Hahah... Yeah, I should get to those at some point. I know I *stopped* playing through Koudelka the last time around because the battles were taking forever with the load times and whatnot.

Admittedly, the 'recommend things for me!' is actually there so that people with me in their multitaps will see it if I ever drop too far on my now-playing. It's positioned where it is for a good reason.

Dear wonderful people at Choice of Games:

Here is all my money. Please use it to make more wonderful text-adventure games.

Sincerely,

Jayson_Four
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Okay, seriously, when did these wonderful little bits of awesomeness come out? I remember Choose Your Own Adventure books- and the Time Machine series, too- back from when I was a kid. I'm an incredible fan of the Lone Wolf series (so much that I think I'm on Project Aon every single week multiple times), and these... these are just right in my "Okay, time to buy every single one I can afford!" file.

Sixteen new games. I'm never going to beat my backlog...

I figure if I ever need a space to rant about something, I'll just drop one here.

I read something online that raised my blood pressure (something that's impossible for everyone to avoid- sooner or later, you'll read something that just gets you going just because you can't believe somebody would actually hold that view)- it was somebody ranting about how nobody ever seems to bring over new and quirky games to the States; that all we get are nothing but basic re-hashes of the same familiar stuff, and that is causing gaming (at least in the perspective of the whiny gamer whose comment I was reading) to become very, very boring.

Honestly, I don't know if it's my age or what, but this kind of comment just makes me shake my head and want to give that person a Gibbs slap upside the head. American gamers, I understand you guys say you don't like playing the same thing over and over, and you get irritated at publishers who keep dropping the same game with just a few improvements every year *coughEAcough*, but let's step back for a second.

Imagine if you were running a video game company, and your whole reason for existing was to make a living developing games. You take a bit to listen to the consumers out there, and you call your accounting people in to figure out just where the money is being spent. The two groups would come back with some pretty different results.

Listening to gamers reveals that they desire new, fresh ideas- games with ideas, playstyles, everything that they've neither seen or tried to do before. They want new games, played new kinds of ways ready to change their minds about games of that genre. They say they want new and fun ways to challenge the status quo of the industry.

That's when the accounting people butt in and remind everyone that as much as American gamers like to complain there's nothing new on the market, their spending habits say otherwise- Generic Football Game XXVI just broke the sales records of its predecessor, while Quirky Fun New Game is hemorrhaging money hand over pixel, and will be lucky to recoup its development costs, much less make a profit. We don't see a lot of quirky games out there because while we may complain about them, we still drop the cash for the sequels of stuff that was just released last year.

If they have to choose between making money and pleasing fans, big developers will always go where the money is. If you want more quirky games, buy them and show there's a market for them!