Final Fantasy VII: Cutscenes

In my youth I was a Nintendo kid. We had a SNES and then a Nintendo 64 in my household and I don't recall even thinking once about getting a PlayStation. As such, when Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997 I didn't have a clue about it and certainly never played it. It wasn't until Josh joined the group of people living in Comfy Prime (and brought his PS with him) that I had a chance to play it at all. And by that point Final Fantasy VIII had come out and I'd watched many people playing that game. I only played FFVII to differentiate myself from everyone else who was playing FFVIII.

By this point I'd heard such good things about the graphics in FFVII but I remember being pretty unimpressed with them. People who had played it at launch would have been comparing it to the 16 bit era FFVI at best. I was comparing it to FFVIII and it wasn't spectacular at all. It probably didn't help that our collection of televisions was pretty low grade since we were poor students and all. At any rate, my memory of FFVII's graphics was that they distinctly mediocre.

When I hit the first FMV cutscene the other day on my PSP I was blown away. The PSP has a pretty high resolution screen for a portable device which I'm sure helps but I'm now in a position to compare this to FFVI. A remade PS version of FFVI mind you, but one that tried very hard to keep the 16 bit look and feel. I am now very impressed with the FFVII graphics. Combat and stuff is pretty good, but this FMV was awesome. I guess this sort of thing is why the game was 1.3G, eh?



I love how Da Fool and Ubu jump into the back of a pick-up!

Advanced Civilization

Advanced Civilization is one of those classic hardcore board games that a lot of people I know sometimes talk about but no one ever plays. The game takes many hours to play, requires many people, and has some pretty punishing mechanics to it. Personally I believe I've only played once, back in University, and I was actually playing on a team with Snuggles. One of us (I forget who) had to leave after a couple hours so we teamed up to start with the plan of cutting down to one person when they had to leave. 10 hours later we were both still playing. I don't remember if we won or not but I know we did very good despite neither of us having played before. Two heads may be better than one! It was long, but very fun.

Robb mentioned earlier this week that he was considering playing Advanced Civ at WBC this year. Now, I find WBC time is way too valuable to spend 8 consecutive hours playing something. Especially since all the Advanced Civ games start at 9 in the morning! I have to think I'd be better off sleeping in until 11 and playing three other games instead. That said, I would like to play the game again since I did like it. WBC may be the only chance I have since the odds of finding 7 other people who want to play a 10 hour game at the same time seem pretty darn slim...

Or they did until I read the WBC recap from this year's Advanced Civ event today. It turns out there's a website up that handles running games of Advanced Civ similar to Diplomacy judges. You get 2 or 3 days per move and the game takes about 4 months to resolve. It feels like it should be easier to get people willing to check a website for 10 minutes a couple times a week for a few months than it is to get someone to spend a whole day doing something. Especially with how many of my old gamer friends have children now. Mistakes are made, but we can work around that.

So, the question is, is anyone interested in giving this site a spin? I figure I'll probably join a public game later this week if there isn't enough interest to get a game going from people I know. Or maybe I'll do both...

WBC Event Recaps

The event recaps for this year's World Boarding Championships are almost online. By this I mean that they are actually up on the website but they haven't been announced as up and aren't linked to. Of course any hacker who cares can figure out where they are... Each year they just increment the number at the end of the webpage name and it seems the 12 one is up. This is always a happy time for me since I love reading all the event recaps. Some of them I read to see if I get mentioned in the recap. Some I read to see how the event ran to know if I should try it in a future year. Some I read even though I don't care about the game at all because I just like reading them.

In 2011 there were five events that didn't submit a recap. There's a punishment for not getting one in on time and that's a reduction in status for the event itself. A top tier event get bumped down to a potential trial. A potential trial gets kicked off the trial ballot for a whole year. This year there were three events that didn't submit a recap. That makes me sad in general but these ones in particular make me really sad since they include two events I've won in the past and a third I was interested in playing now that the game is on Yucata. Hawaii has been kicked out for a year while both Puerto Rico and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation will have to be voted back in as trials.

I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand I've never been a GM so I'm in no real position to complain that they aren't writing recaps. On the other hand if I'd known the Lord of the Rings GM wasn't going to submit a recap I would have written one myself to let it have a full compliment of plaques next year. It feels like the people getting punished here aren't the ones who slacked off for whatever reason but the people who do well in that specific game. But as Sceadeau pointed out on Facebook yesterday you can't have any punishment against the GMs specifically or you'll really deter people from volunteering to GM and that's the last thing you want to do. I'm worried enough that I'd do a bad job GMing and forget to do something... If you threaten me with a ban from WBC if I do a bad job then there's no way I'd do it. And if there's no punishment at all then way more than 3 reports would get skipped each year. Presumably people choose to GM games they care about in some way so the status quo does seem like a reasonable way to approach things.

