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. Yeah, I probably got the gender of that word wrong. Sue me. Don't say we didn't warn you.

So I played a few PSX games on my PS2 last night, and more than anything it reminded me of getting a new Transformer when I was a kid. You'd save up for weeks to get that new Decepticon, anticipating the moment when it would be yours, driven to the brink of insanity by endless commercials and the TV show...

And then you'd get it, change it back and forth between a robot and a space shuttle/submarine/alarm clock for about fifteen minutes, and then say to yourself: "Ok, that was fun... so now what?"

Don't get me wrong, it's still shiny and blue, but graphical upgrades are only amusing for so long. Out of the games I tried out, Vagrant Story clearly came out the best, moving from "Absolutely phenomenal if you remember this is a PSX game and squint a bit" to "Absolutely phenomenal if you remember this is a PSX game." Most impressive were the characters' faces - I can now see expressions change, mouths move, and eyes track. Ironically enough, Lunar 2, the game I'm currently playing (and maybe my last PSX game ever) doesn't benefit at all from the PS2, except for (maybe) slightly faster loading times.

But it is blue, so no regrets.

Onward.

I don't think I explained myself well enough, so as a clarifying example, let me talk about Actraiser.

The basic premise of this game was that your character was a god - true, one long dormant and largely without power in the beginning, but still a god. And we got a taste of that (albeit through the annoying angel interface) in the sim mode... but the rest of the game was a standard hack and slash. Your character had some spells at his disposal, but it was nothing terribly inventive - fire, lighting, force fields, standard wrath-of-god type stuff. And the kicker is that he couldn't even use them that often. Mostly you just swung your sword, which did not have great range, great power, and never got better, even as your character supposedly did. And, just as a reminder, this was supposed to be a god doing this stuff... not some generic, faceless barbarian hero.

Some qualifiers - Actraiser was a great game, especially for the time, and you honestly couldn't have expected more from an SNES title. But think about it for a second - if there were really an avatar of a god walking around on earth, would it be a Conan clone in a mask, or something like a hurricane compressed into a vaguely anthropomorphic form? If it could do magic, would it just throw fireballs, or warp the very reality around it in strange, frightening ways? Having all that power wouldn't necessarily mean that it was invulnerable, or that destroying evil would be a cakewalk - but it would mean that evil would have to be more interesting than generic ogres that wander back and forth on a tree limb. Use your imaginations, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

Thinking about it for a second, you're absolutely right. 90% of the time I keep my mages in reserve, right up until the end of the dungeon and the boss fight, which leaves me with a character only marginally more useful than, say, Malak. (Harsh but true.) And when we reach the end of the dungeon, even going full out with their most powerful spells, the mage rarely does more than twice the damage as the strongest fighter. Some games (Lemina's collection of staffs in Lunar 2 comes to mine) make your mages useful in other ways, but by and large mages aren't that fearsome or that useful. Again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any kind of limits on the mage's powers, but think of the kind of respect Gandalf got in LotR, and design a character worthy of that respect.

On the contrary, character development would be great - but most of the character development we get (at least as far as powers and abilities are concerned) are largely a cheat. FF9's a great example of this. Your characters gain enormous strength throughout the game, but little about them actually changes, because even as they go from two to three to four digits of damage in a hit, they're simply fighting more powerful enemies who still take the same approximate number of hits to dispatch. There are a few key abilities you can pick up (like the Life spell) but by and large, spells fall into the same trap. This is precisely why I didn't have a problem with FF8's lack of levels, because they're already something of a joke anyway.

Now think of characters that actually change, so you'd play the game much differently at the end than at the beginning... kinda like that old Sega game Altered Beast, but more inventive and set up so that you'd only become a dragon at the very end of the game. I don't think there's any real limits on this idea working, except, as Mr. Ford points out, a lack of imagination on the developer's part.

"We live in an age of things gone past monstrosity and become necessity."

-Greg Bear

If we keep pushing this consoles-as-women analogy, then we'll have to see ourselves as Highlander-style immortals, outliving everyone they ever loved and watching them fade away to old age and death... And that's just too damn depressing. Nope, I drop my consoles as soon as they stop putting out new games, since that's easier for all concerned.

And I guess now that I've got a PS2, I've got to start finding reasons to rationalize its purchase... er, I mean, research the upcoming new games. ZOE and some of Konami's other games look fine, but being the Square whore I am, I still think I'm gonna have to go with the Bouncer... do you realize it's been nearly 10 years since I last bought a straight beat-em-up?

As for your last point, it may just be a case of different people looking to get different things out of a game. I'd like to think I could relate to a demi-god coming face-to-face with his own limitations just as easily as I could a teenage kid saving the world... but there's gotta be a hybrid of the two that would work. What about a perfectly ordinary kid who becomes near-omnipotent? You might not be omnipotent yourself, but surely you could relate to someone like yourself dealing with something extraordinary like that, if the story was told well, yes?

Taking on Mojo is one thing, but there's no way I'm getting behind this - my foolish bravado has limits, dude. When Pat Robertson comes by to kick your ass, I had nothing to do with any of this...

I do believe you're mistaken, sir. Had I said "$50", your method would be correct, but I was referring to an indeterminate collection of individual dollars, rather than a single proper amount of money. Thus the plural contraction would be the correct one.

Thanks for your concern over my grammar, however. You may now return to making sure that all the books in your bookshelves are all pushed out so their spines are exactly even.

As always, I love printing letters that agree with me pretty much verbatim... or maybe I stole his ideas and used them in my responses further up. You'll never know, will you?

Prequel... mmm. And sounds about right - I saw it in two different cities, one a major metropolis, one a fairly small town, and at both places there was a good sized audience that seemed appreciative of the movie. Now if we could just get all those people hooked on RPGs, we'd be set...

I think I'll leave the details of that up to you, Drew... but just remember, as Double Agent, I'm entitled to a full share of the profits. On the other hand, the way things are going for some of the dot coms, we may be the only even vaguely successful site on the Internet before too long, at least as far as games are concerned.

Yay us!

I thought I'd get a lot more letters than yours about Sega, assigned topic or no. (And hey, you can't say all I ever print is topic letters.)

But here's a question for you in response: why didn't you actually write me a letter about Sega, instead of writing me to ask why I didn't ask you to write one?

Closing Comments:

Regardless, tomorrow's a free topic day, so write in about Sega or whatever else you like. Incidentally, this week's been great for both the quantity and quality of letters - thanks, and keep it up. See you tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan, who's blue, but not in a good way