I actually played and finished Atic Atac on Rare Replay this year. It was the game that made me want a Spectrum when I was 12. I played it at my friends house and came home to give my mum and dad a 15 minute TED talk on its virtues and why we should get a Spectrum. I got both but never finished it… until this year. God I love everything about it.
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It is sad. It does earn it. Beautiful experience.
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I finished the 3rd door last night and feel like the game has some self awareness going on which I like. Spoilers: When the Maria reveal happens the game acknowledges that the player could have predicted that the turn was coming. I appreciate this because it felt pretty obvious, the game feels like it’s conditioning me to think that the worst possible outcome is the one that is most likely to happen. The seemingly nice character is actually evil felt too telegraphed and I’m glad the game was aware of that.
I’m interested to see where it goes but yeah my overall feeling hasn’t changed much after the 3rd door. Still intrigued enough to see what’s next but I’m not enthralled by it.
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I think those first 3 doors was the 6 hours Jaffe was talking about on the show, so your opinion might change over the coming hours.
I had the same reaction to the spoiler: When that happened, I was like, yeah. Makes sense! I thought Jacopo’s behaviour was that kind of contrived you see in anime writing but that self awareness the story has sort of grounds, I guess? It reads Shakespeare with how over the top it is.
I started the final door last night and I’m thoroughly hooked.
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mentioned in the Game For Cheapskates thread bc it’s $4.19 atm been playing Armoured Commander II it’s quite good. Based on the old and Patton’s Best Avalon Hill tabletop game. It’s a roguelike RPG in which you play that part of a tank commander during a WWII campaign. Game includes dozens of historical campaigns and hundreds of different unit types. Attempts a lot more “realism” than first glance would suggest. Currently operating the lead tank in a BT-7 squad on the Soviet side in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. Back in action in late July after spending 12 days recovering a field hospital after taking a spalling injury to my (Mladshy Serzhant Viktor Lutrov DOB 9/10/1910) L foot. Highly recommended! Allegedly works good on the deck. Lots of good dice rolls, RPG mechanics, etc
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I’m still going with Lufia II. I can feel myself starting to get attached to these characters a bit. I’m just past the part where Maxim gets married and while that seemed very sudden, I thought Tia coming to terms with their relationship was pretty well-written.
The puzzles haven’t given me trouble for the most part, though I have had to look up on average one puzzle per dungeon. Shrines.rpgclassics.com is such a valuable resource. Usually I have fun working them out, but there are occasionally puzzles where I can’t even tell what it wants from me.
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Finished Chants of Sennaar. It was really good. The setting design feels simple, bright, and sharp, with tall straight lines for much of the buildings with various flourishes distinguishing each layer (color, yes, but also windows, columns, doors - subtle touches).
Major end-game spoiler: the twist about Exile (what I originally translated “No”) felt well done thematically. It was apparent that each layer was translating the same concept in different ways: god, duty, beauty, transformation, and exile. The key to the game was countering the entity Exile’s influence (which locked everyone in their own perspective) by getting them to talk to one another. The later puzzles, which were based more in generating language (translating) to help others speak, felt less dynamic than the earlier puzzles. Climbing the tower felt like a full gamut of stealth, physical puzzles, riddles, and language; unlocking the secrets of the tower focused primarily on language with one stealth snippet sometimes. Still, the puzzles were fun and I enjoyed flexing the building linguistic knowledge. The final twist - of being in a simulation and having to work one’s way out from Exile - was a lot of fun and didn’t overstay its welcome.
Only two things chafed in the last portion:
- Unless one is a genius who knows every puzzle the first time they encounter it, there is a lot of backtracking. I like to visit a puzzle, tool around with it a bit, and then explore again. I looped up and down that tower so many times, and even with the teleport spots, it took time to get to where I wanted to be next.
- I wish I had taken better notes on some of the linguistic features of the language. Having the game auto-translate once one pieces together word meanings can lull one into a sense of security that is taken away when they suddenly have to generate a new sentence in that language. Relearning syntax (does the plural go first or second? Is it subject or object first?) led me to backtrack more than usual. In one case a late-game puzzle asked for a kind of syntax uncommon in the game (a noun compound), and that took a long time to figure out.
