Well well well. Another weekend gone, another week of anger and despair to come. Ahhhhhh, Double Agent. How I missed thee.

In the "oops" category, Drew neglected to provide a link to the picture of Katarina Marx , the most compelling argument for Socialism you'll ever lay eyes on. Told you she was real. (Picture clipped from the Ottawa Citizen daily newspaper, by the way.)

My sister just returned home from a concert downtown, where she insists she saw Bono, of U2 fame, in the audience. This is further proof that yes, some people really are too stupid to live. Bono in Ottawa. In the rain. Riiiiight.

In the Betcha Didn't Notice department, I completely rearranged the Double Agent archives this weekend. See, as it stood, the /letters directory on the GIA server had about 200 files in it. And we just celebrated out six-month GIA anniversary a few days ago. So, taking a pre-emptive tack, I went through all the archived columns, divided them up into folders, (categorized by month and year), slashed off the Recent Columns lines since it seemed redundant to have them included in an archive of all the columns, and got it all up-to-date and spiffy. I even added banners to them like a good little capitalist. None of this affects you guys in the least, but it was a hell of a lot of work, so I felt like explaining it. In related news, I'm going to put a stop to my being lame about updating the archives as well. No more broken links to Recent Columns on weekends.

And lastly, the Nickname Generator that Drew coded this weekend is staying in effect. Sign your letters, or become Her Majesty the ape and a big bag of Bob for a day.

Your point about competition being necessary is well-taken. That's one of the keys of our society here in North America, and while it sometimes grinds some worthy but poorly marketed products into the dust, I think it holds up well in principle. That's one of the key problems and obstacles in creating a unified standard for gaming - getting the companies involved to agree on a standard, and slowing down the drive to outdo one another.

I'll let the Macintosh = inferior model remark go, though I urge to you watch you step. Yon Agent is writing this columns on a G3, thank you kindly. And I'm not exactly known for my open heart and soft spoken manner.

This one's worth printing if only for the "pure badass" line. Maybe it's me, but a three foot tall, white-furred, muchkin of a creature doesn't exactly scream "badass" to me. For chrissakes, the little antennae on its head are called flobies. Compared to moogles, Pikachu looks like something that was surgically removed from the lower intestine of a cow with the ebola virus.

Ahem. Anyhow, it seems that moogles have become overused of late. They show up as summon monsters and in mini-games, but Square feels that milking the Chocobo = Cuteness cash cow is a more viable use of their time. I wouldn't hold your breath for a sudden resurgence of moogle use in Square games.

I sense a divergence in the Force. Wait, no. It's just a divergence in the views of RPG fans. Change is coming, yes, but there are at least three basic paths to cross, FABIO.

On one hand is the way of the Story. FMV can be used very effectively here. These are the games where the story is paramount, and while they can innovative and clever gameplay, the purpose of the game is to follow and develop the storyline. Cutscenes, FMV sequences, and the like are used to pack large amounts of story development into the game in an aesthetically pleasing way. The most obvious example of this is the Final Fantasy series beyond FFIV.

The second type is the gameplay-centric game. These need not have totally worthless plots and characterization, but the emphasis is on giving the players more to do and develop, rather than giving them as clear a path and plot to follow. These games are growing rarer these days, mostly due to advances in the former type. As story RPGs get better at getting players involved and interested in their plots, gameplay-centric ones increasingly leave players with "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" feelings. See: SaGa Frontier. A gameplay-centric game whose gameplay doesn't interest the player is a dud. A story-centric one can have awful gameplay if the story is interesting enough. And finding a gameplay style and breadth that interests a wide variety of people is very, very difficult. You can alienate if you get too complex (Tactics Ogre is returned mid-rental more often than any title at my local game store) or too esoteric (Persona, anyone?). It needs to be fun and involved. And that's really hard.

Neither one of these approaches is intrinsically superior. Nobody has to rush out and embrace a style of gameplay that doesn't appeal to them, on the basis that it's the way things are changing. What people do need to accept is that running around and insisting that others are obviously wrong because they like FMV, or because they hate long cutscenes in RPGs, is a total waste of time.

The last path is that of the people who think that 7th Saga is the pinnacle of RPG achievement. These people are known as morons. Ignore them.

See, I agree and disagree. Sure, I admit to overstating my opinion regarding certain issues, just to provoke reactions. I need to keep you people interested, and quite simply, you guys like to argue. My letters load triples in size if there's a hot topic to debate. If I tie up debate threads, the next day's letters batch will be miniscule. So, in the interests of keeping things fresh, interesting, and rolling, I crank up the attitude a notch.

