Magnus

I loved Kotaku's article about the quote. Owen Good seemed extremely offended about the whole thing, complaining about how the Metacritic guy only wanted more free content for his website. ... Apparently he didn't see the irony in how Kotaku gets most of its content from other places.

IGN listed the original Super Mario Bros. as the best game of all time, so I'm not sure what they're complaining about.

Happy birthday to the member we all love more than Mikey. That's because they're essentially the same language. Oh, yes I did.

Well, he did say "in terms of BioWare games". They undoubtedly peaked with Baldur's Gate 2.

Should have said "evvvvvver", Dyson. Wasted opportunity. I agree that it's really good, though. That and Machinarium. And Braid, of course. I haven't played any of the others.

So, um... does everyone get a bonus when a game does well? Like, even the code monkeys? And at some point he's all, "this game made [this much profit], so that's $800,000 for everyone who worked on the game", which makes me think he's slightly insane. So, what - a game does well and the publisher just gets back their initial investment and gives away the rest of the money? That's... not how I thought these things worked. Also, it's all well and good if a game does well. Yeah, sure L.A. Noire sold well and made a lot of money, but what about if there are developers who are in crunch time for a year and the game flops?

Now go back even further and play Baldur's Gate 2 to see where the gameplay in Knights of the Old Republic got started. I was going to suggest the first Baldur's Gate, but it's not as good and the parallels are more obvious in the sequel.

A moderator with time on their hands should start deleting anything within parentheses in ReZ's posts.

FOX owns the X-Men movie rights, so any sequel wouldn't appear on that list. So yeah, there's probably still a chance.

Probably. Other RPGs that are generally considered to be some of the best of all time: Final Fantasy VI and VII, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment. I'm sure the list goes on. It's not like Chrono Trigger is all that short, anyway. A first playthrough would probably take 25-30 hours. Not as long as some other RPGs, but still pretty long overall. But no, I don't think there's any reason to needlessly make RPGs long just for the sake of it. Whenever I play longer games, my interest begins to wane once I pass the thirty-hour mark. After that, it's pretty much just the story that keeps me going, as well as my need to finish every game I play. That said, I don't think the people who crave more JRPGs would really be content if developers started making ten-hour RPGs. A certain amount of content is pretty much expected in the genre. It's a bit like Tales of Monkey Island, which was released episodically. Yeah, it was good and all, but it didn't compare to the larger scope of the previous games.

If they wanted to be more efficient, they could remove the story entirely. That'd save a lot of time and money. Or why have towns at all? There are still people out there who would play a game like that. I don't think there's such a thing as the perfect town. Part of the fun of JRPGs is exploring new areas and meeting new people. Even in Persona 3/4 (both of which I loved), I was dying for a change of scenery after a while, as the entire games take place in just one area. It sounds like you want games that are more like Dragon Quest and Etrian Odyssey, which are more about combat and getting better equipment than they are about story and characters. Which is fine, I guess, but they're about as far as you can come in terms of fun for me. I doubt we'll see any downloadable, forty-hour (or whatever is an acceptable length), sprite-based JRPGs on the 3DS. With a handful of exceptions, the downloadable side of the DSi has been a joke, and I don't think any developer making an RPG with the scope of something like Chrono Trigger would make their money back. It may be possible for JRPGs that aren't very commercially viable to be released as downloadable titles for the Vita, though, where you can actually download full-size games. That was my point. You said 16-bit RPGs hadn't aged at all, which is mostly true, except a vast majority of them had random encounters (and, of course, this is true for many RPGs on the PS1 and PS2 as well). That's one thing I really don't miss. One of the first things I make sure of when buying an RPG is that it doesn't have random encounters. I can live with them, but it'd have to be a really great game for me to be able to look past them.

Happy birthday, Mikey. Not that you're going to remember any of it tomorrow.

Grazza's vision of the perfect JRPG doesn't sound like a game I'd want to play. I could do without the random encounters, though. This all reminds me of the downfall of adventure games. They were massively popular in the late eighties/early nineties, but they became increasingly expensive to produce while the size of the audience stayed the same. These days, the only developers still making adventure games are smaller ones. All of the things that made adventure games special (stories, characters, puzzles...) have been absorbed into other genres, so adventures games have become pretty redundant. Which is a shame if you were a fan. Someone said in another thread that they were glad the 3DS and Vita are so powerful, because it means Japanese developers could no longer get away with making technically unimpressive games. I think that'd be a sad future, because it would mean we'd never get games like Radiant Historia or Trails in the Sky again.

They'd say sorry and compensate his widow?

Wasn't that the whole premise behind the comic to begin with? I still read it every week. If you feel like you need more validation I could try to comment more often, though there's not much to say beyond "it's still good".

They kill chickens. That's it.

This being Nintendo, I expect a folded-up poster and a Super Mario Sunshine wallpaper.

Dude, just click on one of his YouTube videos while it's playing.

So no long moonlit conversations about why Pikachu is better than Piplup? This is what I imagine dating you would be like.

What Serebii looks for in a prospective mate: 1. Must be female. 2. People on online dating sites need not apply. 3. Must think that Pokémon is the cat's pajamas. That's the list so far.

From Wikipedia:

Compromise: Bob picks girls, but Dyson undergoes a sex change.

I watched Super because people in this thread seemed to like it. It felt like a poor man's Kick-Ass. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. I did like Ellen Page's character, though. She was the movie's only saving grace.

That sucks, Dyson.

Having trouble deciding between two girls again?