Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. Buying books at airports is expensive. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. Don't say we didn't warn you.

As I've been reminding you as much as I can, the Double Agent column is hosting a "Boost AK's Ego" contest. To review, the rules say this: boost AK's ego by sending in pictures of either him or someone with an incredible likeness (Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Matt Van Der Beek, etc) doing cool things. Or don't. You don't have to play if you don't want to. In fact, there's really no point to this contest, since my ego is pretty massive already, as you've undoubtedly noticed. But we'll do it anyway. At any rate, I'll be posting stuff tomorrow, so be sure you've sent in your entry!

This is a pretty good idea, UFOKidd. It's a pretty random example, but a good idea. And why limit it to Capcom? I'd like to see Crono meet Cloud, and they could ram each other with their spiky hair and see who has the spikiest hair. What a game that would be!

Yeah, weapons upgrading is the wave of the future. I think it's very likely Chrono Cross will use either weapons upgrading or everyone will have one weapon for the entire game. The latter would kinda suck, so let's hope for the former or something equall acceptable.

Lucky Dan looks very cool. Very, very, cool. I mean, he's a scarecrow. How much cooler can a character get? Everyone knows scarecrows are the pinnacle of evolution, above even koala bears. Cait Sith was weird too, I'll agree with you. But was he as weird as the fat chocobo in FF4?

Pilcrow, I wasn't going to post your letter because the whole Lucky Dan thing is pretty weird, you know? But then you had that brilliant realization... GIA: GILGAMESH IS AWESOME! That rules! Why hadn't someone thought of this before? Pilcrow, I'm going to give you a special prize.

Happy birthday lemmer! In fact, I have $20 right here, JUST for you! Wait! Look! It's Superman! And he's panhandling! Sorry lemmer, but I'm afaid I'm going to have to give this $20 to Superman. He has a cooler outfit.

I wonder what Superman will do with the money...

I'm sure that everyone respects Ian. YOU'D BETTER!! But if anyone were to try impersonating him, it would be ineffective, as all of Ian's letters are encoded with the newest advances in cryptology, and are also dabbed with just a small amount of his favorite perfume.

Uhoh... a serious letter. This means I'll have to give a serious answer. What a bummer.

There are two big reasons we go with the Quicktime Sorenson encoding. One, it has pretty good compression and stuff. Better quality at a smaller size. The more prominent reason, though, is that Glick does our movie encoding and he won't touch anything that's not Apple. At E3 he would get into fistfights for the Mac computers in the media room. It was messy, since Glick is as effective a warrior as Melissa Joan Heart.

In Glick's defense, though, it is a pretty good format and stuff. We would like to post in multiple formats, but it really isn't practical because of storage space issues. The issue is that movies use a lot that we don't really want to fill up. Sorry, dude. If we come up with a better solution, we'll go for it. As a big Unix fan myself, I feel your pain.

Absolutely. Even though it's a funny thought. I'd like to see the little guy come out in leather, spiked green hair, and the entire text of War and Peace tatooed on his body. And don't forget the pierced eyebrow.

Closing Comments

I sometimes forget to change these things. Oops.

-Andrew Kaufmann