The director of Final Fantasy 8 has shot down hopes that the next numbered Final Fantasy might see a remake once the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy comes to its conclusion. The reason? Simply that it’s a lot of damn work.
]]>The standard edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator costs £59, but like me trying to show my parents their house from a Airbus A320neo, we can go lower. A lot lower, as it turns out. Here’s how you can play (but not own) what’s looking to be the first game of the next, next, next-generation for as low as £1. And you get over 200 other games with it as well.
]]>[Warning: this article must be read entirely in a comedy cowboy voice]
Howdy pardner. Spittoon? Take it, we got a whole crate of them right here. Every god-fearing outlaw needs a good spittoon at their heels, as my grandmammy used to say. Hoo-wee, what a women. She was known to enjoy a strong snifter of list article, you know. Everyone who visited got a spittoon and a list article. And vidyagames be damned if I ain’t the same obliging sort as my grammy, yes sir. So here you go, friend. In anticipation of that there Desperados III, here are the 9 most desperate cowboys, cowgals, and cowbots in PC gaming. Yeehaw, I say, yee and haw.
]]>And with that we are another year closer to the eagerly anticipated cooling of all matter. You may have read that the concept of weeks, months and years is the culmination of humanity’s collective understanding of a complicated astronomical pattern. It's an interesting take. However, the correct hypothesis was posited by your stoner housemate Jed from university. “Time is, like, a construct,” he said, with the deep wisdom and clarity only three tins of San Miguel can deliver. “The Chinese have a totally different calendar, y’know. Do you want to order takeaway?”
So let’s chronicle games about time, specifically those that prove the passing of years is nothing but a directionless tumble through the jelly-like substance of spacetime. Here are 9 games about time travel. But which of them would you undo?
]]>Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it's Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I've never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like "Massive Stunner" and "Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st", I'm already 100% convinced the music must be great.
However, given my rather lacking expertise in all things Tekken-related, I thought that instead of doing a big Tekken musical breakdown like I did for Capcom and all the Final Fantasy games, I'd take this opportunity to celebrate some of the other great gaming soundtracks you can currently listen to for free right now, because boy howdy are there loads of 'em. So bang on those headphones and turn up the volume, folks. It's head-banging time.
]]>Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It's called ImageNet Roulette, and it's basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it's probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.
]]>Whenever someone asks me what my favourite Final Fantasy game is, the answer is always Final Fantasy VIII. It's getting on a bit (20 years, in fact) but its tale of time-travelling witches, lovestruck teens, cannonball dogs and bonkers floating military schools is still, for me, one of the best things to come out of this never-ending series.
It is, however, one of the more trying Final Fantasy games to get running properly on PC. The 2013 PC release is, let's face it, a bit of a fudge. The music isn't right, the controls are fiddly; it's aged horribly. Good thing, then, that today marks the release of Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, a spruced-up, PC-friendly version that finally does it justi-- wait... What's wrong with those SeeD students? And those backgrounds? And oh sweet Guardian Forces WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SQUALL'S FACE?
]]>For all the decades of ha-ha-hilarious jokes about a final Final Fantasy as the numbers kept climbing higher, we hadn't predicted that Square Enix would keep it going from the other end too with remakes and remasters aplenty. Up next is Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, a fancied-up version of the game which in 1999 was definitely the last in the RPG series for real ho ho! Squeenix today announced that it's coming real soon, on September 3rd. This is the game our Katharine declared the best Final Fantasy (and Brendan reluctantly agreed) so maybe I'll have a look next month.
]]>We've been drowned by E3 2019 this past week, but maybe you only waded into the river of game reveals and new trailers up to your ankles. If you didn't get your hair wet, there might be some gems among the flotsam and jetsam that you missed. That's what this post is for: we've rounded up our picks for the best games of E3, based on our own impressions of either seeing the games behind closed doors at the show, or of watching the videos from the comfort of our homes.
]]>Square Enix are but a fading spectre of their former glory. Square Enix can tie a crate of Final Fantasy trading cards to themselves and get in the sea. Square Enix are all horrible bastards who don’t understand what makes a good RPG anymore. Never again will I have to say any of these clearly untrue and potentially libellous phrases, because Square Enix - who I’ve always said were the best - have now confirmed that they’re remastering Final Fantasy 8. Well heck.
