It was time for one of my old machines to get another workout. In fact, this game is one of the main reasons why I spent so much time getting my old computers up and running again in the first place.

In addition, this is quite an important year for this game, as it is the game's 25th anniversary, and also the 20th anniversary of when I last spent any time in it whatsoever.

Yes, it was time to revisit Final Fantasy 8.

Well, I tried so hard to get this thing working on Windows 98 on my Dark Star computer, but unfortunately just couldn't manage to get everything working completely correctly. While PS4 controllers work by default under that old OS, which I really liked, I couldn't get the game to detect the d-pad. I eventually found an old program called Joy2Key which would map the d-pad to the arrow keys so I could use it instead of the analogue stick.

However, I just couldn't get the Direct X renderer working, and the game would only boot with the software renderer. I did try a community made OpenGL driver, but this wouldn't work on Win 98, and needed a newer system.

So it just didn't seem possible to get the game running how I wanted, and have something like Fraps take some screenshots. I probably could have got it working eventually, but it didn't seem worth the effort. Poor Dark Star. Will I ever get any more use out of it?

Instead, the XP side of Ashe stepped up, and I was able to use the OpenGL driver to get a much better resolution than the game would normally allow. This did introduce a few visual glitches here and there, but overall it was playable.

I'd already got a plan for this playthrough, and it was a tactic I'd not tried before. During this run, I was going to turn as many enemies as possible into cards, in order to not gain experience, but continue to level up the GFs. These cards can then be turned into items and magic, and will negate much of the draw grind that I experienced during my old playthroughs.

However, I did not want to fully follow through with this tactic and play lots of rounds of Triple Triad in order to win even more cards, as I hated that mini-game back in the day.

So would this technique work for me?

During the first mission, all of the time Seifer was in my party I had him hit himself until he was on 0 health. I hate that dude, and I've never been sure why he gets away with the ending he gets. Prick.

After this, I spent some time on the beach, levelling all of the refine abilities and getting cards. Little did I know it, but this was my first little mini-grind of many, in a playthrough that was supposed to be mostly devoid of grinding.

As I pushed through disc 1, I had my one and only hard crash, right after loading into the game in Deling City. No idea what happened. Just one of those weird things.

I never realised back in the day that the sniper mission is flawed, as the Sorceress is moving away from the shooter team when she is trapped by the gates, not towards them as she should be. Irvine wouldn't even be able to see her to take the shot. I mean, the CGI cutscene even shows Squall approaching from the back. Odd.

Onto disc 2, and Galbadia Prison was an absolute ballache. I really don't remember it being such a drag. Constantly round and round the circuit and up and down the stairs. It was here I also messed up during the one moment you are allowed to junction before the Biggs and Wedge fight, so only one character was set up properly, and I had no way to mug them for their good items.

In fact, the junction system all the way through the playthrough was a pain, but especially during the first half of the game. There are so many times where you have to switch everything to other party members. Yes, the junction exchange is there, but then lots of cures are always needed, rather than the HP being topped up already.

After the escape from the prison, I was back to the same point in the game that I got to the last time I played it, all the way back in 2004.

Or so I thought.

For a laugh, I found out the old save files, because I thought comparing my character levels from that old playthrough to this one would be quite enlightening. However, when I tried to load that save from 2004, the game asked me to insert disc 3, which was not what I was expecting. Clearly I got further into the game back then than I remember. I found myself right at the start of disc 3 after the battle of the Gardens.
What was also strange was the levels of the characters, and I'm really not sure how I got into this situation. But Squall was 50, Zell 32, Rinoa 28, Selphie 24, and Irvine 22. But Quistis was the really weird one, at level 55. How'd she get all the way up there?

I also checked out some really old saves from back in 2000, as my old Final Fantasy blog post from back in December 2012 reminded me that I'd used a lot of weird names for the GFs in an earlier playthrough. I can't remember what those names were for the life of me, so I was hoping these old saves could solve this riddle. However, upon examination, the names in these saves are all the default names. Therefore these saves must have been from my second playthrough that I did later in the year. Unfortunately, I guess I'll never remember what the weird names were. Shame. I may have found them quite funny.

The disc 2 experience was pretty much a drag. Maybe that's why I don't remember playing through it back in 2004. The missile base was back and forth. Saving Balamb Garden was round and round. Fisherman's Horizon was back and forth. Though something interesting happened here, in that I didn't realise you could just up and leave while in control of Irvine, and go explore the town.

