DFALCON'S PROFILE

To be entirely serious about your question:

1-brandon says "writers who swear aren't creative"
2-I mention Harold Pinter, who won the nobel prize for literature (the highest honour for any writer), who swears in his work; therefore, brandon doesn't know what he's talking about.

This is a good point and I'm glad someone made it. Thank you.

3-I tell brandon that if he doesn't know what he's talking about, he shouldn't post, because most of what he says is likely to be uninformed.

The jump from "your opinion is flawed" to "you probably can't contribute anything to this discussion" is condescending, yes.

(that you call it "profanity" is again, hilarious, and shows how brainwashed you are)

I have no idea where you're getting this particular shibboleth from (for example, I haven't observed that "profanity" is part of any euphemism treadmill) and don't appreciate being tarred as some unreasoning prude because of that.
(Somewhat relevant sidenote: I originally had "unreasoning obscenophobe", thinking this was a fun takeoff on an existing phrase, "unreasoning xenophobe". However, a Google search revealed only a handful of hits for "unreasoning xenophobe", all from the same sentence of the same book. Small reference pools indeed.)

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I have a hard time putting together a coherent position here, other than "I like Penny Arcade". As we say so often for other reasons, it's all about the execution, but certainly I've seen newbie games fall into the "AAA++++++++ seller, would do business again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" pitfall.

I find SFL's post eminently reasonable and take the same general side, so I feel a little bad quibbling about one small bit of it.

Unfortunately games are not always the sum of their parts. Considering them as such works well when you consider something that focuses aggressively on certain areas. For example, most roguelikes have no graphics to speak of. It's nice when they do, but even the ones with just an ASCII interface can be worth having around for the gameplay. Likewise at opposite positions on the story/gameplay/graphics/sound axes.

Now imagine that you have to listen through discordant noise for occasional beeps to know when you can progress in the game. That a game's maps look like tiles were vomited at random across the landscape - and each one pans around a few times before you move around, so you can be sure to see everything. That a game's characters read like bad fanfic, and the unskippable text crawls at half speed. That the game has stupid battles and forces you to spend a third of the game in them. That there's a bug and you can't play past the first ten minutes. Basically, in any complex interconnected system, one bad bit can screw up a lot.

...I had more but it was getting wildly off-topic. Leave it at that for now.

The link for Wilfred the Hero ( http://rpgmaker.net/games/132/ ) is down, I would guess because it points to a user account hosted on rpgmaker.net before the advent of RMN3.

I had assumed the removal of such accounts was deliberate, but it would be nice if somebody could upload the game and/or fix the link, because if you don't know the story it looks like a broken internal link.

The quest given by "Off-duty Guard" early in chapter 1 says it's repeatable at the accept/decline message, but he doesn't pop up a quest balloon afterward.

I often, though not always, use name-generating programs to get ideas for character names. Many of them can work from different datasets to give different regional flavors.