Final Fantasy XII: First Impressions

Bunny girls!  Air ships!  Shameless disregard for the laws of physics!

And jaggies.  Moving jaggies.  It's like an on-screen migraine.

This is the first time I've hooked up the PS2 to my LCD TV.  Before, I played it on my computer monitor, and before that, on my old computer monitor (and when I say old, I mean the monitor from my Amiga 1000) or my TV.  The larger, brighter screen makes the colour and detail really jump out - but it makes the jaggies jump out too.

Instead of the PS3, Sony should have made a PS2.5.  Nice simple dual-core 1.2GHz in-order CPU, hardware geometry, single-pass texturing, 300MHz 32-pipeline graphics chip, 128MB main memory and 32MB video memory.  Not as amazing as the PS3 perhaps, but it could deliver a very high degree of PS2 compatibility with the power and memory to run HD and/or anti-aliasing, and get rid of those damn jaggies.

Huh.  Does the PS3 support anti-aliasing on PS2 games under emulation?  That might actually make it worthwhile.

Interestingly, according to this chart, the built-in graphics on my motherboard have a higher fill rate than the PS2 - 1.6GT/sec compared to 1.2.  Which isn't saying much unless you know that the PS2 graphics engine had a phenomenal fill rate but was otherwise relatively weak - no hardware geometry, as implied by my suggested spec for the PS2.5.  How times change.

What?  Oh, the game.  Well, let's see.  You can't save in the initial training session, so I'm going to have to run through that a third time.  Yeah, third time.  Turns out you can lock up the game if you go into the location map before it teaches you how to do that.

Oh, and the main character is some git with spiky blond hair.

And yes, I'm aware that this game came out two years ago.  I've been looking everywhere for my PS2 power supply.*  Hey, it took me three years to get around to playing FFX.  At this rate, I'll be firing up FFXVI on its release day - sometime in 2016.  Hey, I still haven't finished FFIII!

* Er, sort of.  I'd found everything except the power supply, and thought I needed to look for that, so I'd put off actually setting the thing up.  Then I realised that in my original-model PS2, the power supply is on the inside...  On the plus side, when I went to scrounge a matching cable from my cable box, I found my missing Canon battery charger on the end of said cable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:08 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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