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Trigames.NET Podcast Ep. 104 - Gumball de Slunk

• 22Dec 09

  Holiday Quiz Madness: Final Fantasy Fighting Music

  Nobuo Uematsu has long been one of my favorite videogame music composers, ever since I played my first "proper" Final Fantasy game in 1991 (that being Final Fantasy II on the Super NES, more appropriately known nowadays as Final Fantasy IV). Through over ten iterations of Final Fantasy, Uematsu has evolved his style while keeping certain trademarks alive.

  Of his works, it's quite likely that the most recognizable tunes Uematsu has composed are the themes that play when players are forced into battle. Well, duh: With a standard battle theme for each game, it's the piece of music most repeated throughout a player's experience. Well, that and whatever standard theme exists for an overworld map.

  Seeing as I have recently re-integrated myself into the world of Final Fantasy for the sake of studying VIII's junction system, I thought I'd kick off the upcoming holiday by bringing back the little music quizzes I used to do. This one, as I've telegraphed above, involves the battle themes from the first nine iterations of Final Fantasy. As such, it won't be quite that difficult; after all, these are some of the more recognizable tunes in franchise history. But who wants to break a sweat during a holiday? It's a time for fun and relaxation, so it's probably best not to start off with something maddeningly difficult. (I'll save that for Saturday.)

  With that, allons y! Follow the link to the youTube video and keep this window open to leave your answers / guesses in the comments.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4HQbl2bos&feature=player_embedded

  (Sadly, the Gamespot video uploader doesn't want to cooperate, so I'll have to refer you to the version I uploaded on youTube for the time being. Please bear with it--I'll try to upload another version soon if I can figure out why the one I've been trying to upload keeps failing to encode.)

  • Posted Dec 22, 2009 11:09 am PT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 21Dec 09

  Revisiting the Nemesis: The Final Fantasy VIII Logs (12-21-2009)

  The Playstation Network re-release of Final Fantasy VIII happened much quicker than I would have imagined. When I came home from the airport late Thursday night, my podcast co-host Al informed me that Sony had just thrown the game online and I immediately booted up the MediaGo software to begin downloading it. $9.99 (plus tax) and five hours of sleep later, I had Final Fantasy VIII on my Playstation Portable--PSP, as acronym-loving humans like to call it. Considering that I had put in a handful of hours before the PSN release, starting it over again on the PSP would mean that those console hours would go to waste. Well, say hello to the wastebasket, hours.

  I haven't done much with the PSP release yet since I've been busy with other obligations, so I haven't even reached the point where I stopped on the PSone (that being just after finishing the SeeD exam). I did get a chance to see how the emulation fared on the PSP, and so far it works just fine. Pete, our third podcast member, told me he heard that when Final Fantasy VII was released on PSN, a critic on another podcast mentioned something that implied that the emulation was pretty bad. I hadn't experienced that with FFVII in particular, myself, and in the limited time I've spent with FFVIII, I haven't experienced bad emulation either. I will say that it's slightly irritating to not have that second set of shoulder buttons, since it forces you to map the L2 and R2 commands to either the d-pad or the analog nub. I liked playing FFVIII with the analog stick on the Dual Shock (it's more accurate on the world map), and obviously using the d-pad for menu commands (it's way more precise), so being forced to choose one or the other was a bit saddening. But that's just a small gripe inherent with the PSone-to-PS3 conversion, obviously.

  There are a lot of conflicting comments on my previous blog, mostly pertaining to how to best play the game, with a few Final Fantasy VIII detractors here and there. This all seems to ultimately speak to Final Fantasy VIII's greatest strength: There are so many ways to play the game, that depending on how you play it, you might love it or hate it equally. I'm not talking about Oblivion / Fallout "ways to play" in terms of your decisions and their impact on the game world around you but rather how you choose to customize your characters' abilities and whether you choose to spam Guardian Forces; use or not use magic; power-up your party by leveling up traditionally, or not leveling and instead relying completely on the Junction system; et cetera. It's actually quite fascinating, really, and it's precisely the reason I chose to give the game a second whirl. I have to re-iterate that no matter how interesting or deep a game is, if it doesn't end up coming together for me--and that's a totally subjective, je ne sais quois type of thing, as it is for everyone--my opinion won't be making that 180-degree shift to the positive. But in fairness, no matter what happens in the end, I'll definitely be glad I gave it a shot.
  

  • Posted Dec 21, 2009 3:04 am PT
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• 18Dec 09

  Send an email and WIN something (maybe) (You got 1 day left!)

  Hey! Remember this from yesterday? No, you don't, because you don't have photosynthetic memory (I know, that makes no sense), so here it is again.

  Just so you don't miss out on the opportunity to win something (it could either be crappy, or it could be super awesome--I have no idea yet; YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT IN SUSPENSE!), don't forget to contribute to our mailbag for this week's podcast. All the details are in this previous blog post.

  If you have NO idea what I'm talking about, just click that link above and take a quick read. If you have no idea what the podcast is, click THIS link. And if you have no idea where to email us, then click THIS link. Just remember--the deadline for submitting mail for this week's episode is noon Eastern Standard Time on December 19th, which is this coming Saturday.

  By the way, there's this:

  No, it's NOT yesterday's Dragonball vid. It's more awesomer. Or less. I can't decide.

  Hm, it was way back when I was fatter, so I'll say it's less awesomer than the Dragonball vid.

  • Posted Dec 18, 2009 7:16 am PT
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