Thanks, guys, for your wonderful comments. The article hasn't been online for long, and it's good to see a few praises before the inevitable nitpicking begins. I've already caught a few stupid mistakes that somehow managed to get into the final draft, DESPITE many proofreads. Of course, no sooner do I catch them than some idiot is on Slashdot raving about how ignorant I am. :-P

I did feel that I wasn't able to offer a high level of commentary on many of these games, but felt like even briefly mentioning them was better than omitting them entirely. In general, I tried to describe what made each game different or how it fit into the grand scheme of things, though I'd have loved to spend more time on them. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to do that in the book, where I can give pages to games that only got a paragraph and so on. I'm still trying to think about how I might organize it. I'd like to entertain ideas other than a simple chronological progression, though I think the "ages" bit works well as a general framework.

Of course, there's also the sad fact that I haven't spent NEARLY enough time actually playing most of these games, and had to depend on reviews, Wikipedia, owner's manuals, and fan websites to get most of the info. Nevertheless, I was very reluctant to put anything into the articles that I hadn't personally witnessed via emulation. In other words, the games that get the least mention are mostly the ones I was unable to find or emulate, and wasn't on sound footing from a fact-checking perspective. The way I see it, it's better to be brief than indulge in too much speculation and second-hand information that could be flat out wrong. Then, there's the basic fact that I had to get the thing done in a reasonable time! The thought, "save it for the book" came to me many times.

Still, my overall goal here was to give people a better idea of just how expansive this genre is, and get them talking about the games they know and thinking about games they may have heard of but never tried. As I mention in the article, I STRONGLY recommend you try Baldur's Gate II and PlaneScape: Torment, even if you're afraid you won't like them. I just can't imagine any CRPG fan not enjoying these particular games.