h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just a quick warning to those people out there who might be thinking of buying Final Fantasy VII or VIII for the PC: the conversions aren't too hot. Put it this way - when they work, they're stunning, but both conversions have major problems that can seriously reduce enjoyment.

Final Fantasy VII worked fine on my machine when I bought it, but as soon as I:

a) upgraded DIrectX
b) upgraded sound or video card drivers, or
c) installed another game

the whole thing would either not work, or freeze during a video cut-scene or after certain battles (if you killed a particular monster, the game would go up in smoke).

Final Fantasy VIII works fine on my machine at the moment (PentiumII, Voodoo2, ATI Xpert@Work and Soundblaster 64 Gold), but there are numerous well-documented problems and a lot of unhappy people out there - for an overview, try visiting:

http://www.deja.com/[ST_rn=if]/group/alt.games.final-fantasy.tech-support

Having said that , the games are excellent - wonderful atmosphere, great visuals, fantastic storylines... some of the dialogue isn't exactly Shakespeare, but it all adds to the charm

Azimuth

I was one of the lucky ones (the minority it seems) that had no problems with FF7 except hard-to-read discs.
After clearing hd space and copying the mvoies to teh HD, it worked fine. I managed to beat Sepiroth with minimal levelling too.

I tell ya something, Knights of the Round and Bahamut Zero look kick ass in 640x480 3d accelerated.

I know what you mean; some of the FFVIII animations are breathtaking with hardware acceleration. That's why I held off and bought the PC version rather than the Playstation one, having tested the playable demo to make sure it was going to work on my machine

However, I have to say I'm looking forward to seeing what they make of the PSX2; a Final Fantasy game using DVD video and the power of the PSX2 should look pretty awesome...

Azimuth

I own both ports of the FF games, and while FF7 did have a lot of problems on my old computer (Pentium 120), FF8 seems to be much more solid. The game (FF8) itself was coded very nicely, and while there may be some complaints of "bad looking backgrounds," I found thoes complaints very under-supported. FF8 has not crashed once, it looks great, sounds great (especially with EAX support on!), and the movies are even better when I saw them for the first time on the PlayStation. People should not complain about these games at all. I think they're execllent ones, and PC gamers are very fourtnate to have such a chance to play execllent console games which we otherwise might not have had. People should stop complaining about minor faults of a medicore first-attempt port, and realize that the games are excellent, if you are a true FF fan, that is.

I'm not sure what to say to this...

The Final Fantasy games are excellent, there's no doubt about that. I couldn't call the PC conversions excellent, though - I've seen too many problems with both versions to be able to recommend them to my friends over the Playstation originals. Some people were very vocal in the Usenet newsgroups, and the ones who simply march in, swear and march out again are childish, annoying and no help at all. However, a number of people saw the shortcomings in the conversions and addressed them, releasing workarounds, patches and utilities to help those who'd been caught out. So, their complaints were constructive, and allowed me to get round the 'plonky MIDI' limitations of FFVIII when running on a machine with an older soundcard (Soundblaster Awe 64 Gold). Having scoured the newsgroups and fiddled with the program itself, I'm now happy and I'm enjoying the whole experience. Complaining isn't necessarily a bad thing; it just depends on how you do it...

Azimuth