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. Non-puppy-kicking evil geniuses of the world unite! Don't say we didn't warn you.

Daily Radar is dead.

Daily Radar has taken an unholy amount of crap from the gaming community, much of it probably deserved, but I still can't quite get too joyful about its demise. I never really read the site - the game coverage wasn't the greatest, which could be inferred with minimal exposure, and the reviews were generally completely off base. But because I never read the site, I can't summon up that much bile about it going down.

What's slightly more important is the context of the site dying off - this isn't a case of a hated enemy dying off, leaving the field clear for expansion by the good guys, this is more like the first fatality from a disease that'll carve through the whole population, deserving and undeserving alike, and leave the few survivors scarred and shaken. There's a bit more about this in the topic below, but suffice it to say, this is, at best, mixed news.

Onward.

Everybody seemed to think I was going for VR with this topic, but I wasn't. That technology's a long way off, probably won't be seen in our lifetimes, if ever. Instead, what I was getting at was the fact that even a simple controller pulls you more into the game. It's absolutely true that a dance pad really only measures your foot movements. Theoretically you could beat it by sitting down and hitting the sensors rapidly with your fists, much the same way friends of mine used to cheat on the NES "exercise pad". But if you actually play on a dance pad, you tend to get into it - you don't have to do hand motions or get into the groove, but you'll probably do a bit better if you do. Not to mention you'll likely enjoy yourself a lot more, and isn't having fun what games are supposed to be all about?

But you're dead on as far as controller costs - I bought the orignal NES Zapper, once upon a time, but never used it because there was nothing to use it on. (Except Duck Hunt, which sucked, and Gumshoe, which wasn't bad.) And I've never bought any other kind of peripheral for any other system I've owned, and doubt I ever will, so wondering about using something other than the controller for an RPG is probably a moot point.

I think you're contradicting yourself a bit here - you're saying that you wouldn't want to do anything too active for too long, and then you complain that most minigames are half-assed. Hey, what if we put the peanut butter in with the chocolate, or some such lame analogy?

But seriously, I think you're right in that you wouldn't want to do anything too strenuous for the marathon play sessions an RPG requires - to my mind, if you don't get to sit down and explore a town for a while, or see a cutscene every now and again, it's not really an RPG. Likewise, most minigames are lame, but that's probably because they're not much like what they're trying to be. Ocarina of Time's fishing game is a notable exception, but other than that, most throw-away games are just that. That's why shaking things up a bit might work in a game's favor. Suppose you'd been able to carry out Irvine's sniper mission in FF8 with some kind of sniper scope peripheral. (Say, a light gun with force feedback and an aiming scope that made stuff on the TV look further away, thus requiring better aim.) People have already pointed out that such a thing's not feasible, but it might be cool if anyone ever could get it to work.

I'll just point out the irony of someone attacking us for not defending our opinions on DQ7 (I've got plenty of old rants on the subject in the archives, if you're really interested) and then trying to defend his ideas by placing the burden of disproof squarely on our shoulders.

I'll actually leave it to the next letter to talk about the 17000 pages thing, but it's worth noting that we here at the GIA get nearly as many letters attacking us for our opinions as Daily Radar likely did. Of course, the difference is that the GIA is always right, but everybody has their heroes and villains - who knows, perhaps DR really spoke to the above gentleman.

I was thinking much the same thing last night, but somebody beat me to it, dammnit. Still, it's not completely impossible. DQ7 is, by most accounts, a fairly non-linear game, and a lot of that text could be various changes in NPC dialog that you'd never see unless you visited every possible town after every major event. And if we say that a page of text is a text box, then you can easily go through five or ten of those in a single minute, leaving plenty of time left over for gameplay. But if that's the case then "17,000 pages of text" is likely off by an order of magnitude or two, since a text box is the slightest fraction of an actual written page of text.

Absolutely. There are any number of arcade games that work precisely because of increased immersion. Gunblade NY's pretty dated, but I still love to play it for the bass rumble of the floorpad and the rattle of the toy gun in my hands. Ditto Tokyo Wars. And it's amazing what you can get with only a little investment - Time Crisis only had a cheap light pistol with a weak feedback mechanism, and a simple foot pedal to simulate motion. Yet when I was learning to play through the game for the first time, I was so into it I was leaping back and forth from the screen, leaning into the imaginary firearm punch and holding my gun up in a neutral position during the cutscenes. That's the kind of immersion I'd like to see cross over to home games, if possible.

Point taken, although it might make you a less caviler about killing off your players just to be able to use limit breaks.

This is the last letter I'll post about the Columbine thing, just because it points out fairly well how carried away people can get, putting words and opinions into people's mouths that were never there. Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of how self righteous everyone's getting about this - everyone agrees the lawsuit is bogus, and yet everyone seems to feel it's a grave threat to humanity. Folks, MGS2 is an M-rated game, and even Joe Lieberman agrees that the games industry has done a good job of policing itself. Nobody's gonna be losing any curse words or blood from any big-name titles because of this.

Meanwhile, things that are affected because of this get little notice - on the media side of things Paul Dini's Batman Beyond animated movie got fundamentally lobotomized, and those of you who have been in high schools the past few years have probably noticed a subtle increase in the number of cops and metal detectors. But as Mr. Bomis points out, it's a lot easier to write a pissed off letter than to start some kind of organized cause against the slow erosion of our freedoms.

It was scary to see how many people spoke up against that WW2 statement, not because they had specific counter-examples, but because they apparently felt history is too large and ineffable to make such statements about. Ok, I'll qualify my remark, if you like - the invention of agriculture might give WW2 a run for its money. Otherwise, WW2 is the boss: 50 million dead, at a monetary cost that's simply impossible to calculate, the destruction of major empires and the creation of new ones, the rerouting of goods and services into the first serious, wide scale military economies, the development of practical rocketry, computers, jet aircraft, nerve gas, and of course, atomic weapons, which have made the world a truly global society. Welcome back to the stage of history, and all that rot.

Closing Comments:

I like the GIA a whole lot - it's an honor and a thrill to work here, even if I don't have much to do with the actual news arm of the organization. This site, and countless other fansites, have ramped up the interest and professionalism dedicated to gaming as a hobby, and we've put together a body of work that deserves to be mentioned in anybody's history of the first 10 years of the web, as an example of how good a hobby site can be.

Problem is, that might be what's killing off the professionals, such as they are.

Daily Radar needed to make money to survive, but we just need to pay for our server space. Daily Radar needed to worry about finding and keeping good people on staff, and we do too, but it's a lot easier when your staff's naturally obsessed with what they're doing. Daily Radar needed to get hits on their page every day; we like hits, and need them to a lesser extent, but we also have the luxury of being able to let a day or two go by without an update if there's nothing to report. In the immediate sense, Daily Radar died because they couldn't get paid for their work, and other similar groups are working on a way to do that. But the question is, why would anyone pay for Daily Radar when they can visit sites like the GIA for free? Drew touched on this a bit in his weekend column, but I think it deserves a bit more attention - if IGN and videogames.com died tomorrow, would you be able to get by on the GIA and RPGamer, or would you rather have full time people bringing you full time news coverage? Let me know.

Chris Jones, lecturing on the Punic Wars at 12:30 tomorrow