The clock is ticking. Yes, rejoice or sob, as is your wont. After this, only one more Double Agent column to go until I'm off on my one-week trip, plus a day for recovery, for a grand total of eight days under the auspices of AK. Who, by the by, royally thrashed my hide at Jeopardy today. Bastard. I'll kill him for that if it's the last thing I do. Oh, and in the Deep, Dark Irony category, the most popular topic for today's column was, by a landslide... Final Fantasy VII! Sigh. We'll never be free of that game, will we? Also note that today contains my first FF8 content letter. It's clearly marked, with big red letters, but I figured I'd mention that it's there. | Behind the scenes at GIA | I was reading back through the 26th's mailbag, and saw that in the GIA spacestation, there's a brothel. Doesn't that piss off the female members of thestaff so much they raid the armory, and grab assault rifles. Meanwhile youguys are chilling out wit the chicks (since you're all pretty fly for whiteguys), when suddenly the door bursts off it's hinges! Before you can react,you're mowed down in a hail a bullet's! THEN THE WOMEN WRITE ON THE WALL INBLOOD "YOU'RE NEXT CORNEO! YOU'RE NEXT!" AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! FRITZ SLEEP WITHTHE FISHES!! FRITZ SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES!!! -Owen "It's Prozac time!" Humphreys |
Right, Owen, right. That's good... Anyhow, yes, we've got a brothel in the GIA satellite, but hey, it's not like it's stocked purely with women and girls. We have our female staffers to think about, for one thing. And female guests. Or hell, if we just feel like experimenting, we've always got a few gigolos hanging about, ready and waiting. Here at GIA, we believe in versatility in all things. | Adding length and hard to kill | Personally, I (that's pretty redundant) think you should increase the lengthof the Double Agent Column a bit. By about 2-4 letters. It'd have to varydepending on the length of the letter. It would mean more work for you, butit just doesn't seem like the column is long enough. And yes it is possible to kill Ash when he's a Vandelier. And there's reallyonly one possible way. Being brain dead. All challenge vanished from the game(I really didn't think it was that hard in the first place, though) aftergetting the Vandelier class. Let's see ... choices choices, I guess I'll useplasma wave and then... oh wait never mind all the enemies are dead Locke828 Back my day we didn't whine about not having fancy, schmany graphics, or thatthe story had typos. In my day if an NPC said hello to you that was a goodenough story and all the plot we needed was a big bad demon and a princess.And we didn't bitch about a character dying, or that the game was cliched, orit was to easy. We walked back and forth for hours with our little spriteswith four-letter names and we would kill ogres and creeps for hours on end,and we damn well enjoyed it! And then when the second and final RPG of theyear came out we did the same thing over again, and we still liked it! Butnowadays we have people whining and bitching left and right. |
All right, for the remaining two days that I'm home and writing this column, I'll be experimenting and adding about two more letters to the pull. It's perfectly understandable that you don't find it long enough. After all, how can anyone not want to read more of my wit and wisdom every single day? Cough cough. By the way, that last bit there is very, very funny, and I hope to god that it was intended as a joke. | Finding CT? | Dear Mr. Agent, Recently, I have found a new interest in Super Nintendo RPGs. When they first came out I was young and foolish and too deluded to buy them (not to mention poor). But now, as gaming gems have become harder and harder to find I have been going back to the good times and playing the games of yore. I was lucky enough to buy Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy II off of a friend but Chrono Trigger has completely eluded me in my search. So I was wondering if you know of a good place to buy Super Nintendo games on the web or where I could find Chrono Trigger specifically. Thank you for your help. |
The most obvious, and usually cheapest, answer is eBay online auctions. Variable levels of reliability, but if you're looking for something, they probably have it. Beyond that, there's always FuncoLand or usedvideogames.com, both of whose prices tend to suck, but have been around since the beginning of time or so. Used Video Games has CT for $42, which kinda sucks, but it's there. I'd personally suggest going to eBay first, though. | Pity for Europe | hey agent, =i'm just here to whine. why is it that sony computer entertainmenteurope releases very mediocre games like wild arms in europe but notxenogears? i want xenogears (and no i can't import it. don't have the money) -gunblade whineheart |
