Well, stress seems to be a magnet to all things lately. Let's start this out on a light note, how was Amish in the city? See, I told Paul to take pictures. Of course he was going to take tourist pictures, but there was a deeper mission in that. One I fear he refused to take up due to extreme sexiness. One can only hope. How's the weekend commutes going? Exhausted yet? I hope not. Well, I picked up a terrible game for $15 Saturday. Can you guess which one? There's a lot, but it's one you refuse to discuss in this column due to hatred. Dream sexy dreams of me!

Farewell to arms this time,

O' Shrouded One

ANDREW Yes, I'm afraid Paul's batteries suffered a mysterious failure to continue providing energy fairly early on, and for some reason, the crappy Canadian batteries he bought to replace them just didn't have enough juice. Fancy that! At any rate, I pray you didn't buy Rhapsody, for it will ruin your soul if you dare play it.

I was replaying FFX the other day and saw the scene where Auron looks at Rikku's eyes when you get her and I remembered a question that puzzled me then. Is she a robot? I know in Guado she mentions that she is afraid of the lightning plains. What does Auron mean when he says: just as I thought? am I missing something here. Sorry if this is a boring question, it just has been bugging me for a while.

thanks
Jeremy

ANDREW While her ridiculous behaviour certainly mirrors that of a robot, Rikku is in fact just a plain old Al Bhed, and like all Al Bhed has those crazy spiralled pupils. I'm not exactly sure what Auron thought, but given that his um... mortally estranged status puts him beyond the reach of certain pesky laws involving jailbait and the pursuit thereof, one would suspect that it was dirty dirty thoughts.

With regards to a complete listing of all the Shin Megami games... to say that Rpgamer has covered them all is fallacious. According to http://www.atlus.com/smt/history.html, there are over 50 games in this series, and while the ones listed are probably the main ones, it's apparent that not every game has been covered.

ANDREW You're right, you got us. As penance for our failure to cover dozens of worthless games that are probably shameless knockoffs of each other and / or lousy anime by the same name, I will now proceed to compare you unfavourably to a rotting pig corpse. Zing!

Which leads me to my next statement: the games Rpgamer does cover (particularly ones released in Japan only) seem to be somewhat sporadic. Front Mission History (supposedly the last thing from Square Enix for the PSX) has had only one measly article written about it, from nearly a year ago. No propaganda, no screens, no nothing. And many of the titles in the "series" section have titles missing. The "Popocropolis" section only has Popocropolis IV (I know nothing of the series, but I'd be willing to bet that there was a Popcropolis I, II, and III released somewhere in there), Legend of Heroes only LoH VI, Ultima's missing a ton, I'd like to know about Elder Scrolls I and II, and so on. You get the idea. Other such implied game omissions (Deception III, Linda 3, Lunatic Dawn 3, etc) are present in the "others" section as well.

ANDREW Without sounding too defensive, I hope, a lot of those games don't tend to have very much information available about them, and so in terms of covering them, we're left to balance getting new information about games the bulk of our readers are likely to want to know about versus fleshing out our archives. Certainly, we should be making these efforts on both fronts if we are in fact to be the source for "Complete RPG coverage, period." but then again, I never was one for buzzwords and slogans. You'd be right about Popolocrois 3, incidentally. I did a number of stories about it myself back in the day which you can find under early 2001 and late 2000 in the news archives. Given that not much else came of it, however, it was probably dropped from coverage.

I guess I should ask my questions now:

1. Is it possible for the coverage of this site to be split up into games that have been slated for American release and games that haven't? It would make searching through "upcoming" a lot easier.

ANDREW It is to the extent that it can be. I think it should be fairly obvious why structuring our coverage in this manner is not the best way to go about it; first off, if you immediately consign a game to the flames by convincing yourself that it'll never see North American release, chances are, as a North American news site, you'll pay less attention to it and end up focusing on other games to its potential exclusion, which could be a rather glaring omission if the game is randomly set for localization some years down the road like oh, say, Growlanser. More than that, though, it's a silly sort of way to look at things, particularly in view of the fact that the third major videogame territory, Europe, muddies the waters completely in that sort of system. Ultimately, if you're that curious about whether a game has been released here or not, check the game pages. Though the exact release dates are not always accurate, the nuts and bolts of "released in US" or "not released in US" almost always are, and so you should be able to figure stuff out on your own from this point.

2. Do you think it would be possible to start a new branch of Rpgamer (which would employ different people) to create similar coverage and listings of fighting, action, racing, sports games, etc? Despite my criticisms above, I love the work you guys do, and I've never seen so thorough and complete a coverage as you guys manage, and I'm guessing that fans of other genres would like to see such a dedicated site. It would also have benefits for Rpgamer, as the site would begin to attract the eye of all sorts of gaming developers. I think it might be worth considering.

ANDREW Notwithstanding your criticism of the above, which appears to be in direct contradiction to your compliments below, no, RPGamer will not be branching out into those other areas because quite frankly RPGamer is an RPG site and to cover those other areas of gaming would be a costly and in the end, unwieldly diversion. The reason you see the holes in coverage you do most of the time is that we have trouble as it is maintaining adequate staffing to keep all this information up to date, so to expand our focus in such a way just isn't possible.

