Archive for category Games

Final Fantasy VII Music

1997 was my favorite year in game history. That was the year that Final Fantasy VII came out on the original Sony Playstation. I remember seeing the trailers to that game with that famous opening scene with the train. Back then, that was some amazing graphics.

I had never played a Final Fantasy game up to that point. I have yet to play any other Final Fantasy game that even compares to it. I bought VIII when it came out, and I liked it, but it was missing something. After years of examining my fondnesss for Final Fantasy VII, I've come to the conclusion that what really makes Final Fantasy special is it's confusing story and it's wonderful music. As a side note, I bought FFVII on PSX, PC, and finally on PS3. I didn't complete the game until I played it on PS3 in 2010/2011.

Final Fantasy has a good story, but it was completely confusing. I loved that. It made the game more interesting. FFVIII (which I never completed) also had a confusing plot. I really need to complete it next. Plot for plot, I think that FFVIII is just as good as FFVII. It's hard to tell. One thing is for sure, however, FFVII has the best music. I would say that FFVII has the best music of any game ever. I'm listening to the Piano Collection version of the sound track and  it's amazing. It brings back some great feelings from the game, but it also stands on its own as good quality composition.

I've recently commented that new movies aren't even worth pirating these days. When I think of good movies, I think of movies that came out during the 80's and early 90's. I realize that a lot of this is my own bias, as I was growing up during that time period, but movies today are just terrible. The best movies today come from Pixar. They are about the only movies worth having in a movie collection. I spend most of my movie watching time viewing classics. There's just nothing out there today that really grabs me.

I don't think it's the overuse of special effects or the concentration on 3D technology that makes the movies terrible though. I think it's the lack of quality musical compositions. Think back to some of the best movies, or watch some of the movies that have awesome scores.

Superman 1 - 4 weren't that great, but they had an amazing soundtrack. The original Star Wars trilogy was awesome, but think about the score that went along with it. ET, Jurassic Park, The Godfather, The Last of the Mohicans, Jaw, and many other movies benefited greatly from their music.

I think the same can be said about Final Fantasy VII. You know I read a review of Final Fantasy VII back when it first came out. They gave the music a very low rating. It's funny. I don't play FFVII anymore, but I still listen to the music.

, , ,

No Comments

BattleField 1942 in Windows 2008

I decided to play BF1942 today. I installed it and Battlefield Vietnam. These two games are about the only first person shooters I can play without getting simulator sickness. It had been a while since I played BF1942 so I wanted to try it first.

It should be noted at this point that I've been using Windows 2008 server as a desktop operating system for about three months now. Up until now everything pretty much worked out of the box, but once I tried to start up BF1942 I ran into a slight problem. It complained about having the wrong version of DirectX installed. It requires DirectX 6.0 or higher.

I knew I had a higher version of DirectX than this. So after digging around for a while I found out that there is a bug that causes this issue. The fix is a little strange. One person suggested that it was an issue with fullscreen mode. True enough, after changing one line of a config file for BF1942 to force it to start in windowed mode, there was no issues. The only problem is that windowed mode sucks.

So, searching further, I discovered that there is a fix that involves a patch for GTA2. Here are the instructions to execute this solution:
1.) Download this.
2.) Unzip
3.) Copy the dmusic.dll and dmusic.inf files to C:\Windows\System32
4.) Inside the system32 directory find dmusic.inf...right click on it and choose install.

BF1942 should now work in full screen mode.

»crosslinked«

, ,

No Comments