Slashdot Mirror
Square Steps Back from 'No FF on 360' Remark
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Square/Enix has stepped away from a comment made by Executive Producer Shinji Hashimoto. Wednesday we discussed his comment, which would seem to indicate that Final Fantasy titles won't be coming to the 360. Square took pains today to specify that he was only referring to current plans. "A spokesperson for Square Enix told GamesIndustry.biz, 'Hashimoto-san was talking about the current situation' - which would suggest his comments shouldn't be interpreted as forward-looking. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said he expects the next Final Fantasy to appear on PlayStation 3 exclusively - but observed that Square Enix will face a tough decision. 'The series has always been single console and given the Xbox 360 sell through in Japan, it would be hard to put the next Final Fantasy installment on the 360 only. Square Enix faces a dilemma: put the next game on the 360 only and alienate Japanese fans, depart with tradition and make it multi-platform, or go with PS3 as an exclusive and deal with the backlash from the west. I view Square Enix as a tradition-bound company, and expect the last alternative to be chosen.'"
I'd much rather get updated versions of Chrono Trigger and the Soul Blazer trilogy.
Unfortunately, getting an update on the Soul Blazer series isn't likely to ever happen, given that it wasn't quite a best seller, and the people responsible for it have long since moved on from Square-Enix. However, you might be interested to know that it's not quite a trilogy.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Final Fantasy VII and VIII were both released for the PS1 and PC.
Final Fantasy XI is on the PS2, PC, and 360.
A 360 port wouldn't exactly be an earth-shattering move.
re: 1. No. It won't have the horsepower. Sorry. All these comments about this by people shouting "Wii" are dreaming. Square undoubtedly has spent millions already making high definition textures, models, and graphics. Have you seen the trailers?
Now you expect them to downrez to 480p? Come on. It's either the PS3 or the 360, or both. Smart money is on the PS3 here.
I've never seen a situation in which anti-alaiasing is a BAD thing. No matter how fine your resolution is, antialiasing reduces flicker during motion, as well as increasing percieved resolution.
I think most people don't know what anti-aliasing is, exactly, and what it can do. But the difference very is apparent at the subconscious level.
I'm playing Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, right now, on the PS2. Arguably the best graphics on the system (way above FF12 in quality, for instance). But the lack of anti-aliasing is still a bit problem. every time movement stops, everything looks beautiful, but every time you move, all the diagonal lines and finer details just flicker as they scan along, and it's very hard on the eyes. The unfortunate thing about this is that the more detailed the graphics, the more flicker is going to become a problem.
An anti-aliased game just looks more polished. It's why no PS2 game could ever quite look as good as a GameCube game, no matter how detailed they made the models (well that, and the lack of lighting effects).
And from what I've heard, no, the PS3 doesn't have it built-in, but MOST software developers code it into their games. The XBox, 360, GameCube, and Wii, however, all have anti-aliasing subroutines built into the platform.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Anti-aliasing essentially takes neighboring pixels, such as those in between every pixel on a diagonal, and makes them a semi-transparent color of the internal edge, thus approximating "half way to being the edge". What results is a pixel-based structure that represents more geometery than the exact location of all the pixels. Probably not a very clear way of describing it, but I don't know a better way without grabbing a sheet of graph paper and making a diagram.
Flicker occurs when "jaggies" (to use layman's terms) change their geometeric structure, usually by the simple rotatation of a diagonal line, or finely detailed texture. If you can dimish or completely stop jaggies from occuring through anti-aliasing, you also kill the flickering that occurs from the result of it's rotation. So yes, anti-aliasing, does, in fact, reduce flicker, tremendously.
There is a small similarity between anti-aliasing and interlace flicker filters used on NTSC displays, although an interlace flicker filter is much more simplistic and just a vertical gaussian blur applied to an image. But interlace flicker and alias flicker stem from similar problems with displaying abrupt edges on a pixel-based display.
Video doesn't share this problem because the chip on a video camera already acounts for neighboring pixels. But in a 3D graphics envirnoment, not accounting for neighboring pixels will create jaggies and huge amounts of flicker.
And obviously, no, anti-aliasing doesn't reduce framerate if you have the horsepower to do it. It's extremely graphically intesive because you're forcing the computer to calculate geometetric positions far more detailed than the screen resolution itself. But I can make a strong case that anti-aliased graphics appear to be much higher resolution than the same graphics at 4 or 5 times the ACTUAL resolution. If you would like, I could go into more detail.
As a graphic designer, I have to know a certain amount about the ins and outs of the visual perception of graphics.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.