I wish I could help you, but sadly, I can scarcely afford games for myself, much less buying them for people in another continent. Sales-wise, how does the European game market measure up to the US and Japanese markets? I imagine that the TV standards affect costs, which is part of why porting games for European releases takes so bloody long, but are there additional concerns? Do games in Europe simply not sell enough copies to justify rapid release? How prevalent is the import scene? Educate me. | FF8 GUARDIAN FORCES - MINOR SPOILERY STUFF | Hi oh wise one, I have a question about the Guardian Forces in FF8. Do you start with them(which would be really unfair with Bahamut and Eden)? Or do you have tofight them to earn the ability to summon them like in FF 4/5/6? Spuzzz |
You don't start with any GFs, but gain a few of them relatively quickly. Mostly, you gain GFs in one of two ways. Either you beat them in combat and "earn" the GF if you win, or you Draw them out of boss enemies. I'm told, insistently, that Bahamut is a bringer of hot flaming death, in particular. So I'm pretty sure you won't have a 5th level party getting his GF. | English language fetishism. Kinky. | After importing a few PSX titles from Japan I have noticed that there is alarge amount of English words in them. For example Street Fighter 3 ZeroJapanese has the characters names and some of the menu commands in English. Same thing with FF8 Japanese, the intro movie features English sentences.The trend also extends to the Anime realm, which is not a part of thissection so I'll keep it brief, where many of the songs in the Animes arealmost entirely in Japanese with one phrase of English thrown in. I had heard that Japanese people were fascinated with English characters,especially the teenagers. It just seems like a really interesting culturaldifference between Americans and Japanese. Does anyone know why Japanesehave such an apparently large fetish with English? It would be uberinteresting to know why. - Eldon Nelson |
I originally wrote up an explanation of this, but given that I know there's at least four Japanese-born readers out there, and a slew more who've studied the country and its culture extensively, so I'll pass the buck. All right, you Japanese-savvy people, show us your wisdom. Tell me why the Japanese seem to have an American fetish? Anyone who can tie their explanation into why Andrew Vestal has a Japanese fetish wins ten points. | Why Toronto isn't the capital of Canada | Is that everyone hates it. There's not a person who doesn't live in Torontowho likes it. Not that Ottawa is much better liked, but at least it's not so universallyhated. Though, really, I think that Canadian cities are either hated or ignored,though some of them(coughreginacough) which should be hated are ignored. But I'm lucky, I live in Winnipeg, so I'm ignored, and I get to live in thecity with the largest amount of restaurants per capita in North America. And I never know how to end these things, so I'll just stop typing and hitsend after this sentence. |
Yeah, well Ottawa boasts the largest amount of lawyers per capita in North America. Isn't that just smegging GREAT? I think it says something that one of the most exciting, popular tourist attractions in Ottawa is the Eternal Flame. You know what the Eternal Flame is? It's a fire in the middle of a water fountain that supposedly never goes out. That's it. It doesn't move, it doesn't burn a special color, it doesn't create Skittle-raining rainbows, or anything vaguely interesting. It just burns. Yee-frigging-ha. Okay, I think that's enough Canadian content for one week. We now continue with video game-related banter. | FF7 is | I've been reading the column the past few days, and I've been wondering whatthe hell this F-F-7 thing is you guys have been talking about. I've neverheard of it. Do you pronounce it EF-EF-SEVEN? Is it some kind of kitchenappliance, or possibly a brand of Butane Lamps? I'd really like to know. - Agent J |
