After a couple of months of collecting older video games, my partner and I finally found copies of what’s effectively known as the “holy trinity” of Super Nintendo RPGs – Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the 7 Stars – in excellent condition. She’s delighted, being a fan of Japanese RPGs since the dawn of gaming, but I’ve got this feeling of emptiness. That got me thinking about things in a gaming context – how often do you feel that the quest is the more rewarding part of the experience, and that the ending is a bit of a letdown?

This week, The Warp Pipe is going to serve up another round of quick thoughts and observations loosely associated with video gaming.

More Absent-minded Pondering

Sometimes when it comes to piecing together this column, I have ideas which seem like gold, but unfortunately can’t be fleshed out enough to fill the length of the column, or just don’t resonate with the gaming public outside the walls of my office. So this week, I thought we’d run through a few summaries of these recurring ideas and observations just to get them out to the world at large, and get a few thoughts from the handful of readers who actually still touch the Internet on Sunday mornings.

I was watching a segment on the 7:30 Report earlier this week which was all about the upcoming decision on deregulation of Australian exclusive copyright on books, which would enable retailers to import books from other countries enabling cheaper prices for customers at the expense of author royalties. Does anyone know if there’s anything about exclusive local copyrights for video games in Australia? My brother messaged me from the Crown Casino arcade earlier today to ask for recommendations for games to play; Sega’s latest Rambo game was my immediate pick. The Lindbergh board isn’t much more powerful than a common desktop PC, but the experience of the game is what really sells it (and the gun’s feedback is awesome). The arcade at Crown is the only one I know of in the country that’s keeping up to date with newish arcade releases – does anyone know of any others? Speaking of arcades, there still aren’t nearly enough good classic arcade games on downloadable services. It’s always the same old Altered Beast and Street Fighter II; I like those games, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a few newer arcade games, say Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, Elevator Action Returns or Daytona (if the rights issues were sorted, that is). What do you think is missing on these services in terms of quality arcade games? Plastic instruments aside, game controllers seem to be a lot sturdier than they used to be. I think we went through about half a dozen Mega Drive pads as kids, yet I’ve probably put more time into my Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2. The sticks and triggers are still tight, the buttons still responsive and I’d say I’m probably a little harder on the pads then I was as a youngster. Shame the same can’t be said for the console hardware. Heroes, Origins and Legends. With all of the creative talent in the video game industry, you’d think they could come up with slightly more creative subtitles than the above three staples. Creating a good name is hard (I went through about 25-30 to name this column, and it’s still not that great), but falling back on these three is just lazy. There are too many male protagonists with overly deep and raspy voices. It was alright the first hundred times, but now I find myself yelling “Get this guy a lozenge!” at the screen with every new barbed wire-throated hero. I prefer it to the alternative – the standard “androgynous male” voice – but you can have a deep voice without sounding like someone whose been smoking for 50 years and ate a bowl of nails for breakfast. I miss older styles of video game music. There seemed to be more energy – I guess that’s something that ties into the fact that older games were a lot more frantic. Still, good things can happen when you get some of those early composers together, like the Super Smash Bros. Brawl soundtrack. LucasArts has finally started to acknowledge the existence of their back catalogue with the appearance of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in the new Indy game on the Wii and their recent Steam additions, but there’s a lot more they can do with their classics. A compilation of a few old adventure games for the Wii or packs for Steam really need to happen – give me a full Star Wars PC game pack. It’s a far better use of their time than publishing tripe like Fracture. Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free this week. It’s really amazing to see how far the series has come, but also how much it’s been streamlined. The later Elder Scrolls games have, in my opinion, far better game worlds, but the number of abilities and things you can actually do in the game world seem fewer. Running around town naked is also pretty amusing. Has anyone tried to complete the National Pokedex in Pokémon Platinum? I just restarted Pokémon Sapphire in the hopes that the missus’ and my combined efforts could eventually lead to us completing it, but you need copies of every GBA and DS mainline Pokémon game (Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Fire Red, Leaf Green, Diamond, Pearl, Platinum) to capture all 460-odd that are needed. That’s not taking into account all of the backwards and forwards trading you need to do to get certain ones to evolve, breeding and all of that jazz. It’s a bit of a con, and certainly expensive, but the sheer volume of content and depth to these games is pretty surprising.			It’s like the Wii game everyone wants
			Was “Origins” the best subtitle they could come up with?
			Could Guybrush’s return mean LucasArts regained their sanity?
			Catching them all is a monumental challenge