Oh, Geoffrey, whenever I pass an arcade in the street or at an airport I feel obliged to spend a pound there as daily sacrifice to ensuring Sega’s continued prosperity.
I assure you that I’ve never born any love for the abomination that is S*ny, and have excoriated and inveighed against it at every opportunity since that fateful year when its first Box of Torment afflicted my vision. The contemptible Final Fantasy, similarly, is not granted any significant degree of leniency - I’ll concede that the eighth instalment had good music, but beyond that they’re all ultimately repetitive and derivative bunkum, and as you say they’re notorious for defecating incessant hordes of imbecilic fan-boys more rapidly than it took the Tower of Uru to devastate the Grig Orig. All you need to do is compare the engrossing strategical scope of the Shining games to the ‘battle’ system of the Fantasies - which, despite Squaresoft’s idle meddling with magic, ultimately remains “Wait, Press X, repeat ad infinitum, nauseam et mortis” - or the ‘emotion’ of Squall Leonheart’s angst to the mounting sequence after Edge bonds with Lagi at the commencement of Saga, where you note the slight suggestive upcurl of your steed’s maw, as if he is thrilled with eager anticipation at the prospect of unfettered flight again, to realise what utter uninspiring drivel the Fantasies are. I was enraptured to see that Final Fantasy was taboo at Shining Force Central. Why can’t SquareEnix’s series actually live up to its name and bankrupt the company?
I may have been slightly hyperbolic in my first post - although it still remains a singularly unpalatable prospect that I don’t particularly relish, I suppose that I’ll have to bite the bullet sooner or later and invest in a new console. I don’t have any qualms with Microsoft (after all, the Dreamcast was based on Microsoft technology and I’m using a PC with Windows now!) so I could purchase an X-Box without any trouble - especially seeing as Sega seems to have determined it to be its ‘hardcore’ platform, and I need to play Orta. My aversion to Nintendo has been something viscereal since the playground shouting matches that characterised the conflict of the fourth-generation SNES-MegaDrive War, but I could reconcile myself to the GameCube on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. However - I know it sounds irrational and juvenile - whenever I see a Playstation game being advertised in the window of GAME, I want to charge in there with a sledgehammer… so I’m willing to bide my time until the inevitable GameCube and X-Box ports occur for any Playstation title. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-and-HA!