If you play games long enough your bound to have done something stupid at some point. Some kind of dire mis-play in an online game or some stupid decision in a single player one, it happens to the best of us. One of my favorite Braindead Gamer Moments can be found on Game Center CX where Shinya Arino, the host, is playing Bonks Adventure. He enters a bonus stage, jumps off the ledge to the first platform and immediately overshoots it and eats shit, ending the stage and getting nothing for his trouble, hilarious.
That's just a silly mistake though, my personal dumbest gaming moment I feel is far worse because it was influenced by an advert and entirely self inflicted. The picture at the top of this post is an advert for Playstation 1 memory cards. Just in case some zoomer stumbles on this post, the PS1 didn't have an internal memory so if you didn't have a card, you couldn't save your game. You may notice that at the bottom of the image it says "Try beating Final Fantasy VII without it!". This of course is because FF7 is a big ass game and the idea of beating it in one go without a card is unthinkable to most. I however, was quite young and instead of being sold the idea of going out and buying a memory card I instead took it as a challenge. "Fuck you, reverse side of the manual, I'll fukken show you", I thought. So for years I would play Final Fantasy 7 without ever saving. I would sit and play and then at the end of a session I would turn off the PS1 and then start from the beginning every time I came back. What made this even dumber was that I owned 2 fuckin memory cards for my PS1. It wasn't like I didn't have a card and couldn't just give up the idea of finishing in one go, I was just to stupid to realize how long a 3 disc game was and too stubborn to ever give up and so it took me an embarassingly long time to beat Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.
What made this worse was that this mindset extended into other games. Another title that took me an embarassingly long time to finish was Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Even though that DID have internal memory I was so pressed by the challenge at the bottom of that FF7 advert that every time I came back to OoT I would delete my file and start over. I think the furthest I ever got for a long, LONG time was the end of the Forest Temple.
If my memory serves then the tipping point for me breaking this habit was when Final Fantasy 9 came out. I think that was around the time I wised up and though "yeah you right, I can't beat it without one" and started saving like a normal human being. I spent an embarassingly long amount of time not beating many games because I refused to save because I wanted to show a marketing team whos boss.
Ironically, in my adult years I have taken up speedrunning and there are now many games I can finish in one sitting. Hell, even big RPGs like Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn I am now capable of finishing in a single sitting but that doesn't change the fact that child me refusing to use saves was probably the dumbest gaming releated thing I have ever done
First thing I saw when I woke up this morning was announcements for some FF7 mobile games so I'm going to take a moment to talk about what I think of those. There was apparently an announcement for some Yuffie-based DLC for FF7 remake but that's exclusive to PS5 which I don't currently own so it can fuck off. It does seem however if you own FF7R on the PS4 you can get it for PS5 for free which is pretty nice I guess.
The first game that got announced was Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier which is a Final Fantasy......Battle Royale game. In the same vain as Fortnight, PUBG or Knives Out (if that's still even a thing), the usual deal of dropping into a map and shooting at each other with guns until there is only one person or one team left. Only this time it has an FF7 skin wrapped around it. I'm indifferent about this one since Battle Royale is kind of uninteresting to me, the genre lost its appeal pretty quick.
Final Fantasy Ever Crisis on the other hand, looks a lot more interesting. From what I understand it's an episodic, more traditional style of RPG that involves dudes standing in a line and you picking commands from a menu. There isn't much gameplay in the trailer to speak of but from what I can tell it seems that Ever Crisis will cover the whole FF7 universe including things like Crisis Core. Considering that the only things I play on my phone right how are a Hatsune Miku rhythm game and a Mahjong game, having a proper RPG to fiddle with might actually be a welcome addition
There are some people though that seem to be dismissing these games, not because they are battle royale games or episodic games but purely for the reason that they are on Mobile. This makes no sense to me because if anything, Square are one of the only companies that make a least somewhat half decent little distractions. Sure Record Keeper and Brave Exvius aren't the best games in the world and they are full of gatcha bullshit but you could do a lot worse. Let's not forget as well, there are still people, people who will happily look down on Ever Crisis, that still beg for re-releases of Before Crisis which isn't just a mobile game, but a mobile game released on FLIP PHONES.
