I was referring to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games. I-IV were released for both the Famicom and the NES. V and VI were Super Famicom games, released around the same time Enix pulled out of North America. They also re-made I-III for the Super Famicom, updated graphics and music and all that.
Then came the PlayStation, which got Dragon Quest VII (released over here as Dragon Warrior VII, DQVIII is the first DQ game with the same name inside and outside of Japan) as well as a remake of IV. There were also remakes of I-III for the Game Boy Color, based off of the Super Famicom versions, which were released worldwide.
There's also the whole Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior Monsters series for the Game Boy Color that I never got into. Sort of a Pokemon clone.
That makes at least two original Dragon Quest games (V and VI) and three remakes (I-II, III and IV) that were never released outside of Japan.
"I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people that see the VIII after the last Dragon Quest game will assume that it is an ongoing story and would be hard to just jump into at this point."
I haven't been on top of the DW/DQ series as much as I should be, but I know enough to know this ain't Final Fantasy. If I-III and IV-VI are any indication, VIII is a sequel of VII, in every sense of the word.
At any rate, when they gonna port V and VI stateside? They'd be perfect for the GBA at this point. How 'bout that remake of IV? PSP or DS would be nice.
"They might as well have a story line [or a thousand] where some robe wearing muslim is planning to blow up an office complex or something:-)"
That wouldn't fly because, unlike gamers, Muslims/Arabs/etc. have organized groups that make noise on all the news outlets when this sort of thing happens. What do we have, Gabe & Tycho?
"Look at artical 10 and then the list of signatory nations near the end."
Wilson's signature is worthless without the "advice and consent of the Senate." The parent got it wrong: the United States was not a part of the same peace agreement as everybody else; we signed a separate peace agreement (with the consent of the Senate) with Germany after the fact. While you're Googling, look for the "Treaty of Berlin" of 1921.
Where's all the free weapons and munitions France gave to Poland, ala Lend-Lease? How many French volunteers were there for the Polish cause?
The US government, as always, was paralyzed and/or doing exactly the wrong thing, but it seems the American people were at least sympathetic. And, unlike the United States, France had treaty obligations to defend Poland.
That's funny. My capital? I would have passed out gasoline to the invading troops, to purge that blight of a city from the face of the earth.
The repulsion of those same British forces from Baltimore and later New Orleans (yes, that New Orleans) just goes to show that, even in 1814, the folks in Washington had their heads firmly shoved up their asses.
The Beloved Party handed down execution orders for the parents, on the grounds that they wasted precious state resources raising their One Child to be so completely braindead. The deceased child will be eulogized and immoralized as a state hero for sparing the national gene pool from further corruption.
(If you're gonna have a police state, have fun with it!)
"Geeks rarely are assertive enough to capitalize on such a situation"
"Capitalize on such a situation?" When did we start talking about an IPO?
"and too stupid and desperate to realize that they're just being used and won't get anything except less sleep before class out of it."
You assume it isn't mutual. The girl gets a functional computer, the geek gets to have an excuse to be within ten feet of a girl (all without having to think of something to talk about). Neither is a life-consuming goal for either participant, but the working computer and the female exposure make for nice perks for both.
"Anyone else would recognize it for the waste of time it is."
Not everybody has the same heierarchy of values.
"Unless she's calling you for a bootycall, she's just using you."
"Unless?" If you look at it, either way you're getting used. The only difference is that you get sex out of one of them. That being the case, a choise between casual sex and casual tech support, I'd rather do the tech support: no worries, no hang-ups, no bad sex. Not everybody has the desire to have sex with as many different people as possible. It's a quality vs. quantity thing.
"don't be a passive pussy hoping that SHE'LL offer something"
When did this become a competition? If it's not mutual, where's the fun?
"Tell her to call the bad boy on the motercycle she bangs on the weekends or the frat boy she bangs late at night and ask him to help her."
Bitter much? It sounds like you're spending entirely too much time trying to emualte that bad boy you seem to be pissed off about. It may be sour graps, but personally I'd rather not touch the flighty, self-centered, shallow girls that those guys get. If anything, they're about as concerned about image as you are, usually of the opinion that they need nothing more than their looks to do anything, including (but not limited to) being a decent lay. 9 times out of 10, those women are only attractive to me until they actually open their mouth, and then I know too much about their personality to want to touch them.
(Heck, I've gotten prejudiced against women I find "too attractive" over the past decade or so. I have to force myself not to assume that she's not worth talking to.)
