This post contains a big Final Fantasy VII spoiler which, chances are, you’ll know anyway but I thought I’d warn you.

Do you ever get that urge to go back and play one of the classics? I had that urge the other week to go and actually finish Final Fantasy VII, having never even made it past the first disc. My first attempt barely made it as far as Junon and my second came to an end when I got out of Corel Prison and realised that my lack of levelling had severely crippled my game. When I decided to play it again my old PAL copy was long gone, and since I had a chipped PS2 I thought I’d make sitting through those summon animations 17.5% less painful and go for a US copy. One trip to the local importer later I had in my hands a mint NTSC copy of the 29th best game ever (according to the worst list ever).

This playthrough has been much more successful thus far and I’ve done so much levelling that it’s becoming something of a cakewalk in places, but the real point of this was because I’d just seen for the first time the death of Aeris. It was such a beautiful scene – the way that the whole thing was done slowly in that ethereal location, the way that Aeris’ theme kicked in as a requiem when the materia hit the ground, and the way that the music continued through the battle with Jenova (which, incidentally, is a piece of piss if you have a Water Ring since every attack heals you).

It really shows how cinematic games can be and was an amazing way to end the first disc. Even though I’ve been told about it countless times the beauty and emotional impact of the scene wasn’t diluted at all and now I’m anxious to see the rest of the game. If I can make it to the end this will actually be the first time that I’ve finished a real RPG.

Just found this, the results of a PR survey for 7 Sins on what people thought the biggest gaming sins you could commit were. I can’t be the only one who found it slightly worrying that a significant number of people seem to think that cheating for personal gratification in games comes above both piracy and sabotage (I’d guess that hacking in online games as well as more nefarious tricks like stealing CD keys fall into this category) in the sinfulness stakes.

There’s apparently something very wrong with people…

Wow…what a match. Liverpool totally deserved to win if only for the fact that they came back from 3-0 down within five minutes against possibly the best club in Europe. Dudek’s penalty behaviour was questionable (aren’t you supposed to stay on the line until the ball is kicked?), but it was a victory that was thoroughly deserved.

The only downside is that it nearly killed my Freeview box, so now I’m going to have to go and spend £40 another one. Now all ITV channels make it crash within about a minute and I need my E4 on Friday. This one was free and lasted me six months so I suppose I got my money’s worth.

In a similar vein to my previous editorial on what future hardware can actually bring to the table, Pointless Waste of Time is running A Gamers’ Manifesto, a long but insightful read into what we should be wanting from the future generations of consoles. It’s well worth a look if graphics alone don’t really do it for you anymore.

I’ve now got a photo gallery section for the site which for now will serve as a repository for my random photographs but has the ultimate purpose of being my way of keeping a photo diary when I’m in Japan. It’s running on the excellent Flickr Gallery WordPress plugin which, after trying just about every other WordPress image gallery solution, seems to be by far the most versatile and customisable. I’ll make a post whenever I have new updates to the photographs to check out but in the meantime it’s available in the sidebar.

Thanks to Collin from Command-Tab for the help in getting the plugin to work and for drawing my attention to it in the first place. Give his site a look if you’re an Apple fan.

I’m sure everyone was as blown away with the Killzone 2 demo that we saw at Sony’s conference, and it certainly succeeded in bringing a lot of people who thought they had seen the light with the Xbox 360 over to their camp. Now it seems all but certain that the demo, along with most of Sony’s other stuff, was pre-rendered and simply “indicative” of what their machine would be capable of.

That’s all well and good, but I can’t be the only one who has very clear memories of the unveiling of the PS2 as well. Sony’s rhetoric told us how it would be the entertainment hub of our homes (it turned out to be a crappy DVD player), that it would deliver graphics beyond our wildest dreams (was it really that much more powerful than the Dreamcast?), that it had the “Emotion Engine” (a link to the PS3’s “Reality Synthesizer”?), and that it would render CG quality in real time. They showed the ballroom scene from Final Fantasy VIII and told us that the PS2 could do it, and I’m sure that I heard Toy Story mentioned more than once.

Somehow they managed to pull exactly the same tricks this time and, as expected, everyone ate it up and it stole the thunder than Microsoft had built up with some real-time footage of games for their machine. I’m shocked that MS haven’t been making as much capital out of this as they can by making sure everyone knows that they showed genuine footage of their stuff that still managed to stand up to Sony’s nifty CG work. It makes me wonder if the PS3 is actually going to come out of the gate with any more power than Microsoft will do later this year.