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. Jose Chung's from outer space, the bastard. Don't say we didn't warn you.

You folks lucked out today - I came this close to not doing a column at all, thanks to a fire here on campus that shut down power to the email servers and prevented me from reading my mail most of the day. Classes were cancelled too, so I got to stay in and play Lunar 2 most of the day. Can't beat it with a stick, whatever that means.

Onward.

What third party is going to develop for a console with no future? But that's the whole point - if this is true, then the Dreamcast will piggyback on the X-Box, and be a viable platform for at least as long as the second system will be around, which could be a good long while.

Of course, that raises the question of who's gonna want to develop for the DC chip set when they've got the much more powerful X-Box to work with, but it could still happen - if the X-Box development environment is difficult to work with, and the graphical demands aren't that intense, the DC might still be the preferred development platform. Not that this'll do much to extend the life of the existing standalone DC boxes, but it could be good for Sega, depending on their financial arrangements with Microsoft.

That last line refers to one of many links to the story I got in my mailbox yesterday, but we actually got word of it from another source just after the stories went up. So nice try, but keep trying.

Otherwise, some good stuff here - the controller issue begs the question of how long this has been in the pipeline (quite some time, I'm guessing, and we're just now hearing about it) and of course the DC's already strong software library will be a boon to Microsoft... although, as someone else pointed out, this is yet another set of ports, not a standalone reason to get the X-Box for itself. Still, if enough of these half-reasons add up, you're still left with a pretty attractive platform. I mean, if Square and Konami bring over everything they do for the PS2, what more do you need?

Kinda scary, and I'd be surprised if the software compatibility actually worked that well, but it's an interesting thought none the less. Good job.

For everyone who couldn't make it out yesterday, or complained that their net connections weren't up to downloading a ~30 meg file (wimps!), this is the truth of the matter: the flash in question does show an overexposed shot of one of Amano's sketches of Relm, and yes, it works a evidence that she's Shadow's daughter. At least one person did email to say they'd already found it, but Nistelle's the first I'm aware of who posted it, so rock on.

Meanwhile, give me some credit - of course I recognized that it was Relm. The comment about Celes was (half-jokingly) referring to her model in the opera scene at the beginning of the movie, but I did go ahead and change it when I realized there was some ambiguity.

The whole issue did get me to thinking, tho: the FFA movies are still one of the few places where Amano's actual character drawings have faithfully been rendered in CG. Even in FF9 Garnet's hair somehow drifted from blonde to brown (check the illustration on the back of the instruction book) and Vivi's model is extremely conservative compared to some of the other art of him. So why are we still seeing corruption of Amano's concepts, when a blonde Terra in the intro suggests that you can move directly from paper to polygons?

Before anything else, I'm pretty sure that this rumor is true, at least at the moment. Further revisions may find Microsoft removing the capacity from the system before release, but I'm do believe that there are DC hybrids in Microsoft's labs at the moment.

That said, you paint a harsh, but largely accurate, picture of the situation, which leaves me with little to do but spin control.

Two things (excuses, rationalizations, call them what you will) come to mind. First off, it's the very nature of gaming journalism to be in love with minutiae, and likely always will be. Think about it: even as the people interested in this stuff grow up, the area of coverage is still seen as ephemeral, trivial stuff, not real news. And that's probably pretty true. Just like entertainment news or movie rumor websites, we scramble to get possibly false info on issues that don't really deeply effect many people, when all is said and done. And why do we do it? Because we like to, because we (both readers and staff) are obsessed with games, and greatly interested in every little tidbit we can find, regardless of if it's ultimately true or not. So in other words, this stuff gets published because just about everyone involved cares more about throughput than veracity.

Second, we're seeing a lot of this stuff about Sega because the industry's in a very unstable time at the moment. For most of the past decade, there have been easily identifiable top dogs (Nintendo and Sony) but at the moment, no one's sure what's gonna happen, and everyone's trying to figure it out. That generates rumors. Sega may not be in as desperate straits as some people think (and I hope they're not) but it is a truism that even a small amount of instability generates rumors of much more. For an example of this in another context, take a look at any random issue of the Wall Street Journal and see how many stories you can find about trouble at any of a dozen companies. Misery gets reported, good times do not.

So much spin control... I feel like a marketer. I feel... dirty...

Sounds good... will they be spinning their own merchandize off, including a Final Fight-type video game?

This letter's interesting for a few reasons - after yesterday's announcement, I'd completely stopped thinking about things like this, but they're just as relevant as ever, or more so, since adding DC compatibility will likely make the system even more complicated. We may think differently about all this when we have some perspective on everything, so don't jump to too many conclusions just yet.

Closing Comments:

My gift to Drew is this: a topic for tomorrow. Let's hear some feedback on why Amano hasn't been well represented in past games. The original excuse for having Nomura was that his more solid-style designs translated better to the PSX, but with the PS2, the more delicate, stylistic models we see in the FFA movies become possible. So is it just a matter of time before we get true 3D Amano characters, or are there other factors at work here? See you Monday.

-Chris Jones, fighting the urge to join a PR firm