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. I went nowhere and saw no one this past week. Honest. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, I swear. Maybe. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Cosner. Fraundorf. Korossy. McClendon. Bow down before their mad letter writing skills, and sacrifice something valuable to your preferred deity that their verbal brilliance was around to cover my lazy ass last week.

Oh, and somebody out there (Expert Gamer, to be precise) likes us. As well they should. Thanks for the kind words, magazine dudes.

Onward.

I think the fact that the guy in question was running the game for two days straight likely had more to do with it, and that the above statement is just an attempt by Sony to sell more vertical stands. But they built the system, I didn't. Actually, until I myself am a multi-billion dollar company (which won't happen until Wednesday, at the earliest), you might do best to ignore my opinions on such matters.

Seeing as how I'm almost entirely divorced from the news side of the site, I'll do what I usually do: give a half-assed answer and hope someone else steps in to correct any mistakes.

We update the site in good old straight HTML - give us a text editor, a web browser, and an FTP client and we're happy. As for keeping track of what's already up, we keep copies of all our old stories in the archives - really, the only thing that changes is where it's placed on the front index page, which tends to build up in a stack, with older news stories pushed further down. There are at least four or five guys every night looking at what's current, what new info is out, and figuring out what should go up, Aside from the fact that we're distributed all over the North American continent, very little about the process would seem confusing to a newspaper editor from the 1800s.

At first I thought this letter was about Walter Jon Williams, and couldn't figure out what AV was so upset about... and then I realized that it was about Tad Williams, who's entirely different.

And yes, I did just entirely sidestep that argument, thanks for noticing.

Two thoughts here - the Discworld games are pretty decent if you're a Pratchett fan, but they're really more of a throwback to his earlier style, which tended to emphasize gags a bit more and theme a bit less. A modern Discworld game, along the lines of something like Carpe Jugulum or Small Gods *drool* would probably go a long way towards being more the kind of "authored" game people were discussing.

And I like The Dream Hunters very much, but let's be honest here - it's fundamentally no better or worse than any other Sandman graphic novel, just with more intricate art and fewer illustrations.

In all honesty, I was never that big a Nirvana fan (ironically because I couldn't reconcile their anti-pop message with their huge popularity)... although the spirit of Nirvana, indeed, of all punk, seems more and more important in these latter days when abominations such as N'Sync walk the earth.

Er, anyway, it really comes down to how much you like Nirvana, and how much you see yourself liking them in ten or 20 years. The thing is, the PS2 will be a lot of fun right now, and for three or four years to come, but beyond that it's pretty much a doorstop. On the other hand, if you really are a lifelong Nirvana fan, then the album's something that you'll enjoy just as much in thirty or forty years... but you also might find yourself saying "In Utero? Yech, what the hell was I thinking back then?" Your long-term commitment is what'll decide the issue, and that's something only you can really figure out.

End of pretentious, long-winded response.

It's gotten to the point where I really have nothing left to say to letters like this - I just print them to cover all sides of the issue.

You seem to enjoy games fundamentally unchanged from the 16-bit era, and think that the change that's required is for more "Japanese" games to come over to the states. To put it bluntly, I don't - I'm already wary of the existing levels of "Japanese" wackiness that we already get, and while Lunar 2 isn't a bad game, it's for sure not the gaming future I want to see. I'll put up Vagrant Story against all your SFA3's and Lunars, and leave it at that.

Ok, but why don't we take that logic one step further, and get rid of traditional villains entirely? What if we simply have conflicts between two protagonists who are neither entirely good or bad, just looking after their own conflicting interests? Too much of that narrative setup leaves you with morally uninteresting gray gunk, but it'd be a nice change of pace from "valiant hero fights misguided dupe and the ultimate darkness that controls him." Sometimes there is no bad guy - stuff just happens. And as you point out, as long as that stuff is interesting enough in and of itself, that should be sufficient for a great RPG.

Closing Comments:

Normally I'd complain about being too far behind in gaming to talk about what's new and hot at the moment, but with this next game, that's not a problem. Yep, tomorrow's topic is The Bouncer, and if you haven't played it yet, don't complain to me - just go out and buy it, you'll have it finished by tomorrow afternoon, promise. See you then.

-Chris Jones, already missing that cute Italian girl