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. Just between you and me, I think I could have won that gladiatorial combat deal. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Bill Gates is starting to really impress me. Yeah, I know, the whole 10^11 dollars thing should be impressive enough, but I always figured that Gates had just the right combination of brains, guts, treachery, and most of all LUCK, to surf the whole PC revolution right up to his current huge fortune. (Do you realize he could buy a freakin' Space Shuttle and hardly even feel it?) Doing that and only that would have made him interesting, but hardly an original. Check out the whole Credit Mobiler thing back in the 1860's, when the first NorAm-wide railways were being put up. (Kids, History flashbacks can pop up when you least expect them. So stay away from anything even remotely resembling a history class, lest you turn into a twisted wreck who brings up obscure trivia to make a point, like me.)

But now Mr. Bill looks like he's found a cunning plan to outfox the legions of US Justice department lawyers out to tear him into tiny pieces. This is truly amazing - any halfway decent RPG hero can save the world from ultimate darkness with only his trusty Masamune and a few close friends, but this is reality, and there's nothing even remotely Crono-esque about Mr. Bill. The kicker is he looks to be saving his butt through gaming. How, you ask? Just click here.

The gist of it for all you people too lazy to click over or read more than a few sentences (yes, I can see you out there) is that the X-Box could finally be the much-vaunted "Set-top box" which entrepreneurs have been trying to shove down our throats ever since Trip Hawkins and his 3DO. (3DO - cackle!) If Gates can sell the X-Box, he gets a version of Windows into people's homes on a standardized platform, and the government can't touch him because by anyone's admission the console gaming market is a kill-or-be-killed setup. From the X-Box he can launch some of the more insidious initiatives he's been talking about for years, like wiring your frige and your toaster to your PC. (I don't know why anyone would want to do this, but it seems to be the wave of the future.) All of this assumes Microsoft can sell the X-Box, which seems unlikely given current opinion, but come on, this is Microsoft we're talking about - they consider selling ice cubes to Eskimos insufficiently aggressive. In the end, Mr. Bill may end up having more business incarnations than Mario. Now that's impressive.

1. Umm... check your batteries?
2. Octarine, which, like the bikini itself, doesn't exist in this dimension.
3. Hey, if it's 10:10 and 30 seconds, the clock face forms an inverted peace sign! It's a massive conspiracy by the military-industrial complex! Run away!

In general, I tend to be wary of "cultural expectation", as it's pretty hard to differentiate cultural expectations from personal expectations. That said, I agree with you to a point. There's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance between Amano-san's art in the FF Anthology manual and the in-game sprites, which are what most people perceive the characters as looking like. But this difference has less to do with Amano's art being appropriate and more to do with the translation process and the hardware the game was originally developed on. I think Amano's style is not at all suited to relatively primitive systems - Amano's all about detail, which gets downsized to nothing on a 32x32 sprite. In media where there's room for detail, like the CG movies on FF6 in the Anthology, Amano comes off pretty well. It took me a while to get used to a blonde Terra, but after looking at it a few times, I think Amano's version plays at least as well as the in-game sprites. I'd also like to see a 2D game that could take full advantage of Amano, like Saga Frontier II or Seiken Densetsu IV, but with animated backgrounds and characters by Amano.

As for drawing style, I don't feel there's anything cultural about the way Amano draws. I liked the art in the Amano/Gaiman Sandman collaboration, feminine guys and all, a whole lot more than standard American comic art with insanely bulky guys and oversized babes. Come to think of it, comic art featuring exaggerated physical characteristics is at least as common in Japanese manga and anime as it is in the US, so you really can't say what Amano does is purely Eastern.

Those bastards! Never before has anything been marketed this much before, except for Mario, way back when the NES was first out... and all that Rugrats stuff... and the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers... and the Smurfs, but I had almost entirely blocked them out...

Seriously, I sympathize, but you have to realize things are never as bad as they could be as far as marketing blitzes are concerned. People wisely rejected the proposed Jar Jar Binks merchandize bonanza, which, if unleashed, would have pretty much started Armageddon. (Potential Jar Jar Binks products registered with the US patent office included the Jar Jar Binks Sports Bra and Jar Jar Binks Three Bean Salad. I'm not making this up, the local paper ran a story.) Be happy with what you've got.

Son, Bob Dole feels your pain. Bob Dole often talks about himself in the third person, and people laughed at him for that. But now Bob Dole's laughing all the way to the bank with his paychecks from Viagra. Bob Dole also appreciates Earthbound, which shows the good things that can happen when a red-blooded American boy gets healthy exercise outside beating up hippies and drug addicts with a baseball bat. Earthbound also encourages kids to pray to a higher power when faced with an insurmountable obstacle, and Bob Dole's all for that.

