Not hot but FF7 on steam!

JoeUser said:
Why are people still excited about this game? It's nearly 20 years old...if you haven't played it by now then just give up. Also FF7 has been on PC for a long time now and works perfectly as it is.
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Install FF7 on windows 7 and tell everyone how it works perfectly. Out of the box it actually dont fucking work AT ALL You need a special codec not included in windows 7+ to play videos, you need to patch it or it runs like crap and crashes often, and in order to even save your game FF7 must be run as an administrator.

So no, it does not work "perfectly" as is.
 
Disposed said:
Theres no always on DRM. Do your homework instead of reading the first post on google and regurgitating false info.

High res support, works like it should out of the box (Try installing the original PC version it wont work without jumping through hoops), Cloud saves, cloud based cheats (some may want this) .

To me the cloud based saves and higher res support alone justifies the cost and the one time activation (There is no always on DRM).
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What in the heck is a cloud based cheat? IM drawing a blank here.
 
Disposed said:
Theres no always on DRM. Do your homework instead of reading the first post on google and regurgitating false info.

High res support, works like it should out of the box (Try installing the original PC version it wont work without jumping through hoops), Cloud saves, cloud based cheats (some may want this) .

To me the cloud based saves and higher res support alone justifies the cost and the one time activation (There is no always on DRM).
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There's no good reason for them to require online activation at all on such an old game. Why not just use Steamworks. Loved FF7 but I won't support this.
 
x3sphere said:
There's no good reason for them to require online activation at all on such an old game. Why not just use Steamworks. Loved FF7 but I won't support this.
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Mad about online activation, OK with a game being on steam using steamworks. Fucking hypocrisy at its finest there.

Is steamworks free? How much more of a cut does valve get for hosting the saves? Why pay them to do so when you already have your own infrastructure? People always have to have something to be outraged about...
 
Disposed said:
Mad about online activation, OK with a game being on steam using steamworks. Fucking hypocrisy at its finest there.

Is steamworks free? How much more of a cut does valve get for hosting the saves? Why pay them to do so when you already have your own infrastructure?
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I'd prefer a DRM free option, but realistically, that's not gonna happen. That said, Valve has done a great job building up Steam and creating an infrastructure that benefits its users. On the flip side I have no faith in SE's service... whether it will be around a few years from now leaves me in serious doubt.

Steamworks is free actually. Valve takes a cut for the game being listed on Steam only. One of the reasons a lot more publishers are using it rather than rolling their own solution.
 
awesome :) i wasted a year of my life playing the crap out of ff7 when I was 17 (12 years ago)
Will buy it on pay day for some nostalgics
 
x3sphere said:
I'd prefer a DRM free option, but realistically, that's not gonna happen. That said, Valve has done a great job building up Steam and creating an infrastructure that benefits its users. On the flip side I have no faith in SE's service... whether it will be around a few years from now leaves me in serious doubt.

Steamworks is free actually. Valve takes a cut for the game being listed on Steam only. One of the reasons a lot more publishers are using it rather than rolling their own solution.
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You have no faith in the service of a company that has been hosting MMORPGs and other online services for as long as steam has been around to host your 3kb save file? Your fears are clearly well founded...
 
Blah, I bought it when it first came out, but I gave up when I couldn't beat the chocobo racing part. My first documented case of nerd rage I think.
 
Derangel said:
The port you are talking about was released in 1998 with MIDI music. This is a mildly altered rerelease of that port.
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As I recall they completely redid the music for the first re-release (the one via the square steam clone thing). I never played it but many complained that the music while encoded in a higher quality was worse. I think they changed the tracks or re composed them or something.
 
Vegas P11 said:
Blah, I bought it when it first came out, but I gave up when I couldn't beat the chocobo racing part. My first documented case of nerd rage I think.
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Hold L1 + R1 for unlimited stamina regen.

Now you know.
 
dandragonrage said:
Really guys? This port is sub-par and I expect real gamers to know better than just buying everything on Steam. Does anyone actually research before spending money?

Get the old PC version and mod it up with the high-res and music mods and you will have the best experience of FF7 without having to pay Square AGAIN. I already bought the game legally - twice (PSX & the old PC release) - and I'm not buying it again - especially not a buggy port with DRM that isn't even close to the best version of the game. Do it the right way and your characters will even have FINGERS.

Oh, how I wish market demand weren't so driven by bad purchases of ignorant people.
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Wow, you're right. Since you bought it, that means everyone must have bought it as well. And that everyone still has access to their old installation media.