I just wish there was a way to prod these things along. Because I don't want popular games to get removed and because I want to be able to read about all the events each year. And because I want to win a Lord of the Rings shield!

Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition

I got a message out of the blue from one of my WBC friends, Sceadeau, asking if I happened to play Blood Bowl. I haven't in quite some time, but back one summer at Comfy Prime we had a board in use probably 20 hours of every day. Man, those were the days. We didn't get into the whole Games Workshop idea where you had to buy and paint your miniatures before you could play... We used numbered pieces of paper, the junky minis that came with the game, and the pewter pieces from my copy of Robo Rally and had a grand time of it. I bought the PC game when it came out in 2009 and had fun playing it but I found it lagged too much on my laptop and ultimately got distracted by other games. Probably WoW given the year.

Apparently they've been coming out with new versions of the PC game with improvements and new teams. A new version recently came out which brought the number of playable teams to 23. I took a quick look and discovered that halflings are one of the teams added in since I last played. Here's the very first sentence under their 'strengths' on the webpage...

"You’re going to end up losing a few Halflings regardless of what you do,"

Oh man, now that brings back memories. I lost more than my fair share of halflings back in our league. They're so terrible! I can remember that they were so cheap to replace that I'd retire guys if they were just going to miss the next game. No sense playing with only 15 people next time when I can turn him into an assistant coach and throw another 30k at a new dude instead! I loved playing halflings partially because they were truly terrible and partially because you got to do some very silly things. I can remember one time I stopped someone from scoring (Josh's maybe?) by chucking a halfling at the ball carrier who was on the sidelines and out of running range of my team. Direct hit! The ball bounced into the stands where they threw it down the field in my direction.

One of my guys got an early agility up and he became my go-to scorer. Get him the ball, get him beside a tree-man, and chuck him down towards the end zone. He broke his neck on one such play when he failed to land properly and ended up only having one strength. He sure was terrible!

It turns out the game is/was on sale on Steam for the black friday/cyber monday junk, but they also were offering the new version for $10 to anyone who bought an older version. Sceadeau is putting together a league of some kind and I figure I can go be terrible there for old time's sake. So I upgraded to the new version and played a game against the computer last night to see how things worked... Turns out halflings are still terrible! The AI didn't seem great and still ended up knocking me down below a starting roster by the last kick-off of the game. They were also down to only 10 guys but that's because they only started with 11! I had the full 16! Lots of little speed bumps all over the place.

Trees are still awesome, but it looks like wood elves can buy treemen also. Which means they pretty much have to be better than halflings at pretty much every aspect of the game. Except being expendable I guess... But I don't know that I want to be good... I want to be awesome! And nothing says awesome like using your teammates as projectile weapons!

If anyone is interested in joining in let me know.

Dancing With The Stars Finale

Tonight will have the final competition episode for this season of Dancing With The Stars. This season was special in that they brought back 13 stars from previous seasons to have an all-star season. Lots of past champions and such. One returning star in particular has been awesome this season and I found myself wanting to re-watch all her dances and link them on facebook. But since I'm probably going to want to watch them again later it would be useful to have them all in one place. So while this is pretty off topic for a gaming blog, I'm going to stick them all in here anyway.

Watching DWTS has taken away a fair amount of gaming time in recent weeks and Robb was confused as to why I'd choose to watching dancing over playing League of Legends. I donno. I really like precise, in sync movements. I don't get when the judges talk about the emotional connections or whatever. I think that's the Vulcanian in me. It's the sort of thing I like to imagine I could do myself someday if not for the whole needing a second person thing which just doesn't seem very likely, does it?

At any rate, Shawn Johnson is simply awesome. After the week 3 dance her pro partner was visibly exhausted from the dance and she didn't look winded at all. She hits every single step precisely and they're just able to go so high energy. Last week she finally got tired after an incredible bhangra dance. I really hope she wins tonight... I don't go crazy and only vote with one Facebook account so I'm not really doing all I could to help her win, but I hope she does anyway.

And now... Youtube videos! Try not to get as bitter about Len's scores and comments as I do...

Final Fantasy VII: Versions and Plans

Next up in my marathon is the best selling game in the series: Final Fantasy VII. I'd remembered hearing something about a recent PC re-release of this game so I figured I should go looking for information on what may have changed to see what version I wanted to try playing.

