Oh, so true, so true, my friend!

Take the marvellous music of Tetris - it is impossible to express it in other terms than it's Russian-ness!

It has this particular ... uhm... aire of a Diaghileff dance with tints of Mussorgsky expressed authenticly by the unexplicable broad Russian soul of a Solzhenytsin. It sparks the image of Vrubel's Seated Demon in my mind. I wonder if I'm the only one.

Art academics is the cancer that is eating culture. imho. I wish they left games alone but they're befuddling them with Wagners and national characters and whatnot.

It's just a question of time untill those professors of game design will develop their own arcane vocabulary. How else would we know their work is serious business worth the salary?

Now, how about an arpeggiated dynamic piano anticipatory presentation factor for your next unit of gameplay? Would you like it Japanese? I can't really bring up the player-system-enthusiasm for even a sub-boss without a proper dynamic anticipatory musical accompaniment, especially if it's not Japanese. What I'm wondering at now is how this new wave of Japanese neo-post-existentionalism in game design will affect the french maitres.

The author is stating the obvious and making superfluous categorisations. All the 9 pages could well be fit in one or two paragraphs - in one slashdot post if you wish.

Though his style is admittedly admirable. What he lacks contentwise he makes up with literary style.

"Disparity between Plot and Gameplay" is an example of an article that completely succeeded in everything it was trying to do. The literary style was outstanding. Even in a year full of articles with superb wording and syntax, those elements in Disparity stood out. The statements of each paragraph tied it all together well.

No one complains about what the article was. You'll read complaints about what it wasn't. And sometimes you'll hear that someone just couldn't get into it.

Reviews are something you read for fresh insights and general reading pleasure. If you're reading it to write self-aggrandizing slashdot comments about how you're above it all and ahead of all the rest of us, then Gamasutra is a good choice because it's a great game review site. But it's not the best review site at everything every review site does well. And you can pat yourself on the back noticing that.

Personally, I might have enjoyed it more if it was in 13375P34k instead of English. But the story belongs to the author, not to me.

Yes, the average gamer is not a teenager any longer. He's in his thirties and getting older. Today's teenagers rather consume whatever the internet offers and thus have little time left for the feeble games.