I have to wonder about Gohan, though. I don't know him, and it's entirely possible that he writes these letters just for kicks, just to see the havoc he can sow. What I do know is that he's very rude and abrasive, to the point where any point he makes is not just lost, but actively killed. It's not intelligent to sabotage your own opinions.

And for the record, I still think Dragonball Z is really, really poorly paced. I've grown to enjoy the show, but I'd like it twice as much if the pacing was any good.

I swear to god, that random nickname generator has made doing this column half again as fun, just to see what kind of messed-up names are signed to the letters. Hee.

How many endings? (Legend of Legaia ending spoilers, sorta)

In response to a letter yesterday, there are four different endings inLegend of Legaia. All of your responses throughout the game make nodifference. The only decision that counts is what you say to Dr. Ushawhen he talks to you at the Genesis tree in Rim Elm after you beat thefinal boss. None of the endings are too great though... Joshsquall

Thanks for the info.

My guess, if it turns out not to be FFIX, is that we'll see it as a spin-off game of some kind, a la Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon. No idea what it'd be titled. But I doubt the characters we've seen will be headlining FFT2. Gut feeling.

We're not sure, to be honest. Tami, GIA staffer, has expressed an interest in maintaining such a thing, and we certainly have the server space. If it does happen, it'll be in the community section, whenever we actually launch that. The uncertainty comes with quality control, basically. Fanfic sites are a dime a dozen, really, and making ours stick out is a tall order. Moreover, we want to have the best possible content up at all times, but a regularly-updated fanfic section would be hard-pressed to always get its hands on the best of the best.

Putting it another way, do we spend a lot of time trying to launch a fanfic section that needs to struggle to be the best, or do we shoot for something else, something different, to make us more distinct as a site?

And get it approved by Sony, and get it published, and advertised and hyped. But still, you're right, it's not exactly an earth-shatteringly difficult port job, is it? Truth be told, I don't know why many of these translation jobs take so long. RPGs, okay, I can understand why. Text to translate, got to make sure it all fits in the boxes, that it's timed correctly, that it makes sense in context, yadda yadda yadda. But shooters? I suspect it's for marketing reasons as much as anything else. Give the product a few months to accumulate hype, and with any luck, positive pre-reviews of the import, before releasing it onto the US market. They probably could release it faster, but they choose not to. There's a distinction there.

For the record, GameArts is the developer of the Lunar series. Kadokawa Shoten, to my understanding, is a production company. They produce games, movies, cartoons, comics, books and magazines. I'm a little fuzzy on their involvement in the Lunar games, but my suspicion is that they are the ones who produce the animated cutscenes, put out the art books, and so forth, and probably publish the game itself, whereas GameArts is the developer. I think.

Whatever the situation, Kadokawa Shoten is a fairly large production company (500+ employees), with multiple offices throughout Japan, who handle a variety of projects. And yes, that includes both video games and anime. I'm fuzzy on their involvement with Lunar, and would appreciate correction on that point, but they're a production company. I think I've said that once or twice. ;)

I can't find a home site for Majesco, so here's what I know about them. They're a company with offices in the US who have bought up the rights from Sega of America to produce low-cost versions of their older systems, and market them at low, low prices. You can generally find them in places like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and the like, as opposed to traditional video game outlets. They also have the rights to release some titles in the game libraries of these systems, again at cut-rate prices. I assume the deal only extends to first-party Sega titles.

To date, they're shipped the Genesis 3, which is really tiny, and markets for about thirty bucks US. There was a Game Gear rerelease planned during the winter, at a price point of thirty bucks. And after that was to come a revised Saturn shipment, retailing for about forty or fifty bucks a pop, games for about ten to twenty dollars. Not bad, really. I've seen the Genesis 3 with my own eyes, but haven't heard hide nor hair of the other two revamped systems for a few months now. Being unable to locate Majesco at all, it's impossible for me to know if they're even still in business. I hope so, though. I can't argue with affordable rereleases of classic games.

Closing Comments

And lo, another day of mirth and merriment ends. Remember, everyone, only you can prevent forest fires, so put down the flamethrower already. Okay? Okay? Are you listening to me, you insignificant little snot?

Oh, and for all you left-wingers out there, a late cheer of celebration about the Supreme Court of Canada's 8-1 decision late last week. In Canada, a same-sex couple that is married are legally considered spouses, with all that entails. Equal rights just won one, baby. :)

- Big Al