Incoherent fool - July 4th, 1999 - Drew Cosner
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not neccessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. This column has been known to cause cancer in test specimens. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)
I think it's possible that I have the world's worst timing. I'm not going to go into some tangent about all that is wrong with my life, I'll spare you that garbage. Anyhow, I was going to have this column up for you guys, and just as I was finishing up the power for a 6 block radius went out thanks to everybody cranking the air conditioners. Naturally, I hadn't bothered saving my work up until that point. The power didn't come back on until moments before I left to enjoy the Holiday. Yay me. But I don't want to end a streak. As far as I can recall, I haven't missed a single update, and I don't intend on starting. So, I've come home, it's late, and this is probably going to be damn near incoherent. Bear with me. | PE for the English speaking man | Hey Drewy boy! (ack)We all know that Parasite Eve was inspired by a book. Now, do you knowif that book was ever translated to english? The book's probably good,but I'm a complete failure in terms of japanese. Help me! If it DID gettranslated, you know anywhere i can find it?Thanks!! -Mr. SpeKKles |
Nope, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Parasite Eve never made it stateside, translated or otherwise. Okay, so I lied, I like to be the bearer of bad news. It makes my life feel more complete. | The giving of the shaft | In response to the people asking about a Pro Action Replay, I own one, and it's a neat little utility. Aside from letting you play CD-R backups, and imports, it also allows you to view the contents of the CD for locating and playing back movie files (.str) and XA files (.xa). Sorry, it doesn't seem to be able to playback PCM files. So for all the music in Square games, we're out of luck...But as to how reliable it is, I've been having problems with it recently. I've been having trouble getting all the games in the Final Fantasy Collection to start, as well as the Legend of Mana demo. But then I bought a mod chip, and they work fine! What I would recommend to the importers, get both! If you have both, you're practically unstoppable. And now a couple questions.... 1. What happened between Sega of America and Working Designs all those years ago? I'm sure many people who have a sudden interest in Working Designs would like to know. |
During the E3 of '97, Sega was to give Working Designs a section of their mammoth booth to set up shop. In the end Working Designs got stuck with some space about the size of a closet and in a crappy location. Naturally, WD took offence. I'd like to think that there's more to the story than that, seeing as an outrightr refusal to publish for Sega's systems is a pretty major stance to take. Maybe somebody at Sega told them Shining Wisdom sucked or something, who knows. 2. "I can't wait to meet a great guy I can scream at and exchange blows with!"Didn't you say that Michael Baskett was supposed to be fluent in english? -The Poppin Fresh Doughboy |
I don't even know what to say. You'd think, wouldn't you? You'd think Square would pay some guy straight off the street just to stand around and say "No, that's stupid" when he saw morbidly awkward lines like that. Square needs to find a middle ground. They either go overboard with translations that are so literal they sound like you're talking to Webster's Computerized Dictionary, or they have characters like Barret, who's lingo they picked up watching late night reruns of 80's American television shows. | More of my whining about translations | I know that Final Fantasy Tactics has a terrible translation and all, but that probably means that if there's a sequel, it will have one of the greatest translations ever. Remember how Breath of Fire II, despite being a great game, had an awful translation, so Capcom worked really hard on Breath of Fire III, giving it a great translation? I bet the same thing will happen. This will be kind of sad, though, since I kind of looked forward to finding new errors in the game. Maybe the GIA should start a petition asking Square to crap up Final Fantasy Tactics II. If they make a sequel, which they should. -BenGrande |
That would be a good theory, except for the fact that Final Fantasy VII's translation was kind of questionable, and FFVIII is looking to follow suit already, just from the few english screenshots released thus far. I don't hate Square, really I don't. So get yer finger off that send button, I don't need none of that choice hate mail. I'd just like to see a translation that showed at least some semblence of effort. I'm weird that way. | Musically inclined | Hi, The bad/average sound quality of FF7/FF8 isn't Nobuo's fault. He composes the songs and chooses the instruments to play the song ('arranging' it), then it's up to the sound programmer to translate Nobuo's notes and instruments into instructions that the psx's sound chip understands and can play. And to make it sound good. Unfortunately Minoru Akaou, the sound programmer who did FF7 & FF8, is nowhere near as talented as Hidenori Suzuki (who did Xenogears). Alas, FF7 and FF8's music sounds very "videogamish", while Xenogears music sounds "real". -Rob S |
