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. Pft. Like you turnips'd ever say something offensive. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Another sparse day for letters, so to show my appreciation, all you get for an intro is this.

Amazing what the journalistic scroungings of the GIA staff often uncover, eh?

I'm rabies! Yay for rabies!

...

Don't even give me that. You are too surprised.

Give us an ounce of credit, people. Just as my referring to Kuja as a woman in a previous column (which earned me a a flurry of letters pointing out how lacking my hometown school system must have been) was a joke, so is this. It's a parody of Ultimecia's kapricious Ks. In the future I suggest everyone set their sarcasm detection to "on."

Forever After the Fact

"I don't understand why people buy PS2s with the current price of $299." Hello? How about nearly a dozen must-buy titles, most of which are covered by this site? The PS2 has the strongest second year lineup since the SNES, it's beaten out the X-Box to rudimentary online support, and, well, I won't even bother going on. If thats not enough of an argument for you, then I'll leave you to your green light and aerosmith tunes in peace. KZ kuzap@shaw.ca

And there's your second opinion.

My bet's on Nintendo persisting in being Nintendo

Erin, Could you shed some light on the rumours flying about the net suggesting that the GameCube will not be released in the PAL territories until October/November 2002. If this is true then I'm afraid it's the last straw for many gamers in these territories. We were treated like second class citizens when the N64 was released but to wait such a long time for the GameCube really shows how Nintendo feel about us. I've tried finding a contact e-mail address for Nintendo Europe or Nintendo Australia but I've had no luck. The e-mail I sent to Nintendo America was met with the following reply. "We would like to be able to assist you; however, Nintendo of America Inc. only provides product support for the United States and Canada. For assistance in finding the authorized Nintendo distributor for your country, please visit the Corporate area of our web site at www.nintendo.com. Click on Company Connection, and then International Distributors." After following the said links I could find no sign of any contact information to help with my enquires. Regards, Roj

I poked around a little looking for an answer for you, and while I couldn't find specific PAL launch dates for the GameCube, everything I've read points to spring 2002. Also, several Australian game sites had Tony Hawk 3 for the GC slated for a March release, which would seem to support that theory.

However, a UK trade paper did recently murmur something about September being more likely.

Nintendo has never confirmed a PAL release date either way, but given their track record, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

A veritable assload

Good Topic. Whenever I see one like this though, I always think "Game X had just an assload of that" and usually that's all which gets sent in. Lucky for you, your probably going to be inundated with about 20 letters apiece devoted to Vagrant Story and Metal Gear Solid. So, for banalities sake, I'm sticking my foot in the door and saying "Not I". Sure, Vagrant Story gave me fits in the Iron Maiden, but nothing really compares to the frustration and anguish of Zelda 1's Death Mountain. Man, thinking about it just makes me want to start cursing.

The final labyrinth of the first Zelda will go down in history as the only dungeon for which I have ever drawn a map. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I fought my way through that bastard castle's zig-zagging passageways as a small girl, only to confront Ganon prior to having obtained the silver arrows.

When I had eventually found them, along with everything else I would need for the final confrontation.... some ass among my immediate family deleted my game. More than start cursing, recalling it fills me with the need to weave a tapestry of obscenity the like of which the Great Lakes area has never seen.

Fahrenheit 451

Personally, my favorite puzzles are not really puzzles at all. I'm really not one for the ridiculous, forced, gee-we-better-make-this-dungeon longer block puzzles and what have you. Instead, I prefer where you are given a task - any task - and, because of the design of the game, are given multiple ways to complete it. That becomes the puzzle. Not choose the red book or blue book (wait! get the white page! it's the green book!), but, "How can I complete this task most efficiently and most entertainingly?" I tend to prefer more free-form games, which are conducive to this kind of puzzle-solving. Grand Theft Auto 3 is a good example. If I'm supposed to assassinate somebody, should I ram their car off a cliff, yank them out of the vehicle and pop a cap in them, or set up a barricade of stolen minivans and chuck grenades as he tries to bull through? It's better than de la Metallica, anyway. -Eightball, ended up using the flamethrower to set the engine on fire

For the record, I think De La Metallica sucks wombat testicle. I really, really hated that zarking book. Had flamethrowers been an option in that particular scenario, I'dve been all over that.

