I'd like to start off today's column by thanking Mary for her... kind offer, but I'm afraid I need to decline. Ahem. No hard feelings, I trust.

That bit of semi-personal business aside (the letter was sent to agent@, so it's technically fair game for the column), there's nothing terribly compelling in the works tonight. No flamewars, no calls for action, no petitions (yay!), no fucko. Life is good.

Anyone who can score me a job in Ottawa wins a big, big prize. Hey, it's worth a shot. :)

Also, I am seriously, seriously pumped about Metroid 64 being announced. I may buy myself an N64 yet. Should be quite a ride, whenever it gets released.

And lastly, be nice to your parents and small children, and feel free to beat the crap out of everyone else. :)

Not that I advocate violence or anything.

Welcome to the world of Double Agent, Dan. Hope you survive/enjoy your stay. :)

As for why all games don't incorporate live music, the reasons are varied. For one thing, hiring professional musicians to perform the music, and record it properly, would cost money. Lots of it. Game soundtracks tend to be pretty massive, too, which means that there'd be a lot of studio time to be logged. There's the issue of speed - it's a lot faster to generate MIDI music than it is to load up a music file. There's the issue of storage space: Redbook audio takes up a lot more room than MIDI. There's the issue of versatility: some games have been able to remix MIDI songs on the fly, toning them down or up, switching songs in mid-stream, almost imperceptibly. You can't do that with prerecorded music. And lastly comes the issue of familiarity. Many game composers, okay, all game composers are used to working with internal sound chips, and using them to their limits. What they can do alone with a keyboard and a computer would require a lot of people and instruments to execute live, and that doesn't even take music cueing and recording into consideration.

For all those reasons and more I can't think of, while just about everyone prefers "real" music to sound chip stuff, it's a lot more practical to stay with the MIDI for a while yet.

Larissa is a secret agent working for GIA. She's also a fictional character, so don't you smartasses start writing in, responding to the first sentence. We styled her to look vaguely like a wizard of some sort, but with the secret agent twist, and distinctive enough to not count as a copyright infringement. :)

Sorry, but the music for Jade Cocoon is done by Yuro Mama. I suspect that Hisaishi keeps himself pretty busy, too busy to learn the ropes at game music scoring. It's a whole different ball 'o wax, and not everyone can do both, or wants to, for that matter. Not everyone can be like Yoko Kanno.

I don't know if EB World's web page continues the preorder deal with Shadow Madness or Lunar. WD has promised an official announcement on the subject soon. To be on the safe side, my suggestion is as follows: find your local participating store. Walk right up to them. Say the following: "I want to/have already reserved Lunar/Shadow Madness. There is a demo available for me because I have done so. Give it to me or suffer the wrath of Khan. You killed my son, you Klingon bastard!"

My advice is to not let yourself get ripped off. You reserve it, you earn the bleeding demo. In my experience, even suggesting that you want to see the manager about it is usually enough to get them to just hand over the demo. My other advice is to, if at all possible, deal with a branch store, not the website. It's easier to say "just give me the bloody thing" face to face.

Grandia was a title announced at the launch of the Sega Saturn, by GameArts, who also developed Gun Griffon and the Lunar games. It had a high pedigree, boasted then-unmatched graphics for an RPG, and good word-of-mouth. The waiting began. Grandia eventually took quite a while to reach market, but upon arrival, became a fan-favourite in Japan, and many US Saturn owners are still bitter that neither Sega of America nor Working Designs ported it over. It had gorgeous polygonal backgrounds overlaid with well-animated sprites, great music, and was generally lauded to the hilt, aside from frequent complaints about lousy frame rates.

Bottom line, it's a superb, cult classic RPG that never saw US release, and a lot of people want to see it. Clear enough?

You're sneezy, of course.

Thanks for the support on handling the letters, by the by. It means a lot to me. I like to make sure that we never get too serious around here, and while I tend to print more long letters than most lettercol writers, I try and keep it balanced off so no one is driven off. Well, okay, I guess I drive people off when I tear into them, but that's a different kettle of fish entirely.

As for learning Japanese, it really, really depends. An "average" amount of text varies wildly depending on the game itself - the weird dialects of the Tengai Makyou series tend to make it hell on non-native players, whereas FF games tend to be relatively simple. It also depends on how intensely you're studying, and how well you progress. AV's been learning Japanese for about three years now, if memory serves, mostly through school. On the flipside, I have a friend who's been taking Japanese courses for five years and she can't read it worth a damn. I guess it boils down to what your learning options are and how easily you pick the language up. There's no way to predict it.

As for learning Japanese for games, well, a surprising number of my friends have, or are doing so right now. I almost did it, until I looked at my record with French, a language I've been learning since I was 3, and decided that developing my English skills would probably do me more good. Not that it shows. I don't think your reasons for learning the language are stupid or annoying. You're dedicated. Worryingly so, a bit, but hey, it's a practical skill in the end. More power to you.

Okay, point to you for invoking Fallout 2. That's a good benchmark for at least simulating non-linear gameplay. I stand by the idea that truly non-linear gameplay is a pipe dream, but as Fallout 2 proves, it can be simulated very effectively, even given the limitations therein. To me, non-linear play would mean that you can truly do *anything*. Fallout 2 doesn't quite allow that; you can't accidentally get involved in torrid love affairs with the girl next door, or get attacked by a chimpanzee for no reason at all, or whatever. But you've got oodles of freedom, and there's lots to do, and lots of variables you can interact with, so cheers to it.

I also point out that console games, with limited save space, would have a lot of trouble as a game got less linear. A lack of distinct "checkpoints" means that more information about what's been altered in the game world, and that'd inflate save game memory dramatically. Look at Tecmo's Deception for an example of that on PSX.

I presume that the opening sequence is played at the start of the game, followed by the scene of Tina, Biggs, and Wedge atop the glacier, followed by the very cool sequence of them in the snow. I've been told that the FMV sequences in the games are in addition to the existing game, displacing nothing, and since the opening FMV seems to end with Tina getting into her mech, I'd assume the game itself picks up after that. So, while it's not a pumped-up version of the original opening, it doesn't cut it out either. Best of both worlds, and all that.

And for those that asked about whether there'd be more FMV in the non-FFC release of FF6 for PSX, well, we're going to have to wait and see.

Closing comments

Someone wrote in to ask if there were strategy guides for Tales of Destiny or Guardian's Crusade available. The answer is, to the best of my knowledge, no. There are rather significant and thorough FAQs and online guides available, though, including one for ToD by our own Fritz Fraundorf.

And with that, I vanish like a puff of smoke, never to rise again... until tomorrow.

- The Double Agent