FF7 is actually the code-name for Frederick Foswell, the seventh agent hired by J. Jonah Jameson in his ongoing efforts to discover the true identity of Spider-Man, and to expose him for the corrupt fraud that he is. Foswell, sadly, was eventually slain by a gunshot, a death which Betty Brant blamed on Spider-Man, forever preventing him from revealing his secret identity to her. Thwipp! | Memory glitching | Guess what. In November 1997, I, a 13 year-old boy with a $3 per week allowance (stop laughing!), manage to buy presents for all my family AND rent FFVII three times; enough to beat it. I gets to fight Sephiroth once, but fail to remove the threat to humankind. Taking a half hour to rethink my strategy, I build up the courage to try again. I insert the memory card, the loading bar begins to fill up.........it's almost done.......now the screen will appear which shows my save files, right at the end of Final Fantasy VII........there, the screen has appe--OH MY GOD!!!! I FELL OFF THE CHAIR!!! I'm on the FLOOR, where people have been WALKING! After taking five minutes to recuperate, I get up--only to see one of my files is now empty and another is literally "white". "Hmmm...interesting" I go, and reset the game, hoping it will go away........What's this? TWO are empty and the only remaining one is white. "Well, I'll be! I'll just go to the PlayStation's memory card screen to see ! my memory status...Hmmmmmm..All my FFVII files are empty. Oh, and my Bushido Blade file with-the-Slash- mode-beaten-without-dying is gone, too. Whaddya know! Heh, I didn't think my Tekken 2 file with-all-the-secret-characters would be gone!". I walk upstairs--there's a box. "Just my cat, frozen solid with a bullet in his chest. I should politely write that farmer asking an apology for killing my only friend. But that wouldn't be nice...at least I don't have to repeat that frightening CHAIR thing again!! I'm gonna have nightmares tonight!" Now, Agent. I sit here in a sturdy sofa, pondering how I could develope a chair that refuses to topple over, and a thought pops into my mind. The FFVII incident...game glitch, or memory card glitch? -The Cowardly Lion (forgot how to spell "Quizzlequek") |
Memory card glitch. I don't know what the hell happened, but it's a memory card error. | Threading the needle | Lali Ho! Allan, or Lali Ho! Andrew...whoever's there :) Something has been bugging me lately, and surprise surprise, it's FF7. Imyself thought FF7 was a EXCELLENT game *dodges tomatoes* and personallythink it just fell victim to the skinhead mentality, but thats just myopinion. Lately, a topic has been "Why are people still ranting about it ayear and a half later?". Well....seems to be this is the usual formula: 1)someone writes in, because they felt like ranting...and FF7 was on themind. Letter goes basically "FF7 was a horrible game because [insertwriter's opinion] and everyone knows it." then someone responds, whohappens to like the game, and it goes something like this "No way man! FF7was an awesome game! Think about it! Everyone knows it had [insert writer'sopinion]" Now normally, going by the formula, I should be stating my opinions herein support of the one who liked FF7....but IMHO (a very important tag toput in to letters like this, that IMHO is ;-), BOTH sides are makingthemselves look ridiculous and immature. Everyone is going around statingthere opinions as fact. A letter in the 2-27 column read "We all know thatFFVII didn't live up to people's expectations." What the hell is with that?Speak for yourself. "IMHO" it surpassed what I was expecting of it. Therecent amount of letters all begin with someone stating their side, andthen begining sentances that contain their opinions with phrases such as"We all know". What it really comes down to, is that we, as peers in a gaming community,need to learn to be less self centered. Don't keep trying to force youropinions on people, and they will become respected for their individuality.You can hate a game for your opinions, but don't hate a person for theirs. - LockeCole3 |
All but one response to the FF7 Thread Which Would Not Die (tm) was essentially stating that hey, FF7 *was* good, dammit. Many took issue with the casual statement that it's clearly not the best game ever made. Another letter-writer said that it was clearly the worst game ever made, and obvious not an RPG at all, since it took the emphasis off stat-building, and onto the storyline, which is irrelevent in a true RPG. The little hamster wheel in my noggin that powers my brain is spinning like a top right now. I don't know how to resolve this conflict. I mean, what it's boiling down to is that different people have different opinions, and that some people love FF7, and some people don't. Which elicits a long, drawn-out DUUUUUUUUUUH from the studio audience. Do we, as gamers, need to be less self-centred? Do we need to be more open and accepting? Oh, it'd probably be nice if we were. But will it happen? Are we, as a whole, truly good enough people to be open-minded and accepting of each other? Not a chance, bubby. Not a chance in hell.
Closing comments Gah! This just in! Sony announces PSX2! World explodes! I am muchly stunned at how powerful this sucker is going to be. I remind everyone that processor power isn't everything, and that games support is what makes a system successful, but damn, that's an impressive piece of hardware. - The Double Agent | | | |
