing that one off on their way to their trailers.

Oh, and just so I'm on topic: The GBA with a cell phone. Game idea? How about one where you have to call up your friends to gain back MP and HP, and the longer you talk, the more you get back. I'm sure Sprint PCS would rake in millions with a game like that helping them out.

-Banjax, hoping that, just once, Sepheroth cracks a smile and gives the camera the finger.

It might also be cool to see an outtake wherein Tifa changes into street clothes and burns the enormously padded bra she wore, or a behind the scenes shot of Cloud going through can after can of hairspray to keep his spikes up... but seriously, I doubt we'll ever see such a thing from Square, since that kind of meta-humor seems at odds with the general attitude the FF series seems to want to maintain.

The Compleat Final Fantasy
Chris,

Out of curiosity, why hasn't Square, with all its remaking on various systems, ever gotten around to producing a high-quality, matched, box-set kind of anthology?

If they figure they can sell FFA to PS owners, FF I-III to WSC owners, FF IV-VI to GBC owners, FF VII-IX to PS2 owners that can already play the originals on the same system, etc... Why couldn't they put together a nice-looking package that has FF I-XI or something? Honestly, what FF fan *wouldn't* buy it?

Half the turn-off to me about all these remakes is that none of the are matched in a coherent anthology attempt. (I.E. They could have included IV with FFA, but instead choose to release it a year later. It would have been much sharper to release them as a package.)

Maybe Square should contract WD to put together something nice. :-) Ys Eternal I tell ya! (Although, as my sentiment goes, Ys Eternal would have been infinitely better than 10 remakes of every game on various platforms with no version coherency at all.)

-Evan M.

I'm not sure Square would or could take that kind of tack, but they could do far worse than release an anthology collection with Lunar Complete-style extras. If the name of the game here is to get Square as much money is possible, then they wouldn't want to release the games as a boxed set, but a soundtrack disc per game plus some of the extras like they had in their Millennium Collection would go a long way towards making the games attractive, even if they didn't end up changing any software at all.

A week of binge drinking, or 5 minutes on a cell phone
uh, considering that research I've done lately points to cellphone-emitted microwaves causing the blood-brain barrier to leak albumin (damned engineers,eheh ), i duno... but since my brain is probably already nuked at the key points, what would I like to see? For one thing, I'd really like to get a try at multiplayer action-RPGing that I missed out on with secret of mana... I'd also REALLY like that new FF to have a card game, and maybe auctions, too, with an option for human opponents. It may seem rather trivial; but I've been dying to challenge somebody ever since FF8. There's really nothing else I'd want, save the ability for lewd graphical "away" messages...

machka drek

Considering that the number one complaint I get about Legend of Mana is that it didn't have a decent multiplayer mode, any developer would be doing itself a big favor to release a distributed SoM type game. I'm not sure that you'd really want voice communication the whole time, but if you could implement a PSO-style pictorial communication system, you probably wouldn't need one.

But first, I gotta know... what's albumin? Or is your inability to spell a result of albumin poisoning?

Closing Comments:

There be a topic below, so read, write, and respond. Until tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, feels like a Microsoft whore every time he uses Windows

Topic for Thursday, 1/25/2001
Here's something that has bothered me for a while and that might be an interesting topic for a column...

Someone asked me once if his PSX could get a virus trough a memory card. "That's nonsense!" I told him. But the idea remained with me, and now with the coming of consoles with hard drives and modems for internet connection, I think this is now a reality.

Hard drives provide viruses with permanent storage. Internet connection is a way they can propagate... So if the OS is flexible enough, the idea of a virus doesn't sound so farfetched now.

Maybe I''m just being paranoid. Maybe such a thing is not possible. Still, with X-Box being a windows based machine, I can imagine that a few of those annoying pests will find themselves right at home in an innocent console gamer's living room.

So are we now doomed to the same fate as the PC Gamers? Are we going to have to watch out what add-on we are downloading or if this new level comes from a trusted source? Will Norton release a PS2 antivirus? Will a radical Nintendo fan create a virus with the sole prupose of erasing every X-Box save file it can find on the hard drive?

If somebody asks me, the merging of computing and console gaming sounds more like a bad idea with every passing second...

--
Carlos Rodriguez

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