Cidolfas
Cidolfas
| Name: | Cidolfas |
| Active Status: | Active. |
| E-mail: | cidolfas@rpgclassics.com |
| Contributions: | Creator of the Bahamut Lagoon, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy III, Illusion of Gaia, Live A Live, Star Ocean, Star Ocean II, Soulblazer, Tales of Destiny, Tales of Phantasia, and Wild Arms shrines; creator and webmaster of the Final Fantasy Compendium; formerly in charge of shrine submissions; PHP programmer. |
| ICQ Number: | Not used. |
| Join Date: | 04/24/00 |
| Chat Room Status in #rpgclassics: | Voice Operator (VOP) |
| Message Board Status: | Moderator (The FFCompendium Forum) |
| Quote: | Sinistral: you sound like what I sounded like this morning: disturbed
Cidolfas: I'm not disturbed. I disturb other people. 8-) |
Staff Bio
| Real Name: | Daniel Orner |
|---|---|
| Other Nicknames: | Cid, and any number of misspellings of "Cidolfas"... |
| Pronunciation: | Sid-ALL-fahss. At least I think so. The funniest one I've yet heard is "Slim-fast". |
| Gender: | Male |
| Occupation: | Software Developer |
| Religion: | Orthodox Judaism |
Place of Origin/Residence: | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Birthdate: | September 21, 1980 |
| Hobbies: | RPGs whenever I can get them, Talmud study, web stuff, just helping out the masses. |
| Favorite Author: | Terry Pratchett! I've got a ton of his Discworld books and I've read most of the rest. Go check out my long list of my favorite Pratchett quotes! I've also recently gotten into Robert Rankin, Tom Holt and Terry Brooks. Highly recommended: Orson Scott Card, Jasper Fforde, J.K. Rowling, Tanya Huff. For real-life stuff, Agatha Christie, Jonathan Kellerman, Robert Ludlum and John Grisham. Go check out my reommended authors (and webcomics) here. |
| Favorite Games: | Changes often. Check my reviews page for in-depth coverage of What I Think Of Specific RPGs (and anime). |
| Favorite Music: | More or less anything harder than Celine Dion at her mushiest and softer than Korn at their hardest. No country, R&B, rap, or techno. All-time favorites: REM, Great Big Sea, Counting Crows. |
Cidolfas's Projects
The Final Fantasy Compendium - the only one of my websites that really got popular. (As of this writing, we have more than 1.1 million page views per month.) It's a huge and comprehensive guide to the FF series. It'd take too long to list everything in there; the best way to find out is just to dive right in. 8-)
The Center World - an old project of mine, and one which I'd doubtless do quite differently now. Basically, I thought up an RPG: characters, places, a 200-page script, monsters, skills, the works. Everything besides actual programming. 8-) Taken down now due to embarrassment.
RPGClassics Mailbag - I hosted this weekly humor column/letter column/Ozzie bashing thingy starting... I dunno, a while back. 8-) I took it over from the able Macc Maverick, and I still don't think I did quite as well as he did... ^^;
Sparse - a really cool PHP project which allows anyone to program database-driven web applications using plain old HTML - no programming expertise required! Buggy for now, though, and defunct.
Histree - a Firefox extension which is the basis of my M.Sc. thesis. Also buggy and defunct.
HTML Tutorial - I designed this specifically for people wanting to make game shrines for RPGClassics, but other folks should be able to understand it as well. 8-)
These websites contain ALL the information about a certain video game. I used emulators to snap pictures, and sometimes other FAQs to grab the information (never without permission, of course).