Sounds about right. Yet another example of why I just don't get what goes through Square's collective heads sometimes. I suppose if Nobuo really wanted to go redbook or some such, he could push to have it done, he's a big man on the FF scene and all. But the arranger and the actual composer who puts the music into a format the PSX can handle are usually two different people, I'd expect that to be the case even here. | Answer me! | Greetings Drew..... I own an Action Replay Game Enhancer, so I can give you a bit of info. First, I want to say that I'm very satisfied with my game enhancer. It works wonderfully. To play an import, you DO have to do the CD swap(putting in a US disc to start it up and then switching with the import), but it's the "safe CD swap". Doing the CD swap with an older game enhancer, from what I'm aware of, was dangerous for the Playstation because you had to swap the CDs while the disc was spinning. This could lead to the motor getting screwed up or something. The "safe CD swap" is much easier and as the name implys, it's safe for your Playstation. First, you put in the US disc and wait for the disc to stop spinning(the game enhancer causes it do do this). Then you swap discs. Next (if the game doesn't need codes), go to the "Start Game"option on the onscreen menu and you can play. This all takes about 30 seconds at most to do. It's still easy if you need codes to play the game. You just need to store the codes in the game enhancer and choose the codes you need before choosing the "Start Game With Cheats" option.For multi disc games with the save option before you switch discs, you turn the Playstation off after you've saved and repeat the startup process with the new disc. I've heard that if you have the mod-chip/game enhancer combo, you don't have to do this, but instead you just put in the the new disc. One person wrote that Metal Gear Solid doesn't have a save option before disc change. I don't know if that's true or not since I don't have the game, but with games like that I've heard that you can do the Unsafe CD swap with out having to shut the system off. Of course, I would never do this because I would never endanger my Playstation(which explains why I don't like mod-chips).A plus(to some people) with the Pro Action Replay Game Enhancer is that you can also watch the FMV sequences and sometimes listen to some music with certain games(it won't do this for FF8, and the Square demos).This isn't a feature I use too often, but it allowed me to finally figure out how much FMV is in FF7(around 50-55 minutes for anyone who's interested) with out having to use a stopwatch and going through the entire game. Another plus: It also has a memory card manager so you don't have to take the game enhancer out in order to delete information.AND another wonderful thing about it(unlike the mod-chip) is that it can be removed from the Playstation and brought to a friends house if needed, but that's kind of pointless for me since I have no social life anyway.WELL, that's about it. I hope I was of some help. -Tetsuya |
Yeah, that's what I was interested to know. For answering my self-serving question, I give you a gold star. That'll get you in free to Brian Glick's strip joint. All Canadian, all nude. | It's hip to be fruity | Hey Drew,What's wrong with good ol' Matsuno. I love his games and all, but do they all have to have heroes that look like they have questionable sexuality. I mean seriously, Ramza? He was the biggest woman ever. And this time around he's even pushed the estrogen overdoses onto the villian as well. 'Cause, man, Sydney looks rather womanish. It's not really a hindrance to the gameplay or anything. I mean, as long as they can whoop up some mad shit I don't really care what they look like. It's just something that's kind of bugged me for a little while. Thanks for listening. See ya'. -Mark John(s)on |