After getting through these sections, I now had the Garden to move around in, but unfortunately this led to some sections of grinding. First, up to the frozen north to grind fluid from some monsters that I could turn into the Meltdown spell. Then, down south to farm Tonberrys so I could get the Tonberry GF. This in turn led to me having to go back to the Deling sewers, and my first real big draw grind to stock up on Life spells. This was so I could keep all my characters in low health and keep using their limit breaks to smash through the Tonberries.

It was time to get through this 2nd disc, so it was time for the battle of the Gardens. I first tried to be sneaky and just walk up to Edea's house, as that was the goal. However, the game would not continue until the two Gardens duked it out.

There was another stupid bit of the game here, when Zell and Rinoa spend ages talking about Squall's ring. There's a war going on, and they are worried about this? Also, Squall wears gloves. How do they know about the ring anyway?

Onto disc 3, and I'd totally forgot the weird sounds in the Esthar music. Made me turn the sound off for large stretches of this section, as it was annoying me.

I wasn't looking forward to going into space, as this was one of the parts I remember being a drag in my early playthroughs. But here I couldn't believe how easy the Propagators were this time round. It seemed the tactic of keeping the character levels low, but pumping up the GFs, was working.

After getting the Ragnarok, I had a decision to make about how much grinding I wanted to do. I'd got to do at least some, in order to get items for Doomtrain, and killing Cactuars to level up the GFs. But how much more would I want to do, to get spells and items for weapons etc...

Part of me wanted to really go all out, so that I could kill Omega Weapon for the first time. But in the end, just getting the items for Doomtrain was too much of a drag. I decided to do as little as possible. As it turned out, I had come to the conclusion that the game wasn't really worth the effort required to do everything the way I did with FF7 a while back.

I'd only ever made my way through Ultimecia's castle once before, and I'm hoping I'll never have to do it again. Once more during this game, there was just way too much back and forth, constantly running up and down the same sets of steps and through the same rooms. Urgh.
At least every mini-boss fell with a few quick attacks.

Going in to the final fight, I'd been using Squall, Quistis and Zell pretty much exclusively since the start of disc 3, and they were the ones with plenty of magic and proper sorted junctions. For the other characters, I just patched them up as best I could while at the last save point. And of course, as I go into the fight against Ultimecia, who does she choose to accompany Squall but Irvine and Rinoa.

Still, I thought I had surely done enough to make the fight easy. It probably would have been, but sheer hubris on stage 2 saw the entire party wipe to the Shockwave Pulsar attack for my first game over of the run.

Never mind, I thought. Surely now it would give me at least one of my other fully-prepped team mates, right?

But of course, on my second attempt to beat this bitch, it gave me Selphie and Rinoa. Not a single Zell or Quistis in sight. Though it mattered not. I was fully focused this time, and even with an ill-prepared party, it was a fairly easy victory. In fact, I was surprised she died so quickly, as only Squall was really doing any attacking. Rinoa and Selphie were more focused on keeping up the shields and heals.

So how was the game after all this time away from it, and how did it compare to the playthrough I did of FF7 a couple of years back?

Well, sadly, I have not massively enjoyed this experience at all. The game just makes itself so difficult to really love, as it's just so grindy and awkward to do everything I wanted to do. I think the main meat of the problem comes from how the GFs are so heavily interwoven into the gameplay. This is not just because of the junctioning of magics, but also because you have to use their abilities to refine magic and items from other magic and items. It's just such a ballache to get certain items, when you've got to go and grind 100 other items that can then be turned into other items, which can then be turned into the item you want.

Even the combat was awkward using this card method. This was because there's a much higher chance of turning monsters into cards when their health is low. So there was constant fear of causing too much damage and outright killing the monsters instead of carding them. This led to lots of very cagey fights where I was only trying to hurt the monsters just enough, and I went through a lot of the game without any magic junctioned to strength at all.

It was definitely different to the grinding in FF7, where I could pretty much turn my brain off and kill things as fast as possible. Here, everything just seemed to be slow and awkward.

I also don't really care much for the story or characters in this one. I know the English translation didn't do him any favours, but Squall is pretty much a damp squib that out of nowhere just magically becomes a hopeless romantic with very little evident transition. Still, at least he gets some kind of character arc. The supporting cast are pretty much cardboard cutouts.
I also don't really care for the time weirdness that goes on.

Also, how the hell does a fool like Laguna keep failing upwards all the time?

I can't say I regret playing it again, because I really don't. It had been way too long. But as I think it's unlikely I'll ever play FF7 ever again, which is my favourite game, am I ever really going to want to pick this up again?

Absolutely not. And I highly doubt I'll miss it.

