Googleshng:
Yeah, I have a truly uncontrollable urge to correct people. You know when that REALLY got me in trouble? Highschool. Some teachers enjoy learning new things, but others really flip out on you if you, say, point out that it's Asimov, not Asminov.

Anyway though. On to H.P. Lovecraft. He lived from 1890 to 1937, dying something like 40 years before RPGs came to be, and thus did not help create the Call of Cthulu RPG except by writing the stories it's based on.

He also wasn't exactly a novelist. He wrote a whole bunch of stories, but kept mainly to the nice short variety I've always had a soft spot for. Most of his really famous ones can be found in one convenient bundle, except The Mountains of Madness.

Now then, as for the rationalization of how this got printed, while most people have never even heard of him, pretty much every work of horror from the last 30 years, along with everything to ever feature a big blobby tentacle covered monster or evil book, is inspired by him whether they know it or not. Some of the more noteable such works include of course the Call of Cthulu RPG, and the console RPGs Koudelka and Shadow Hearts.

Googleshng:
I haven't heard anything about that, and I'm pretty darn sure the team behind the series is too busy with Golden Sun 2 to handle that on the side, but then, you know how it goes when I try to poke holes in rumors, so swing by later today and look for stories on the main page. 8)

Googleshng:
That's actually an extremely hard combination to find, since console games come from Japan and stay pretty linear, and non-linear PC games tend to come from the U.S. or europe and feature decidedly non-anime graphics. The closest I can come up with would be Valkyrie Profile, which honestly doesn't quite meet either criteria, or possibly the upcoming Zelda game, if you count it as an RPG.

Googleshng:
Now HERE I can help you. Aside from BESM, I can name you a paper RPG book from every major engine with an anime kick to it. For your standard d20 games, Palladium has a Robotech RPG. For d10 fans, Chesh constantly recommends Exhalted. Oh, and of course for those who like d6s, there naturally exists GURPS Anime.

Consoles meanwhile in Japan are up to their ankles in anime-licensed RPGs, surprisingly many of which are good, although none of said good games have managed to skip the pond to my knowledge. If you're going to import though, I'd recommend the Super Robot Wars series, since that way you get like 50 shows for the price of one game.

Googleshng:
I'm too tired to give a properly witty response. Sorry.

Googleshng:
That's one of those instances where realism takes a back seat to practicality. I think Xenogears is really the perfect exploration of the issue. On the one hand, it addresses the issue by heavily implying there's many more towns which are just invisible so you don't get distracted by them, and that with the really huge towns, you only explore the tiny portion that concerns you.

More importantly, Xenogears shows us why. A few towns in Xenogears are unquestionably Too Darn Big. I mean, when you like to go everywhere and talk to everyone, a town with a population of, say, 50 people can really suck your soul out, and that's still just a tiny fraction of a realistic number.

Oh yeah, there's also the fact that game designers are lazy by nature.

Googleshng:
Grants exist to be squandered, so go nuts!

Googleshng:
No, I don't have any intention of getting an Xbox. Aside from some of the more frivolous reasons I have, like the controller being a giant unusable monstrosity, and it being against my religeon, there's the lack of even a single game that so much as catches my eye. Oh, and believe me, I've been looking too. I won't deny I'm biased on the matter, but I've had my eyes peeled for appealing games so I can debate over how they aren't worth buying a console over. In any case, I've never heard anyone name a game they were interested for on the sucker except what you listed just now, but with the possible exception of Brute Force, which I'd never even heard of until you mentioned it, not a one of those is an Xbox exclusive, so you can't really count'em.

Anyway though, onto the more serious question of whether supporting the American console would help American developers. Nope. Not one bit. For starters, getting a game onto a system is not a hard thing at all. The hard part comes from getting the game made in the first place. Oh, and even if that were the case, Americans don't make console games. They make PC games. It's just one of those weird truths of the universe.

Googleshng:
That's one way of interpretting it yeah, and true at that. Another way though is that as a genre, RPGs are a stagnant pool of homogenous auto-canabilizing formless creatures that will eventually consume themselves leaving only putrid bloating corpses in their wake.

...

Remind me never to read that much Lovecraft before a column again.