An early Double Agent update! Gasp! A DA column that's actually up for a significant portion of the day for which it's dated! Double gasp! Will wonders never cease? If you missed out on yesterday's col, don't feel sad - you can read them in the Recent Columns list, or in the updated Archives. Yes, they've gone a shockingly long time without being updated. I am sorry. I blame the Communist bloc in Idaho. They're quiet bastards. Too quiet.

Special update! We have a winner in the "guess which letter Allan forged for the April 1st column" contest! Cecil correctly identified the Mario Party/Bizarro world letter as my contribution to the joke letter pull. I'm a comic fan, what can I say? :) I'll announce his prize tomorrow, and thanks for playing.

Oh, and while I've got the chance, I've got to express my deepest sympathies for a certain website whose post-April Fools fake FF joke story was broadly thrashed. It's got to be tough, being derivative. Don't worry, everyone botches a story once in a while. Poor bunny.

And last but not least, a big ole happy birthday goes out to our own Brian "Slick" Glick! Hooray! Now he and I can go and get horribly sloshed in Ontario bars together, like all good Canadian youths of 19 should!

Ook, Cloud and Co. can buy those really expensive, powerful weapons from shops withour fear of someone else getting their hands on such hardware because Cloud's a nasty bastard. While you see the shop screen, Cloud's using the Buster Sword as leverage to gain an assurance from the shopkeeper that no one else will be sold any decent weapons. Apparently, his threats work.

Barret is one of the few people who can claim to be a multiple amputee. You're right, when he puts on a new weapon, he first needs to hack off the existing one, and solder the new one onto the bloody stump. And people wonder why he's always in such a pissy mood.

Lastly, Grandia's release date does seem slightly curious. I imagine that Sony has something major planning for the Christmas season, or else it anticipates FF8 being delayed. Then again, the RPG market seems to be large enough to cope with one or more releases a month, so I guess they're banking that players will get antsy from waiting during the summer months, and be willing to invest in a good RPG Right Now, rather than going for delayed gratification.

You remember correctly. There was indeed a Dragon Quest anime series, brought over for US airings during, if memory serves, the fall of '91, under the title Dragon Warrior. There was the bold hero Abel, his goofy sidekick, a wizard in a turban, and plenty of other characters I've forgotten about. As I recall, the US airings left off after Abel killed a giant snake with his Frost Brand sword. There's more information about it available right here. I've been unable to find copies of the series, sadly, but I really liked it at the time.

By the by, there was a live-action Vampire series based on the games by White Wolf, produced by Aaron Spelling. It didn't last long, and for good reason.

I think it unlikely. The restructurings of Square are, from my understanding, taking place within the core company, and its immediate subsidiaries. Square EA is a joint venture between Square and EA, with clear operating parameters, and would therefore be left out of any internal shake-ups.

In short, Square EA is unlikely to see any disruption of their operations, so whatever games they have in store should stay on schedule.

I didn't put down The Crow. I thought it was a kickass movie. But it's a prime example of a movie where a good chunk of the soundtrack was composed of pre-existing songs, as opposed to an orchestral score, like Star Wars. It also had a grittier feel than the epic-styled SW movies.

Crow: City of Angels sucked, though.

Lunar: SSSC will, I'm confident, stack up pretty well against other RPGs. The graphics aren't anything to swoon over, unless you count the anime cutscenes, which are excellent. On the other hand, the music is excellent, and the voice acting's a lot better than Square's efforts thus far (not much of an accomplishment, granted). The gameplay is fairly standard stuff, too. But, as I never tire of saying, the characterization is what makes it. Each character is carefully and clearly defined, with a memorable personality, manner, and background. Square could take some notes from Game Arts, in that respect.

I'm glad you've found an interpretation of FF7's ending that satisfies you. Getting ten RPG fans into one room, and having them agree on what happened in that ending is a mission not even Jim Phelps would attempt.

I think the Hammer = black man reasoning is dodgy at best. While racial representation isn't exactly a hallmark of Japanese-made RPGs (or US-made ones, for that matter), I think the speech pattern and his role in the plot are distinct. Yes, he has low self-esteem. Yes, he shoots someone. And yes, he speaks in, for lack of a better term, ebonics. But my gut feeling is that he wasn't conceived of as a black guy. I think his role as the ordinary guy who gets caught up in the world-saving and cracks from the pressure was decided first, and the memorable speech pattern was added on later to make him likeable, which makes his betrayal all the more heartbreaking.

Ah, the triumph of mediocrity. I'll keep it down to five choices, since these lists are probably getting damned tedious.

1. Wild Arms. Sorry, WA fans, but I can't chalk this bad boy up as anything more than mediocre. Aside from the very, very faint Western stylings, there's nothing to distinguish this game from the rest of the pack.

2. Just about any version of Tetris. Again, not bad, but basically dependent on rehashing the concept yet again with questionable improvements ("It's Tetris in a toilet bowl!").

3. Legendary Axe for Turbografx-16. Totally generic side-scrolling action game.

4. World Heroes, for Neo Geo. The later ones were kinda neat, but man, the original was so derivative of Street Fighter 2 that it was just shocking. It was very competent and playable, but the total lack of originality lands it in the land of mediocrity.

5. Wolfgang Unleashed. Whoever thought making a first-person shooter out of the life of Mozart must have been on crack. Be that as it may, it was a pretty decent game, with surprisingly good use of the Jaguar sound chip to reproduce Mozart's music. And the fight with Salieri at the end is pretty impressive - it looks just like F. Murray Abraham. But all in all, a weird license plus an okay game makes for a top five mediocre game.

Nah. Space is just a nice bit of visual shorthand for something that's really, really gargantuan and cosmic in scope. A spell is a spell, a lightshow and some damage indicators. But man, when the heavens themselves open a can of whoop-ass on your enemies, they're in it deep.

The dominant game genre in Japan is the RPG. Consequently, the 64DD, which was supposed to boast three big RPG-related titles (Zelda, Mother 64, and a Pokemon game or three) would have been their attempt to retake the Japanese market. Moreover, Japan is Nintendo's home market. The bulk of their programmers live in Japan. So it only makes sense to give the 64DD a launch at home first, then expand to international markets.

The problem is that, as you point out, the N64 is a player in the US market, and not much outside of it. Frankly, I suspect that the 64DD will get a minor release in Japan only, like the Famicom Disk Drive did, precious few exclusive titles, and will act as a stopgap until a new system can be pressed into service to take on the Dreamcast and the PS2.

Closing comments

New today in the blue box is a nice summation of several styles of boss combat styles. Not really an editorial, as most Deep Thoughts tend to be, but interesting enough, and a pretty good capper to the what are last bosses like/what should they be like discussion. Sort of a boss tactic style guide, for lack of a better term.

Also notable is the fact that I actually updated the archives! Hooray! Love me!

All that said, I've got lots of work yet to do, so I'll bid you adieu for now, and remember, eating soap doesn't clean out your pipes. It just makes them all foamy.

- Allan Milligan