Doug

[Drat! I originally put this in the wrong place. Here it is!]

undrssthemachine and Evadrion, I agree with much of what you're saying. Many of the traditional elements of classic RPGs are more of an annoyance than a "fun" part of the game. As you both say, it's the story and the chance to embody the main character in that story that really constitutes the role-playing experience. That being said, there is a difference between embodying a character in a good RPG (say Fallout 3 - which in itself was a bit of a hybrid) and playing a character in an action-adventure game (say God of War). Both have strong stories, both have you play a role, but ... I don't know ... maybe something like God of War is like watching a movie and playing an RPG is more like reading a really long novel. I like both, but I'll miss the really long novel when it's no longer economically feasible to make one.

... maybe I'm just depressed about Final Fantasy XIII. (I'm in the denial stage.) :-)

undrssthemachine and Evadrion, I agree with much of what you're saying. Many of the traditional elements of classic RPGs are more of an annoyance than a "fun" part of the game. As you both say, it's the story and the chance to embody the main character in that story that really constitutes the role-playing experience. That being said, there is a difference between embodying a character in a good RPG (say Fallout 3 - which in itself was a bit of a hybrid) and playing a character in an action-adventure game (say God of War). Both have strong stories, both have you play a role, but ... I don't know ... maybe something like God of War is like watching a movie and playing an RPG is more like reading a really long novel. I like both, but I'll miss the really long novel when it's no longer economically feasible to make one.

... maybe I'm just depressed about Final Fantasy XIII. (I'm in the denial stage.) :-)

We seem to be witnessing the end of the RPG. Or at least a dumbing down of the genre to appeal to a larger audience and pull in the big bucks needed to create modern HD games. First Mass Effect 2 moves toward a faster-pace action-adventure style, then Final Fantasy XIII becomes a completely linear story without the traditional side quests (and the creators admit that it was just too expensive to make a traditional Final Fantasy in the age of HD graphics). Now Fable is making the move away from being an RPG as well. When HD gaming arrived, we all dreamed of how wonderful our favorite RPGs were going to look on the new platforms. Little did we know that the new platforms would be the end of the genre as we knew it. I guess all things must change, but it's a little sad. It makes me long for the days when all gamers were "core gamers."

I'm juggling students, advisees, co-researchers, projects, papers; I could go on. I need Daylite!

I've put about 3 hours into the DS version of this game ... and that's about it for me. I think there's a good game underneath there somewhere, and I'm debating buying the XBLA version when it comes out, but the DS version has several flaws that ruin the experince, including long load times even before the inventory screen, questionable UI elements such as the sliding game board, imprecise touch screen controls, and fuzzy sound that breaks up everytime it saves (which is often and disrupting). They developed this in Lua, which is cross platform, but evidently not optimized for the DS. It's a shame. I enjoyed the last one so much, and I've been looking forward to this one since it was announced.

Another update and yet Word still loads so @#!* slow!

What's the story behind Next-Generation? They give the impression of "serious, unbiased journalism" but they seem a bit slanted towards Sony and Microsoft. (Or have I become a fanboy? :-)

I'm dating myself here, but my first apple product was an Apple IIc with a whopping 128 *kilo*bytes of RAM, a 5.25-in. floppy, and a 9-in. green-screen monitor. Oh, yeah, and an Apple ImageWriter dot-matrix printer. My parents bought all this for me when I was in high school (nice P's!).