After the mediocre 'Final Fantasy XIII' and the sheer disaster that was 'Final Fantasy XIV,' many fans have lost faith in the RPG titan.

Jason Schreier

Categorized in : Lost Faith Fantasy Disaster

Modern video games like 'Mass Effect' and 'Uncharted' cost tens of millions of dollars and require the labor of hundreds of people, who can each work 80- or even 100-hour weeks.

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What Brad Bushman did is in 2010 he ran what's called a meta-analysis, which is an analysis that looks at a whole bunch of different studies. They concluded that, yes, there is a link between violent video games and aggression.

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Gamers have this tendency to turn games into mathematical equations, breaking them into lists of components like 'presentation' and 'mechanics' and judging each one on its own merits.

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Among video game developers, it's called 'crunch': a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food.

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Most game developers in the United States do not receive extra compensation for extra hours.

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To avoid long-term deleterious effects, game developers must commit to stop facilitating a culture in which crunch is the norm. The occasional long night or weekend at the office can be useful and even exhilarating, but as a constant, it is damaging.

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One of the best games to play with a significant other is Nintendo's 'Super Mario Maker,' for the Wii U, which lets you build and play your own Mario courses.

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Chris Ferguson brought up a really interesting point that I agree with, and he said science is a human endeavor. The more someone tells me that they're absolutely objective, the less I believe they are. So people need to fact-check things. They need to understand that science is easily damaged by politics and personal opinion.

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As someone who has been playing 'Final Fantasy' since before I could walk on two legs, I was particularly disgusted by 'Final Fantasy XIII-2''s soundtrack.

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While 'Final Fantasy XIII-2' does quite a bit to fix the mistakes of its predecessor, it does very little to stand out on its own merits.

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There was once a time when 'Final Fantasy' meant greatness, when seeing Square's brand on a game box meant you were about to play something special. That time has long since passed.

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It's easy to think of a role-playing game as an amalgamation of two main components, narrative and gameplay, jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, they fit together nicely; other times, they're as awkward and frustrating as that one weirdly-shaped 'Tetris' block that always falls into the gap where you need an L.

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A great JRPG captures that feeling of going on an unusual adventure, of bringing a ragtag group of heroes from famine to fortune or steering cold-hearted villagers away from indifference.

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When gamers look at games not as overall experiences but as chimeric potpourris of sight and sound, we take too mechanical a perspective and ignore what really makes them special.

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Scrabble has always been immensely popular, so it's easy to see why online Scrabble is just as lauded.

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Between 'The Godfather,' 'The Sopranos,' 'Goodfellas,' and the countless other mob stories that have been both critically and commercially acclaimed over the years, it's not hard to see why a game like 'Mafia Wars' works.

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Sure, when you think 'World of Warcraft,' you might picture the nerdier set - those who may have sacrificed hygiene and sleep to reach one more experience level. But the truth is that 'WoW' is populated with players of all sorts of backgrounds, from rural housewives to NFL punters.

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Most strikingly, 'World of Warcraft' allows you to live a veritable second life. Girls can pretend to be boys; boys can pretend to be girls; human accountants can pretend to be elven mages.

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I think there's this tradition of a culture of NDAs that has spanned all the way back to the '70s and '80s when game developers where very paranoid about cloning and people copying one another's ideas and business sabotage.

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I think there's that widespread sentiment that game developers need to be quiet unless they're talking on-message. I think that's changing a little bit; Twitter has helped, with developers sharing personal opinions on things.

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