I'm not holding out for these games to be the next hot ticket, especially not The First Soldier, but I am hoping they will make some nice little distractions while I'm riding the god awful Japanese subways
The Last of Us Part 2 has been delayed and of course, the internet is not happy about it. People are (or from what I can tell on Twitter, were) excited for this game and some users in particular are not taking the news of the delay very well. However as you can probably tell from the title, delays are not the whole story with this, there have been big leaks regarding the story and while I have read them myself, I'm going to write this post without referencing them directly.
Before I get into the real meat of this issue though I'm going to once again touch on the issue of spoilers. While its true that ruining the big twists of any piece of fiction for a new user makes you a bit of a dick head, at the end of the day, spoilers don't really matter do they?
For example, to take a non-TloU example, imagine that you're playing Final Fantasy 7 (PS1) for the first time and someone tells you that Aeris dies. No more details than that, they just run up to you, scream that in your face and run away. If you are the kind of person who, upon hearing that, throws a tantrum and stops playing the game, then I'm sorry but quite frankly you're a little bitch. If anything a spoiler like that should have you asking questions of who, where, why or how and having you pushing on just to see how exactly something like that came to pass. Hell, when I was streaming Resident Evil 7 around the time of its launch, some dude came in my chat and spoiled the game for me. Only his spoiler was lacking in any detail so my reaction was one of more intrigued excitement rather than being upset or angry. I even ASKED my friend for what happens at the end of the FF7 Remake because I had these ideas about the plot and when he explained what happens it sounded so batshit that it just made me want to play the game MORE so I could hurry up and see it for myself .
But the spoilers are only really half the story here when you start to look into just why these details were released in the first place. From what I understand there has been some kind of pay dispute between Naughty Dog and an employee and when the company wouldn't cough up the money he was apparently owed, he coughed up the spoilers to the internet.
A quick google search can get you all manner of articles about the working hours and the working conditions at Naughty Dog and they sound pretty bad. "Crunch" has been a problem within game development for a good while and can have some really negative effects on the people that are being subjected to it. Hell, one quick Google search of "Naughty Dog working conditions" quickly gets you an article that references a tweet from Jonathan Cooper who states
This isn't cool, even a little bit. These people are being worked to the bone and for what? so you can have some grimdark movie-game about a not-zombie zombie apocalypse. Factor these statements in with the apparent reason for the leak and its easy to paint a picture in your head of the Naughty Dog offices being filled with overworked and underpaid staff.
If you're the kind of person who is currently on Twitter throwing a tantrum about <redacted> happening or Druckmann being a "SJC cuck-tard" then you're an idiot that's missing the real problem here. Sure you can dislike the direction of the story or dislike Drukmann and his attitudes (of which there is good reason to, mind you) but what the real focus of all this SHOULD be is the way that, not just Naughty Dog, but studios in general treat their staff during a games development. I think this story breaking off the back of "Gearbox (Borderlands) underpaying staff with promise of bonus based on sales and then not paying the bonuses" should have people getting quite upset.
These are the people that make your fucking games for crying out loud. They put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into these things and they deserved to be compensated for that much work. You can bitch and moan about the story or the delay but without the team behind this stuff you wouldn't have it any way, shape or form in the first place. If you want more content like this that you really enjoy you should at least be making sure that the creative teams and minds behind it aren't dropping dead in the process of trying to get it to you because you know, a dead or hospitalized developer can't make games.
There's word in Japanese, 過労死 (karoshi),that literally means death by overwork, its been a huge problem here since long before I arrived in the country. You HAVE to look after your staff because best case they get mad, leave and spoil your video game and worst case they just fucking die. It's cool that these people have such passion for what they are doing but if we want to keep enjoying the fruits of their labor then we have to make sure that these people at least don't work in literal hell holes.
It's good that you're mad that this shit got leaked, just make sure your anger is being channeled in the right direction.
I'm not usually one for demos. When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind. However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it. Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.
The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision. Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at. I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.
There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat. At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with. He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell. As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two. So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again. The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster. Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character. You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control. So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens.
The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters. It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest. I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to. My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.
Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get. I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.
There's quite a few posts dotted around this blog now about stuff at Universal Studios Japan. I'm not affiliated I swear, they just keep doing video game related stuff and therefore I'm compelled to go and check it out.
Usually I go to USJ for the Halloween events but this time I went out of season to go and check out a limited time Final Fantasy themed roller coaster they had.
The ride has, for now, replaced the Space Fantasy ride and the whole area has been COMPLETELY changed for the event. As you come into the vicinity of the ride you can hear the series main theme played on the park speakers which does a pretty good job of hyping one up for the upcoming excitement.
