I *was* going to send in a letter for yesterdays column...But I got completely preoccupied pondering the meaning of "The face of understanding is the voice of reason."

Actually I was trying to design a website. Nothing too fancy, just a simple, fast loading, asthetically pleasing, navigatable page. And instead I vomited forth what has to be the most butt ugly page in creation. Looking at it makes me burst into tears and fills me with the urge to lift my computer monitor over my head and let go. The idea for the page is sound...But the design...Sucks. No wait...Let me say it again. It. Sucks.

...Hmm, reading this letter and my last one again makes me think it might be a bad idea to drink coffee mixed with eggnog at 3 AM and write letters.

I still want this to be posted though, oddly enough...Um...Who's the prettiest letter columnist in the world? And buddy, I can't think of anyone more suitable for that Gilgamesh/THE MAN award.

~Ian P.

Eh, Mr. Bond.

On the topic of game music versus mainstream music, I think there is a genre of rock a lot of game music fans would love. Progressive rock (two words that would make any Rolling Stone writer shiver in fear of something different). By nature it has more complex harmonies than songs you'll hear on the radio, and much of it is classical-influenced. If anyone wants to try something different, pick up the album Fragile by Yes. Or if you want something more keyboard based, Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP). Hell, their keyboard player even uses a keyboard called a Mini-Moog.

Or you could just forget everything I said. Damn Shinra!! %@#$!

Minion

Hey Andy,

I would talk about videogames, but I have something much more important at hand. I am talking of course about my birthday. That's right folks, on wednesday Mikey B.'s turning seventeen! Now you may be asking yourself "Why the hell are you saying this now, and not on tuesday or wednesday?" Well the answer to that question is simple: Drew doesn't like me and never prints any of my letters.

Ahhh seventeen. You know what that means: I finally recieve my much awaited driver's licence. No more taking public transportation, like a loser, for me. Booya, Grandma! Booya!

About the song thing, I hear ya man. When I listen to the most simple of songs, like Violent Femmes stuff, I think to myself "Hey, I can write a song like that. It's just a simple three chord progression," but for some reason, whenever I try to make my own stuff, it sounds like garbage. How is it that I'm good at playing other people's stuff, but when it comes to writing a simple little original chord progression, I can't do it? Oh well....

-Mikey B.

Ey yo, Mr. Kaufmann!

I've been having some trouble. You see, I've been getting into R.E.M. a lot lately (inspired by your love for them, no less), but the problem is, everyone wants to kick me for listening to them, saying that they are "gay". What am I to do...?

-- matt dance.

Just had to respond to Edward's letter in the last column and mention that the GIA is definitely aware of the musical sensation known as TMBG. In fact, Nich and I have gotten into discussions about them, and gotten each others' lame injokes involving their lyrics on a few different occasions on IRC. This may be a little off the topic for an gaming site, so I'd like to note the connection between TMBG and gaming by pointing you towards toastyfrog.com, and more specifically http://www.toastyfrog.com/docs/ro/luckydan/sightings.html, where Sak and myself have been slowly uncovering a strange string of coincidences involving the Johns and Chrono Cross's Lucky Dan. I'm not entirely sure yet, but I strongly suspect that Lucky Dan is the "filthy scarecrow" mentioned in Where Your Eyes Don't Go...

- Andrea "Ng" Hartmann

Hey hey!

I bought Xardion, too! Well, actually, my grandmother bought it. I asked her to get "That RPG game Final Fantasy 3," and she brought it home. She said, "They didn't have that RPG game, but I asked for another one and they gave me this."

Well, anyway. I played the game and liked it. Hm, scratch that. I hated it, but I played it because there were so many things I didn't get. I had to get the Panther-man's power up, the big ass-kicking robot's power up, and the other ones. I had a very boring childhood, as you can tell.

~Aquila

Hey, AK:

SoulBlazer is better than Illusion of Gaia in my opinion. The music is outstanding; I still remember several tracks clearly even though it's been years since I played the game. The gameplay, magic and item systems are all well executed, and it has a real experience system, unlike Gaia, where killing everything in a certain room netted a stat increase. And you kill lots of things. In summation, go play it.