"Yet they always end up with these average chicks that they somehow believe are the hottest babes on the planet."
Some of it could stem from a sense of thankfullness, depending on the geek. But you seem to be assuming that you know more about their sex lives than you possibly could (probably basing all your assumptions on looks). You probably have no idea what that mousey little librarian is capable of when she feels like it.
"I was a jock for most of my youth."
Congratulations.
"You do not get the same quality of chick as a "geek" only as you do when you're a "jock only"."
You can have your "chicks," I'd rather have women. If I cared so much how she looked on my arm, I would probably also worry more about my wardrobe beyond "jeans and a t-shirt." I'd rather have someone who stands her ground and can give as good as she gets than some stuck-up little "I look hot so you must worship the ground I walk on" any day.
"There's nothing wrong with taking whatever you can get,"
That's the main point we differ on. If you're just interestd in "taking whatever you can get," do both her and yourself a favor and just go spend the evening alone with your right hand and a box of kleenex.
"television shows like 'Beauty and the Geek' have made it cool to be a geek."
I had to look it up; it's a reality show and on broadcast TV, so I'd never heard of it.
What bugs me about the show's apparent premise is the idea that the two were somehow on equal footing, that they needed to learn from each other.
Yes, the geek may know some technical jargon the "beauties" in the show have, but when push comes to shove these women have tits^Wsocial skills and ultimatley they don't need to know this stuff. If ever a technical problem crops up for one of these women, guys will magically show up out of the woodwork to fix their problem for them, often without the woman even having to ask. Who needs know-how when you have lackeys? Guys want to be around these women.
On the other hand, often other geeks don't want to be around geeks. The only reasons a woman talks to a geek are:
They need tech support
pity
Some bizarre sociology/anthropology experiment, ultimately a disguised form of #2
Does this show suddenly make it "cool" to be a geek? At best, it just shows us as possibly being more useful than originally thought.
Geeks are usually looking for some sort of human companionship. The women they seem to have selected want their VCRs to stop blinking 12:00. Not exactly equal goals, in my opinion.
How to move gaming beyond the geek culture? By selling out.
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Ah yes. An AMERICAN."
Somebody from Texas does something you don't like. Abroad, everything from Texas or New York or even Saipan is only labelled "made in the USA." Additionally, federal taxes collected from businesses in New York still benefit those folks in Texas.
Now, would you like to go even further out of your way in the course of your boycott to make sure that you only penalize those businesses from Texas, or do you want to make sure that everybody in the US, regardless of what state they're in, is penalized for allowing Texas to do what it does and helping them to do it?
Just because there are times when you should ask whether the scalpel or the chainsaw is the best tool to use doesn't mean the chainsaw is always the wrong choice.
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The difference is that I don't have "pirate" stamped on my forehead. If Sony didn't want to milk its name recognition for every dime it's worth, they wouldn't have "SONY" written on everything they sell. Even if they didn't want to spin off their hardware division, they still could have followed Disney's example of "Touchstone," et al.
They want to make money on the Sony name, period. If there's going to be a consumer response, then the response should show the industry just what that "SONY" nameplate is worth.
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"I would like to point out that at Sony's size, the different divisions have little or nothing to do with each other."
They're associated well enough to have the name "SONY" branded on them. Good enough for me.
Re:FBI? NSA? Homeland Security?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nine times out of ten, if you find yourself asking that question, the answer is "yes." There is often doubt about what is art, but there is rarely any doubt about what is not art.
It's up there with questions like "Is this a dumb idea?"
"Instead, I find it likely that Squaresoft will unveil Final Fantasy XIII around the time of the PS3 release,"
Final Fantasy XI will be released for the X360, bundled with the upcoming new expansion pack. FFXII is probably still in development for the PS2, but ultimately S-E is getting more hardware agnostic; they actually made games for the GameCube.
At this point, I don't think anybody knows what consode FFXIII (or DQIX, for that matter) will grace. For all we know, they'll be on the Revolution.
And there's still the matter of the Phantasy Star line.
Yeahhhhh... You know something else that hasn't happened in the video game industry before? Somebody other than Nintendo topping the Game Boy. In light of the lackluster performance of the PSP, do you still believe Sony has the ability to pull a hat trick out of their rear end?
Besides, the only reason this is a "more of the same" competition is because of the tactics of both Microsoft and Sony, looking for little else beyond keeping it "more of the same," a competition they seem to excel at. Nintendo seems to be going off into a new direction and I'm not sure it's been decided yet whether or not their new direction is going to be rejected.