If you had never heard of Space Fantasy before there's almost no way you'd know it even existed in this space before they changed it for this ride, EVERYTHING has been made over.
For example this used to be a big talking space face that would move around and all sorts of crazy shit and it's been COMPLETELY gutted to make space for this table with Moogles on it decorated with various iconic Final Fantasy weaponry.
Once inside the ride itself its the usual Space Fantasy coaster but you are given a pair of "Crystal Goggles" so that you can navigate your way to Midgar and get back to an airship that's waiting for you. Inside the VR you approach a crystal that has a little picture of Midgar on it and straight away some twat punches it and sends you to the Thunder Plains from FFX. This happens a whole bunch of times and you fly through a bunch of areas from other Final Fantasy games until you land in Midgar and watch Cloud and Sephiroth have an Advent Children fight for a bit. The ride ends with a bunch of Moogles telling you that you did a great job despite the fact that all you did was sit in a chair and get flung around a steel track.
All in all it was a pretty good experience. Nothing out of this world but not bad for a bit of fanwank at a theme park. I actually wanted to ride it a second time but the wait time became pretty massive in the afternoon so I had to skip it. Also there was merchandise, I bought a water bottle with a chocobo on it that was pretty cool but they were expecting people to pay about £25 for a fucking ball pen which is just retarded. Unfortunately it's not a permanent thing and Space Fantasy will make its return before too long but I'm sure once the ride is gone you'll be able to find some footage of it on YouTube or something.
I was going to make this little rant post the day that the trailer hit but I'm glad I held off because the bullshit got worse in the small span of time I waited in order to write this post. Before I go on I just want to clarify that I desperately want this game to not suck, I want it to be good but all the evidence that is being given to me right now is pointing to this remake being full of shit and betrayal.
So first let me post the trailer so you can watch it if you haven't seen it already
Looks pretty exciting right? I mean the good thing is that the visuals are awesome and it's kind of nice too see all the old Duplo charactes from the PS1 game finally being brought to live with a more realistic look. I only really have one complaint about the game visually and that's the choice that they made for Barret. At what point in time between them finishing the adventure on PS1 and restarting it on PS4 did he decide to become a hard core Wesley Snipes impersonator? While it's kind of dumb looking like Wesley Snipes isn't exactly a bad thing so that's nothing more than a minor nitpick.
But there are 2 big things in this trailer that throw up red lights.
The first one is the combat that is shown. No longer do we have the ATB fights from the original and instead we are given this weird Kingdom Hearts-esque combat that's entirely in real time. Now I'm not some kind of prick who thinks that there's something inherently wrong with real time battles but in FF7 I can see the new combat system making a lot of fights piss easy. No longer will you have to carefully manage materia, equipment and limit gauges in order to overcome your foes. No, you'll just be able to fucking dodge everything in real time (I bet there will be some kind of rolling feature) and all the enemies will have either stupid telegraphs that make it easy to predict whats coming or undodgeable screen filling bullshit. I'm sure they'll change the combat to make the already existing fights more challenging but generally speaking action RPGs are piss easy and I'm sure there are plenty of fans that are sad that the old ATB system that they knew and loved has now gone.
The other part of the trailer that set my alarm bells off is right before they start showcasing the combat. Cloud is surrounded by a bunch of guards on a road above some train tracks in the middle of Midgar. Now, if you'll recall back to the original game you can choose to either fight them or run away and after 3 fights or so cloud hears a train horn and makes his escape by jumping on the top of the train.
Now, in the trailer for the remake something weird happens. Cloud winces and the screen gets covered in some light static and he starts to run for the train tracks. I KNOW this isn't the way the game transitions into combat because the first fight they show is from a completely unrelated bit of Midgar and it does eventually cut to the part on the bridge, also the combat in this section is already done with when cloud makes his escape. So what's the big fuckin' deal? Well this small detail points to one possibility and that's that they are changing the story which to me would be unforgivable. I don't mind them making small dialogue changes here and there but the overall plot has to stay the same otherwise this remake is going to become a giant piece of betrayal. FF7s plot may be a little bit silly and nonsensical in some places but that's what makes it FF7 you can't just go changing it now after all these years all willy nilly without upsetting a lot of people.
