Back to the old letters game, I am. After a lualicious weekend of Drew doing his first fill-in on DA, ye olde Agente has returned to his humble abode to find the ground strewn with unread missives and goat blood, in equal measure.

So, what's new with me? Well, let's see. I've got two job interviews this week, I really am going to play Legend of Legaia soon, I need to pester Glick to send me the Lunar demo, and... yeah, that's all.

So, all that aside, I guess it's time to mambo.

The FAQs at GameFAQs are for the Sega CD version, which is indeed different from the Saturn, PSX, and demo versions.

I assume that the demo is pretty damn close to the final version of the PSX release, with the obvious additions of the teaser footage at the end, plus a few minor issues like the level cap. But, as you say, you can play in the final game from where the demo left off, so the changes between the demo and the final will likely be minimal.

Persona and Last Bible are part of the Megami Tensei series. These are a series of RPGs for various platforms, including SNES, PSX, Saturn and Game Boy Color, developed by Atlus. They tend to share the gameplay ability to negotiate and talk with monsters, and usually have demons in there somewhere. There's a whole slew of the buggers, most of which have never been seen in the US, including the denied Soul Hackers (boo SCEA!).

This has been a test of the Agent Surreality Alarm System.

Had this been a real influx of surreality, ants would be hats, and I'd have to be chipping dead squirrel guts off the inside of my pinecone-infested earlobes simply to have a chance at getting in touch with the lawn chair that's cradled inside my fetus.

Thank you.

Much as I personally find it nice to unwind with a good game of Super Dodgeball, I have to concur here. I've been researching video game violence and its effects, and one of the recurring results of studies done regarding it find that it doesn't relieve stress at all. It doesn't rechannel negative emotions into something harmless - it just seems to replace them, or distract until they fade away naturally.

No.

We never said Dino Crisis was an RPG. We never will, because it's clearly not. We clearly and specifically announced that we were adding coverage of Adventure games to GIA. If we haven't formally changed our mission statement to reflect that, we will be doing so shortly. We founded the site, we set down our parameters of coverage, and experience taught us that we'd probably meet the interests of our viewers better if we expanded into Adventure games, and got a lot stingier about Puzzle coverage. Basically, lots of people wanted us to cover Adventure games, and nobody gave a shit about puzzles, so we said "hokay joe" and that was that.

GIA is not an all-RPG site. We've never stated that every game we cover are RPGs. We said adding adventure games was "a natural fit to our comprehensive RPG coverage." It's a complement, not a subsection.

It might show up in the Community section, whenever that gets going. I can safely say that I won't waste, er, dedicate my time on a reader review section, though. Too much work for really variable quality output.

Tecmos seemed to degenerate into utter crap very quickly once the NES died, and I think they just up and folded.

This is one of the beautiful things about GIA's genre expansion. Is Zelda an RPG? I don't know. And as a GIA staffer, I no longer *need* to know. It certainly falls somewhere under the combined Adventure and RPG umbrellas, is therefore fair game, and that's that. I love semantics. :)

I'd contest that Zelda 2 is more RPG-like than the Gameboy Zelda title, actually. The latter contained vastly more plot and character interaction than the former, both traits which I associate with RPGs, not adventure or action games. Miyamoto's comments stand uncontested, though.

Sorry to interrupt here, but while Front Mission games are all part of the same world, in a single chronology and continuity, they are distinct games. They do not require any prior knowledge of the other games in the series. You get more out of them if you're familiar with the others, catching little references and whatnot, but they're self-contained. It'd make perfect sense to bring it over here, if it would sell of course.

Actually, I've complained at length about FF5's lack of character development. And was yelled at, and received death threats, because of it.

Be that as it may, I'm not sure the mob mentality you speak of is so much an issue of "this country" (I assume you're referring to the US), as it is of the Internet. Online life spawns opinions and debates, and public forums for such, at a fantastic rate. Getting opinions out to a massive number of people is a cinch. And one of the results is that like-minded individuals can quickly and easily group together, and become disproportionately loud and pervasive. As I've said before, people are certainly welcome to be negative about Square. And I've never refused to let them express their opinions in this column, which, I might add, actively encourages people with off the beaten track opinions to congregate and make themselves heard. Double Agent, and most forums like it, is not representative, and we can't lose sight of that. This is a select, quirky group here. It is not the mainstream.

Okay, be that as it may, I don't think Square is eeeeevil. It doesn't have a hairless cat that it pets obsessively, and doesn't concoct plans to ruin the lives of small children everywhere. They're a Japanese game developer, with a US branch that ports games for them. Their development focus is for Japan first. They will release games in the US which they believe will sell well, and make them money. They are not evil. They don't hate US gamers. But neither are they about to toss out common sense, hard sales data, and market research, to pander to the desires of a relative minority of gamers with an internet connection. They are not infallible, but neither are they evil. They are a company. One company. Breathe. Breathe.

Aside from the quibble that this is a debate, Q&A, and humor column that discusses several genres of video games, I think this sums up my position more than anything. While I don't contest that the tragedy should be discussed, if only so we can learn from it and try to prevent it from recurring, we've really wandered into an area of discussion where Agents fear to tread. I've received some very interesting, compelling letters about the phenomenon around the shootings in Littleton. I've received some shockingly heartless ones. I've been accused of promoting the lifestyles and viewpoints that allow those things to happen. I've even been told that one of the teens who were killed read this very column, daily. That's a sobering thought.

There are some tangents from all this that I'd like to pursue. I'm researching video games and their effects on children for a future SI column. I'd like to hear commentary about the ESRB - is it working, should it exist, and how can it be made better? But tragic as the murders in Littleton, Colorado were, it's fallen outside the purview of this column. Let's get back to games.

Closing comments

Whew. I think that most certainly caps us off for one day. My apologies for any misconceptions or opinions presented yesterday which went unrefuted, but in the end, I had to go with my gut instinct. My gut tells me that we should be talking about video games in Double Agent.

Tomorrow, we'll probably get more on Square Wars, and perhaps launch into some all-new, sexy topics of discussion. Dunno what they'll be, but hey, I trust you guys. You'll think of something. That's the great thing about doing a letters column. Other people have, like, ideas and stuff. I can be dumb. It's very keen. Ciao, campers.

- Allan Milligan