I think it worries me a little that people seem to be more enthusiastic about the dumb puns I slap into the blog entry title field every night than they are about the content that accompanies said puns. Well, I guess tonight you’ll just have to settle for content, because I can’t think of any RPG-related puns that aren’t entirely too trite and overplayed for my conscience to allow. So no puns for you.
Also, this article has nothing at all to do with StarTropics, but that ghost dude seemed kind of seasonal. Today was the day that all the unnecessary Halloween candy publishers send us every year arrived at the office, you see.
And if you want to read about system anniversaries that aren’t the NES, I did a thing or two on the PlayStation 2’s tenth over at work.
Speaking purely for myself, the pun enthusiasm is easily explained. As an early adopter of GSQ5, I both oohed and ahhed over the content months ago. While it remains uniformly excellent, the puns are new material. And dumb. Beautifully, beautifully, dumb.
Originally the pun in the title was “Bit for your Byte.” So not all of the punniness is Parish. :P
I thought the title was playing off of the title of Cladun: This Is An RPG.
“So that means the genre has been largely stagnant from day one, at least from a mechanical perspective, because it relies upon numerical abstractions and descriptions for everything about the characters in a game.”
Strictly speaking, everything in every game — hell, every computer program — ever is a numerical abstraction. RPG’s are different because they SHOW you the numbers.
Nah, what makes RPGs special is more the number and relative explicit importance placed on those numbers. Any fighting game aficionado will know intimately the numbers and math involved in their game of choice, but such knowledge really isn’t necessary to understand or play the game. That kind of number crunching IS necessary for most RPGs since you’re using statistical heuristics to flesh out a character. I.e.; what makes a Fighter a Fighter instead of a Black Mage in lieu of the fancy sprite.
Did I miss something here? I thought this article would expound on the evolution of the RPG on the NES. Instead, I find a rather aimless ramble on the allure of RPGs.
The author’s claim that the NES wasn’t awash in RPGs because of its limited power is revealed as nonsense when you realize how many RPGs were developed for the Famicom. Not only did the Famicom get 3 Final Fantasies, 4 Dragon Quests, 2 Goemon RPGs, Mother, Famicom Wars, Fire Emblem, Sweet Home, Shin Megami Tensei, etc., etc., but there were countless other RPGs that are today little known or forgotten. Legend of Ghost Lion, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (a very fine game), Bandit Kings of Ancient China, etc.–the RPG was big business in Japan, despite the limitations of the Famicom.
The author would have done well to demonstrate how the RPGs of the West were adapted for Japanese audiences and then shown how JRPGs developed. A rare misfire by GameSpite here.