"You can argue until the cows come home whether this is true in practice but it suffices to say that American's believe this to be mostly true."
Yeah, that explains why the numerical majority of registered voters don't bother to vote, and that's not even counting the people who are qualified to vote but aren't registered.
I doubt most of the people who even bother to vote truly believe what you claim. They go into their voting booths and pick their "elected leaders."
"The UN presupposes trust in government--which Americans simply don't possess."
The UN doesn't give a damn about how people and their governments relate, they interact with the governments and only the governments, relying solely on national sovereignty and they generally consider anything that doesn't cross national borders to be Somebody Else's Problem. It is in no way a republican organization.
"It's not because the US doesn't respect the rest of the world or wants to control everything. "
Bullshit. The US has never had much respect for the rest of the world, the only thing that has changed is that we stopped looking at them with revolutionary disdain and started to look at them with imperial disdain. And as for control, one of basic premises of our beloved War on Terror seems to be that anything we do not control can harm us.
They had peers, they had friends, they had extracurricular activites they felt they fit into, and they had something to look forward to after graduation.
"I am proud to be an American where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff in such a case."
No it's not. This is a civil trial, not criminal, which means that it relies on something that in the US is called the preponderance of evidence. The defendant (nor the plaintiff) is not given any sort of special treatment or presumption, both sides have to argue their respective cases on their own merits. In the flippant example of "So-and-so eats babies!" the defendant would still have to demonstrate why it is reasonable for them to believe that the plaintiff actually eats babies.
The differences between US states and other common law jurisdictions are a bit more complicated. The only big difference is that, in a US state, there'd be the option of having this heard before a civil jury.
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games. I-IV were released for both the Famicom and the NES. V and VI were Super Famicom games, released around the same time Enix pulled out of North America. They also re-made I-III for the Super Famicom, updated graphics and music and all that.
Then came the PlayStation, which got Dragon Quest VII (released over here as Dragon Warrior VII, DQVIII is the first DQ game with the same name inside and outside of Japan) as well as a remake of IV. There were also remakes of I-III for the Game Boy Color, based off of the Super Famicom versions, which were released worldwide.
There's also the whole Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior Monsters series for the Game Boy Color that I never got into. Sort of a Pokemon clone.
That makes at least two original Dragon Quest games (V and VI) and three remakes (I-II, III and IV) that were never released outside of Japan.
"I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people that see the VIII after the last Dragon Quest game will assume that it is an ongoing story and would be hard to just jump into at this point."
I haven't been on top of the DW/DQ series as much as I should be, but I know enough to know this ain't Final Fantasy. If I-III and IV-VI are any indication, VIII is a sequel of VII, in every sense of the word.
At any rate, when they gonna port V and VI stateside? They'd be perfect for the GBA at this point. How 'bout that remake of IV? PSP or DS would be nice.
"They might as well have a story line [or a thousand] where some robe wearing muslim is planning to blow up an office complex or something :-)"
That wouldn't fly because, unlike gamers, Muslims/Arabs/etc. have organized groups that make noise on all the news outlets when this sort of thing happens. What do we have, Gabe & Tycho?
"Did you know that his wife got some sample packet of vaginal lubricant in the mail,"
Since she didn't try out said packet, it seems like everybody is out to get him except for his wife. Is Jack an honorary Slashdotter?
"Look at artical 10 and then the list of signatory nations near the end."
Wilson's signature is worthless without the "advice and consent of the Senate." The parent got it wrong: the United States was not a part of the same peace agreement as everybody else; we signed a separate peace agreement (with the consent of the Senate) with Germany after the fact. While you're Googling, look for the "Treaty of Berlin" of 1921.
Where's all the free weapons and munitions France gave to Poland, ala Lend-Lease? How many French volunteers were there for the Polish cause?
The US government, as always, was paralyzed and/or doing exactly the wrong thing, but it seems the American people were at least sympathetic. And, unlike the United States, France had treaty obligations to defend Poland.
"Losing our capital just pissed us off."
That's funny. My capital? I would have passed out gasoline to the invading troops, to purge that blight of a city from the face of the earth.
The repulsion of those same British forces from Baltimore and later New Orleans (yes, that New Orleans) just goes to show that, even in 1814, the folks in Washington had their heads firmly shoved up their asses.
