Gamasutra have a good article up from John Harris
here is the link;
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4066/game_design_essentials_20_rpg...

Ten western and 10 Japanese crpgs.

Matts book gets a cite at the end.

I just got this press release in and thought it important enough to share right away for all of you Commodore Amiga and would-be/should-be Commodore Amiga fans. This is a great LEGAL emulation package based on a legendary platform for modern PCs and well worth checking out. I'll try to have some type of review up soon.

BEGIN PRESS RELEASE:

Today's casual photos, again taken with the Panasonic digital camera, are Kriya Systems, Inc.'s Typing Tutor III (1984) from Simon & Schuster for the Apple Macintosh, and three cartridges for the first ever programmable videogame system (i.e., utilizing interchangeable cartridges), the 1976 Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES), later known as the Fairchild Channel F after the release of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) in 1977. In fact, after the name change, Fairchild would come to pull out of the market entirely and Zircon would assume rights to the platform, which limped its way into the bargain bins of the early 1980s.

As some of you will remember, my wife and I were contracted to write, "Wii Fit for Dummies". With the recent announcement of "Wii Fit Plus", all work was stopped on "Wii Fit for Dummies" in lieu of "Wii Fit Plus for Dummies", pending that product's release. Well, long story short, its final form is now "Wii Fitness for Dummies", and will cover "Wii Fit Plus", "EA Sports Active: Personal Trainer", and "Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2010", all in glorious full color, coming in at approximately 250 pages. There will also be brief mention of 10 of the other top Wii Fitness programs in a chapter in Section IV of the book, Part of Tens, which any "For Dummies" book fan will be familiar with. We'll let you know as we know more, but right now the only product in our hands is "EA Sports Active: Personal Trainer", so that will be our focus in the mean-time. I'm in contact with both Nintendo and Majesco about the other two products, but whether we'll be able to get pre-release copies of their respective titles is still very much up in the air at this point, as they're not even finished yet.

Having finally had a chance to play my copy of Fight Night Round 4, one of the more interesting features to me was the "Photo Face" feature, where you use your Xbox Live Vision camera (or go through a process of accessing proper images) to capture front and side profiles of your face, then via some digimagic, it maps it to a 3D model.

As for the game itself? Still not sure if I really like it, or really, really like it. It definitely doesn't have the same "wow" factor Round 3 did (how could it? You can only surprise people once!), though it does seem improved in just about every way. So far, just a few hours in and I'm still coming to grips with the new control scheme.

Anyway, here's what my first attempt looked like (I've since changed the hair to better match how it's actually shaved):

Today's casual photos (bit higher quality than usual, with my Panasonic digital camera), shown below, are two rare Apple Macintosh RPG's from 1989, Xor's TaskMaker (original version) and Postcraft's Citadel: Adventure of the CRYSTAL KEEP. The classic Macintosh platform is not known for its RPGs, and stand outs on the platform have been few and far between. Some of the others I own are rare and generally highly sought after, including Legends of the Lost Realm, a multi-character role playing game from Avalon Hill (1988; I don't have the sequel, which uses the same box, just with a small sticker on it to distinguish it), and the classic, Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth (1988, Infocom), which was originally released by Simulated Environment Systems in 1987 as simply Quarterstaff before Infocom's acquisition, and is considered one of the few authentic pen and paper-style RPGs in videogame form. Photos below: