I've been looking for The Mythical Cutest Screenshot of Final Fantasy VII, but obviously, my search has ended.

That's Red XIII's tail, right there on the right hand corner!

Red XIII has such a cute tail, and hard to get good screenshots of.

(I'm currently playing through FF7 yet again, mostly because I'm writing stuff for the Wikibook.)

US version.

European version.

A small, random observation from Final Fantasy I&II: Dawn of Souls.

I keep hearing how much this localisation ruled, especially compared to previous translations. One of the most frequently heard praise is that the translators restored the classic mistranslation to the game. When the heroes in Final Fantasy I confront Garland, the first boss, for the first time, he says, just like in the NES version, "I, Garland, will knock you all down!!"

I didn't keep my eyes that peeled when I fought this baddie, and it had been quite a while now since I'm already on the end side of the game. Well, a new game, and... huh... "I, Garland, will cut you down to size!!"

But then I realized that I'm not really mad. In US, I can sort of understand why people wanted the line back. After all, that's how the game was when it was released there. But here, the game was never released with English translation (or in any form, for that matter, until Origins).

Yet, I find it pretty interesting that this single translation bit might build some sort of gap between US and Europe. Here, I think, Garland is a bit different person now.

Oh well, it's an awfully late hour. Just felt like posting some comparative screenshots and rambling.

Or, why game walkthroughs need some attention.

Every gamer, no matter how serious, has probably been quite a few times to GameFAQs. It's definitely in my bookmarks. I'm not perfect. I'm currently trying, first time in my life, to determinedly play a game (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes) through without using any of these outmoded spoilers and walkthroughs. I'm slowly losing my sanity at times. I've got to admit that I've needed to check out a few FAQ bits for that game - only to find out what I, strictly speaking, knew, so I don't think those times count. =)

Yet, the first thing that anyone who visits there probably notices that there's many FAQs. Many many FAQs for the same game.

I know variety is one of those things that make the world go around, but sometimes, all of this just feels like wasted and duplicate effort.

Aww, heck, my head isn't in the condition to do really really long rambling anyway these days, so I just conclude it thus: I think old FAQs are getting somehow busted. At least I think it would be really great if FAQ authors would cooperate more. They clearly are cooperating; Most good FAQs I've seen have loooong credits lists listing everyone who bothered to email stuff to the author's direction.

The communication is the problem. Usually, maintaining a single page and incorporating changes emailed by the users is pretty painful.

Also, GameFAQs generally only accepts FAQs in text format: there are cases when graphics really clarify things. I remember people throwing a lot of heavy critique to Jeff Rovin's direction for How to Win at Game Boy Games and related book titles, because they didn't have much graphics to go with the text.

I remember one horrifying night when I played Metroid: Zero Mission. I read the FAQ, which was, obviously, in exact same format as Rovin's book and the gameplay description hadn't changed much from those days: "go left and jump up there and shoot that and then go left and..." I squinted at the map and tried to make sense of it, went down wrong hallway, and such. Then I realized how to do the whole thing, all by myself, by accident.

So, here was my big rambling for the day. I'll just add this little plug here, though, because it's definitely on-topic. Wikibooks, these days, seems to also have game walkthrough guides. I saw their Final Fantasy VI book and I was amazied: This is probably the perfect format for game walkthroughs and guides. It allows inclusion of exemplary graphics, and allows people to immediately include the changes they were thinking of. Now all Wikibooks needs is some exposure: I really hope people will find out how great medium for game FAQs this thing is.

And my own plug here, finally: I recently started a Final Fantasy VII Wikibook. I already have some great (I think) stuff there, in form of exemplary notes and diagrams which just would get messed up in textual FAQs. If you know anything at all about the game, please come and edit it.

I've now switched from Blosxom to Typo for this site.

It's not that Blosxom didn't work. It's just that Typo seems a lot more flexible and it also supports a lot of cool stuff. Having all of the stuff in sqlite database also hopefully makes backups easier. It's also one of the few really featureful blogwares that don't need MySQL and also supports PostgreSQL and such. (I won't be paying my webhost for garbage like MySQL but would be paying if they had PostgreSQL =)

I hope this thing will help me make editing a little bit less troublesome. And it's written using Ruby on Rails which makes it even cooler. =)

...and if you can read this, that means the migration actually worked =) I've yet to migrate/make the site layout. One cannot have a game blog without the Joystick up there.

Update, 22:26: And here's the first update using Drivel. =) Typo seems like a really great blogware. I've only so far run into problems with Technorati, they seem to remove the last slash from the blog URLs even if I specifically gave it to them, and no matter how many Apache RewriteRules I throw at this thing, it just gives me a 400 Bad Request without the trailing slash. Well well...