There are other things to nitpick at too such as the fucking TERRIBLE English voice work. I've not looked to see if there's a version of this trailer with Japanese voices but the English voice actors really sound like they are phoning it in. Also the exploration game play that they show is a little uncomfortably close to Final Fantasy 13 but I think that's just the nature of the area rather than being an indication of the game as a whole.
But here's the reason I'm glad I waited a day before writing
What the actual fuck, go and fuck yourself Square-Enix. Multi-part games are bullshit on their own but there is NO FUCKING WAY this should be in multiple entries. I don't give a flying fuck what the reason is, just release it as a whole, complete game. When I buy an RPG, especially one that's a remake of a PS1 game from 199 fucking 7 I don't expect to have to wait months between key moments in the story. The original was technically speaking in "parts", as in there were 3 discs and those disc changes came at key moments in the story but at least all 3 discs were packed in the fucking box upon purchasing the game.
This is just a cheap, shitty way to milk the fan base for as much money as humanly possible. Of COURSE the hardcore fans are going to buy every single fucking part because it's a PS4 remake of their favourite PS1 game, it's guaranteed profit from people who have been waiting for this shit since that really old PS3 tech demo where they showed the opening in "next gen" graphics.
This would be like someone selling me the PS1 version for like £20 but only giving me the first disc and then making me wait a few months and charge me ANOTHER £20 for the next disc. This isn't going to be some budget game with parts that cost £10 or less, I can almost guarantee that each part is going to be full game price and if it doesn't turn out that way I'll gladly let someone punch me in the face for falsely accusing Square Enix of being money grubbing little cunts.
Well whatever, I have no doubt in my mind that at the very least the Final Fantasy 7 remake will be a good game. The only problem is that it will be so drastically different from the game we played back in the day that I'll be left unimpressed and pissed off. I don't want to play Final Fantasy 7: Kingdom Hearts Combat Edition, I want to play fucking Final Fantasy 7 with fancy new graphics. If you're going to go to all this length to make what is essentially a new fucking game, then just make a new fucking game.
Let's just give it some time and maybe things will get better but OH BOY I FUCKING DOUBT IT
You may think that title is a bit strange but it's something that happens to me quite often and it's a shame because usually the thing I end up hating ends up actually being quite good. The problem is that my stubbornness to not be associate with the legions of twats kicks in and I end up nitpicking every little problem I can find with a given title or series and I convince myself it's shit.
This happened pretty hard with Final Fantasy 7, a game I got when I was quite young and loved the fuck out of it. I'd play it for hours a day, multiple play throughs and even talk about it at length every day for weeks at school with my friends. Then I got my hands on an internet connection and discovered a whole bunch of annoying twats that started to make me hate it.
It was a slow process. First I found all the twats on forums and sites like GameFAQs or I'd see read some cringe worthy fanfiction and have to stay away from the computer for a few days to recover. But I'd still play the game and enjoy it, their shittiness didn't affect the quality of the game after all. But then I stopped playing it and eventually my memories of the game started to fade away and me being me the things I remembered most were the things that I had problems with. Then large groups of twats would come along and brand it "THE GREATEST RPG EVER MADE!" or you'd play a game and there would be some 13 year old boy with XxSephiroth007xX as his username and eventually I'd end up hating it.
Then in 2010 I got over myself I replayed Final Fantasy 7 and.....loved the fuck out of it the same way I always did. It's happened to lots of other things as well such as Kingdom Hearts and Halo with both communities being filled with the largest know-nothing sacks of shit to every curse a keyboard with their greasy hands and while neither of those games are bad there mere mention of it in conversation makes me roll my eyes and sparks thoughts of suicide. Kingdom Hearts fans with their "2Deep4U" shit and Halo fans who will be OUTRAGED if you claim that Halo has always been a mediocre shooter that ruined the genre and the idea of sharing a common interest with these people makes me sick.
It even happens in other fucking mediums too
Attack on Titan, a big popular anime in Japan that seems to have garnered a pretty big western following I think is a show that I've never watched but I fucking HATE IT. It seems like an interesting premise but back when it was fairly new there were a large number of cockrockets on my Facebook feed posting shit like "LOOK AT HOW ADULT IT IS!" with a screenshot of someone being bitten in half.
Violence doesn't make an anime adult, you can't just look at a scene of someone being eaten and claim that's what sets it apart from anime who's target audience is school children. I have a better argument, it's published by fucking Kodansha so OF COURSE it's not adult, it's just shonen trash.
