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. Scrabble, anyone? Don't say we didn't warn you.

I rediscovered reading books in the past few days, which is partly why this column is so late. I tore through This Must Be The Place, a Talking Heads biography whose author wore his grating prose style on his sleeve, but the source material was fascinating enough to be worth the irritation. I'm currently trying not to finish Word Freak instead of writing this, and next up is Just For Fun, an account of Linus Torvalds and the OS he created. Very stereotypical "college geek" books, all of them--it's as if I was possessed by Slashdot at the bookstore.

Well, they did get all the way to Breath of Fire IV--although I notice they started over again on GBA. But you're right, they do seem to display a strange ambivalence toward actually advancing series numbers. From the endless iterations of Street Fighter II and now III to the "clever" idea to create not 4th games, but rather 0th games (in both the Street Fighter and Resident Evil series), watching them slap a "4" on one of their big-time franchises is a little like an AA first-timer admitting his condition.

As for the rest, I agree with that; Metal Gear Solid 2 and Silent Hill 2 both seem like more desirable and more genuine "mature" games. It's like the difference between the original Halloween and the scads of copycat films such as Friday the 13th which took the original's surface elements without understanding its real virtues. One is considerate and intelligent, and the other is doing everything it can to playact at having those qualities. Those things aside, it's still quite the coup for Nintendo. Whatever your thoughts on the series might be, it sells very well, and Nintendo is bound to move a few systems due to the announcement. And while it may not exactly be mature, it's also a far cry from all-ages entertainment, which should give a big boost to Nintendo's campaign to make sure the GameCube isn't seen as a "kiddy" platform.

This is pretty much my take. I do plan to buy a GameCube, but the Resident Evil factor wasn't part of the decision. I made up my mind at E3, and Spaceworld just cemented the decision further.

What I really wanted to comment on was your throwaway about "less talking and movies" in RPGs. Are you feeling okay? In an amusing but not altogether untrue comment on Final Fantasy VII, Old Man Murray's Chet said "It's fun, but its long... they give me more background on the subplayers then I know about my own family... so either I am a total bastard, or this game talks too much." The difference is that an RPG's 12 hours of exposition and dialogue is spread out over something like 35 hours of samey gameplay, while (for example) Metal Gear Solid's 5 hours of dialogue and movie sequences unfold over the course of a 12-hour game. It's about the same proportionally and is in fact less if you take the straight quantifications; it only seems longer.

   Come to think of it, this is definitely the oddest thing yet Nintendo's done with the GameCube. The company has largely eschewed cinematics and non-interactive material from its past efforts, so seeing it embrace a series that's so wholeheartedly derived from cinema is a little strange.

That's certainly true, but I'm still at a loss as to what Miyamoto sees or saw in Resident Evil. As I said earlier, he's known for making games which are short on storyline and atmosphere, but long on intuitive playability and charmingness. In other words, the opposite of Resident Evil--and that's assuming we're being charitable to Resident Evil, a series which I find to lack intuitive playability, charm, storyline, and atmosphere.

I, too, was disappointed by the news that RE1 on GameCube would feature no gameplay upgrades, such as a control system transplant from Devil May Cry. The first game was excusable, since they were making things up as they went along, but extending the ridiculous control scheme across three more games is just sad. Even worse is that so many copycat games took the awful control wholesale, which isn't really Mikami's fault, but it certainly is his fault that he put it Dino Crisis, his own copycat series. My thoughts on the matter in general are already public and I won't go further into them here.

And I've heard it rumored that one of the reasons Capcom made the jump was to punish Sony for a few reportedly arrogant and unreasonable demands they've been making. It looks like what you fear may in fact come to pass ...

Closing Comments:

You could argue that Resident Evil jumpstarted the trend toward cinematic, movielike games when it first appeared, and the distinction between that style of gaming and a "purer" style sparks debate to this day. (In large part, it was also at the heart of that old Dragon Warrior vs. Final Fantasy argument and was cited regularly by participants in both sides of the fray.) Shortly before that, the introduction of polygons created the still-vast rift between 2D and 3D schools of gameplay.

Your topic for tomorrow: What's going to be behind the next schism in game design, and why?

-Nich Maragos, Game Freak