Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Has anyone ever thought about this?

I have pondered this question for years. Has anyone ever gotten well into a game - really caught up in it - maybe pulled an all-nighter and either called in sick or dragged around all day at work after two hours sleep? Have you ever approached a group of your friends and co-workers, folks who will generally discuss anything and everything, and tried to convey your excitement about a particular game, only to draw blank stares and confused chatter from people who clearly don't know how to respond? Or, if they do, someone says something like, "Who has time to spend 50-100 hours on a game?" Isn't it funny that people can discuss movies or books - and some novels take just as long to read - and those who don't read at all or haven't read a particular book will still carry on a normal, unrestrained conversation.

So, are we different? If that is the case, did we become that way after we got hooked on RPGs? Or, have we possessed certain non-mainstream traits our entire lives?

In my own self-analysis, I believe I have been "different" since I was born. I don't take any more time playing RPGs than some people spend watching ball games, reading books, or sitting on bar stools after work, shooting the breeze endlessly about nothing in particular, yet family and colleagues have always found it strange that I enjoy RPGs so much. Second, I believe I have always been wired differently. School was a snap for me, so I would sit in class and write poetry (which several other students did, too) or do "crazy" things such as invent new, secret alphabets. I would write pages of text that no one could understand - things that no one else seemed to do (and saw no purpose in doing).

In time, I disciplined my fluctuating beats of different drummers by choosing a military path (I was always adept with firearms.) and turned some of my eccentricities to my advantage, career-wise. Working in the field of military intelligence (following combat duty) within a sub-culture that is considered esoteric (and a bit spooky) by mainstream officers who just fly airplanes or such, detail-oriented creativity rewarded those who helped keep everyone alive at crunch time.

Once I wrapped up my military career and commercial writing days, moving to a very rural county with no incorporated towns and only two stoplights, I turned to home building. With total flexibility in my schedule, virtual independence, and plenty of time for hobbies since the kids grew up and moved out, writing for fun and playing RPGs have provided many satisfying hours of fulfillment.

Now, whenever friends drop into my newly constructed hobby shop and see ZSNES open on one of the monitors, some are a bit curious. So, I show them how I can quickly craft an English text screen in a particular game. Usually, they just stand there speechless, rather like the people I once tried to tell about RPGs. First, they are amazed that someone can even play an SNES game on a home computer. Second, they can't believe that a game released only in a foreign language is being written on the spot by some guy wearing a flannel shirt who just set down a still-warm chain saw on the front porch of a little cabin in the deep woods next to a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, then walked through the front door and plopped down at a computer workstation two seconds later.

Yes, I KNOW I am different, and I enjoy being that way.

I have friends who can tear down car or motorcycle engines and reassemble them into perfect working order. I know others who are proficient in dozens of skills, everything from handcrafting metal roof systems and training race horses to hang gliding, but all of these people look at me as if I'm the strange one with this RPG thing. Know something? I have made being different work to my advantage my whole life, and I wouldn't change a thing.

So, if any of you have pondered this question, wondered if you are different, decided you are, and maybe worried about it some, I urge you to learn how to make it work for you, too. I hope some of you will share your ideas and experiences regarding this question of whether we are different, and if so, why? Meanwhile, excuse me while I take a little mid-morning break and play Chapter 29 of Luminous Arc-II!

I agree with everything you've said Wildbill. My first memories in life was of me sitting in front of the my old wooden style TV with switches and dials playing Wonderboy 3 the dragons trap on my Master system...I really have been the same ever since. Unfortunately i missed out my fair share of RPGs early in life, though I had played secret of mana but until FFVII (the first one localized here officially) I had been all but alienated from the genre. More often than not I've spent nights with little to no sleep trying to further myself in a game. Some RPGs being lengthier than others. (See Disgaea)

That is just who I am in the end...Like you say, people spend their lives doing their hobbies, either that or nothing...To be honest I'd say that's a much greater waste of spare time. Each to their own ^^ I'm just glad it really isn't quite as few as it appears.

I believe what defines a RPG person is the ability to sit through a good story and enjoy it.
I tend to compare a good RPG to a good book, it has to draw you in and make you want to advance, keep you interested.
My first RPG experience wasn't even a mainstream RPG, it was Shining Force II; it had me so frustrated that I decided
to learn english and reached the level of it I possess today.

It wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 that I had my first major RPG experience. I played fevereshly day and night until I finished it.
From that point, I modded my PS1 and got into emulation, so I started going back, took in everything RPG I could find, like a sponge. I'd say Shining Force and Final Fantasy both shaped me up as a RPGer and SRPGer, hence my love for MA, Feda and other such games.

I always thought of myself as different from the majority, not trying to sound cool or anything or say I'm better, just different.
So in all, RPGs will shape up your life and your self, and it has an enduring effect unlike an LAN afternoon playing Counter Strike.

Sadly speaking, we retro RPG gamers are a rare and dying generation. Most of the games today focus only on graphics and usually lack story wise. Not to mention that these old 80-90s RPGs are more poetic and thought provoking than most other game genres and other RPGs of this day and age. I honestly don't understand the pleasure of blasting some guy in FPS games... Remakes of old games are also usually worse than the originals with few exceptions (in my opinion). For example, I like the original Breath of Fire 1 & 2 and Tales of Phantasia on the SNES much more than on the GBA. The graphics look worse and there's also cut out scenes and slightly edited story lines, most of which makes no sense to me. Eh, I really trail off and rant too much. I must be getting old...