]]>Matt: This is it. The final blog down. Square Enix are about to tell us about what they're up to, and we've both reported to our liveblogging stations for the very last time. Both Cheerer and Jeerer have one more opportunity to don their respective masks of love and loathing, but who will take up each mantle?
Actually, forget I asked. Jetlag has snuck up on us both and filled our hearts with jeer, but I'm the one writing this intro so I get to bagsy it. Plus it's my turn anyway. Nuh-nuh.
]]>Trying to keep up with E3 2019 is a fool's errand, and the foaming river of content streaming down the internet's face doesn't always make it easier. So here's a round-up of every news story from the show we think matters to you, with links to our full stories (and bantful liveblogs) where relevant. We'll be updating this hourly, so keep coming back.
]]>Following the epic boyband road trip of Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix now plan to let us create our own pop trios in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Today they announced the 3v3 crossover brawler, made with Dead Or Alive developers Team Ninja and released on PlayStation 4 in 2018, is coming to PC as a free-to-play edition. I think my dream pop trio might be Noctis, Kefka, and Sephiroth? Or Yuna, Lightning, and Noctis could be an interesting musical dynamic. Squeenix insist the trios do fight each other, but I assume it's mostly about building and admiring your dream lineup.
]]>Final Fantasy VIII, aka the best Final Fantasy, is 20 years old today. Here's our list article about that.
So you thought you’d celebrate your 20th birthday by taking all your celestial god buds out for a drink, did you? Biggest mistake of your life, pal. Oh, sure, they’ll save your life from a time-travelling sorceress in a pinch, but when it comes to a night out, I’ve never seen a sorrier bunch of cheapskates in my entire life. Consider this your one and only warning before these mythical moochers take you for everything you’re worth.
]]>We're still waiting for the PC release of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth while jealously looking over the shoulders of our PS5 brethren. But that doesn't mean we can't ride some other chocobo, so to speak. There are tons of other great Final Fantasy games you can play on PC right now. Below, we've ranked the 10 best Final Fantasy games you can currently play on Steam, putting an end to the debate over which Roman numeral is objectively best.
]]>Welcome back to Spawn Point, where we take an element from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it's worth your time and how you can dip your toes in and get involved. Last time, Brendan gave you a 101 course in Final Fantasy XII, a JRPG that recently got spruced up for PC twelve years after its original launch on PlayStation 2. This time, however, I'm going to be looking at JRPGs as a whole, discussing what they are and which ones you should try your hand at first if you've never played one before.
]]>It’s the 30th birthday of Final Fantasy, says Square Enix. The first in the series was released in Japan on this day in 1987 and an old story goes that the name was chosen because Square was in financial trouble at the time – almost bankrupt – and it was likely to be their last game. But that’s rubbish, the creator later said in an interview. It turns out any old F-word would have done.
It’s nevertheless a series worth celebrating. A tropey, dopey JRPG series that somehow manages to be comforting and friendly. At least, some of the time. Here’s the highs and lows of the series.
]]>Since we've got a little bit of a gap in big RPG releases at the moment, I've spent the last couple of weeks playing catch-up. A couple of games I missed when they came out recently. One... quite a bit older. Final Fantasy IX was one of those games that slipped past me at the time, not because I wasn't aware of it, but because I didn't have a Playstation at the time, and by the time I bought a cheap PS2, a double-whammy of Final Fantasy X and X-2 made it tough to go back to the previous generation. Square's recent rush of re-releases finally offered a good chance to catch-up. But I'm not really planning to talk about that specifically. Instead, I was pondering the sad fate of that most cursed of Final Fantasy fans... those of us who came to them on PC. Brrr.
]]>I played a lot of Final Fantasies during my rock-bottom console gamer phase. Final Fantasy VIII was not one of them. Well, that's not entirely true. I tried a demo disc from some old PlayStation magazine once, and it chugged, whimpered pitifully, and died on me about ten minutes into the opening cut-scene. Beyond that, I heard too many mixed things and decided to get my fantastical fix elsewhere. Did I make a boo-boo, though - perhaps even the biggest boo-boo of all, Boo-boo-aga? If so, just say the word and I'll duct-tape a gun to a sword, don a poofy, pouty coat, and load up the newly released Steam version of FFVIII.
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