There is no reason to buy this again, especially not to have it work out of the box just by double clicking it.

by the way -- all those mods you're talking about apparently still work with this version. I found that out with a little research...
 
When they put it on steam just a few days ago? So you're complaining about a "buggy port" without any experience with it...
 
Edit: Nevermind, had this confused with the other recent re-release.
 
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This was released on Steam on July 4th and is not the version that you're referring to. The information that you are providing is not related to this version at all.

It's possible you're talking about the release that SqEnix did themselves a while back. The one where they stood up their own storefront and sold it directly.

Read through the thread a bit... it's all in there. The ability to mod it with the texture packs you want to install, the lack of DRM (except steam).. all that and it just works out of the box, unlike the original PC release.
 
hardware_failure said:
Is this the same game I played on my PC 14 years ago?
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Yes, but do about 5-7 mods to it and it'll be more like a late PSX to PS2 game instead of an early PSX game. And will have amazing audio quality. The OpenGL driver, high-res texture packs, and "FF7Music" plugin are the most important mods. The OpenGL driver also works for FF8PC, if anyone actually liked that game... Still, obviously only worth buying if you're the type who does replay games, and I'd still recommend the old PC release if you can find it used for cheap as it won't have DRM (Steam is still unacceptable DRM).

The game could have better from the start if they used the Sega Saturn instead... Playstation was the weakest machine of its generation (though N64 sucked too because the carts didn't hold nearly enough, leaving Saturn as the only decent machine hardware-wise from that time).
 
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dandragonrage said:
The game could have better from the start if they used the Sega Saturn instead... Playstation was the weakest machine of its generation (though N64 sucked too because the carts didn't hold nearly enough, leaving Saturn as the only decent machine hardware-wise from that time).
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I'd need a link or reference too this because I owned both Castlvevaina Symphony of the night on PS1 and Saturn and the Saturn version not only looked worse its would slow down all the time....could just be bad programming.
 
stevedave said:
I'd need a link or reference too this because I owned both Castlvevaina Symphony of the night on PS1 and Saturn and the Saturn version not only looked worse its would slow down all the time....could just be bad programming.
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Saturn was dual-CPU running each about 28MHz and much harder to program for than the PSX's single 33MHz CPU, and between that and the fact that Sega screwed up with the whole Genesis/CD/32x/Neptune thing, Saturn got little interest from developers as developers were the ones screwed hardest by Sega's BS. Saturn also had dual GPUs though I don't know how functions/code were split between them. I got most of this info from Wikipedia, as I had forgotten most of it aside from Saturn=dual-CPU PSX=single-CPU. It has more info if you want to check it out.

It's similar to the PS3 underperforming compared to the X360 for some titles. Cell was the hardest chip to program for (and I remember reading about it having a major bug transferring data from certain memory to one of its cache stores, being basically unusable).

And anything that is a port usually performs worse as ports are always halfassed. Reuse of code that is not optimized for the second system's architecture.
 
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dandragonrage said:
Saturn was dual-CPU (SH-1) and much harder to program for than the PSX's MIPS CPU, and between that and the fact that Sega screwed up with the whole Genesis/CD/32x/Neptune thing, Saturn got little interest from developers as developers were the ones screwed hardest by Sega's BS.

It's similar to the PS3 underperforming compared to the X360 for some titles. Cell was the hardest chip to program for (and I remember reading about it having a major bug transferring data from certain memory to one of its cache stores, being basically unusable).

And anything that is a port usually performs worse as ports are always halfassed. Reuse of code that is not optimized for the second system's architecture.
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wouldn't harder to program for mean not as good as easier to program for? So even if on paper it was better they likely could of never realized the same results on the Saturn as they did on the PS1. Having owned both the PS1 always out performed. I even had resident evil on both and the PS1 was hands down better.

Faster single core > 2 slow cores from what I have seen.
 
stevedave said:
wouldn't harder to program for mean not as good as easier to program for? So even if on paper it was better they likely could of never realized the same results on the Saturn as they did on the PS1. Having owned both the PS1 always out performed. I even had resident evil on both and the PS1 was hands down better.