I also wanted to mention that I have most of this information to the general feedback address in the "feedback" section a number of months ago and never got a response.

The Pezman

ANDREW The trouble with that is that webmaster@ allegedly points at the department heads at the site, but in reality points to Mikel, who is generally too busy to check through all his mail, my old email address, which eats webmaster@ for no apparent reason, and Google, who would probably have ended up chucking the letter in with Q& A stuff or passing it on to Mikel, who again does not always have time to read all his email. We should be resolving the situation soon, though.

I believe this is my first submission to anything in this site, but i do visit the site quite often. (it's my home page, actually). I was reading over the past few Q&A's, and figured i would submit my thoughts/questions.

As far as the gender issues with MMORPG's are, i personally believe that people can play whatever they want, i mean they're paying $12.99+ for it. I, for one, am a female Hume Bard, and damn proud of it, but am in no way a female in real life. And I could care less how many other people do the same thing. However, when they start pretending to actually be female, that's when it crosses the line, in my opinion. It's all just a matter of choice. Personally, i don't wanna go through a game staring at some guys rear the whole time, so that's one reason i chose female.

ANDREW So THAT's where yesterday's title came from... Anyhow, I really don't understand that viewpoint cuz from where I stand a character is a chunk of polygons and not really something sexual one way or the other. There are a few noteworthy exceptions, of course - games that make an effort to accentuate anatomy, or stupid Dual Hearts garbageface, which seems to take a perverse delight in jamming Rumble's ass in your face as much as is humanly possible - but for the most part, characters are sufficiently clothed that checking out their asses isn't really an issue.

As i read further back in the Q&A's, i got to the one where someone mentioned the Tales Of series, as well as Star Ocean. I played Tales of Destiny all the way through, and loved it. Same goes for Star Ocean 2. But when i got my hands on Tales of Destiny 2, and later on Star Ocean 3, and played those for a little, it just didn't feel right. The games seemed to have lost their edge. My question is thus: Did you notice the same thing, or know anyone else that did? Or do you know why this might have happened? Or am i just crazy?

Anyways, that's enough from me.
Bored Reader

ANDREW Having not been a big fan of Star Ocean 2 to begin with, I'm not sure there was much of a feel to lose. As for Tales, from what I understand they're all somewhat similar, so maybe the characters just didn't do it for you or something.

As some may be able to surmise from my previous letter to Andrew, I am a big fan of PnP RPGs, just like my man Jake over there. Over where? Who cares? Wow. Too much rhyming. Anyways, I've actually played all those 'challenge characters' with the exception of the intelligent troll and the creepy leather bikini one. So...hah? Anyways...I'd like to express my appreciation for Jake's explanation of the whole "reasoning behind playing a female", as it is quite accurate of most examples I've seen in my time.

ANDREW Yeah. Actually, the whole being unnerved by a character's posterior never occurred to me for some reason, I guess because I have better things to do than check out the curvaliciousness of Squall or Serge.

As for the topic at hand (at least I think it still may be...), Neverwinter Nights has proved to be a worthwhile distraction for me. The inclusion of Prestige Classes (which is a great feature of 3.X that was sadly missing from the otherwise fantastic Icewind Dale II) is a great plus, and I believe it's worth mentioning that you can now get the original game along with the two expansions for only 39.99 by way of the Neverwinter Night Platinum Edition, it's quite a steal. (Damn you Rob for buying the Gold Edition for my birthday instead of a nice little 'IOU the Platinum Edition.) From what I've seen from playing my buddy Rob's, Hordes of the Underdark seems to be the best of the expansions, but in a happy fun way, all materials introduced in the expansions are available in the original adventure, so if you felt like playing them in order, you wouldn't have to wait to try all the nifty stuff (like various Prestige Classes). Oh, and I guess it's worth mentioning that I'm pretty sure Hordes of the Underdark takes you into Epic Levels (I'm not sure it's required, but I know it's available), which is unseen in any other current iteration of D&D video games (correct me if I'm wrong, =P).

Well, after that long-winded blather of video-gamey nonsense, I'm going to return to making this stupid collage about myself for class and then finish the depressingly short Demon Stone and hawk it to a friend for 30 bucks and then buy GTA: San Andreas. Hey, look, a run-on! Hah. Take that, fancy-pants Q&A folks.

ANDREW Hmm... 40 bucks, eh? Well, that's probably in your crazy American dollars, but those are dropping like a stone, so really, that's only about 50 bucks Canadian now. Of course, that doesn't stop Canadian retailers from charging $60 or $70, but I suppose I could always go down to Buffalo and buy it. On second thought, I'll just pay the extra $20...

Second i just wanted to comment on the gender thing. I can remember at time when I was younger and would take chun li over anybody in SF2. (not an RPG, so what you wanna fight about it?) She just plain kicked ass.....that and i would much prefer jiggling boobs than brawny dudes.

well see ya round if you don't turn.....nevermind
Jakert00

ANDREW Yeah... I have to admit, even though I piously declared I never pick characters for those reasons, Chun Li is in fact the exception to the rule. Curse you, Jakert!