Alundra. Pshaw. I chortle in the face of thy "puzzles."

Ms. Mehlos, Damn, this is a cool topic. In all the games I've played, the one puzzle that has ever truly stumped me was in the PlayStation game, Alundra (which I highly recommend that anyone who has not played it, go out and buy immediately). There is a dungeon later in the game called Nirude's Lair. At one point in the Lair, you enter a door and come upon a sign that tells you that there are two switches below that must be hit in the order left, right, left, left, right, right. So, you go downstairs, and find that the switches in question are inside a big cage in the center of the room, with doors on either side of the cage. Outside each door is a button in the floor, and when you stand on a button, the door on the -other- side of the cage opens. For example, when you stand on the right button, the left door opens. And when you open a door, it closes seconds later-- not enough time for you to run over to it and get in it. I worked for three weeks trying everything to get in there before the doors closed; never could get in there. Finally I gave up and consulted a walkthrough, and found that I was supposed to step on the buttons in the floor in the order left, right, left, left, right, right. Not the switches in the cage-- the buttons in the floor. One can learn a lot from a puzzle like that. -Nij

Ah, Alundra. I can honestly say this supreme bastard among games gave rise to the puzzle that stumped me longest - that frigging colored saints business took me the better part of a day. But I refused - I REFUSED - to consult a walkthrough. I like the hurt. Yes I do. All those delicious burning sensations in my frontal lobes...

To say nothing of the burning sensation in my facial capillaries at having just confessed my illimitable stupidity to you bloodthirsting hounds.

Graham gives the wand a good shake....

Dear Agent, Puzzles are fun to an extent. I think that Silent Hill 2 was almost perfect. 99% of the puzzles were stuff that I figured out completely on my own. I think I used a faq once or twice. The fact that you can change the puzzle difficulty independant of the monster difficulty is an awesome feature that I think should be implemented more. Harder puzzles are a LOT of fun, especially if you have time. But many people(including myself) get tired of puzzles, and run to a FAQ just so that we can get through the game. I guess it depends on the type of person that you are. Most puzzling moment ? Buying Myst and walking around for about an hour. Then returning it. I honestly don't understand people that can play that game for hours. I don't see any story driving the player forward at all! KTallguy

I never played Myst. Funny, that.

But I must regrettably confess that I played a lot of King's Quest. Even worse, Phantasmagoria. Worse still, Blazing Dragons.

While I had honestly thought the above Alundra anecdote to be my greatest trial, KT's dredging-up of old PC point-and-click graphic adventure memories has helped me to look further back and successfully recall what was truly my most humble puzzle moment: the desert in KQV.

Gah. I've also successfully recalled the painstakingly-repressed memory of that damn song: "We're the ants / Under King Aaaaaantony! We're coming to help / King Graham...!"

Fall into the GAP - Gamers Against Puzzles, that is

Erin - I'm not so big on puzzles. For some reason, I had obscene amounts of fun with The Seventh Guest a decade ago, but beyond that, I don't really play puzzle games. And I definately don't like puzzles in my non-puzzle games. In general, they're an annoying distraction from plot and gameplay alike. In some games like Shadow Of Destiny the puzzles are inherently tied in with the purpose and world of the game, but more often they have nothing whatsoever to do with anything else. I _really_ don't enjoy being hooked on a great RPG, and then being forced to stop (and often race to the computer to look up the solution) by a puzzle that involves sliding blocks, or trying to make a certain rock fall from the ceiling, or using every special item in my inventory on every object in the room, or whatever. Most irritating of all would probably be the ones that involve backtracking through dozens of random encounters trying to find the right switch to press or tile to stand on. I hate those even more than the other puzzles that I hate. Naturally, my tolerance depends on the game. If I'm playing a Zelda game, I'll be expecting to spend more time solving puzzles than in, say, a Final Fantasy game. Hmmm, that's funny, for some reason I seem to play FF games more often than Zelda ones. -Toma Levine, planning to buy ICO at first opportunity regardless

Something that's impressed me with DWVII thusfar has been the conspicuous absence of random battles in areas explicitly set aside for puzzles (those Tetris rip-off crystals, for example).