Just got done with a surprisingly short puzzle game called The Looker, which I spied on its release a couple of years ago, and looked pretty interesting.

The game's main mechanic is that you have to whip out a pen, and draw a line from a start point to an end point, in order to solve each puzzle.

Sound pretty simple? Well it is. At least, for the most part.

There were definitely one or two moments that made me scratch my head, just trying to figure out exactly what the next puzzle wanted me to do.

Like at one point, in order to continue, I needed to open a door. Now upon this door was a sign with many words. What took me forever to realise was that, in order to open said door, I had to draw a line from an S to an E, which were letters within other words on the sign. Now, the game had pretty much set me up to look for this kind of crap by this point, and it should have come to me sooner. But I spent way too long mucking about with that thing.

Apart from the one or two puzzling moments, the game flew by, and felt kind-of rushed, even by single developer standards.

But still, it's another one done which can be crossed off the list.

Despite all of the wargaming terrain I've made over the years, I've never actually made my own proper gaming table. In fact, for well over 20 years, I've used 4 boards of completely different thicknesses, all with a badly glued down GW static grass sheet on top.
This has always bothered me, as it's always so obvious where the boards meet.

I thought it was about time I did something about this, and resolved myself to actually constructing a decent gaming space.

Unfortunately, the project has been hampered by a complete lack of experience, a multitude of decision changes, an enormous underestimation of how long this would take, and the complete and total lack of space required in order to accomplish such a mission.

This is how things have gone so far...

I first picked up some pretty cheap and naff wood to act as a base. I picked up 3 sheets of 2' by 4', and cut one longways down the middle. This wood is the same thickness as one of my existing boards, so the plan is to eventually retrofit the old board so that it will fit in with the new ones.
This will give me a multitude of different board combinations to use, with 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 foot wide tables available.

As the edges of the wood were very rough, I decided to rub some filler in there and give it a basic sand, so that it was easier to handle, and would look a lot nicer when painted. This has so far been about the only thing that has gone well.

As I look back, the most foolish decision I made was the very first one. I'd got some 6mm and 9mm polystyrene sheets from other projects in the past. The initial idea was to glue this to the wood in different areas to have 2 slightly different heights forming the basic tabletop.
However, as this was polystyrene, I knew I'd need some fancy method to keep it protected from damage.

I really should have just used some thin wood all over. What an idiot I am.

As I'd watched some Youtube terrain videos, and thought myself just as good as those guys, my first idea was to make up some home made modelling compound and completely cover all of the boards in this, to make them very hard wearing.

This would need shredding up a lot of toilet paper, and would require a lot of casting powder. Now, as shown a little while back, the casting powder I received was delivered by a wonderful Amazon driver, and the tub was split straight down the side. I managed to dispense this into an empty cement tub I'd luckily got in the shed.

As I started to glue the polystyrene to the wood, I thought that I needed to have some method of protecting the edges. To this end, I left a little gap, not taking the polystyrene to the edges. I figured I'd fill it in with modelling compound to firm it all up later. When a couple of days had gone by, I wondered what the hell my brain was doing, and realised I should have just trimmed the boards with thin wood. This meant I had to cut back and remove a little polystyrene. Luckily, the glue I'd bought wasn't super strong and I was able to peel and scrape it away.

I mixed up the modelling compound and started to add it to the joins between the different types of polystyrene, trying to smooth these out. This is when I learned that the modelling compound technique takes forever. The damn stuff sets so fast that you simply can't mix a big load and slap it all on, or it will be set before you can push it and smooth it into the correct positions.

I struggled on through the poly joins, mixing tiny little amounts of compound at a time, but my mind was already made up that this stuff was not going all over.

So I had a different idea. I chose a test area of one of the boards, and using a sieve, I gently scattered casting powder over it. Then I sprayed it down with a misting of water, before laying sheets of toilet paper on top. Then I scattered some more casting powder on top, and sprayed it down again. Then, when it started to set, I wet my fingers and smoothed it out as best I could.

This worked to a degree. Yet though it was a lot faster, it still took a long time, particularly the smoothing out part. The final nail in the coffin of this idea, is that the area did not set flat, even after all my efforts with the smoothing. There were all these lumps and ridges that just did not look natural at all.

Though I wasn't happy with that technique for the large flat areas of land, it did look like it might work for the river section, especially if I painted it right. Therefore I went ahead and covered the river bed using this method.

By this point, I was rapidly running out of time, and wouldn't have the space for much longer before the boards would need to be moved. One morning I randomly woke up at 3:15 AM and panicked so much that I jumped out of bed and started painting the boards green. Just to do something.