That said, if I watched it I'd probably get a kick out of it because shonen trash does tend to be sort of entertaining in a mindless way where you can just admire the spectacle of some insane shit going down. I can't ever bring myself to actually watch it though because alone I cant justify spending my time like that and with friends I'd just be nitpicking and pissing them all off. So thanks Titan fans, you ruined that show for me forever.
I'm sure one day I'll get over it give it ago but until then there's a lot of things that are being ruined for me by twats.
OK I have some some SICK new prizes available for you to donate for provide by my good buddy. Both prizes are hand painted pictures of awesome video game shit. The first is the painting you see in the heading image. In case anyone isn't familiar with what they are they are looking at, it's the Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2.
This painting is awesome so there's a minimum donation of £5 but I feel that's a small price to pay for the quality of this piece of art.
The next prize is this cool Final Fantasy 7 picture
As cool as it is, it's not quite Pyramid Head levels of awesome and the artist agrees that it's not quite on the same level so this one has no minimum donation..
So, all the prizes and how to be eligible to win them are displayed on the blogs prizes page!
So recently I was killing some time and decided to browse around the app store on my shitty iPhone. Before downloading some anime game about girls running races with each other I noticed that Final Fantasy 7 had been made available for download. As I was swiping through the screen shots I found this.
Since I live in Japan the information came up in Japanese but I'll tell you what it says. It says that on this version of the game you can turn off the encounters and raise your stats to maximum in order to make it easy to "play". Now I'm also pretty sure this feature is available on the Steam PC version too and I may have ranted about it then but I don't remember so I'm going to go off on one again just to make sure.
Why is this even a feature? What the fuck is even the point of playing a game if you are going to strive to take out all the "game" aspect of it. Part of the reason FF7 is so good was because combat was fun and levelling up your characters and materia was a satisfying experience. Sure, the story was cool as well but it wasn't JUST the story that made it a PS1 classic, it was the whole damn package. If you're just going to cut a huge part of the games content just because you're lazy/shit then what's the fucking point?
See, we are playing fucking video GAMES here. That means that there is some element of skill involved weather its platforming, solving puzzles, precise movements or accuracy or in this case, managing a team of adventurers so that they are able to cope with the challenges that the story presents them.
Imagine if I was playing Mario and I could opt to turn off all the pits and enemies and just run to the end of the game for the "experience" of playing it? It would be the most boring, retarded bullshit and anyone who actually cares about games would laugh you out of the fucking room. If you are so stubbornly unwilling to get good at the GAME aspect of the video GAME then maybe you should just fuck off.
But wait, I hear an idiot somewhere on the internet cry "what if I just want to experience the story! I should be allowed to!" To which I say go and fuck yourself up the ass with a spiky baseball bat. These are games and if you aren't willing to put in the time or effort to gather enough skill in order to play it through then you shouldn't be playing at all. If you want to experience a story go and read a book or watch a fucking movie, you aren't entitled to see the ending to FF7 just because it's a popular game that you haven't beaten due to being shit.
If a game wants to include an easy mode so that the less skilled members of the gaming community can play through their game and feel good about it, that's cool. Even on an easy setting there is still the fact that you have to play the fucking game and get at least somewhat good in order to make progress but this is just retarded. Doing shit like this just dumbs down the medium but that is another post for another time.
If you want to play Final Fantasy 7, play fucking Final Fantasy 7 and spend the 10 minutes required to learn how materia works in order to beat the game. It's a fucking easy game, even someone COMPLETELY new to gaming could see the ending. If you want to experience a story in a game, go and google some good visual novels I'm sure picking from a list of A, B or C choices won't be too taxing for you. Then again, if you're the kind of person who needs to max stats and turn off combat then I'm not even sure that you could find the button to progress the text.
So it's finally over, I played Final Fantasy 7 for 24 hours and surprisingly made a lot less progress than I thought I would. Despite that, the marathon was a great success and I have to give a great amount of thanks to everyone who joined in and supported the stream, you guys are awesome.