TOP GBA is really a sorry excuse for a game. Makes me wonder if the programmers fell asleep on the keyboard during
coding sessions and the game became so littered with garbage internally that it became the slow, awful sounding monstrosity it is.
BOF and BOF2 GBA aren't as bad, but aren't up to par either. The GBA suffers from a weak sound quality that seems to be quite chronical to most of its games, but gets worse in remakes because programmers have mess with the original score so it can fit
GBA specifications, be by downsampling, altering tempo and pitch and obviously the instrument table;
that's where it hurts the most.

Graphically, sans palette though, the GBA is quite capable of mimcking Snes
level graphics with success (provided of course it doesn't try to do stupid things like rotation, scaling and zooming).
That said, if you take Narikiri Dungeon games, it becames clear that the GBA is capable of generating good graphics and sound
at a reasonable speed; but that's because its not a port, its a native GBA game
(same thing for Summon Night, quite high end game).

As for the games mentioned, one is probably better off with the PSP version of TOP if you consider quality alone,
and in BOF 2 case, just get the Snes game and use the latest retranslation patch, that's plenty good enough.
I'll say this, I like games that are strong in all areas, and RPGs are included. Decent graphics are important, and as much as the creative side of gaming seems to be overwlemed by more superficial aspects, it doesn't mean a RPG with astonishingly beautiful graphics can't be good; at the flip of the coin, I can't stand a game like Ultima IV where my character is four pixels tall, even if the overall argument is interesting.

Yes and No. I think that there are so many different things that appeal to people in an RPG, and I also think RPGs have become more mainstream, and RP elements are present in so many kinds of games that you wouldn't expect. (Apparently Fallout 3 has a lot of rp type stuff... I don't know, but that thats what I've been told.) I loved games like the Metal Gear series and Bioshock, despite their not falling into the traditional "RPG" mold.

For me, what attracts me to a game is the story. I love a good story. I've been calling RPGs interactive novels for years. In an RPG, story tends to take precedence over game play (for me anyway, I could never geek out about getting perfect stats and the like, just so long as I could advance with the story) and it's your involvement in that story as a player that hooks you in, keeps you up all night, and alienates you from your friends and loved ones and drop out of High School. (only kinda joking! Stay in school, you'll have the rest of your life to play games!)
I think of myself as normal enough, I have a wide array of interests one of which happens to be Role playing games from the 16bit era (I blame it on my Japanese neighbours and their SFC and Anime)

So yes, we are different, but everyone is different, and in that we are all the same. Or as Yoda would say," Same but Different, Everybody is, hmmm?"

Re: Snes ports
I loved that they had old snes rpgs on the GBA, because that meant that I could play them in bed during the winter. Simply the best. Graphics smaphics.

I'll really have to disagree with this. I love my old RPGs as much as all of you do, but saying most of today's games focus only on graphics isn't true at all. Let's be honest, a lot of games back then, RPGs or not, had little to no story at all. This changed with the SNES, but again the number of RPGs that drew something mind-blowingly original storywise were fairly scarce, just like they are today.

And focusing on graphics isn't inherently a bad thing, it's a good bonus. I loved playing a game like Disgaea on the PS2, which had really bad pixelisation and crappy effects, but this doesn't mean that something modern like Fallout 3 or Lost Odyssey will have bad story. If you ask me, RPGs, Japanese or not, with really good story have always been rare, and that didn't change today. Graphics have nothing to do with the quality of the story, and I don't think that any company that works on creating RPGs will cut in the scenario to improve graphics. Maybe they'd do that in other genres, and again I doubt it, but in RPGs, nah not a chance. And guess what, even FPS can be original and have interesting stories. The Timesplitters series comes to mind quickly here. The characters were great and loveable, the game had a pretty unique setting, and was legitimately funny, despite it being a naturally violent game.

It's impossible and unfair to categorize genres like this and generalize on what developers consider important today compared to back then, when in fact, I don't think there's really much of a difference besides the fact that technology progressed tremendously.

Everything I would say is said right here, almost as word for word as I would put it. I love reading and I love a good story. Some times an "interactive story" would take precedence over a story in a book and other times just the opposite. As for if I ever wondered if I was "different" yes. I knew I was from the very first of my memories. But I always told myself that I was "special".

One thing that I think was true about my RPG playing when I was younger and a benefit for being "different" was that it certainly boosted my reading levels because I started playing RPGs quite young. One thing quite cool about learning new vocabulary is that in RPGs you have a "moving picture" of what is happening in the story and thus a lot of clues to what unfamiliar words mean. RPGs definitely helped my education and fortunately I had quite a few friends that also played games in this genre, of course my girlfriend isn't one of them, when we play games it is usually games like Mario Kart and I'm sure we will be playing New Super Mario Brothers on her Wii.

Now, that's what I'm talking about.

When analizing a game, I take in consideration almost everything about the game, story, battle system, evolution system, character customization, skill customization, graphics, visual effects, music, sound effects. The only thing I don't take in consideration when analizing a game is it's name. I couldn't care less what it's name is, if it's part of a famous series, it doesn't matter to me.