PhreQuencYViii wrote:

If I could make both of you play this fucking horrible Sonic game, I dunno. It would be bad. I just fell through the floor for the third time. I just want to beat it to justify the 15$ I spent.

Sonic the Hedgehog GENESIS for the GBA? I've heard that game is a total disaster. Incorrectly sized sprites. Horrible collision detection. Sonic jumps too high. Etc. From what I understand, SEGA has long since lost the source code for Sonic the Hedgehog and probably many other games from their library. They literally remade Sonic 1 from scratch for the GBA. Guess they couldn't emulate it on that hardware. Why didn't they develop it for the DS instead if that were the case? What you get is the best they could (or cared to) do. Sad.

As for the original RPG discussion, I loved final fantasy back in the day. I remember getting the Official Nintendo Power Strategy Guide for Final Fantasy one X-mas in one of those grab-bag gift exchanges at school. I'd never heard of the game before, but that guide made it look so cool and involved that I had to get it. Loved "IV" and "VI" on the SNES as well. I even enjoyed the PS era entires, but by X, I was bored. Then came the betrayal with XI as an MMORPG, and the joke that is X-2. After that, I had no enthusiam left for XII. I agree that most of the VII fanboys are annoying. They lack taste and basically latch on to FF VII because it somehow became cool. The game was good but it's NOT that great. I'm sure many of them haven't really played any OTHER RPGs, be they Final Fantasy entries or not.

My first RPG love, however, is Dragon Warrior. Final Fantasy is a quality series, despite some flawed entries, but Dragon Warrior/Quest has always had a certain charm to it that still hasn't grown old for me. I actually won the first Dragon Warrior game for the NES in one of those Pepsi "under the cap" contests. The promotion at the time was the chance to win a selection of Nintendo merchandise. I'm pretty sure your could win an NES with other bells and whistles, but what I remember most clearly is the selection of NES games you could win: Super Mario Bros. 2, Tetris (Nintendo's licensed version, of cousre), and Dragon Warrior. Well, I was pretty ecstatic when I opened up a Pepsi bottle and found I had won an NES game. My hope was that they'd send along Tetris, but Dragon Warrior arrived at my door instead. That was my first RPG, and it was kind of a steep learning curve, but I kept on until I could best the Dragon Lord, and then I was hooked. Needless to say, I got Dragon Warriors II, III, and IV as well, each more satisfying to me than the last. It was a looooooooong wait until Dragon Warrior VII. Dragon Quest VIII turned out well too. It's a shame that Squre-Enix felt they needed to "Westernize" the interface of the game to appeal to an American audience. The addition of voice acting worked well, but I missed the "classic" text-based menus, with black background, white lettering, and simple triangular pointer. I also missed the classic battle sound effects. Here's hoping that Dragon Quest IX on the DS will retain those classic elements when it's released outside of Japan.