Back in '93, I remember getting furious at that whole "ERAUQS SI DLROW ETH" thing in Daryl's Tomb, simply because I was completely fed up with fighting Mad Oscars. Bastards. What I wouldn'tve given for a bucket of Listerene.

"Note to Ashley - bring a stepladder next dungeon crawl."

Hey Erin, You're doing a great job as DA, especially considering the state of console gaming during your short time at the helm (i.e. can't send letters now, playing MGS2/Halo/GTA3/Super Monkey Ball, etc). So, what makes a perfect puzzle? For me, a big point would have to be context. Take the Resident Evil series for example. Few of the puzzles in this series require more ingenuity than your average Graphical Adventure game's inventory management (Can you pick object A up? Better take it with you. Does object B shine when you walk by? Better take it with you.) Not exactly a big deal or a real brain teaser no? However, what brings my suspension of disbelief to a full stop is the fact that in the RE series, objects A and B are, say, Two Halves of a Golden Medallion (TM) that you need to place in their proper receptacles to advance further in the game (Or a medallion and a chunk of non-ferrous material, or a pair of red gems, or...). Is it too much to ask that if fetch quests are to be used in lieu of real puzzles, the items to be fetched at least make a modicum of sense? At least in Parasite Eve, when the power in one of the game locations gets cut, you must scurry around to find fuses for the fusebox, rather than collecting assorted chesspieces. At least the wierd item fetching in Silent Hill occured in a really F'd up demonic setting. It sounds to me that ICO pulls off run of the mill sliding box puzzles without falling into the absurd realm of, say, Vagrant Story (note to Ashley, bring a stepladder next dungeon crawl). Another point would be the pacing of the puzzles. One of the things that made the De La Metallica sequence of Wild Arms so maddening was that, at that point of the game, one of your main characters was out of commision, and with each random encounter you fight while running around trying to solve the puzzle, the gap between your characters becomes greater. Jump foreward to Vagrant Story and the box puzzle before the silver key and rinse-lather-repeat. Getting back to the real topic, I think that a cool puzzle would be more ongoing and optional, rather than a story stopping bottleneck. FFX's translation sub-quest if done properly, sounds like it has the potential to be both engrossing and rewarding. Something akin to Champollion's translation of the Rosetta Stone would fit right in with most RPG's (FF 1 flashback anyone?), especially if it unlocked new insights into the game. It would be even better if, unlike other Square in-game puzzles/mini games, this one doesn't unlock some uberweapon (which for me makes it a mandatory quest) but rather hints or tips for upcoming bosses, or something of the like, but perhaps this is too much to ask. I'd settle for the puzzles to just make some sort of sense. Bryce Rollins

Puzzles that jolt me out of a game's story or present a radical departure from the rest of its pacing and gameplay tend to piss me off, yes. But is distancing them even further from the game's core concept and relegating them to some sideline subquest going to make them any more appealing?

Personally I think they just need to be better integrated.

It always comes back to ICO

I have to say, I think that kind of question is a bit irrelevant, really. I think the difficulty of a puzzle is far less important than it's implimentation. You look at a game like Ico, for example. Sure, the game had beautiful graphics, incredible ambiance, and realistic characters, but on the gameplay side of things, it had some of the best puzzles I've ever seen in a videogame- and not because they were hard or easy, but because they were just so well-designed. Every last puzzle in that game (Up to the oh-so-perfect final sequence) was designed in such a way that the player didn't feel like the game was "Putting him through the motions", but rather, thinking their way through a situation and working out a way to rise above the difficulties they've been presented with- something most game designers could learn a lesson from. -CaspianX (Wow, what a wonderful game... On a side note, do you guys have any idea what Sony's "Ico team" is up to now?)

Puzzles are definitely at their best when they mesh with the overall gist of a gameplay experience. The majority of ICO's puzzles centered around some kind of meaningful interaction with your environment that didn't really jolt you out of the experience like, say, having to have the correct food items to present to each of the monkeys guarding every freaking passageway.