The Beloved Party handed down execution orders for the parents, on the grounds that they wasted precious state resources raising their One Child to be so completely braindead. The deceased child will be eulogized and immoralized as a state hero for sparing the national gene pool from further corruption.
(If you're gonna have a police state, have fun with it!)
And here I was worried I was getting too jaded.
At any rate, I can only speak for myself here.
"Geeks rarely are assertive enough to capitalize on such a situation"
"Capitalize on such a situation?" When did we start talking about an IPO?
"and too stupid and desperate to realize that they're just being used and won't get anything except less sleep before class out of it."
You assume it isn't mutual. The girl gets a functional computer, the geek gets to have an excuse to be within ten feet of a girl (all without having to think of something to talk about). Neither is a life-consuming goal for either participant, but the working computer and the female exposure make for nice perks for both.
"Anyone else would recognize it for the waste of time it is."
Not everybody has the same heierarchy of values.
"Unless she's calling you for a bootycall, she's just using you."
"Unless?" If you look at it, either way you're getting used. The only difference is that you get sex out of one of them. That being the case, a choise between casual sex and casual tech support, I'd rather do the tech support: no worries, no hang-ups, no bad sex. Not everybody has the desire to have sex with as many different people as possible. It's a quality vs. quantity thing.
"don't be a passive pussy hoping that SHE'LL offer something"
When did this become a competition? If it's not mutual, where's the fun?
"Tell her to call the bad boy on the motercycle she bangs on the weekends or the frat boy she bangs late at night and ask him to help her."
Bitter much? It sounds like you're spending entirely too much time trying to emualte that bad boy you seem to be pissed off about. It may be sour graps, but personally I'd rather not touch the flighty, self-centered, shallow girls that those guys get. If anything, they're about as concerned about image as you are, usually of the opinion that they need nothing more than their looks to do anything, including (but not limited to) being a decent lay. 9 times out of 10, those women are only attractive to me until they actually open their mouth, and then I know too much about their personality to want to touch them.
(Heck, I've gotten prejudiced against women I find "too attractive" over the past decade or so. I have to force myself not to assume that she's not worth talking to.)
"Yet they always end up with these average chicks that they somehow believe are the hottest babes on the planet."
Some of it could stem from a sense of thankfullness, depending on the geek. But you seem to be assuming that you know more about their sex lives than you possibly could (probably basing all your assumptions on looks). You probably have no idea what that mousey little librarian is capable of when she feels like it.
"I was a jock for most of my youth."
Congratulations.
"You do not get the same quality of chick as a "geek" only as you do when you're a "jock only"."
You can have your "chicks," I'd rather have women. If I cared so much how she looked on my arm, I would probably also worry more about my wardrobe beyond "jeans and a t-shirt." I'd rather have someone who stands her ground and can give as good as she gets than some stuck-up little "I look hot so you must worship the ground I walk on" any day.
"There's nothing wrong with taking whatever you can get,"
That's the main point we differ on. If you're just interestd in "taking whatever you can get," do both her and yourself a favor and just go spend the evening alone with your right hand and a box of kleenex.
I had to look it up; it's a reality show and on broadcast TV, so I'd never heard of it.
What bugs me about the show's apparent premise is the idea that the two were somehow on equal footing, that they needed to learn from each other.
Yes, the geek may know some technical jargon the "beauties" in the show have, but when push comes to shove these women have tits^Wsocial skills and ultimatley they don't need to know this stuff. If ever a technical problem crops up for one of these women, guys will magically show up out of the woodwork to fix their problem for them, often without the woman even having to ask. Who needs know-how when you have lackeys? Guys want to be around these women.
On the other hand, often other geeks don't want to be around geeks. The only reasons a woman talks to a geek are:
Does this show suddenly make it "cool" to be a geek? At best, it just shows us as possibly being more useful than originally thought.
Geeks are usually looking for some sort of human companionship. The women they seem to have selected want their VCRs to stop blinking 12:00. Not exactly equal goals, in my opinion.
(Me, bitter? Nah!)
""Oh no, you are not! Don't be so hard on yourself!"."
No, Cartman, I really am Jewish!
Still, at least we're not at the point where there's talk of the "G-word" being "their word and only they are allowed to use it."
"Male geeks have feelings, desires, hopes, and dreams just like everyone else."
That's not going to change the way people treat them. Feelings or not, you're still just a walking calculator/encyclopedia/etc.
How to move gaming beyond the geek culture? By selling out.
"Ah yes. An AMERICAN."