Slight spoiler, just to show how the notebook looks, with sketches corresponding to concepts and giving a canonical translation once the correct symbols and sketches are paired:
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Hey I still play video games.
Late last month I think I was either watching a yt clip or reading some lore on the ffwiki about what I’ve been telling everyone is my favourite FF ever. Maybe you can relate but this is another symptom of internet use I’ve noticed that causes me to choose to reminisce about a piece of media I’ve played or watched etc. when I clearly want to re-experience it in full. It’s the lessening of friction made by having all this information available on websites that want to dominate your free time. I caught myself this time though and wondered like what if I did just replay Final Fantasy VIII? So I’ve been doing that. It’s been so long since I actually played all the way through this game that I don’t remember when I last completed a playthrough. It might not have been since high school. I’ve definitely started the game over again many times since then. Why wasn’t I getting further than that? I’m putting the explanation under a cut cause I couldn’t keep it from feeling longwinded and sidetrack-y.
optical media bullshit
I found out why when I got to the end of disc 2. The very last FMV on that disc skips and freezes on my copy of the game—and I remember this happening to me regularly at the same point, during the battlefield scene after saving Rinoa. I checked the disc physically and there are unmistakable ring scratches toward the disc edges. Disc 1 had them too but they never caused any issues, and disc 4 has them faintly but we’ll see if they pose a problem. Disc 3 doesn’t have ANY. When we got a PS2 slim in like 2006-07 we’d long since sold our PSX so that’s what I’d have had to play the game on: all new games and any endgame disc 4 saves. Why is that relevant? The ribbon cable feeding the lens pickup in the PS2 slim’s DVD drive is so long and floppy that when the lens is positioned about halfway between the spindle and the outer edge of the tray the ribbon cable will pop up enough to graze a disc while it is spinning, scratching the hell out of it. I must have tried I don’t know how many times to replay the game and been halted just before closing out disc 2, never progressing further than that.
“Why not just play the game in an emulator, @connrrr?” uhh because I own the game lol. And every time I would forget about the state my discs were in, give a replay a try, commit the couple dozen hours or so it would take me to get halfway through before remembering that it will freeze before I can go any further would be discouraging enough that I’d never bothered to do anything about it. Then I had bigger problems in my life and moved out without taking the PS2 with me. Now I have a PSX with a brand new CD drive and two ways to boot backups. PSIO was no help at all—horrible product. Every other flash cart is drag-and-drop, but this one always requires some arcane tweaking of the SD card to get anything to run, and every time you need to sit through a bloated boot sequence hoping something will play. And then it doesn’t. I burned a CD-R of disc 2 instead and ran it with Unirom, and that did get me past the failing FMV.
This game doesn’t feel the way I remember it. I remember the plot beats and broad strokes but like the tone and pacing, both of which are great, are coming off differently. I’m relating way more to the character’s motivations, predicting Squall’s inner monologues. Either I see myself or someone I’ve met in the cast now. It took many years to develop what I’m bringing with me to this playthrough. I was thirteen when I first played this and I think the first impressions I formed lasted into subsequent playthroughs, or I was a very immature and fucked up teenager (probably that too). I’ve since finished with school, been in relationships, been in positions of responsibility and am even old enough to think about where I was at when I was flashback Laguna’s age.
Squall I’ve always liked. As a kid I thought he was really cool, and later I empathized with how much pressure he was under. Now I see how just like intelligent he is and how nuanced his perspective is. Contemporary coverage and discourse cast him as whiny—and I don’t even know why I should have to acknowledge such a thin telling-on-themselves reading of the character, but such is talking about video games. They’ll let anybody play these things. Squall has multiple opportunities to show that he cares about his group and each time it feels naturally awkward and sweet. In particular I liked how Selphie plays off him in these situations. He gets so embarrassed that he disappears inside himself and is rightfully teased for it. Despite what he’s been through, Squall is not an uncaring asshole. He puts up walls because he cares too much and is carrying an attachment wound because of it.
