Videogames
Sephiroth, the Fake
Final Fantasy VII is about two men who discover they aren’t the heroes they wanted to be. The game is about other things - war, capitalism, ecocide to name a few - but I think how these men address their shame, and compete to overcome it, is its real engine. I recently replayed the 1997 original as a way of preparing for Remake and Rebirth. I wanted a frame of reference and a way back into its story. But I was also surprised at how well it held up, 25 years later, and began to notice the plot details and narrative subtleties I overlooked when I was younger.
March 31, 2024
The Minimalism of Tomb Raider (1996)
Recently I played Tomb Raider 1 for the first time. After I got over the controls and very cheesy voice acting, I was struck by the clarity of its design. The word I want to use is “minimalistic”, but it’s more fundamental than that. “Restrained”, “pure”, “immersive” are other words I could use, but none of them are quite enough to capture what makes this game so great. TR1 is a little hard to get into as a modern game. The old TR games use tank controls, where you rotate and move Lara relative to her current heading, as opposed to modern 3D games where you move relative to the camera. It felt clunky at first but after a while I really started to grasp its elegance.
October 18, 2023
The PSOne Crash Bandicoot games are beautiful in 4K
Modern emulator cores like BeetleHW allow you to play old-school PSOne games in new-school high resolution. Games that rely heavily on polygonal graphics, rather than textured graphics, benefit the most. And as a fan of the original Crash Bandicoot games my eyes just popped to see them brought to vivid life on a 4k, widescreen display. Right click any image + open in new tab for a full sized view. Or view the gallery on imgur.
October 8, 2021
The real villain of Final Fantasy VIII is History Itself
Final Fantasy VIII is a curious one. You play a group of teens at a high-school-cum-military academy who spend their days planning prom dates, riding hoverboards and munching hot dogs at the school cafeteria. They’re training to become elite special forces, but have no idea their school is really a front for a millennia-long war against a time-travelling sorceress who wants to destroy all existence. It gets… strange. You are mortally wounded and impaled in the chest at the end of Disc 1, then awake apparently unharmed. Everyone grew up together in an orphanage but forgot due to Plot Convenient Amnesia (discussed once and then forgotten). You fight a T-Rex in the school gym.
July 25, 2021
Playing TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on PC
Like the TimeSplitters series? What if I told you it’s possible to play TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect on PC with mouse and keyboard support to boot? All you need is the Dolphin Gamecube emulator and a helpful controller plugin. Get Dolphin First, you’re going to need an emulator. Dolphin is a reliable, fast, well-supported GameCube and Wii emulator with support for PC, Mac and Linux. You will need to use the Windows build to get mouse and keyboard support (as far as I know), but if you’re on another platform you can still play with a joypad.
July 26, 2020
MGS2 Tanker as Solidus
I’ve discovered a simple mod for MGS2 PC that allows you to play the Tanker chapter as alternate characters. Here, I use it to play as Solidus Snake, perfect clone of Big Boss and the endgame antagonist. {% youtube 6CUaXCrHJM0 %}
December 29, 2017
The Supposed Half Life 3 Ending? I Just Don't Buy It.
…because the Half Life series is all about Gordon’s ascent to power.
September 7, 2017
Review - Wolfenstein: The New Order
I’m piloting an armed robot through a fictional concentration camp. I’ve seen men beaten, starved, murdered and eviscerated. I’ve scrambled out of a cart of emaciated, mutilated bodies – eyes cut out – and wrought revenge on my captors with vivid, pornographic violence. Now I’m trudging through the ashen rain with a heavy metal riff building in my ears, a Jewish Technology Wizard riding on my back whilst I cut through soldiers’ bodies with my oversized minigun and blast them into quivering lumps with an infinitely-replenishing rocket launcher. Is it necessary? For sure it’s fun as a kind of power fantasy, but I’ve an unease aching in my stomach and a feeling of wrongness I don’t want to peer into too hard. The New Order’s tone is all over the place – it’s a game that really doesn’t know what it wants to be. It presents itself Doom-style ‘neo-retro’ FPS, but it plays like a cover-based shooter. It tells me serious, sentimental war story, but then throws me dual-wielded shotguns like a level of Quake. It laments the tragedy of war, but then there’s times when it looks a lot like a Nazi torture simulator. Ultimately, there’s a fun – if limited – game underneath, comprising some impressive set pieces and frenetic firefights – but as a unified whole it’s a bit messy.
February 12, 2017
Play Indie PSOne Games in the Net Yaroze Hall of Fame
Do you remember the Net Yaroze? Back in the days of the original PSOne, Sony released a special black PlayStation. It allowed ordinary people to create homebrew PlayStation games, with the help of a home computer, exclusive Sony development software, chunky programming manual and plenty of patience and care. Net Yaroze games couldn’t be played on ordinary PSOnes directly, but the Official UK PlayStation Magazine released demo discs that let you finally play the best at home. I recently came across such a disc – featuring 14 of the magazines’ favourite picks – and wanted to share it here.
November 6, 2016
pSX emulator mirror
It looks as though the original host of the excellent pSX PlayStation One emulator - psxemulator.gazaxian.com - has gone down. The site hadn’t been maintained in a while and I fear it may have been forever abandoned. As such, I’ve added the most recent version of the emulator to this site. You can find it here. Besides being easier to configure than ePSXe, pSX comes with a rather handy MIPS R3000a debugger that’s very handy in reversing work. I used it extensively in writing my Long range enemy attack mod for Final Fantasy VII.
October 12, 2014