First I'll say a couple of words about the marathon itself. Over a 24 hour period you guys managed to donate a total of £315 to the Alzheimer's Society so congratulations to you guys for pulling off something that awesome. As much as I enjoy playing these games, the fact that you guys are willing to take part in the charity side of things and donate make it all so worth it, so once again thank you so much. It was a lot of fun but incredibly hard during the final few hours and I probably wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for the continued support of the fans and the dudes with me in the room. There's actually a lot of bullshit in Final Fantasy 7 that I'd forgotten about and the pace of the game is actually a lot slower than I remember. As enjoyable as it is I think there is a lot of nostalgia that comes into play when people give it such high praise.
This in turn got me thinking about the remake that was announced during the last E3. There's a lot of weird stuff in Final Fantasy 7 that I can't see translating very well to a full HD release with fancy new graphics. The biggest example of this off the top of my head is the part in disc 2 where Cloud pulls a Sonic the Hedgehog and does a loop the loop through a tunnel to reach a certain part of a dungeon. I just can't see how that scene would look with today's fancy realistic graphics and this is just one of the more extreme examples. There are plenty of parts in that game that I tried to envision in PS4 mode that would just be weird and after a while the idea of a remake started to worry me.
Still, we should kind of know what to expect since we had Advent Children and Crisis Core give us a vague idea of what the world of FF7 looks like on modern hardware. Square have a very hard line to walk between making fans cream their pants or making them scream betrayal at the top of their lungs but only time will tell which side of this fence we will be on.
Final Fantasy 7, despite all the silliness that goes down, is a great game and if there are any RPG fans that have somehow not played it then I fully recommend it. Maybe play it in more manageable chunks than 24 hours but it's a damn good game and it's well deserving of the following that it has. Just don't take it so seriously or else you run the risk of getting pissed off with it and putting it down. Take everything with a pinch of salt and just enjoy the rich world and great combat and you're in for a good time.
So my old system for prizes was shit and confusing, so I changed it. Also my prizes were shit, so I removed em and added a new one!
So, instead of a complicated system of drawing raffle tickets or whatever, you just donate a minimum value and wait for the draw date to happen. Then I contact you so we can set up how you receive the prize and then you get it. Easy, huh?
Also my prizes were a bunch of crap so I removed them all and made the PC Steam version of Final Fantasy 7 available in conjunction with the FF7 marathon happening on August 8th. You can start donating for the prize RIGHT NOW and the winner will be drawn on the 10th. There is no minimum value so you could donate £1 and you'd be eligible to win, just write "Prize 1" or "FF7 on Steam Prize" in your donation comment so I know that's what your donating for.
More prizes and giveaways will be done in the future so watch this page
So a while back £100 was donated in order for me to perform a 24 hour marathon of Final Fantasy 7 so this is a short post to let you all know when it's going to go down.
The date is set at the 8th of August for the time being. My schedule is a little bit up in the air but unless I post a change to this date on either Facebook or Twitter it's going to go down on that day. I'm not setting an exact start time as I'll just start streaming as soon as I wake up.
I'll be offering a prize for anyone who donates during the marathon so please be sure to check it out at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis and be sure to tell all your friends!
A few days ago I made a post about how I didn't really give two shits about E3 2015 and that the magic of the show had kind of been lost. If there is a God he read that post and then decided to smack me down with some of the best announcements I've heard in gaming for a long long time.
At first I thought I was on the right track when the only thing I had caught wind of was Fallout 4. I understand there are a lot of people who enjoy those games but I'm not a huge fan of modern Fallout but that's another post for another time. After that though, it was just heavy hit after heavy hit after HEAVY HIT!
Doom, South Park: Fractured But Whole, Shenmue 3 kickstarter (that has already met the goal), Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The Last Guardian are just a few to name off the top of my head and I'm sure the show will deliver more and more awesomeness soon. Hell, Shenmue 3 alone was enough excitement to have me bouncing up and down like a 10 year old at Christmas but along side all this other stuff it's almost too much to contain.
This is all news I've had given to me by friends watching the streams and keeping up with the news as it hits while I'm at work so I've not had a chance to start digging through all the stuff yet. I'm sure that once I start looking through there will be some new IP for me to get excited over too so this weekend is going to be very exciting.
The only way E3 could get more exciting at this point would be if someone announced Half Life 3 or some shit. Fingers crossed for more gaming greatness.
OK! I've been making some good progress on FF6 so it's about time to add some new Final Fantasy themed donation incentives to the blog!
The first isn't entirely new but it's pretty recent and that's a 24 hour session of Final Fantasy 7. This will be available until a week after I finish Final Fantasy 6 so if you want to see that get your donations in ASAP. I promise that this time I won't be doing any drinking (unless it's an energy drink) during the Stream so we don't have to worry about me getting drunk and falling asleep again like I did with Euro Truck.
