Final Fantasy VIII

Playground Whispers ・・・ The Truth in Cheating

April 3, 2015 — Leave a comment

Before the internet was a welcoming place for pre-teens, we relied on two sources for gaming tips – magazine walkthroughs that were often spread across multiple issues, and hearsay from kids at school. Everyone ‘knew’ how to get Lara Croft naked, how to catch Mew…all because a friend of a friend of someone’s older brother read online about some secret cheat. These kinds of cheats spread like wildfire, and there were always very specific, yet very different tactics to completing them. We had memorised button combinations for level select codes, and the exact sequence of events needed to run into Missing No. But nine times out of ten, these very specific cheats turned out to be a complete waste of time. How many of us tried to get to that weird looking truck near the S.S. Anne?

There is of course, some truth to a few of these cheats. Encountering a certain trainer with a particular Pokémon in Pokémon Red/Blue that corresponds to the hexadecimal for Mew can trick the game into loading a random encounter with a wild one. It is stuff like this that I hadn’t really understood until I started to play around with hex values in emulators – since there was no risk of corrupting a cartridge this way. Even now, I only have a limited understanding of how the values correspond to one another, but it’s amazing that someone was curious enough to crack the game back then and work it all out. As a kid with no programming knowledge, it just seemed like a magical coincidence that a certain chain of events could trigger this kind of pay-off. Continue reading

Everything I Learned, I Learned From Gaming PART FIVE: Final Fantasy VIII (1999) ・・・ Seedling

February 13, 2015 — 2 Comments

When I was twelve, my parents got divorced and my brother took the Playstation. I was pretty devastated over my material loss. Also I guess it sucked that my parents split. I had my Gameboy, but Pokémon Gold could only hold my attention for so long as a newly found only child. The following Christmas I was given a PS One, the slim line Playstation with a much more pleasant grey colouring. Having been without a console for a year, I was desperate for some Crash Bandicoot so naturally I asked for Crash Bash. What a waste of a game that was. But I suffered through it, because it was the only game I had in my possession. Then one day my dad took me to an Electronics Boutique (as it was known at the time) and told me to pick a new Playstation game.

So I stood in front of a small wall of Playstation titles, as the Playstation 2 had been released the previous Christmas and shelf space was dwindling. For the first time in years, I was out of my depth for choice. I hadn’t been reading any gaming magazines, so I had no clue what was worth playing any more. Then I spotted two vaguely familiar games with simple logotype covers. The name Final Fantasy seemed to ring a bell, as a lot of the anime websites I frequented mentioned it all the time. When presented with copies of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, I had a Burns style ‘ketchup, catsup’ breakdown. To the uninitiated, they both seemed like the exact same thing. Guy with big sword and pointy hair in a vaguely militaristic fantasy setting. So, with all the experience I had with Final Fantasy (or even RPGs for that matter), I chose Final Fantasy VIII ‘because the newer one must be better’. This was one of those rare times where my instinct was right. Continue reading