Final Fantasy VII Remake

Some final thoughts on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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I finally beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! It took me a grand total of 101 hours, and while I didn’t do absolutely everything in the game, I did a significant proportion of all the available stuff.

I enjoyed it a lot, overall. It’s a well-crafted game that pays nice homage to the original while doing a lot of new things that are distinctively its own. And while I won’t spoil the ending in this introduction, it was an intriguing and thought-provoking conclusion that we’ll talk a little more about later in this piece in a clearly spoiler-demarcated section.

So let’s have a look back over the game as a whole, and see what’s what, shall we?

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PlayStation 5

Alone in the Dark 2024: a return to form for classic survival horror

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Poor old Alone in the Dark has been through the wringer over the years.

First released on MS-DOS PC in 1992, it garnered critical acclaim for its innovative gameplay, presentation and wonderful atmosphere, and remains an essential play for anyone interested in the history of the survival horror genre. Without the original Alone in the Dark, we may not have had the Resident Evil series — at least not in the form it took in its early years.

Subsequent entries struggled to live up to the legacy of their predecessor, however… particularly when various companies attempted to “reboot” the franchise on several occasions in the intervening decades. But now Alone in the Dark is very much back on track, thanks to yet another reboot, this time developed by Pieces Interactive and published by THQ Nordic. Let’s take a closer look.

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One-Shots

The history of computing is told through video games

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A while back, I paid a visit to The Cave and Arcade Archive, a pair of wonderful interactive retro tech museums run by YouTubers Neil Thomas, Alex Crowley and a gaggle of volunteers and assistants.

Between the two museums, you can get your hands on a variety of old computers, consoles and arcade games, pretty much all of which are in full working order, and have a tinker with them, as well as browsing an extensive library of old magazines, admiring the ambience of a lovingly recreated retro game “shop” (where you can even scan the barcodes on the boxes and play the games on a MiSTer) and investigating some lovely rarities.

One thing struck me as I was wandering around: although The Cave specifically positions itself as a museum of classic computers and consoles, the focus is very much on games. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let’s ponder exactly why.

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Atari 8-bit

The400 Mini: A great entry point to exploring a range of underappreciated computers

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When The400 Mini was first announced, reactions could be divided into roughly two distinct camps: the “OMG finally the Atari 8-bit is getting the recognition it deserves” crew, and the “WTF is an Atari 400” brigade. Those of you who know me well will already know which camp I fall into.

For the sake of the latter group, the Atari 400 (and, by extension, the entire Atari 8-bit line) is well worth exploring, because although in the long term it lost out to platforms such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in terms of popularity, it was a pioneer in the home computing space and, in fact, the birthplace of a variety of widely beloved games.

The400 Mini is a great place to start exploring exactly where Atari home computers fit into the grand history of home computers and video games. There are a couple of things that, at launch, could do with a bit of tweaking — but there are also a few things you can do with it that you might not expect. So today we’re going to talk about all of those things!

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One-Shots

The enshittification of the video games press

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This is, as many of you know, a subject near and dear to my heart, so it breaks my heart every time I have to write something like this. But it seems that what we think of as “the traditional video games press”, at least in the profitable, commercial sector, is circling the drain.

The latest site to “fall” is Kotaku, a publication which most certainly has had its ups and downs in terms of reputation with different groups over the years, and one which I’m definitely not surprised to see affected by the growing trend for enshittifying everything.

While I had very little time for Kotaku itself, particularly over the course of the last decade or so, it’s still saddening to see once-prominent institutions in the games press landscape gradually sinking into the mire of slop that a significant portion of the Web has been becoming for years now. Let’s ponder the reasons for that a little further.

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Atari 8-bit

Gruds in Space: an early take on the graphic adventure

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Back in the early days of adventure games, there was a hard divide between people who liked text-only adventures — today typically referred to as “interactive fiction”, though if we’re getting technical about it, there are some differences between interactive fiction and text adventures — and those who appreciated games with graphics.

There was a sort of unspoken (well, actually, sometimes spoken) assumption that text-only games were more “grown-up” and for more “intelligent” people, because they specifically required the use of your imagination, just like a good book. And there’s some merit to that argument.

But there were some interesting experiments going on concerning exactly what to do with the graphical capabilities of early ’80s home computers. And Gruds in Space from Sirius Software is a great example.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Did Final Fantasy VII Rebirth need to be a humongous, obscenely long open-world game?

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I’m not going to bury the lede here: yes, I firmly believe that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did need to be humongous, obscenely long open-world game. So let’s spend a bit of time talking about that.

It’s become fashionable to bash open-world games in the last few years, at least partly because for a good long while now, big-budget developers and publishers have been using them as something of a crutch. Rather than providing a carefully structured, well-paced experience, a lot of developers seem to believe that offering the player what they consider “true freedom” (which in practice is rarely anything of the sort) will make up for the game’s shortcomings in other areas.

While there are a lot of companies out there who are very much guilty of that, when Square Enix has made an open-world game — particularly, but not exclusively, one in the Final Fantasy series –it has usually come out rather well. And Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the best to date. Let’s take a closer look.

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Switch

Princess Peach: Showtime! – some impressions from the demo

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I like Mario games, but I enjoy it more when Nintendo gives their other characters a bit of time to shine independently of the portly plumber. Which is why I’m so intrigued by Princess Peach: Showtime!, a game that seems to have been attempting to distance itself from the “platformer” designation in favour of… what?

Well, a demo came out for it yesterday, so I downloaded it today and gave it a play over lunchtime. The demo is pretty brief, consisting of just the game’s introductory sequence and two individual levels — one for Peach in her Swordfighter costume and another in her Patissiere outfit — but it was enough to intrigue me.

Let’s take a closer look, and ponder what I hope to see in the full game when it comes out later this month.

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One-Shots

The lost art of “just enjoying something”

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The Internet has done many things to our collective consciousness, attention spans and numerous other aspects of our existence, but one thing that saddens me more with each passing year is how the art of just enjoying something for what it is — rather than mourning what it isn’t — seems to be slipping away from everyone.

What I mean by this is the way in which I can’t remember the last time I saw someone simply say “I like this” with genuine passion and enthusiasm. It’s far more common for people to pick fault with literally everything, often under the justification “it’s important to criticise the things you love”.

But is it? Is that not just setting oneself up to be perpetually unsatisfied? It certainly looks like it from here.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Some spoiler-free early impressions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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I’ve been eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it actually arrived at my house a couple of days early! As such, I’ve been playing it for the last couple of evenings, and wanted to share a few initial thoughts.

I’m not going to spoil anything about the plot in this piece, because I’m not very far into said plot, and there are seemingly some very interesting things going on. We’ll talk about all that another time; today I wanted to focus particularly on the gameplay that unfolds after about two or three hours: the point at which the game properly “opens up”.

And yes, in a marked contrast from its predecessor Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth really does open up. So let’s take a closer look at that.

Continue reading Some spoiler-free early impressions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth →

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