The flip side of the coin is, when puzzles make logical sense, they also tend to be a lot more intuitive - i.e. easily solved.

Really, truly, horribly

Hello, Agent. I hate admitting this, because I think I'm a smart person, but...I suck at puzzles. Really, truly, horribly. I still try 'em anyway, but-after 30 minutes of wracking my brain I usually give up. I think it's because I'm playing by myself, and don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of-that's when I'm at my best. I don't like to think of myself as a quitter. ICO, I did pretty well at, a credit to the designers, not to my intellect, I think. There were still times when I was off to gamefaqs.com to get help, but I got a whole lot of things on my own. Still, I'm very thankful there's an internet. Unfortunately, I can't tell you why I did well at ICO and badly at Soul Reaver or Silent Hill. Maybe I'm not that damn smart. DIM

When I was a kid, we didn't have the infinite repository of cheats, codes and hints that is the internet. The tradition of solving puzzles unaided is one I've endeavored to maintain, but, alas, it's often fiendishly difficult to refrain from paying gamefaqs the occasional visit when the going gets especially rough. Innit?

The timeless brain-contorter: What the HELL do I do next??

Erin - Dammit, hurry up and buy Golden Sun so I can tell everyone how much it rocks. I had a great Golden Sun aquisition story planned, but my best sniper died in getting the Cube, so... The perfect puzzle? Man, that's a good one. Very few puzzles in very few games have ever had me twitching. I only had to call a friend once during Wild Arms, and he didn't know what to do anyway. Stupid prick, fuck you, Jake. "Oh, it's my favorite RPG, it's awesome, blah." So why can't you REMEMBER the damn game? Whatever, suffice to say, I finished the puzzle (I forget which one) on my own. That's what I get for calling some idiot who got stuck by the false ending half an hour into the game. Ahem. Chrono Cross. The most insanely painful puzzle I have ever encountered. What the hell do I do next??? I am amazed at how much mileage the developers got out of that one puzzle. They threw it out all the time, and I got nailed by it each time. What the hell do I do next? Seriously, that game gave you NO CLUE. At ALL. Ever. Three periods in one sentance, man am I lucky you're not Drew. Anyway, that game bothered the crap out of me. Sqaure must have thought they made the FFs too easy by HIGHLIGHTING all of the place names and directions, so they overcompensated by not telling you a damn thing. CC is the FIRST game I ever needed a FAQ for. I am not sure whether to admit defeat, or blame it all on Sqaure's prick development team. Since my ego won't allow the former, and the tone of the letter fits the latter... Sqaure, I hate you. Now hurry up and make a GBA game, because I'm a junky in serious need of some portable Chrono TRIGGER(not to be confused with its Satanic "sequel") to round out my portable Lunar.... Ehh, sorry that letter has only a small amount to do with the topic, so maybe this will make it up to you. The puzzles in Golden Sun are great. Just hard enough to get you thinking, not so hard that you give up. Peace, Ray Stryker, who just lost a boss battle twice in a row, which has only happened two other times in history. Yay.

Chrono Cross was hopelessly obscure most of the time, yes. It never crossed my mind, for example, to go back to Serge's hometown, talk to the otherwise useless coot on the pier, and be ferried to the Blue Dragon to get his mystical Certs breath and freeze the torrents of lava blocking my way. No one really tips you off, do they?

As a result, sad but true, know how I froze the lava flow?

I didn't. I just made a series of kamikaze dashes straight on through. Q.E.D.

Pity about CC's general obtuseness, because that game might otherwise have made my own personal top 10 on the merits of what I've always regarded as one of the best battle systems in console RPG history.

Closing Comments:

You guessed it, o astute readers. Your assignment for tomorrow is to pen me a missive eloquently arguing the finer points of your favorite (or least-favorite) battle system. Whether you're a die-hard fan of Square's oft-regurgitated ATB or a connoisseur of crossbreeds like Vagrant Story, let me know how you like (or don't like) to do yer scrappin'.

-Erin Mehlos, far too tall to be confused with Napolean