It turns out there have been surprisingly few version of FFVII over the years. Considering how many versions keep popping up of FFIV, for example, I would have thought there'd be more FFVII running around. I guess FFVII is the first game of the PlayStation era and therefore the original version was playable in more places than the old ones thanks to the backwards compatibility of the PS2/PSP/PS3. As best I can tell there have only really been 2 relevant releases. PSX and PC. The game changed a little between the initial Japanese release and the subsequent NA port, and a little again when the NA version was ported back to Japan, but they're essentially the same game. It was also released on the PS Network for PSP and PS3 but that is also a straight port. The PC version apparently was built off of an old branch of the PSX code and as a result ended up a little different. And by different I mostly mean incredibly buggy. But because it was on PC it was relatively easily modded. The new PC release a couple months ago is essentially just the old PC version with the better mods applied which fixed bugs. And some easy to obtain achievements.

The new PC version doesn't sound like it's really any different from the old PSX version. As such, it's really not worth my while to pick it up. But for someone who wants to play the game in one location the new PC version sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to go. At any rate, I still want to play on the bus so I decided download the PSN version on my PSP instead of getting my PSX copy back from Andrew. I have to go through the hassle to set my router up each time I want to download a game on the PSP so I decided to buy FFVII and FFVIII at the same time. I went to start the downloads and ran into a bit of a problem... My PSP came with a 1G memory stick. FFVII is 1.3G and FFVIII is 1.8G! Those are huge! As Andrew pointed out, it's these sizes that took the Final Fantasy series away from Nintendo. The N64 could apparently hold 64M on a cartridge... Assuming this download is the same size as the initial game it would have taken 21 of those to hold the game. Yikes!

So I ended up having to go buy a new memory stick. It doesn't seem like they're really sold much anymore but I found a 4G one at The Source. I wanted a bigger one but if I need to offload games from the stick to my laptop in the future (or even just buy another 4G stick) it won't be the end of the world.

Now that I have the game the question is do I want to do anything wacky... Apparently the game is considered to be pretty darn easy and there are a lot of people coming up with all kinds of crazy challenges. For example, single character, initial equipment, no materia, no accessories, no running from fights. SCIENMNANE for short. The fact that this is even possible should be a clue as to how easy the game is when you use three characters, gear, and abilities!

On the other hand I've only played this game twice. The first time I did pretty much everything. I killed Sephiroth entirely with morph damage! The second time, during my first FF marathon, I think I just plowed through to the end fast. But while I remember a bit about the plot and mechanics I don't feel like I know the game very well. Not like FFIV or FFVI where I could rattle off pretty much the entire game if I had to. So I think I'm just going to play the game normally, be overpowered, and smash things. And then complain about how easy it is later.

Oh, and I'm going to date Yuffie this time. Honest!

Final Fantasy VI: Conclusions

Yesterday on the bus in to work I made my way to the end of Kefka's crazy tower and put an end to his insanity. He was pretty easy. One of his four stages managed to kill off one of my characters, but only because of bad timing on my part. I had entered in the command which killed off the stage and then he attacked 10 times and killed Terra before it resolved. I didn't get a change to cast life on her.

I remember talking with James about this game many years ago and he was annoyed that you couldn't solo Kefka. One of the stages finishes off with an instant death attack that kept trying to resolve even if you dodged it. You could become completely invincible but would get stuck in an infinite loop as the boss stage would use it's death attack, get dodged, and then repeat. Turns out in the PSX version they changed the way it worked. He only tried to use it twice before giving up. Now, I certainly wasn't invincible and pretty much just got lucky that Setzer dodged it twice.

I was a little sad at how easy pretty much everything was, actually. Some of the fights right at the start of the ruined world were a little rough but I scaled much better than the boss fights did. I didn't even twink out very hard at all. I didn't switch in espers right before leveling to make sure I got optimal stat ups. I didn't grind out extra levels. I didn't even bother finishing off the paladin shield. Even worse, I didn't bother taking it off... Setzer kicked the snot out of Kefka even with a cursed shield on. My mages were casting flare or meteor instead of ultima because I took the ragnarok sword and didn't finish the paladin shield. In short, I could have been a lot more powerful. I'm a little sad that there was nothing to do that needed such an absurd amount of power.

I was feeling a lot of ennui with regards to finishing the game. It took about two and a half months to get done which is pretty comparable to what it took to grind out Final Fantasy IV. Don't get me wrong, I think both games are incredible even after all these years. I think the problem is just that I've played them so many times there really wasn't any exploring left to do and that's one of the great end game features of these games. FFVI in particular has so many little cutscenes you can find depending on who you have in your current party. Did you know Shadow is actually Relm's father? Wandering around with different party compositions was a ton of fun back in the day. But now? I didn't really have a great desire to watch Gau interact with his father again.

That said, this game has my favourite villain from any game. And thinking about it more, I think it actually has my top three player characters as well. Setzer, Locke, and Celes are all awesome in their own ways. I like me some Kimarhi, don't get me wrong, but I don't think any character in any game passes any of those three.