Somebody from Texas does something you don't like. Abroad, everything from Texas or New York or even Saipan is only labelled "made in the USA." Additionally, federal taxes collected from businesses in New York still benefit those folks in Texas.
Now, would you like to go even further out of your way in the course of your boycott to make sure that you only penalize those businesses from Texas, or do you want to make sure that everybody in the US, regardless of what state they're in, is penalized for allowing Texas to do what it does and helping them to do it?
Just because there are times when you should ask whether the scalpel or the chainsaw is the best tool to use doesn't mean the chainsaw is always the wrong choice.
The difference is that I don't have "pirate" stamped on my forehead. If Sony didn't want to milk its name recognition for every dime it's worth, they wouldn't have "SONY" written on everything they sell. Even if they didn't want to spin off their hardware division, they still could have followed Disney's example of "Touchstone," et al.
They want to make money on the Sony name, period. If there's going to be a consumer response, then the response should show the industry just what that "SONY" nameplate is worth.
"I would like to point out that at Sony's size, the different divisions have little or nothing to do with each other."
They're associated well enough to have the name "SONY" branded on them. Good enough for me.
"Why hasn't Sony been raided by the Feds, yet?"
Two words: campaign contributions.
"I suggest people consider boycotting _all_ RIAA member labels, not just Sony."
I've been doing that for years, along with the MPAA. I think we've seen how well that's worked out.
"But Is It Art?"
Nine times out of ten, if you find yourself asking that question, the answer is "yes." There is often doubt about what is art, but there is rarely any doubt about what is not art.
It's up there with questions like "Is this a dumb idea?"
"Instead, I find it likely that Squaresoft will unveil Final Fantasy XIII around the time of the PS3 release,"
Final Fantasy XI will be released for the X360, bundled with the upcoming new expansion pack. FFXII is probably still in development for the PS2, but ultimately S-E is getting more hardware agnostic; they actually made games for the GameCube.
At this point, I don't think anybody knows what consode FFXIII (or DQIX, for that matter) will grace. For all we know, they'll be on the Revolution.
And there's still the matter of the Phantasy Star line.
"Reduce or eliminate backwards compatibility, like the Silver Slimline PS2 but more so"
You mean like not being able to take your old memory cards?
"If anyone's going to make it, it's Sony."
Yeahhhhh... You know something else that hasn't happened in the video game industry before? Somebody other than Nintendo topping the Game Boy. In light of the lackluster performance of the PSP, do you still believe Sony has the ability to pull a hat trick out of their rear end?
Besides, the only reason this is a "more of the same" competition is because of the tactics of both Microsoft and Sony, looking for little else beyond keeping it "more of the same," a competition they seem to excel at. Nintendo seems to be going off into a new direction and I'm not sure it's been decided yet whether or not their new direction is going to be rejected.
"You can argue until the cows come home whether this is true in practice but it suffices to say that American's believe this to be mostly true."
Yeah, that explains why the numerical majority of registered voters don't bother to vote, and that's not even counting the people who are qualified to vote but aren't registered.
I doubt most of the people who even bother to vote truly believe what you claim. They go into their voting booths and pick their "elected leaders."
"The UN presupposes trust in government--which Americans simply don't possess."
The UN doesn't give a damn about how people and their governments relate, they interact with the governments and only the governments, relying solely on national sovereignty and they generally consider anything that doesn't cross national borders to be Somebody Else's Problem. It is in no way a republican organization.
"It's not because the US doesn't respect the rest of the world or wants to control everything. "
Bullshit. The US has never had much respect for the rest of the world, the only thing that has changed is that we stopped looking at them with revolutionary disdain and started to look at them with imperial disdain. And as for control, one of basic premises of our beloved War on Terror seems to be that anything we do not control can harm us.
"Yeah, those kids didn't get *any* flak..."
They had peers, they had friends, they had extracurricular activites they felt they fit into, and they had something to look forward to after graduation.
"I am proud to be an American where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff in such a case."
No it's not. This is a civil trial, not criminal, which means that it relies on something that in the US is called the preponderance of evidence. The defendant (nor the plaintiff) is not given any sort of special treatment or presumption, both sides have to argue their respective cases on their own merits. In the flippant example of "So-and-so eats babies!" the defendant would still have to demonstrate why it is reasonable for them to believe that the plaintiff actually eats babies.
The differences between US states and other common law jurisdictions are a bit more complicated. The only big difference is that, in a US state, there'd be the option of having this heard before a civil jury.