Final Fantasy VIII: The Re-Re-Revenge
By Richie - December 17, 2013
So its back again a special Remuxed HD version on Steam. This will be the 3rd time I have "Bought" the game: Way back in the heady days of 1999 I went into a Virgin Megastore, I walked past the new fangled DVD's, muttered under my breath, "As if these will catch on". I carried on through the Videos, the VHS's the plethora of massive series Box Sets. I made my way to the escalator and Up to the CD's, rows upon rows of CD's, determining what area was what genre by the clothing of the figures flicking through them. Again another escalator, walking through the "Specialist" music section, folk, classical and Pan Pipes. To the darkened corner of the "Games Area" The most acne ridden of all the Virgin Megastore's clerks, reside here, disgruntled yet proud, with the word Virgin aptly stamped across their chest. There I saw FFVIII for the PC. Yes PC, and I genuinely bought it for the PC. My beloved PS1 had packed in no more than a few months beforehand actually whilst playing FFVII. This was my first foray into PC mainstream gaming. 180 hours later, 80 of which were undoubtedly spent playing the card game, that fucking song is ingrained on my soul, its written on my DNA.
Unfortunately due to me being a dick, and spending my life playing the card game, I never completed the gamer itself. I, in fact, lost the game file tragically in the great hard drive crash of 2000, a sorrowful instance, on a par with certain other Painful moments in gaming.
Then in a wonderful show of affection a few years later, the PS1 version was bought for me by a rag-tag bunch of explorers AKA "the Hetro 7" and to which I was finally able to complete the game and ignored the card game.
However I did break it a little, there is a bit where Rinoa Fucks off, and you can level your doods to astronomical levels, and essentially when she gets back, she is like level 27 where everyone else is capped at 100 which makes her defunct and useless even with an OP Limit break.
And now it's back, back in my life. I have dicked about with it enough, to realist 3 things:
The character models have not been improved
The pre-rendered backgrounds are very dated and pixelly.
The music is still midi!
I mean a re-release could be given a bit a love, a wee bit of prettying up, and the music could have easily been replaced with the MP3's from the soundtrack.
So far the only improvements I can see is the resolution on the models has been upped making them more obvious against the archaic backgrounds. And the FMV's have been upped a bit too, still quite jarring transitions though...
Love and Edea and Cid, do it Angelo style
Richie X
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