Well, I had to say something about Star Wars, didn't I? I'm not going to spoil it for you guys. But, on behalf of everyone who works at a movie theatre, to all those of you planning on coming to a showing of The Phantom Menace, dressed up in your Jedi robes and Leia hair rolls, can the lame-ass jokes, please. I can't even count the number of times someone has told me to use the Force, while ripping their tickets, over the past twenty-four hours. Or warned me not to join the Dark Side, while I'm trying to fill six cups of Diet Coke from two taps. I'm trying to do my job here, and I daresay I get a little stressed when faced with hordes of people with Darth Maul tee-shirts, bearing down on me at lightspeed, and demanding that I fill up their limited edition Qui-Gon character cup so they can sit in a theater for an hour, waiting for the show to start. I have a perfectly good sense of humor. I laugh at those less fortunate than me on a regular basis. But why does it occur to so few people that laying out lame-ass Jedi jokes at four in the morning is NOT going to brighten my day? And why, god, why did ANYONE think it was ever funny to say "pull my lightsaber"? Is there any joke that less needs an update for the Space Age? People, go see The Phantom Menace if you want to. Enjoy. I don't mind serving you. I really do like my job. Nice perks, nice people, nice business. But please, try and have a little understanding of how unbelievable stressed everyone working at the movie theatre you attend is. Don't antagonize them. Don't play stand-up comedian in the concessions line-up. I assure you, a smile, a thank you, and a generous tip are what'll count in the long run. And now that I've asked for courtesy and understanding of your fellow man, I'll trash that image with my usual expediency... | Domination | Responding briefly to the reader who stated that the PlayStation 2 was guaranteed to dominate vastly above the rest of the crowd... Firstly the Dreamcast. While Sega's track record has been the worst of the three companies in question, and once again planning to be first out the door and onto the shelves, this situation is a bit different from the past. Sega will have nearly a year in both the US and Japanese markets to sell their system, and I can speak from great personal experience the amount that local retailers are pushing presales of the Dreamcast. While this will obviously fade after the release, and be followed by a marketing blitz for the PS2 and Nintendo's next system, Sega has never had so great a head start, and it could be very valuable to them.For the record, however, of the three soon-to-be released systems, the Dreamcast is the only one I'm completing holding off on until I find something on it MUST own (and so far Shen Mue and incomplete Virtua Fighter 3 games don't cut it). Next is Nintendo's system, recently codenamed "Dolphin." Nintendo's recent announcement concerning specs and release possibilities for the Dolphin show Nintendo's desire to directly compete with Sony for the #1 spot, and with customer loyalty (especially stateside) as it is, a system with all of PS2's benefits and more could be all that's needed to bring the developers pouring back in. Nintendo also, unlike Sony, produces some of the best in-house games of any company, assuring some knockout games for the system, nomatter what. Let's just hope that Nintendo doesn't market the Dolphin for an exclusively young market, as in the past.And just to set things straight: Nintendo did NOT tell Square to bugger off because they "don't need RPGs!" If any company has done that, it was Sony with its reluctance to approve RPGs for domestic sales, until the success of FFVII. Third-party developers simply felt (and rightly so) that the PSX's CD-ROM format was easier and more spacious for RPGs, which don't need the speedy load-times of cartridges. Square has stated firmly that they will develop their games for whichever system provides the best medium for their games (read: whichever will pull the most $$$), and that's not a cop out statement. Sony can give Square all the servicing they can to keep them on their system, but in the end, Square will likely develop for the most successful system. And as a final defense against PS2's sure-fire dominance, remember that the PlayStation was Sony's first videogame system ever! Sony will certainly not be on top forever, and, just like Nintendo has recently, will be overtaken by another company and another system. Who can say that another company, from Casio to Mars Bars, won't come out with a game system with the power to rival the Sony giant. As Sony has proven, even the first shot can be a huge success. Thank you for your time, -Nathan Mallory, loyal PlayStation owner and Squaresoft fan |