The second is for me to go one entire disc of Final Fantasy 8 and only being allowed to say nice things about it. I'm sorry FF8 fans, but I fucking hate that game and I could spend a long LOOONG time ragging on it. However, someone suggested to me that I should offer this as an incentive because 1. Actual fans of the game might get a kick out of hearing me sing it's praises and 2. It would hurt my soul. The people who suggest incentives to me are rather sadistic.
The third incentive is a bit hefty at a total of £500 raised to get it but I think it's easily worth that price after doing some research. I'm referring to a no junction run of Final Fantasy 8 which is a particularly difficult type of challenge for that game. In case you don't know what I mean, in FF8 you can increase your stats by junctioning spells to them. Considering the game has monsters that scale in level with you Junctioning is pretty important. No Junction is exactly what it says on the tin, I'm not allowed to do that at all. After reading a quick guide on gamefaqs to see if it was even possible, it seems that the game is stupidly hard and the final boss is ALMOST impossible. If you ever needed an excuse to prolong my suffering, then donate for that.
The final incentive moves away from FF8 and goes into FF10 territory with No Yojimbo. I promised when this started that I would go after secret bosses and such when playing these games. In FF10 this includes a number of very challenging fights known as the Dark Aeons and when you kill them you have to content with the games toughest enemy, Penance. Yojimbo is one of the summon creatures in FF10 but has a weird gimmick where the attack he uses is based on how much you pay him. One of his attacks, called Zanmato, instantly kills any enemy in the game including Dark Aeons and Penance. A cheap incentive of £100 in order to disallow me from being a cheap bitch.
If you wish to donate for these or any of the other incentives found on the right hand side of the page, please go do it at this link
Just so you know, none of the money donated comes anywhere near me and it goes directly to the charity. BT also don't take any commission on donations so if you donate £10 then £10 will go to the Alzheimer's Society.
Thanks to everyone who have donated so far for supporting me, this website and the Alzheimer's Society, let's keep going!
Final Fantasy 7 just hit steam recently and I don't really understand why since there was already a PC release and you've been able to download it for ages on PSN and whatnot, but it seems to be selling pretty well so what do I know?
Anyway, since I'm doing a stream of every Final Fantasy game I own, I thought I'd check out the Steam version because if I bought it on PC it might save me a trip to my basement to dig out my old PS1 discs.
While reading the description of the features in the game I discovered something that made me rather upset. It wasn't achievements, since it has given a few people who haven't played the game in years an excuse to give it another go. It wasn't the cloud saves since that's a fine idea, and it wasn't the optimisation for PC because making things work better is always a good thing.
It was the fucking character booster, a feature built into the game to give the player free health, mana and money. Now you may be wondering why this irritates me so much, surely I don't have a problem with people wanting to experience the story of Final Fantasy 7, right?
Well you are right, I don't have a problem with people wanting to experience the story, but how much of a lazy fuck do you have to be to break your characters to the point where the act of playing the VIDEO GAME is pointless. It's really sad that we have gotten to the point where people who play games feel that they don't have to put in some degree of effort to get to the end. Final Fantasy 7 isn't a book or a movie where you can just kick back and let things happen, it's a video game, where some degree of effort is required for you to reach the ending.
What's worse is that Final Fantasy 7 isn't even a hard game. It's designed so that as long as you don't run from every fight you get in, generally speaking there isn't an encounter that you would have a lot of trouble with. Making smart choices in combat is part of the game and just because certain people are idiots who can't make common sense choices regarding battle decisions and materia setups doesn't mean that we have to stoop to their level just so they can see the fucking plot. It's not like Final Fantasy 7 is some kind of great epic story that everyone must see before they die, so I don't see why they should just have it given to them on a silver platter.
If you're going to play a video game, put some fucking time and effort into it. Almost every game released since the last generation has been super easy and they are only getting easier thanks to whiny idiots who can't be bothered to work out basic game mechanics and feel entitled to an ending. Back in my day if you couldn't beat a game it was a case of "tough shit, get good" but now it's all "aww, well you could always pay for it" or "here, have a feature that will do everything for you". It's pathetic and it's the reason why fun, challenging games are dying.
So in short, take your character booster and fuck right off.