Rinoa’s reception among Gamers was magnitudes worse. It’s hard to forget the hatred this character was met with. It was just part of the experience if you had an internet connection. I was still astonished at the minefield of vitriol you have to tread on if you want FAQs or a game script or discussion or any kind that predates the remaster. The level of full-throated misogyny you can still find is truly appalling. Rinoa is a good character. She leads a political resistance way before Ashe did, and in open defiance of her general—colonel in the Japanese version—father (whose name is Caraway, and who conspires with a group of elite mercenaries called SeeDs). She’s fun and cool and as a civilian foil to the Garden party members is the one to call Squall on his shit. There’s a really silly bit of animation where the party is meeting Galbadia Garden’s headmaster and Rinoa has to pose as a SeeD and is having trouble maintaining a salute. She gets a lot of expressive character animation that is wholly her own. (Zell wiping his glove on his pants before shaking anyone’s hand requires honourable mention though.)
There is a stretch after the prison where she fades into the background somewhat and the only meaningful moment she gets only happens if you bring her with you back to Balamb. I didn’t do that, instead bringing Zell and Quistis with me (cause it’s their home!!). I missed out on that short FMV doing this but either way, there is a bit of dialogue after that between her and Squall that’s different depending on whether you sent her to the missile base or brought her with you to warn Cid. The dialogue you get after reuniting is a lot cuter imo.
And for the first time in my life I got the good outcome from the band minigame-sequence in FH! You can either have the band play Eyes on Me or an Irish jig. Have them do the second one. It’s so funny that they’d make the obvious choice a complete red herring that spoils the interaction between Squall and Rinoa.
My feelings about Seifer’s character are more complex this time around. Seifer is definitely a bully but one I see with way less power than I did when I was younger. He’s kind of pathetic and very vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to be manipulated by Edea and be utterly devoted to her to at least the very last moments of disc 2. The tension and mutual respect he shares with Squall is less overtly acknowledged by Seifer than it is by Squall but it’s still there. This guy should not be in a military academy though, straight up. He fails the SeeD exam out of his incompatibility with the chain of command but also to hold on to the only community he’s got (until he gets booted out when he turns 20). If that’s all FFVIII’s world has to offer him and his friends then its world has failed them.
This game still looks so good. I’m frequently taken aback at the detail in the prerendered backgrounds and the particle effects and relative seamlessness of the FMV transitions and environments. It is peak utopic Y2K-ass 𝒶𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓉𝒾𝒸. I could live here, probably in Timber or Balamb. Everybody says they could live in Fisherman’s Horizon, but the mayor is hogging the only trees. You would miss trees, ok? The character models and their proportions are unwaveringly Realistic. Outfits have splashes of identifying colours to make them easier to pick out in the field, to give them appeal and set them apart from one another but there is a disciplined aversion to any kind of superdeformation. All of this stands out as completely disregarded in the “HD Remaster” and it truly breaks my heart that anyone’s first time through the game had to be with that release. I can’t condemn it enough. If your CG assets are not on-hand to be rendered into a higher resolution then 1080p is not possible and you should try to make 240p look as good as it can instead.
I also just love the fonts in this game? Chicago is everywhere, which I appreciate, but also the text box font which is different in the remaster is so rigid and clunky and it has a fully serif’d capital I and a big fat exclamation mark. It looks especially weird and funny when characters are shouting in all caps and sometimes it’s even coloured with flashing text (can’t replicate it here unfortunately; something to complain to Discourse about?). I’ll try to grab some screenshots for show and tell.
Other stray thoughts:
- Triple Triad is still the only video card game I can get into
- drawing 100s of spell charges isn’t so bad if you’ve got a podcast to listen to
- the sidequests to remember not to miss along the way are finite enough that it really isn’t that big of a deal but have tripped me up with all the temporal distance I’ve gotten from the game. Draw all GFs, read all magazines, farm weapon parts and blue magic items, give Zone his porn mag, do the Laguna flashbacks perfectly, the CC group (finished) and the Queen of Cards quest (haven’t started). I completely missed my shot at the Master Fisherman quest :( and I fumbled the siege of Dollet. This is what multiple saves are for and why the MemCard Pro is the perfect upgrade for the first PlayStation in particular—15 blocks was simply never enough space. I haven’t been doing a ton of rewinding to look at different story outcomes but I was really thorough about the band sequence: did you know that you can take off during auditions and just explore the Garden and FH as Irvine?
