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. Today is Monday, which means I'm not Nich. Er, not that I am on any other day. Don't say we didn't warn you.

26.7 million in just under 3 weeks.

Doesn't look good.

In other news... well, there's not much news on the gaming side. Personally, I saw Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast this weekend, enjoyed myself immensely, and didn't have to wait in the same half-hour-long line to see Jurassic Park 3 that the rest of the lobby was tied up in. Good deal.

Onward.

A Ramayana RPG? Man, forget Knights of the Round, check out this "I am become Death, devourer of worlds" summon...

Never been much for classic mythology in general (unless it's been heavily reinterpreted), and I can't think of anything based on Journey to the West without thinking of Dragon Ball, which gives me a headache. Still, the game looks decent, and if people get a chance to dust off the PSX, more power to them.

For me, it depends pretty strongly on the monkeys in question. I'm not a big fan of cute, adorable, or comical monkeys, like Curious George or those poor wretched chimps who have to dress up in human costumes; nor am I a big fan of evil psycho monkeys, like the Ebola-infected beasties in The Hot Zone. On the other hand, I do quite like the neo-chimps in David Brin's Uplift books, which is why I'm looking forward to Planet of the Apes this weekend.

Ok, I'm just babbling because I really don't have that much personal interest in Saiyuki - aside from the above non-interest in mythology, I just can't get that excited about a PSX game these days unless it's truly earthshaking. Saiyuki seems good, nothing more, and I've already got a big backlist of good games to get out of the way.

Who am I to argue with the Buddha? The Budda, on the other hand, I'll tell to take a flying leap. And that's just it - this is a skin deep change, a shift in locale to a fantasy earth that's no more real than Narnia. Were Koei pushing this thing with all their might, I might commend them for trying to turn US gamers onto something rather unique and interesting, but as it is I get the impression this is just a quik translation job for them to make a few more bucks on, and I don't see much worth celebrating about that.

I felt really embarrassed and ashamed of the site's ignorance, until I thought about it a bit and realized that the GIA's top secret geosynchronous satellite is actually in permanent orbit above Ft. Wayne, Indiana; a dead boring location but pretty much the last place on earth anyone would ever look for us. More importantly, since the state of Indiana is in the Eastern time zone and never shifts over to Daylight Savings Time, the dates we put up on our stories are always completely correct - hell, we even adjust for the slight relativistic differences caused by our distance from the Earth's gravity well.

The GIA: always more intelligent (or full of it) than anyone else. Count on it!

I do and don't think the use of the real world is a crutch for game designers; basically my take is that here or there, it's all in the execution. There are plenty of spectacular, amazing places on the surface of the globe, but too many games have blurred them all together so that Tokyo seems little different from Berlin or Sao Paolo, or a distant field in China seem no more exciting than that abandoned lot behind Wal-Mart.

Of course, the same thing cuts the other way - there's nothing intrinsically interesting about fantasy worlds, unless they're made so. If Saiyuki can make mythical India a cool place to visit, more power to them, otherwise it's just another mediocre PSX RPG.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the 3D chessboard effect of most strategy RPGs - I always appreciated how everything was so nearly laid out in front of you, and how much your players resembled little animate game tokens, right down to the heart-rending screams when one of them bit the dust. Then again, I do have control issues...

At any rate, I'd also like to see more interactivity in strategy games, with the ability to manipulate and take advantage of your surroundings to a higher degree, but at the same time I do like the regular grid structure most games impose, all kidding aside. When your characters have precise locations and moves, it lends a nicely regulated, clockwork feeling to the game - when they can move willy-nilly all over the place, it becomes more like the melee of Warcraft, which isn't bad, but isn't what I like to see in an Ogre Battle console descendant.

Closing Comments:

For tomorrow's topic, let's try to switch tracks a bit this week: write in about your favorite Dragon Quest, be it old school NES game or GBC remix. That's all for now, see you tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, votes to reposition the satellite over, say, Hawaii