Time for a policy lesson.

At the side of the Double Agent screen is a small blue box. By clicking on the appropriate bit of text, you can send a letter to the column. This is, of course, a pretty simple concept. What a few people today have apparently misunderstood is that any and all letters sent to the agent@ email address are considered flagged for potential publication by default. If you don't want it printed, and subsequently archived, don't send it, or explicitly state that it's not intended for publication from the get-go. I will not, I repeat, will not retroactively delete letters from the column. It's GIA policy, and more to the point, it's fair turnaround. Every stupid or ill-conceived comment I make is in the archives. The same applies to anyone who submits a letter and has it printed. Only fair.

So, let's see what stupid thing I can say today...

Canada is the last bastion of Communism on the planet. We're just so innocuous about it that nobody seems to mind. We also make really good beer, so that helps keep everyone's opinion of our fine nation high and dry.

But, sad to say, Ottawa really is the capital of Canada. Not Toronto. Toronto is bigger and more important and a whole lot cooler, and has a much more active drug trade, but Ottawa is where all the bilingual government-types hang out. Trust me. They infest the downtown area like termites at a nature reserve.

There's a couple of reasons. First off, informal translations tend to only cover plot points - the cutscenes and dialogue that matters to the plot. They generally don't deal with the dialogue of regular townspeople. There's a deceptively massive amount of random townsperson dialogue in most RPGs. Not simple because there's a lot of them, but because what they say will often change once certain major events have taken place, and for towns that are accessible throughout a game, this can make for a LOT of different sets of dialogue that needs to be found and translated.

Second, there's the issue that translating text and implementing it are two very different things. It takes time to find the text, find out what it's for, to program in and change fonts, and so forth.

It also takes time to build up a marketing campaign, design a new logo and box, redo the manual, get the game sent past a second bunch of playtesters, and so on. There's a lot more to localizing a game properly than simply translating the text.

Lastly, putting on my cynical hat for a moment, fan-done projects tend to take a lot less time, because they're doing it for no payment, with no regular hours. Corporate entities tend to be less efficient with their time and money than smaller operations, and this is another example of how that is.

As of now, no motions to release a PC version of FF8 have been announced.

Ah... the column length issue. I really do think and worry about this quite a bit, and despite the trust most of you place in me to do the column well (thank ye), I do like to trudge out the quality issue every so often. Personally, I like to have a balance to the column whenever possible. Not all long letters, not all joke letters, but a sort of balance. You'll notice that I had a sort of centerpiece letter, the last letter, as the serious intellectual meat of the day. Surrounding it were miscellaneous Q&A type side dishes, and a one-liner or two, with a silly answer, to keep it from getting too dull. Other days, when there's a less clear focus letter, I have more letters printed, of medium-length.

What about the rest of you guys? Would you like to see me push my limits and lengthen the column? Shorten it up? Any special features you'd like to see put in play? The 100 Letter Weekend seemed to go over pretty well, so would you like to see another one? Pictures? The Agent's Pick 'o the Web/Tube/Screen? None of this will be at the expense of the daily letters, with Q&A, humor, and debate, of course. What's your preference?

You need to go a bit further, yet. Fairly shortly, your party will be captured, and a massive series of cutscenes will ensue. When you get to the inevitable escape sequence, Citan will now be using his sword (automatically), which solidifies his position as the most powerful character in the game by a healthy margin. Trust me, when he gets his sword, you'll know.

Handy help from the GIA staff. Another letter-writer advised looking at the bloody CD cover. Either way, you should find your answer. :)

As if that wasn't enough, ~Eulduc is wondering if anyone knows where he can find the lyrics to "Bringing it Back To Soil" from Wild Arms. Man, this is a musical time, isn't it? Wacky wacky wacky stuff.

You've got a point there. Can anyone think of a game that's been dissected quite as thoroughly as FF7 has? I guess that it's an illustration of the dangers of financial success. Namely, the more people that have played a particular game, the more opinions can and will be developed. Moreover, since there's so many, initial conflicts spin out of conflicts spin out of conflicts, and the breath of the debate becomes epic in scope.

I confess that I'm a tad tired of getting into FF7-related arguments, but then again, I provoke and encourage the bloody things, so it's my own damned fault. In the final analysis, I guess the issue of letting FF7 just disappear is up to us, as gamers. Can we stop writing letters about it? Can we stop using it as a benchmark of RPGing? Can we forget it? I don't know. I get a lot of letters about FF7, more than any other game, so to some degree, my hands are tied. I can't just ignore a massive segment of the letters flow. What to do?

Vandal Hearts II seems to be filed in the same category as Mother 64. Namely, it's in production, it's been announced, but no one has any idea where it's disappeared to. We've seen neither hide nor hair of VH2 since the initial announcement Konami made. No screenshots, no logos, no character designs. My gut feeling is that Konami had initial development for the PSX version done, but backburnered it once the Dreamcast development kits and PSX2 stats game in, and are probably biding their time to see where it'd be best to put it. At the time of its release, VH was sort of a technology test, and I suspect the sequel will be much the same.

By the by, I've got to say that the Vandalier was a) the silliest looking "hero" character I've ever seen, and b) an ass-kicker of cosmic proportions. Is it possible to kill Ash as a Vandalier? How?

Closing comments

Only two more columns until I go on my epic voyage down to the Maritimes. I really ought to start packing, shouldn't I? Hmm.

Oh, and a perfectly shameless webpage plug. I can't believe I haven't mentioned this gem before, but I sure as hell will now: Zany Video Game Quotes! It's devoted to collecting screens of weird, bad, and simply zany quotes from video games, from spoony bards to being bad enough to rescue the president. Any site whose slogan is "A winner is you!" wins my instant respect and love. Cool beans, says I. Check it out.

- The Double Agent