I love the battle system. Adding in something as simple as the 'pass' command which lets the active character skip their turn is such a huge improvement. I still think I prefer the more tactical system of FFX but as far as the ATB system used from IV through IX goes, this is a pretty good iteration.

The leveling system is pretty great, too. I like how just playing the game normally will get you plenty of spells and stat ups but that you can really twink out if you want. All that's really missing is a reason to twink out. An emerald weapon to go beat up, that kind of thing.

The music is fantastic. The graphics are state of the art for the SNES. You can really tell that this is a later generation SNES game and that Square learned from making FFIV and FFV. The sound in the PSX port was tinny which was annoying, but the original console game didn't suffer from that flaw at all.

Going into this whole marathon I was pretty sure FFIV was going to stay on the top of my heap. If anything was going to challenge it for supremacy I was thinking it might be X or VIII. But no... FFVI is the new king. The characters, character development, plot, gameplay, music... It's all here. This game is the complete package.

Final Fantasy VI: Kefka

Kefka is the big bad guy at the end of Final Fantasy VI, and he's my favourite villain from pretty much any source. Game, movie, book... No one else is as awesome, insane, or just plain evil. I really like the way Kefka works into the story of the game pretty much the entire time which is fairly different compared to most other games in the series.

Take FFIV, for example. The end boss of that game is Zeromus, a fellow you only learn exists shortly before the end of the game. For most of the game you're led to believe that Golbez is the prime evil but then it turns out he's actually your brother and has been mind controlled. Great twist and all, but it really doesn't leave much time for Zeromus to come into his own.

In FFV you do learn of the end boss pretty early into the game but you actually don't have much reason to hate the guy. X-Death was imprisoned by your father and I'm sure he was quite evil back then. But now? He's just trying to break out of jail, power up, and get some revenge. Heck, frame it a little differently and that actually sounds like the back story for a good guy.

In FFIII the end boss is just a cloud. It is pretty scary that there's this big cloud out there that wants to devour the universe and clearly you want to go stop it... But can you really call it evil? It's just doing what a giant void cloud does. And even then, it doesn't feature much, if at all, in the plot. It's kinda pulling the strings in the background but mostly it's just there.

Being present throughout the game, it turns out, is actually important for people. You can see this from the first couple World of Warcraft expansions. The initial game had no end boss to speak of. Kill some things, get some loot, wait for new dungeons to come out. Tons of fun, but no big bad guy to hate. The first expansion brought Illidan out as the big bad guy and he featured in the opening video as a guy you really wanted to go kill. And then he promptly disappeared from most of the game and most people never saw him again. But in the second expansion the Lich King was featured prominently in lots of leveling quests. At one point you even inadvertently help him conquer a tribe of trolls and get control of a zone. You really wanted to go beat him up!

FFVI really brings this angle out of Kefka. He keeps showing up in the plot during the events of the first world. You don't think he's the big bad guy at the time, but he's still kicking around and doing things that make you hate him. Square still gets to pull out their big twist when Kefka kills his emperor, destroys the world, and becomes a god. But because it's not the introduction of a new character as the god but the transformation of an existing character I feel it has more power. And oh, what an existing character...

Kefka starts out appearing like the comic relief. He has corny music, he dresses funny, and he's egotistical to the extreme. He's marching through the desert and makes his lackeys dust the sand off of his boots! Then he goes full on evil when he goes behind Leo's back and poisons the entire population of Doma. And that laugh... MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! After all, nothing can beat the sweet music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison...

Kefka kills off one of the other Empire generals, Leo. This shortly after you start to learn more about Leo and start liking him. He seems like a good guy, and then Kefka kills him on you. Kefka also does a decent job of turning the party against Celes by talking her up as a spy instead of a defector. It's things like these that make you really hate Kefka. I really liked Locke and Celes together and it angered me when Kefka drove a wedge between them!

Kefka fights the party over and over, but it actually makes sense that he's a rough but beatable fight each time. He keeps gaining power as the story progresses by killing more and more espers and absorbing their powers. (Which is actually how the player characters progress as well. Espers teach spells and give stat ups on leveling.) Eventually Kefka gets control of the goddess statues that created all magic and uses their power to become a god, at which point you stop fighting him. Then you have to live in a world he's destroyed. Kefka isn't someone you casually run into anymore but you're constantly faced with the consequences of his actions.

Kefka has tons of great lines, he's constantly in your face, and he's absolutely both insane and evil. And his path to power is actually quite believable given the game world. It's for these reasons I think he's the most awesome villain in any story.

And his music is great too... Check out both his normal theme music and his epic final boss battle music!