Thanks to Hollywood, fruity is in. Everybody's doing it. Naming a lead character "Cloud" was just the beginning. The revolution is now. | Gilgamesh not the man? | So here's what I can't figure out. What's with all the fuss about Gilgamesh? Sure, he was one of the cooler-looking villains in FF history, and sure, he had lots of weapons, and sure, he died tragically. But none of that really matters, you see. None of the stuff he did in the game was emphasized all that much. He seemed like your typical badass bodyguard for the main villain. Throughout the course of the game, he never said anything or did anything to distinguish himself as anything other than Exdeath's henchman. Maybe in the Japanese version, he is described in greater detail, or perhaps he simply has much cooler lines. But in the translated ROM I played through (and the translation was very professional-looking, likely more than some stupid hacker's effort), he just never said anything all that awe-inspiring. And all the commotion over his theme song. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I thought that FF5 had the weakest music in the series. Yes, it could have something to do with the medium I've played it on, but I've also downloaded numerous MIDIs, MODs, and MP3s of the music, only to hear nothing all that spectacular. Calling Gilgamesh's theme one of the greatest of Uematsu's works is a complete and utter fallacy the way I see things. Certainly, it rocks, but it lacks the depth and epic quality of other Final Fantasy songs. The melody is rather trite, and the instrumentation could have been a lot better. All in all, I think Lenna's theme, the overworld music from World 2, or the Hiryuu theme would be much better suited to being labeled as the best song from FF5. Gilgamesh was an underdeveloped villain (not quite as bad as Zeromus or Chaos) at best with little unique personality qualities, and his theme song is nothing more than a tune to kick ass to. Basically, if space is going to be wasted on the FF Anthology music CD by Gilgamesh's theme because it sounds cool, there are better tracks from FF6 that have all the same qualities people seem to like, only multiplied by a thousand. Take Dancing Mad, The Decisive Battle, The Unforgiven, Mt. Koltz, Final Dungeon, Fanatics, or any one of dozens of Final Fantasy 6 themes, and you have a piece of music to which FF5 can't even try to compare. In the Final Fantasy Anthology, U.S. gamers are being treated to the best and worst games that post-NES Final Fantasy has to offer. It will be interesting to see how the newly-widened RPG audience reacts to them. -Firebrand |
I don't really have a strong opinion either way, I just posted this letter to bug the Andrews. This is what they get for spreading that image of my head on Richard Simmons' body around the Internet. Damn, that is some weak revenge, I need to practice this stuff more. | Speech patterns | Will square ever use voice acting in the Final Fantasy series? I mean, yeah reading what the characters say is great, for playing late at night when you're supposed to be in bed because there's school the next day, but so much more can be done. The characters personalities could develop so much better with speech. Imagine Metalgear the way they did it FF. All the little grunts and sighs in the way they say things would be lost. All the character intonations would be gone. But without it, it would be horrible. Thank goodness it has voice. Another thing: With squaresoft tackling more titles with very complex plots (Xenogears, Tactics), voice acting would at least help you keep the characters straight (all those people in Tactics are really hard to remember). Yeah, it would be extremely expensive to hire good voice actors. And it's agreed that it might be a little risky (Supposing they hire Mr. Chris Redfield to play someone, you get the idea). But with all the incredible space allowed on the new sysytems with DVD and such, there's really no excuse not to have it. Well anyway, there's my letter. Pick it apart and correct me as usual. ^_^ -Alexander3025 BTW will there be any coverage of that Front Mission 3 game here? It looks like a Square Battletech game. |
Good voice acting would make an excellent addition to the Final Fantasy series in my never humble opinion. The problem is that sticking voices onto a disc takes a lot of space. Space Square has expended on fancy FMV. With the upcoming PS2 or Dolphin, the story changes. Both use DVDs, which as far as storage space is concerned make CDs look like their bitch, in technical terms. So the possiblity will be there, it's just a matter of whether or not Square feels it will be a good idea. And yes, we already have coverage of Front Mission 3 set up here. Sadly, though, unless God decides to have a little fun and alter the course of fate, it likely won't see an American release. | Too scary | Drew, Hi there, love the site. I'm wondering...just what can Capcom do in allthe new Resident Evil coming out that can possibly terrify our desensitizedselves? RE1 and 2 were pretty shocking the first time around, but now theyseem almost laughable...think Capcom can pull something suitably horrifyingout of their sleeves? -Mike |
The Resident Evil series has never exactly been piss-your-pants frightening or anything. Sure it was tense, and a few surprises would make you jump now and then, but I seriously doubt anybody had a hard time sleeping after playing the B-movie inspired schlock. As long as Capcom can stick in a few fresh surprises and some new ideas, RE3 should be a cool game. Closing Comments Keeping the streak alive, baby. -Drew Cosner, the man with the Golden Groin |
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