Faster single core > 2 slow cores from what I have seen.
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Well, it's not that simple. Saturn had more power, but it took better developers and more time to unlock the power, and by the time Saturn came out, Sega had F-ed developers over several times, and they were still feeling sore about it, so they didn't give Saturn much attention. Sega kept changing up its plans, and releasing hardware only to stop supporting it practically immediately. Sega CD and 32x were released later than expected and then Sega wanted to replace them practically immediately. And then they canceled Neptune, and IIRC gave too little notice to devs about Saturn. Developers that had developed for or considered developing for Sega switched to Nintendo or Sony.

It's not exactly a case of 2x28MHz > 1x33MHz, because multithreading always has penalties in conventional programming models (should work a lot better if we ever get games using raytracing graphics engines), but the difference is great enough that it IS worth it IF you write your code well. I know the CPU cores themselves are not exactly the same either, but they aren't MAJORLY different as far as I know. I was going to give you MIPS values for each, but it's hard to look that up for the PSX, because the chip architecture is by the stupidly-named MIPS.

I imagine all of the games you're thinking of were ports from PSX to Saturn, because single-threaded code COULD work for either, but dual-threaded code would only work well for the Saturn (and a lot of that code would be very machine-specific, unlike PCs where the OS has a complex scheduler that mostly just knows how to use any number of cores reasonably well).

Anyway, I should probably get off this topic... pretty unrelated.
 
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Squaresoft didn't know jack about how to develop Sega Saturn games. Just like they didn't know jack on how to squeeze FF7 onto a N64 Cartridge which they could have done. It's called Cutscenes instead of FMV.
 
Dandragonrage, what are you going on about? No one is putting the fault on you. lol

I'm buying this on Steam because i don't have the Original PC version. I still have my black label for PS1 but I'm still going to buy it. I purchase what I like because I have money to spend on whatever I want. Feel free to buy or not buy this. I won't judge you. :D
 
ZodaEX said:
Squaresoft didn't know jack about how to develop Sega Saturn games. Just like they didn't know jack on how to squeeze FF7 onto a N64 Cartridge which they could have done. It's called Cutscenes instead of FMV.
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I think most N64 maximum cartridge sizes was around 64MB, maybe a bit more. That's about 20x less than the 4 CDs. Even with the FMV removed, the music and textures would probably have suffered as well (low-bit, blurry, etc).

Nintendo should have gone optical when designing the N64, a design flaw they rectified with the Gamecube.
 
NeloDiavolo said:
Dandragonrage, what are you going on about? No one is putting the fault on you. lol

I'm buying this on Steam because i don't have the Original PC version. I still have my black label for PS1 but I'm still going to buy it. I purchase what I like because I have money to spend on whatever I want. Feel free to buy or not buy this. I won't judge you. :D
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No idea what you're talking about, but it seems to me like you want to join in an anti-me conversation that has long since already ended upon my learning that this is not the same as the other recent attempt at re-releasing this (if you want to look that attempt up, you'd learn where my negativity towards it came from - it's been under a year since then, so my knowledge isn't all THAT out of date - rare to see two separate re-releases so quickly).

Spend your money on what you want, sure. You can spend and waste as much money as you want. Doesn't necessarily make it smart, but it's certainly your choice and I'll never say otherwise. I do sometimes give the opinion that certain things aren't worth buying, but it's more of an attempt at getting people to realize they might be wasting money rather than trying to forbid them from doing something. If you don't at least agree that many people here like to waste money on unnecessary things and at times try to convince others do the same, then I'd say you haven't spent much time here. Personally I feel I've made huge progress in the past year not wasting all my money on the same stuff that many people on this site do, and I think the same realization would benefit some people on this site. My wording can be abrasive, but it is almost never worded as a personal insult, and when I realize I rushed a post and made it sound too personal, I edit it and fix that, however some people take any negativity towards anything they like or are interested in personally. The great thing about internet forums is that it's very easy to simply disregard posts you disagree with.

Personally, given that you did buy the game, and given that this version has NO improvements (except free improvements from the fanbase), I'd interpret "fair use" a bit differently than some, but whatever. I wouldn't even compare it to buying a BD of a movie you already have on DVD, because at least BD is new technology that when done right improves quality - no such improvements from this. I did check prices on the original PC version on Ebay earlier, and was honestly surprised to see that it's gotten pretty expensive. I bought the PSX version when it was new (well, actually, it was a gift) but I got the PC version used a few years ago for like $2 (and saw many similar deals)... Heh.
 