- “Roses and Wine” and “Premonition” are underappreciated tracks while “Martial Law” is still an all-timer and what do you mean “Blue Fields” isn’t the best overworld theme in RPG history? Despite this, the OST has some stinkers: “Fragments of Memories” grates and “Mods de Chocobo” is without a second thought the least listenable take on the chocobo theme that I’ve heard from the series. Show me a worse one, I know I could be naïve. If there’s a contender then I really want to hear it.
Now that I’ve finished the half of the game I remember most clearly, I charge into the remaining half with renewed interest in a game I thought I knew. I really don’t know it as well as I thought I did! And I understood it even less. You really do just have to re-play/read/watch a thing you like over again if you want to like experience the Work at all, and no amount of wiki lore plumbing can suffice. We can all agree on that, right?
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I agree with and enjoyed reading your FF8 takes. And always love seeing some screenshots from that beautiful game. Thanks, from all us FF8 enjoyers out here!
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FFVIII holds a very special place in my heart. It got me through probably the hardest patch of my life (which I am not going to talk about now).
Whenever I am at my lowest, I boot this game up. The Balamb Garden music is my safe space.
Anyway, Squall is a great character, and I never understood why people thought he was whiny or unlikeable. As a GenXer, his “…whatever” just felt like the right way to respond to everyone.
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FFVIII is really one I need to revisit as an adult. Growing up it was by far my least-favorite Final Fantasy, but looking back I have to acknowledge that the game had absolute hooks in me—I’ve still beaten it all the way through more than any of the other mainline titles, and each one of those was back when the game was still new
Now that I’m older and not in the hell that was adolescence, I suspect I’ll find a lot more to enjoy in it when I finally get around to revisiting the entire series
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Persona 3 Reload is insanely good… Idk if there’s an IC forums counterculture movement to this game as it is a remake of something I haven’t played, but I’m definitely in danger of this game becoming my personality for the entirety of Q1 2025
Having only played Persona 5 in this series, this game feels like a more coherent overall experience. As much as I loved that game, and as much as I do love the bespoke dungeons in that one more than Tartarus overall, there’s so much less pointless dialogue in this game and the tone feels a lot more consistent. Also, in 5 the constraints of what had become a major media franchise were apparent the whole way through whereas in this one I feel like anything could happen. Someone keeps telling me I only have a year to do this thing, and considering the tone of the game, it feels like my character could actually die
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I finished my nuzlocke of Pokémon Emerald. This was the Seaglass hack on hard mode.
I have no way of hooking my analogue pocket up to my computer for a month or so, nevertheless here are my scuffed screenshots.
I killed a lot of God’s children on this thing! Hard mode makes you pretty under leveled going into any gym, and having any real difficulty in Pokémon is kind of a culture shock.
Emerald is a good one! I think people didn’t like the whole water deal, and I’m really partial to Kanto Johto’s locations, but this is a really cool game to hang out in. They got a town on logs. There’s hot springs. I’m looking forward to hitting the shipwreck and trying to catch them all.
Something that Pokémon lost after gold and silver that I don’t know how it gets back is the mystique around legendary Pokémon. Largest culprit in my head is how little legendary Pokémon are spoken of in RBGSC. They are spoken of, and sometimes even cutscened in the oldest games but not nearly to the point they are in Ruby Sapphire Emerald. There’s something kind of haunting about reading about Mewtwo and then finding it silently in the cerulean cave (spoilers for Pokémon???). Ho Oh being in Crystal by tracking these dogs and being given no further instructions.
Maybe that’s overthinking the Electric Monsters but whatever. There are a lot of cool set pieces in this game, I hope I can see Mirage Island, that’s such a good use of the in game calendar (again though something I feel like was already perfected in gold silver, but at least it’s still kinda here).
Anyway - Pokémon is cool. If you’re like me and think Crystal is the best, the creators of this hack did a lot to add in a bunch of little secrets and new mechanics to add variety to the game, and feels very much like a definitive version.