All is well. Fear not, Aretha Franklin sings a mean Irish jig. Your theory makes much sense internally, but does not stand up to the external evidence. Nintendo tried to make the N64 kid-friendly, which you can tell just by looking at the smooth curves and big buttons on the controller. But the N64 tanked, comparatively speaking, and Nintendo's been kept afloat by the few viable (and admittedly brilliant) "kiddy" franchises they've been able to turn out: Mario 64, Zelda 64, and most of all, Pokemon. That's a revenue stream for sure, but not nearly comparable to what Sony's been getting by being the game system for adults. (Well, teenagers.)

However, I do agree that in spite of their failed logic, Big N will continue to make a kid-friendly system, which will leave them alive, but diminished. Sony will continue to lead the market, and Sega will be a strong secondary player because of the similarity of their business model and policies to Sony. So I have written, so will it be. Question me not, mortals, lest I turn my wrath on you.

I think Square's sending a vital message here: there're no shortcuts in life. If you're looking for a quick fix, most of the time you'll end up right back where you started, with less MP to show for it. Lunar, on the other hand, is all about quick fixes. Your girlfriend has turned into a goddess of destruction? Don't go to all the trouble of destroying her in hand-to-hand combat, just wow her with your flute-playing abilities, and she'll soon be your compliant love slave once more. This is yet one more reason to prefer the morally respectable Final Fantasy to Lunar, which features men in drag and talking flying cats, which everyone knows are imps from Satan himself.

I'm sorry kid, but there is no Santa Claus, and there is no Quest website that I can find. The best I can do is point you to Atlus' website, the guys who are doing the US publication: http://www.atlus.com/ogre_battle_64.htm - and hey, this one's in English!

I was tempted to blow this off, but your overall tone is polite, and your questions are reasonable and deserve to be answered.

First I should make the caveat that I'm not necessarily speaking for the GIA, like it says in the disclaimer. I think everybody who works here has their own slightly different viewpoints about what we're trying to do and why. That said, a lot of what you're questioning is answered by the main statement of the Mission Briefing: The members of the GIA promise to provide timely, complete, honest, intelligent, and interesting coverage. Yes, we do cover stories by other organizations, as that falls under the category of compete coverage. When IGN has a piece on when the next Final Fantasy will be released we're not gonna deprive our readers of that info just because we weren't there to hear it first hand. This is not at all uncommon or as dishonest as you seem to believe. Look at any newspaper and you'll find that half the headline stories are by the Associated Press, and not the paper itself. National Public Radio is one of the best news organizations on the planet, but a large chunk of what they do is interview other reporters from other organizations about what's happening.

You might have a point if all we were doing was cutting and pasting: Magic Box recently got justifiably ticked off when they found another site was stealing and posting their HTML code. But more and more frequently, the info is flowing the other way. The Register recently credited us with breaking the story about the PS2 American DVD hack, IGN and Videogames.com both mentioned us in their pieces on Legacy of Kain's lost ending, and of course there's my favorite scoop, the design sketches of FF9.

I think you'd be surprised to find out how much time and effort it does take to put the community sections together. As the letters columnist, I can really only speak for myself, but I've taken over an hour so far to answer your one question. I could have typed out an equally long response in a few minutes if I didn't give a lot of care to what I said, but I get the impression you've put a lot of thought into what you wrote, and I think you deserve the same courtesy from me. I'm certain the other members of the GIA put the same amount of care into what they do - I wouldn't work here otherwise.

Finally, I should point out that you don't have to read this site. If you genuinely don't like what we do here, then either make a suggestion to improve it or simply don't come. That's not to sound dismissive, it's just that everybody has their own opinions, and no matter what we do we won't appeal to everyone. But I was a long time visitor of this site before I started working here, and every day I found something that made it worth my while to visit. To me, that's what really matters in a site, and that's where I'm gonna rest this argument.

Closing Comments:

It's been a long day, and I'm gonna get some sleep. Or I would, if I wasn't headed off to flat, wonderful Illinois to look at grad school. I'm a fairly tall guy and I don't really fit all that well onto airline seats, so I'm dreading this trip. But I'm not gonna jump blind into my future education, so I gotta do what I gotta do.

While you're pondering why you should care about the above, let me suggest a topic: Front Mission. The latest of Square's unreleased series to make it over the Pacific is supposed to arrive in less than a week. This is certainly news for celebration, but it makes me wonder: what does this say about what Square's willing to bring out here? Front Mission was well overdue, but in the past the fact that Square hasn't released everything possible in North America has saved us from some real bombs, such as Another Mind. And part of the reason I like Square as much as I do is that their games are rarely total duds. If the signal to noise ratio goes up, is that a problem, or is it just me? I await your reply. Adios.

-Chris Jones (neutral on the whole Microsoft thing... Really!)