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dandragonrage said:
No idea what you're talking about, but it seems to me like you want to join in an anti-me conversation that has long since already ended upon my learning that this is not the same as the other recent attempt at re-releasing this (if you want to look that attempt up, you'd learn where my negativity towards it came from - it's been under a year since then, so my knowledge isn't all THAT out of date - rare to see two separate re-releases so quickly).

Spend your money on what you want, sure. You can spend and waste as much money as you want. Doesn't necessarily make it smart, but it's certainly your choice and I'll never say otherwise. I do sometimes give the opinion that certain things aren't worth buying, but it's more of an attempt at getting people to realize they might be wasting money rather than trying to forbid them from doing something. If you don't at least agree that many people here like to waste money on unnecessary things and at times try to convince others do the same, then I'd say you haven't spent much time here. Personally I feel I've made huge progress in the past year not wasting all my money on the same stuff that many people on this site do, and I think the same realization would benefit some people on this site. My wording can be abrasive, but it is almost never worded as a personal insult, and when I realize I rushed a post and made it sound too personal, I edit it and fix that, however some people take any negativity towards anything they like or are interested in personally. The great thing about internet forums is that it's very easy to simply disregard posts you disagree with.

Personally, given that you did buy the game, and given that this version has NO improvements (except free improvements from the fanbase), I'd interpret "fair use" a bit differently than some, but whatever. I wouldn't even compare it to buying a BD of a movie you already have on DVD, because at least BD is new technology that when done right improves quality - no such improvements from this. I did check prices on the original PC version on Ebay earlier, and was honestly surprised to see that it's gotten pretty expensive. I bought the PSX version when it was new (well, actually, it was a gift) but I got the PC version used a few years ago for like $2 (and saw many similar deals)... Heh.
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Duly noted. I missed that post that you are referring to about learning that this is a different version.

And I don't want to be part of the anti anyone group, sorry about that. I just didn't agree that anyone who buys this game are fools. But I think you are right to your opinion. For me, if I purchase something and I enjoy it, then it was not wasteful. However, I have been guilty of purchasing games on sale and have yet to play them. Then yes, that was pretty wasteful. But I'm a sucker for a good deal. :D

And I must thank you for posting what you knew about the previous version and its issues. Learned a few things. And it is quite odd that they would release different versions so close to one another.
 
This thread is making me want to check what year it is. I feel like I read all of this before...
 
dandragonrage said:
Well, it's not that simple. Saturn had more power, but it took better developers and more time to unlock the power, and by the time Saturn came out, Sega had F-ed developers over several times, and they were still feeling sore about it, so they didn't give Saturn much attention. Sega kept changing up its plans, and releasing hardware only to stop supporting it practically immediately. Sega CD and 32x were released later than expected and then Sega wanted to replace them practically immediately. And then they canceled Neptune, and IIRC gave too little notice to devs about Saturn. Developers that had developed for or considered developing for Sega switched to Nintendo or Sony.

It's not exactly a case of 2x28MHz > 1x33MHz, because multithreading always has penalties in conventional programming models (should work a lot better if we ever get games using raytracing graphics engines), but the difference is great enough that it IS worth it IF you write your code well. I know the CPU cores themselves are not exactly the same either, but they aren't MAJORLY different as far as I know. I was going to give you MIPS values for each, but it's hard to look that up for the PSX, because the chip architecture is by the stupidly-named MIPS.

I imagine all of the games you're thinking of were ports from PSX to Saturn, because single-threaded code COULD work for either, but dual-threaded code would only work well for the Saturn (and a lot of that code would be very machine-specific, unlike PCs where the OS has a complex scheduler that mostly just knows how to use any number of cores reasonably well).

Anyway, I should probably get off this topic... pretty unrelated.
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Not to mention this was a time when a console wasn't basically just a dumbed down PC made to fit in a sub-500$ price point. Admittedly I've never even seen a PS1 or SegaSaturn DevKit, or had the good fortune to be in possession of a 360 one (seems like they were worth their weight in gold). But I would imagine development tools and APIs back then were nothing compared to what you'd get with today's consoles (especially if we're talking about rendering APIs). Multi-threaded development on the Saturn must have been a nightmare.
 
DogChainX said:
I think most N64 maximum cartridge sizes was around 64MB, maybe a bit more. That's about 20x less than the 4 CDs. Even with the FMV removed, the music and textures would probably have suffered as well (low-bit, blurry, etc).

Nintendo should have gone optical when designing the N64, a design flaw they rectified with the Gamecube.
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They did eventually (try to) go optical with the N64, it was a complete and utter failure.
 
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