FFXII emulator pics

It's been a while. Since I last updated I have moved back to New Zealand, set myself up in a new city ( Wellington, to be precise ), and have been furiously job hunting in the middle of a recession. So, all these things have been taking up most of my time.

This is going to be a quick post, really just a response to my friend Tom's request to see photos of Final Fantasy XII playing in 1920 x 1200 resolution on the PCSX2 emulator. Here they are!:

I've tried to post pics that actually show what the bump in resolution can do to bring the awesome detail of this game out.

Emulation

Recently I've been playing around with PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator. It's really a neat little program. The Ps2 was notorious back in the day for being difficult to program for due to its complex architecture, so the amount of work that must have gone in to make this emulator even remotely functional must have been immense. It's not perfect by any means, however. There are often little graphical and sound glitches while playing, and you can't just play any game you like on it ( yet ).

According to the website, there are 830 games out of 1912 that are playable on the emulator. Luckily, one of these games is Final Fantasy XII. I never got very far into FFXII when I owned a PS2, despite that fact that it's a great game. But thanks to PCSX2 I'm already a few hours into a new game of it. Another bonus of the emulator is being able to play games in high resolutions with texture filtering and anti-aliasing. I'm playing FFXII at a resolution of 1920 x 1200, as opposed to the PS2's native resolution of 640 x 400. It looks incredible! Seriously, the graphics are so sharp and detailed, with absolutely no aliasing.

Oh, and I'm playing this legally, by the way. I'm using an ISO of FFXII that I ripped myself from my own copy of the game. Legal emulation FTW!

F.E.A.R 2 Demo

I just played the demo on PC. Impressions? Mmmmmmokay. Lots of cheap scares, a few of which actually got to me, but once I "broke" one of the scares by accidentally standing where Alma ( the scary Japanese horror movie-esque little girl of the game ) was supposed to appear, causing her to clip right through me and spin around wildy beneath me, she kind of lost her power to scare.

The gunplay is as fun as ever, and basically hasn't changed at all from the first game. The enemy A.I seems pretty smart also, but during the short run of the demo they don't really have much of an opportunity to impress. One of the new additions to the game is the ability to push over objects to create cover for you to duck behind, but I must admit I didn't actually use it at all during combat.

The demo ends with a very fun sequence where you hop into some power armour and literally explode enemies with your huge guns and missiles. I get the feeling the demo was created specially and isn't representative of the actual flow of the game, because it would be strange to reward players that early with such a huge weapon. Monolith also did the same thing with the demo for the first F.E.A.R, basically giving you a sampling of various sections of the game all tied together specifically for the demo.

Overall, the demo is not too bad and definitely worth a quick playthrough. I'll be buying the game when it's released, as the orignal game is one of my favourite FPS's ( despite it's repetitive middle section ).