| Shrine | System | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bahamut Lagoon | SNES | A very cool RPG/strategy-RPG game. Fun and challenging, and you get to play around with dragons! Unfortunately not officially translated, but DeJap did a great job of an unofficial translation! 8-) |
| Chrono Cross | PlayStation | The sequel to the great Chrono Trigger; not exactly up to par with it, but loaded with variety, great music, nice graphics, cool storyline. |
| Final Fantasy III | NES | No, not the Super Nintendo one; the Japanese one that never made it here. It was translated online and I have done a shrine on it! It's an oddly engaging game, with some of the best graphics and sound on the NES system. That's not saying much, but it's still a lot of fun and very challenging. Later remade for the Nintendo DS. |
| Illusion of Gaia | SNES | One of Enix's rather more linear games, but I enjoyed every minute of it. It's action-oriented, but follows a very cool storyline. I just like the ambience of the game. Very nice music, too. |
| Live A Live | SNES | A much-underrated (and never officially translated) SNES game by Squaresoft. It's divided into seven "normal" chapters, an intermediate chapter, and a final chapter that brings everything together. It's a cross between an RPG and a strategy-RPG, extremely addictive and lots of fun! |
| SoulBlazer | SNES | The prequel to Illusion of Gaia. Different mood and gameplay, but still very solid and oddly addictive. |
| Star Ocean | Super Nintendo | Somewhere between Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean: Second Story. It introduces things like skills, specialties, item creation, the battle system, and Approval Ratings between characters. A very interesting game, but it has an oddly unfinished feel to it. |
| Star Ocean: Second Story | PlayStation | An unbelievably original RPG. The battles are fast and furious (everybody attacks all at once). Items can be bought or created using 19 different specialties. Characters can change their romantic or friendship levels with each other. And it's amazingly challenging. Highly recommended. |
| Tales of Destiny | PlayStation | The sequel to Tales of Phantasia (below). Also quite fun to play; very light-hearted, with funny dialogue. Sometimes challenging, usually not too bad. Lots of random battles is the only annoying thing about it. |
| Tales of Phantasia | SNES | A groundbreaking classic for SNES. It combined the skills of Namco and Enix's tri-Ace team to become the jumping-off point for both the Tales and Star Ocean series. Battles are in real-time, with your friends controlled by AI. Lots of fun, a neat storyline, voice clips in battle, and awesome graphics for SNES. The SNES version is only available in English via emulator, though the GBA version was translated. |
| Wild Arms | PlayStation | A neat little game. Not very ambitious, but it's a lot of fun. Exploration is in 2D (with some action elements like bombs and hookshots) and battles are in 3D. Long but not too involved. You can get it pretty cheap by now, so if you find it, grab it. 8-) There's also a remake for PS2 (Alter Code F), but it's completely different gameplay-wise. |
I helped out with some of the online translations done for the emulation community (aka the scene). It's a lot more fun than it looks. 8-)
| Game | System | Group | Job Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cyber Knight | SNES | Aeon Genesis Translation Proclamation | This neat little RPG/strategy RPG was not one I'd ever heard of until approached by Gideon Zhi to help out a bit. The translator wasn't all that hot in the English language... ^^; I basically rewrote the script so it sounded pretty decent. |
| Live A Live | SNES | Aeon Genesis Translation Proclamation | OK, this one I'd heard of. 8p It's an extremely interesting RPG/strategy-RPG that is broken up into nine different chapters taking place in different ages. I helped scriptwrite one of the chapters, and beta tested it as well. It's lots of fun! 8-) |
| Tales of Phantasia | SNES | TransTech/Disnesquick | Same sort of thing as above; I edited the script for this game (way bigger than Cyber Knight) in anticipation of the patch release. Unfortunately, DeJap beat us to it, and this patch never ended up being released... 8-( |
| Star Ocean | SNES | ME! | DeJap again was working towards making a full translation for SO... I wanted to make a shrine on it, so I got sick of waiting. 8-) I taught myself some basic hacking. I already knew katakana, and had a friend who's a professional translator who did the hiragana for me. The result, after a week or two, was this patch, which translated menus, items, skills, techniques, and monster names into English. I was quite proud of it... naive, no? 8-) |
| Star Ocean | SNES | DeJap | After some time, I was contacted by DeJap for help in script editing. As it turned out, I also ended up being the project coordinator (essentially DarkForce's secretary) and setting up the voice dub system, which unfortunately was never used. |
Sprite-Based Comics
These are fan comics from SpoonyBard's Online Life. The first few are pretty bad, but IMO they get better. ^^; Numbers 6 through 10 are part of a short story arc; the rest are just random.
#1: Diff'rent Strokes
#2: I Needed That...
#3: Who Ordered A Jugem?
#4: Fun With Smileys
#5: Excerpt From The Online Dictionary
#6: Quail, Mortals!
#7: Uncle Macc Wants YOU!
#8: Electoral Resolutions
#9: Fools Never Differ
#10: Et Tu, Brute?
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