When we last saw our Favorite Plant Based Lifeform, he was having a merry ol time enjoying life. And then, those evil weeds showed up. First, the 20" monitor blew up. Then, it took 2 weeks to get a new one. By then of course, he was 2 weeks behind on webmaster email, and knee deep in planning not 1, not 2, not 3, not even 4, nor 5, but 6 contests! And just when everything was getting around to how he liked it, and the resident Dragon was out of town, that supreme demon of a weed, Work decided to pay a visit. So what's a plant to do?

By some miracle, my project that I had thought I was going to spend all weekend working on, fixed itself sometime between 4:40pm EDT and 8:20pm EDT. And I do mean fixed itself, because when I left for home this afternoon, it was in about a billion pieces. Anyhow, enough with the crap, let's get on to the Questions!

The reason I remember reading somewhere for the custom discs for Game Cube, is that they won't have to pay the DVD Consortium fees, or something like that. i beleive I read that in a Nintendo Power Issue, and that the lack of fees should lower game costs (probabbly bull). But also, because they do not double as DVD players (who does not have at least one, even a DVD-Rom?), the system itself should be cheaper.

And do you play Table Top RPGS, Goog?

--Allen

Hey Goog do you know if Konami has any plans to put another 2D Castlevania on PSX, PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube. Like SOTN?? That was the best Castlevania ever, music, grapx, gameplay, everything about it was awesome. I can't find any info on what Konami is up to. If they are already making plans I hope that they don't try to make it a 3D game because they tried to do that before (N64) and that flopped. The GBA COTM looks all right. But I want the hard-core grapx, and sound. Just let me know what's going on. thanx for your time

-Idxngod

I thought the voice acting in Shenmue took away from the game. Especially that one little kid that's always like, "HEY MISTER!!! WANNA PLAY BALL!?! HEY MISTER!!! LET'S WRESTLE!!!"

-Ari "You just killed your own fairy. You lose 5 lives."

HAHAHAHA

You didn't remember the 2nd greatest mistakes you can make! The first being "Never to start a land war in Asia.", the second is never to go up against a Cecilian when the wager is Death!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-Urk!

Ciphron

Here's a little "bible" on GODs (Gamecube Optical Discs, as the fan base calls them): GODs Bible

As for no load times being a result of the medium, that's wrong. It's really a programming feat, of knowing when to start loading things. Probably the most obvious example are the loading rooms in Castlevania: SotN. The next zone loads you walk through the room, but since you're occupied, it's basically unnoticable. More games should and are utilizing similar features.

Furthermore, the NGC sports 16MB of RAM for Audio and Animation. This, reportedly, is a very large amount. Excess space can be used to load data, for example.

Bartikus

Dear Sue,

Doesn't it get annoying to have Puffy chirping in your ear all the time?

-Traks

Dearest Sue Donim,

In reading the column I often see people ask what games to buy next or games to recommend. Well, I recently bought Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Makick Obscura for the PC and it is the cat's meow. Imagine Fallout and Baldur's Gate making sweet, sweet love... er... well skip past that part and imagine them having a baby.

Besides the recommendation, I have some questions:

1. What fascinated me most about many older RPGs is not just the characterization but a feeling that they are a part of the world they reside in as well as seeing the effects that the bad guys have upon the world. In my opinion the last game to really do this to any degree was Final Fantasy VII (although many of the previous FF's did so to greater effect than VII, as did some of the Dragon Warrior games). Do you agree that many games have started using the world as more of a place to move the character about changing settings but not really putting the world in peril or having effects that make your character seem a part of it?

2. I wrote in previously and asked if there are any RPGs that have gay characters. Google replied with references to side characters (nameless schmoes that live out their binary lives as moving props waiting to share their one or two lines of dialogue before repeating themselves endlessly) that have been gay and indicated a rumor that Barret from FF VII was gay.

a) What would make anyone think Barret is gay?
b) Do you think a game with a playable or lead character that is gay would be marketable given that game is high quality?

-bean

Do still have the address to that Final Fantasy Questionnaire that picked what character you were most like? I was talking about to a friend of mine about it and I couldn't remember the address. I looked in the archives, but I couldn't find it. If you don't remember the address do you know where I could find something similar to it, because when it comes to search engines, I'm about as competent as a cow.

Cera }i{

Hey hey!

I'm extremely fond of the works of Uematsu and Mitsuda, and I've even bought the Xenogears, Chrono Trigger and FF6 OSTs, but I always find myself thinking, "Cool as this is, it'd be a lot easier on the ears were it orchestrated."

The thing is that the arranged versions of their music are (with few exceptions such as One Winged Angel and the two or three tracks at the end of the Chrono Trigger 2000 CD) reworked, and far weaker than their 16-bit counterparts. The example that stands out most in my mind is Kefka's theme. Both the arranged version and the piano collection are for less dramatic than the original.

Then there's Creid and that jazzy Chrono Trigger thing. They're...they're good if you're into that sort of thing, but they're disappointing as arranged game soundtracks. Nothing pissed me off more than when that accordian hopped into one of my favorite Xenogears songs...shudder.

What's your take on all of this? It's not much of a question considering the length of the lead-in, but... what do you think?

-Matt

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