Remember: nothing lasts forever. Good letter, Nate. | Where's Fritz? and other mysteries | Yo Allan, What's wrong with Fritz? Why don't he or J. Parish do anything for GIA anymore? Also, how can AK consider himself to be sexy if the only women he can score with aren't quite old enough to attend a PG movie on their own? |
Jeremy Parish doesn't do stuff for us because he's not on the staff anymore. Not long after GIA was founded, he just found that he didn't have the time required to really put 100% into GIA, and therefore stepped down. In the meantime, he may have decided that we're all evil and ugly pieces of monkey snot, but since I've been a loser and totally lost track of him (except for his DA letters and message board posts), I wouldn't know. Fritz is very active at GIA. Just in a way that is not really evident, to his chagrin. He worked his cute lil' tush off, these past few months, kicking ass when many other staffers were dragging theirs (and I assure you, my buttocks have scuff marks). He did cool guides, though he won't be completing the Legend of Legaia guide (the rest of the staff's gonna try and complete the walkthrough, though). In short, Fritz is The Man, and you're seeing his work at GIA just about every day. You just don't notice it. He's just that smooth. | Clarification and definitions | "Allan, I didn't want to imply that additional coverage was a bad thing. It isn't.Still, I find it strange that adventure games were the category of choice.There's already plenty of sites that cover the Tomb Raider's of the world.Correct me if I'm wrong, but GIA was founded to cover "intelligent" games,and I think that the large percentage of adventure games fail to qualify. Iwould rather see the GIA cover games on a case by case basis. Metal GearSolid is definitely a game worthy of covering, something that could bedetermined very early on in it's development. The Castlevania series Ithink also qualify as intelligent games. That said, any additional coverage, no matter what genre of games it is, isgreat, as long as it doesn't take away from the coverage of RPGs. I daresay that that is what most of us come to the GIA for (well, that and you'vegot a pretty good letters column). In a very short time, the GIA hasprobably taken over the role of best RPG coverage on the Internet. I justdon't want to see adventure games become the new focus of the site, but assomeone who has been reading the work of the GIA staff for a long time, I'msure that will not happen. Taloon |
Ah... okay, I see where you're coming from. Rest assured, we have no intention of letting our RPG coverage suffer because we've taken on adventure games. And we're not too keen on spending hours with Tomb Raider, since most of us think it sucks, so that's not an issue. :) The issue of whether adventure games are intelligent, and which games to cover at all, is an ongoing struggle. I think the original inkling of adding adventure game coverage sprung from the neverending debate over what the hell Zelda is. RPG? Adventure? Action/RPG? Cleverly disguised fjord? Genre-bending games like Parasite Eve and MGS blur the lines between game genres still more, and when we made the decision to gut our puzzle game coverage (such as it was), we decided the best thing to do was grow, not contract. And, for various sundry reasons, it's been made clear that the greatest area of interest overlap in our readership is between RPG fans and adventure game fans. This is, of course, an imperfect solution. To a great degree, there IS an element of "we'll cover that we want to cover, dammit" to our decisions. On the other, we try to keep some sort of internal logic to our operations, or else the whole site comes off as being random and useless. We'd probably have an easier time of things if we stuck with a single genre, like RPGs, instead of the nebulous "intelligent" definition. But it's my belief that it can and will continue to let us be more inclusive with our coverage, rather than exclusive. So long as we don't spread ourselves thin, I really believe breadth is the way to go. | Crave goes WDish | Please don't kill the leopard! A question: What's the deal with Shadow Madness? I heard that theygot approval to go into production just a few days ago. Does that setback their (already too often delayed) release even further than May 25? Theophrastus |
Shadow Madness has been delayed several times, somewhere between the playtesting and Sony approval stage - it's too late in the design cycle for anything else. I suspect that there was some last-minute retooling of the gameplay due to complaints about the demo, though I've got no proof of that. As far as I know, they will still make their May 25th release date, though. | Covering it up | Howdy. About that suggestion that the N2000 use covers for its discs, it'salready been done. In fact, most early CD-ROM drives used caddy systems,where it could only take CDs that were put into a caddy. It really wasn't abad system, and I wish it would have stayed. Some drives still use it today,and so far DVD-RAM drives use only caddied CDs, since they are so delicatethat fingerprints or minute scratches can render them unusable. -Arpad Korossy |