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My feelings about Seifer is that this becomes glaringly obvious once you get going forward, although I feel that the powerlessness you can feel it right away just when you get to Timber and have that scene with Edea.
Also, I replayed this several times, and did that very recently, but I agree with some of the sentiments you have there, specially about Squall and Rinoa. I still don’t like Rinoa in a way, but now it’s from a much more empathetic standpoint: she’s just a youngster who’s rebellious and immature because of her background, but has a lot of good intentions and is willing to change the world, and I feel she in a way grows as a character later on. As for Squall, I’m surprised he got the reputation as whiny when I feel he has so much burden and responsibility put into him, and it’s such a great character throughout.
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I really enjoyed this write up and I should really go back to the save file I started earlier this year? I think I talked about it on the discord.
If there is a list of games you should replay at different stages of your life I think Final Fantasy 8 will rank high up there.
Based purely on memory regarding Rhinoa I suppose I don’t fully understand the chemistry between her and Squall. But again I should really go back and ay the game again
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I like P5, but the dialogue being constantly rehashed was a major annoyance for sure and it makes me prefer 3 and 4 more. It’s a little bit of a thing in P4, but nowhere near to the same extent. I’m hopeful that the dialogue is being pared down in P6, but it could go either way. P5 Tactica kept with the dialogue bloat, while Metaphor cleaned things up a decent bit.
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I just played Xenosphere, which was recommended by @rejj in another thread.
It’s a short, 30-minute game with some neat mechanical things and pretty 2D graphics. I actually really recommend this one. Very fun game, free, and so short you really have no excuse not to play it if you have a PC and a spacebar.
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infinity nikki remains at the top for me and has been breath-of-the-wild-addicting. and we all know that the character creator is the best part of any video game so having that be so front and center is lovely! anyway i wandered around the ruins of an ancient castle for a long time last night in a way that i wanted to do in like, elden ring, but without the danger of getting got and starting over every five minutes. there’s this thread of darkness woven through the game i wasn’t expecting but is really working for me. lots of lore type things to marinate in should you wish. ui stuff aside this is an extremely well-made game, which i wasn’t expecting for a free-to-play gacha (that you can absolutely 100% play all of without dropping a single cent cuz all the paid stuff is aesthetic, at least as far as i can tell)
side note but i’ve always loved like, poking around in a forest in real life, since i was a child, and doing that in a video game is great too!! open worlds don’t NEED to have something huge every 30 seconds, sometimes it’s nice to just VIBE and soak up the ambience! some of my favorite memories of playing death stranding or horizon zero dawn were finding some odd place on the edge of the map that keeps going and going and it’s just a weird little uninhabited corner of the game that most people probably don’t ever check out. it becomes interesting paradoxically by virtue of it being mundane. there’s lots of nice forest and hills and things to just take a small hike toward in infinity nikki and look at a nice view or just get cozy in the shadow of some trees (but also there’s stuff to do dotting the landscape here too — it’s far from empty). so often in these kinds of games i will chose not to fast travel and i’ll walk the long way because what if there’s a cool log or stump i see along the way, and the jump/float in this game is just chill to boop around with and makes for some pretty easy-going and pleasant platforming.
anyway i bet this game will continue to be ignored by most of The Gaming Discourse for quite a while even though it’s absolutely going to be one of the heaviest hitters of 2025 and will be disregarded by many because it’s Free Gacha For Girls, even though it’s a whole huge delicious BBQ meal
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also re-reading that i’m making it sound like there’s a lot of landscape in the game without anything going on which is not at all true, there are things EVERYWHERE to do and find
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Took a big bite out of The Witcher 3 today. Novigrad has a totally different tempo than Velen. I like that they switched it up.
I saw one of the sex scenes and it was hilarious. Part bawdy erotic literature, part cliche teen boy fan service, it made for a quirky mix.
This games portrayal of women is… Well, multifacited. I don’t have it in me to explicate on that, at least not right now, but I wanted to mention It as something I’m noticing and thinking about. I can’t help but problematize media I interact with, which is mostly fine, except that sometimes the problems I find totally turn me off, but other times I am able to acknowledge the problems and still play the game/watch the movie/etc… idk what’s my deal with that.
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