For some reason, it took me over 3 hours just to paint the tops of the boards. With just a few days left, this was the point I realised I'd made a massive tactical error thinking I could possibly pull this off. I really should never have bothered. I just saw people on Youtube making awesome looking boards and had the absolute gall to believe I could do something similar in the time I had available.

Still, I needed to get as much done as possible now that I was neck deep in it.

Now that the boards were green, I could see a lot of dips and divets that were not as obvious before. I used the last of my tube of wood filler to smooth these out as best I could, and then finished these areas in green also.

I then bought some heavy duty varnish and slapped this on top. I was hoping that, along with the glue and flock that would come later, it would be enough to protect the polystyrene from some wear. But after the varnish, it all still felt really fragile somehow. I knew I needed something else.

Yet more Youtube vids were scoured, and I saw a lot of people use tile grout to make very hard, and somewhat natural looking, ground for their game boards. So off I went to the local DIY store, and grabbed some grout and some soil to mix it with. Firstly, the soil had to be baked and sieved so that it went into a very clean and dry powder.

I picked one of the smaller boards, and glued the grout and soil mix down on top. Then, as instructed, I wet the surface with some isopropyl alcohol, before dousing it with sealer.

A day later, I was assuming I would have a very hard, and pretty cool looking surface. Instead, I ended up with a really odd coloured ground, that flakes off pretty easily if you so much as tickle it with your fingers, with several larger chunks breaking up and falling off.

Sigh.

Things have simply not gone well during this entire venture. And with the space I was using no longer available, the boards are stuck up the corner again until I can find somewhere (and somehow) to try and finish them off.

It's always struck me as a shame that there is no mention of my favourite TV show ever, Farscape, on this blog. Without rambling about it, which is highly unlikely, the only way I could make this happen was to revisit the game of the series.

And now that my old computers were up and running properly, I figured there was no better time than now.

The game itself was a gift I received for Christmas 2002, probably the only thing I asked for that year. I played it at the time, and maybe played it again a few years later, though my memory is a bit hazy.
One thing I can remember though, is that the game was pretty bad.

Not sure I remembered it being quite this bad, mind.

The game is an ARPG style game, sort-of like Diablo and its ilk. In it, the crew of the living ship, Moya, have run into some trouble with the antagonistic Peacekeepers. Some of the characters have crash landed down on a planet, while others are still trapped aboard the vessel.
It's up to us to reunite the crew and take our ship back.

I know it's a licensed product, and they often suck, but this one being so lame really hurts. I absolutely love the show, and wanted this to be good. But alas, it was not to be.

The controls are awful, and the movement janky. Navigation is a real problem, with no north on the minimap, and no larger map to speak of. Even navigating around the main hub town is a pain, because everything looks the same.

Speaking of looks, the graphics are one of the poorest things about this travesty, and are pretty crap even for the time it was released.

I guess the thing that hurts the most though, is that this doesn't even feel like Farscape at all.

The plot and story was nothing like what you would see in the show. And most of the characters acted differently to how they normally would. Also, even though all of the main cast reprised their roles and lent their voices to this, you can tell very much that they know this is crap and don't really want to be there.
Ben Browder's "ouch" any time Crichton gets hit is all the evidence you need of this.

Mission objectives were often unclear. Case in point, to get further in one level, the team has to go up an elevator. But every time I tried to go up there, Crichton would just say, "let's look around a bit first". Unbeknownst to me, and surely unbeknownst to Crichton, I actually had to pick up a shield belt from in one room, that had not been mentioned at all, and would not even be needed until much further into the base we were exploring. And then suddenly we are allowed to go up the elevator. How the hell did he know we needed that? And how did he know it was even there?

Another weird thing was, upon first reaching the main town, I'd got to talk to several NPCs, one being a healer. I go to talk to the healer, who is a Nebari, the same species as Chiana. When the conversation is over, Chiana says she doesn't want to speak to the healer on the chance that the healer is Nebari, and walks away. Did she not see that we were just already talking to her?

Theres a later mission where you have to rescue Zhaan. She loses all of her inventory during this so I lost 2 good weapons and a lot of spare ammo. I was kinda pissed, but then it turned out that this mattered little, as very soon all of the characters got captured by Peacekeepers and everyone lost all of their weapons. I worked hard to save up the money to buy all of those guns, and now they were gone. Thanks, game.

Also, I didn't find Crichton's gun, Winona, on this playthrough. I'm sure I found it here back in the day. Odd.

All in all, not great at all. But I'm glad I played it again, if only to get nostalgia-feels about the show.

Will never play it again, though. That's for damn sure.