Right, good call on the CD caddies, something I'd completely forgotten about. I'm a bit curious about DVDs, though. I've never used them with my computer, but the ones I stick into my home DVD movie player don't require caddies? What makes the DVD-RAM ones different? | Dolphin tech talk | Just want to clarify the 3.2 GB memory bandwidth of the PSX2 and N200X that people seem to be a little "enthusiastic" about. Both systems are probably going to use that RAMBUS direct RAM, which allows for 3.2 GB access. No one is copying anyone. Both companies are getting their RAM from the same company. Oh, and 48Mb cartridges were available since 1994, when Tales of Phantasia came out for the Super Famicom. On another note: I heard that the next Tales game was coming out for the ill-fated 64DD. Any recent updates as to why? |
I've heard no word of a new Tales game. The last time I heard a Tales rumor about the 64DD, the whole thing turned out to be vaporware, and Tales of Phantasia debuted not long after. I sincerely doubt the 64DD is going to be released as anything more than a novelty, much less supported in any substantial way by big companies like Namco. Thanks for the RAMBUS info. I don't know what that means, but it sounds informative. :) | Dolphin's chips | This is mostly a response to Dragona Akehi's letter about Nintendo. It is foolish to compare the Dolphin's 400 MHz processor with the PS2's200 MHz processor and say the Dolphin is twice as fast. As Iunderstand it, Nintendo is using more or less the same type ofprocessor's Intel puts in this ugly computer of mine, which is 32-bit. The PS2's processor is 128 bit. Which means, in theory, the PS 2 couldrun as fast as an 800 MHz, 32-bit processor. Not to say that it willunder most circumstances, though. Needless to say, a modern PC with a400 MHz processor could never render Toy Story in real time, and Idoubt the Dolphin could, else we would have seen a lot more hype forthe machine's specs. Square said that only 5 companies could develop games that take fulladvantage of the PS2's processing power, but I think that quote hasbeen taken out of context. Ever since the good 'ole days of the Atari2600, when a company could pop out a game for a couple thousanddollars, the development price of games has been increasing. This isentirely to be expected. When a console becomes more advanced, gamesbecome larger and have better graphics, both factors leading to moreprogramming, which forces development budgets up. The next generationof 128-bit consoles has simply pushed that trend to the point wheredevelopment budgets are starting to limit the graphical quality ofgames, rather than hardware limitations. The difficulty in PS2development is simply a result of its amazing graphical ability, andthe Dolphin should be in a similar situation if it is capable of thesame type of graphics. In fact, I believe the PS2 will be fairly easy to develop for. Thereal-time physics and emotion rendering the machine is capabe of willcut out a lot of the difficult work for programmers. No longer willthe programmer have to track the path of light through water, or writespecial algorithms for the path of falling objects, or so many otherjobs; the PS2 will do those things for the programmer. Weren't werecently impressed with the speed and the quality of the PS 2 demosproduced? An interesting thought... If Nintendo "is quietly puttingtogether incredible dev kits," how do you know about it? You pointed out that the Playstation has many more bad games than theN64, but it has many more games period. It seems like an unfaircomparison. Not that I want to quibble, as Dragona Akehi's had plenty of goodpoints as well. But some of what I consider to be weak points areworth arguing. That's all for now, I 'spose. |
We're getting more of this tomorrow, so I'll leave off commentary for now. But I do need to say that the "quality, not quantity" slogan that Nintendo has been using in reference to the N64 is a load of crap. Look at the proportionate ratings of N64 games, versus games for any other system, and it's just about the same: some good, lots of average, some utter crap. There's just less of them.
Closing comments All right, I've been working all day, so I'll be hitting the sack now. But there'll be another bold, beautiful Double Agent column tomorrow, when I'll hopefully be a little more rantsy (that's not a word, but I like the way it sounds). Hokay? Good. See you then. - Allan Milligan | | | |