Xardion isn't that obscure. I rented it, beat it. I think it even got some Nintendo Power coverage. It was darn cool, though. How about Inindo: Way of the Ninja? Anyone heard of that? (Anyone actually fond of it like I am?)
--
Pokeytax

Hey AK,

I was sitting here and got to thinking, not something I do often so its a big deal for me. Well anywho, I was wondering if you knew if the main character in Crono Cross will be able to talk or be another mutie like Crono. Although Crono Trigger was a allround good game, I think that the fact that Crono could not talk at all really hurt the game. It's just harder to really get attached to a character that can only smile and nod in response to a questinon. So can you please give me some good news in that area?

-Big McLargehuge

P.S.- R.E.M. rulez

P.S.S.- Oh yea Andrew, what does AK actualy stand for? Ah well, never mind... Like the man said, it's late, and tiredness makes crappy ideas sound that much better.

007: So after all we've been through, it comes to this. Strapped into an elaborate torture device again... Only this time, we're not kidding around.

Jigglypuff: [angrily] Puff!

007: Is that all you can say to me? After all the lust, all the love, all the lies?

Jigglypuff: [seductively] Jiggly...

007: No, I'm afraid I never really loved you. After all, I am a man. And you are... a pink thing. It would never have worked out.

Jigglypuff: [pouting] Jiggly.

007: A tempting offer, my dear, but no, I don't think so. The world is jigglypuff.

-Sanagi

ps. I've been singing to myself 'The World is Jigglypuff' for weeks, and wanted to share the insanity. Enjoy!

pps. I played Xardion. The mecha designs were nifty, but the gameplay was painfully sluggish. I seem to recall the ending being cool, though. Anime-style artwork.

AK,

Are you saying I have a lot of free time on my hands? I... well, actually, that's true. Take a look at what I've done with all that free time, and be afraid. I captured a screenshot of the screen with PSP, then just snipped out the rest of the screen (that's why you got some text in the background.) (If you post this in the mailbag, please put the attached picture somewhere in the letter...) Besides snipping out the rest of the screen, I did not edit the shot any way though. By the way, I put it on auto loop. That's how I got the whole counter thing.

I'm going for the big 50-K, but after that, who knows! Yes, you were right. I have too much free time. Maybe you should send me some cool RPG's to waste it in a more productive manner. Free time can be dangerous. I really need a job.

~Skulryk

About the letter in the 12/3/99 col that had a reader concerned about only 6 characters per name in CC, you need not to worry. There is only 6 because it uses Japanese characters, not English ones. It probably allows you to name a character in Hiragana (standard words, used by children, as they don't learn all of the 2,500 or so Kanji [Kanji are the traditional characters borrowed from Chinese] until around age 15 or 16. Hiragana can also be used for functions similar to English pronouns, words like and, or, the and adverbs, within Kanji sentences) or Katakana (used for foreign words and foreign names), which are the phonetic versions of Japanese writing. There are only six, because one Hiragana or Katakana covers more ground than one English character.

One symbol in either of those systems represents an exact sound used in words, such as ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, ha, hi, hu, he ho, etc. There are also even bigger sounds restricted to one character, such as Ryu, Kyo, Kyu, Shu, Shi, Byo, Byu, etc. Therefore, you can get a word in six of these characters, that you would need around 12-16 English characters for. Make sense? It was the same in FF7-8, and Square did compensate for that in their translations, so I wouldn't worry about Chrono Cross.

-R. Vinall

Er, I thought the size of a block on a PS memory card was 8K. As far as I'm aware, the card itself is 1MBit in size, which translates to 128 kilobytes. 128 divided by 16 gives 8. As there are 15 save slots on a card, that leaves 8K free for the allocation table and other stuff like each save slot's icon.

Perhaps.

Ben.

Hey, whichever letters guy is reading this -

In response to Sugoi, who was complaining that Lucky Dan wouldn't fit into Chrono Cross's renaming scheme, I've got something to say. Back in the old hey-day of console RPGs, we were limited to FOUR characters per name, all capital letters. Try to imagine being forced to name your fighters "STEV" or "BRNT" or "BRAN" or even "MNDA" instead of Steve, Brent, Brian, and Amanda. And you couldn't BUY Masamunes. There was only ONE in the entire game, and guess who got stuck using it? One of your wimpy wizards! You young whippersnappers have no idea how easy you have it, being able to change jobs and learn new spells on a whim.

Oh yes, one more thing. About Chrono Cross. Lucky Dan had better be an optional character, and not force you to use him, like CT forced you to use that wimp Marle. Otherwise I'll only beat it.. thirteen times. That's right, I won't even get all of the endings. That's how disappointed in Square I'll be with this game.