Okay, so this was on your second playthrough when you were already familiar with the game. Do you think you'd have managed on your first play-through when you have no idea what characters to expect or where to find them? I'd really like to play like this but I definitely don't want to restart the whole game because of…

Oh, and who even cares for voice-acting in the first place? At best it blends into the game quite well, but I've never thought it added anything. At worst it slows down the whole game an completely destroys the atmosphere. It's not like we're all six years old and get tired reading.

Wait, you mean to say you think the voice acting in Last Story is good? Maybe it's the good rep of British actors or maybe hearing a foreign accent introduces some much needed distance. But as a Brit I thought it was terrible, conflated with the cliché characters and totally random scenes it just makes me want to hit…

He amasses a valuable collection in his adult life, doesn't play them and then equates selling them with growing up? Not quite seeing the logic in this story.

Meh. There's only a handful of games like Zelda that would be worth playing for entertainment today. You'd have to be really enthusiastic about classic games to be interested in anything else in the top 50.

College is tough. But when you're finished you should really try to find a balance and spend some time doing something you really enjoy. It doesn't necessarily have to be games.

Maybe he'll be successful with this added publicity, but I seriously doubt his collection would normally get close to the $4000.

The most valuable art for collectors tends to be historic stuff that shows the evolution of art, not works considered "best" by some objective measure. Just sayin.

"And have you ever heard of anyone being addicted to paintings?"

I think the main anxiety people have is that they might be severely hamstringing themselves later on if they continue after a character has died. Fire Emblem has always been relatively challenging, sucks up a lot of time and sometimes there aren't that many characters to fill a given strategic niche. If it turns out…

A lot of the countries you named could be counted towards the same central European brewing heritage.

It's actually the self-regulatory USK (German equivalent of the ERSB) which sets the rules. It's very unspecific about the limits of the rules.

They don't stay open at night (Germany has strict laws on opening hours, no Sundays for instance), but they do hide stuff in a separate room. You have to ask the shop assistant and they will wait alongside you until you've browsed through the collection in a badly lit closet.

This isn't unusually low really. It's still the highest consumption of any Nintendo system.

Pictoquest anyone? Helped us get through the first 9 months of the DS's life cycle.

Doesn't really say much at the moment as they've probably got at least another year before they get any competition. The 360 probably would have failed if it had launched alongside the PS3.

I was thinking more in terms of character designs. The hero is basically Son Gohan and all the other main characters could practically have been lifted from Dragonball or Dr. Slump. The monster designs were really good though, more original. Sadly I never got round to finishing the game.

-Nobody pays to see an image.

Yeah, the N64 was a real bummer for RPGs. A lot of Nintendo fans had gotten hooked on them while they had an SNES and blindly bought the N64. But the RPGs never came. The poor old N64 owners were so thirsty for an RPG that the incredibly shitty Quest 64 sold really well. If one of the major RPG studios had had the…

One year is a looonnng time, especially considering the period we're talking about here. And it's not as if it was even an early game. Final Fantasy VII came out a full two years *after* the Playstation was released. So basically, by the time you had played FFVII on the PC and then got round to seeing it on a…