

Final Fantasy VII is available on Steam - ValentineC
http://store.steampowered.com/app/39140/

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lmm
I still have my original discs but it's such a pain getting it to run on
anything newer than WinME that I'd given up trying to play it.

Is the rendering performance OK? Are the movies intact? Do you get the choral
music that was only accessible to people who had a creative card with
soundfont support?

Also, this reminds me of several video gaming magazine jokes:

    
    
        Character Booster – Find yourself stuck on a difficult section or lacking the funds to buy that vital Phoenix Down? With the Character Booster you can increase your HP, MP and Gil levels to their maximum, all with the simple click of a button, leaving you to enjoy your adventure.

~~~
Torn
The music is the same as Enix's old version, i.e. MIDI and not nearly as good
as the original PSX music. There's a mod for that though - google Ficedula's
music patch

~~~
thezoid
Did Enix do the original PC port? That would be kinda weird since, Square and
Enix were competitors at the time.

Guess the use of MIDI is what you do when the hardware doesn't for sure come
with support for redbook audio.

~~~
neverm0re
Actually, the PSX version of FFVII is /sampled and sequenced/ (like a
surprising chunk of PSX music) from a Roland SC-88 MIDI module and part of the
reason why a lot of video game music enthusiasts found the PC port of it
interesting was because of the Yamaha XG support, an extension of General MIDI
that was competing against Roland's GS extensions.

It had nothing to do with a 'lack of redbook', especially given the PC port
shipped on disc and no one was releasing stuff on floppies anymore. It simply
was common for Japanese computer games to support MIDI modules, even into the
late 90s. They kept at it longer than Sierra!

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frankcaron
FYI: The Steam version of the game still has a phone-home, always-online DRM
which requires you to maintain connectivity in order to play. This is not the
standard Steam DRM.

~~~
Sprint
I was about to buy Chrono Trigger for my Android the other day but luckily I
read through reviews before. It too requires an online authentication at least
at every start. I passed.

~~~
EpicEng
And, in an attempt to secure their software, they push people into the arms of
emulation and easy to find, DRM-free, ROMs. Bafflingly short sighted, as
usual.

------
Shish2k
Still waiting for a proper HD rerelease - fans have already hacked the game to
load high-res character models / sprites / menus / etc; but it looks silly
with 1080p characters wandering round a 320p world :(

How hard can it be to re-render an already-created CG scene with a few more
pixels?

~~~
Cthulhu_
> How hard can it be to re-render an already-created CG scene with a few more
> pixels?

Quite tricky, seeing that Square-Enix no longer has the original source files
to re-render these. A proper re-release would require artists to remake the
environments from scratch (based on concept art or the original game).

~~~
thezoid
Even if they did have it, there's a good chance their systems aren't
compatible with whatever they used to render them.

The game is nearly 20 years old, a millennia in video game time. Oh my
goodness... 20 years!

~~~
wmil
Actually that works in their favor. It's been long enough that they can
probably run the original system and software on an emulator with a faster CPU
setting.

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donutdan4114
My all-time favorite game. Got it for PC in 1997, and it changed my life.

~~~
alinajaf
Yep. I'm perpetually waiting for square to get their shit together and just
give us what we want: A frame-by-frame remake with PS4 generation graphics.

~~~
Cthulhu_
But is it really what you want? What you want is to relive that experience; a
full-on PS4-style graphics remake will change the whole experience. It'll be a
game with the same characters, environments, story and basic gameplay, but the
feel of it will be completely different.

I run a FFVII-based fansite (thelifestream.net, [/plug]), and the general
consensus of the community there is that while a full FFVII remake would be
nice, it would generally be criticized by the original fanbase, no matter how
awesome they make it, simply because it's not the same game anymore.

For an example of the only full-on remake Square ever did of one of their
older titles, you could look at FFIII on the DS, remaking a 2d, sprite-based
game into a 3D one. Of course, FFIII doesn't have nearly the fanbase of VII so
there were less tears on the internet over it.

~~~
EpicEng
I would love a full remake. While they're at it they can remake Chrono Trigger
(my all-time favorite) and FFIII (VI) as well.

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wjoe
Does this still use Square's DRM, or is it all handled by Steam now? I was
playing the re-release through Wine on Linux last year, but the DRM
workarounds made it activate as a new PC each time it started. Since it has an
activation limit, I got locked out after a few launches.

~~~
Shish2k
Relatedly, does it use Square's "Cloud Saves" (ho ho ho)? I've got the square
version, but it was largely unplayable because you when the cloud servers are
down / timing out (as was the case 9 times out of 10), the load / save
functionality would be disabled (can't even load or save local files :-/). And
then after playing for ~20 hours, the game decided to overwrite my save file
with a cloud backup from ~19 hours ago...

~~~
dkersten
It does, but you can turn it on/off. Its off by default.

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markolschesky
Remember how the original PC version always crashed at the chocobo races if
you tried running it on Windows XP? I remember being so bummed about that
until someone released a patch for it on the internet. What did we do before
automatic game patches?

------
radikalus
I remember when the demo for FF7 was released alongside Brave Fencer; I think
I played that demo alone 50+ times. Completely changed my expectations on how
immersive/cinematic/emotive games could be.

~~~
EpicEng
The demo was released with Tobal No.1, not Musashi. I also played the crap out
of that demo. It was amazing for its time having just come from the SNES.

~~~
lmm
It's funny how we remember the games from the early years of a console over
the more polished final ones, even when trying to choose "best of all time".
Perfect Dark improved on Goldeneye in every way, but rarely makes such lists
(and similarly with Majora's Mask). FF6 and Chrono Trigger were stunning,
pushing the SNES far further than one would have imagined possible - but it's
FF4 you hear people rave about. And sacrilegious as it may seem, I think FF9
actually improved on 7 - but it's far less remembered than that first,
stumbling foray into 3D, FMV and all the rest of it.

~~~
radikalus
I think is a pretty common psychological tendency, no?

It's like more about the derivative (delta/improvement) of quality, the
velocity of the game relative to previous efforts not its actual position in
space.

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rcruzeiro
PC only? Really square? I guess it would be really difficult to port those
amazing, cut-edge graphics to opengl...

~~~
toyg
I guess the business plan was something like "let's make this old win32 code
run on win7 and ship the fucker", rather than any well-thought-out long-term
effort...

~~~
seferphier
"and print money!"

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hansbogert
Ow c'mon Steam, you were on your way to support Linux so well -- windows only
:(

~~~
omni
Valve had literally zero input into this decision, so direct your frustration
at Square Enix instead.

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sergiotapia
Why are they charging so much for such an old game?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Simple: because people are willing to pay for it. People pay fortunes for
vintage toys because their parents got rid of them two+ decades ago and they
want to relive their youth and have expendable income. Similarly, people want
to relive their youth from 15-20 years ago with video games, and are willing
to re-buy a version of the game that runs on modern-day systems.

Re-releases of old / 'vintage' video games are quite popular on Steam,
allowing the owners of the rights of said games to sell them again with
relatively small investments. This also happens on modern consoles (PSN on the
PS3, etc), which no longer have backwards compatibility, so that the game
manufacturers port the game to modern systems (at minimal investment) and sell
them again. Optionally rendering the game at a higher resolution and calling
it a HD re-release.

