Rhapsody of FIRE!

It's been quite a while since I listened to any bands that were new to me. My personal favourite genre is even less easy to find in America than it is in Britain, where I could usually find something worth listening to at the music place in Dundee, and I haven't really been following the news about releases in Europe as much as I used to. In fact, America seems to have a tendency to get the Japanese imports of European albums rather than the original ones, which is nice for the bonus material but not for price or ability to read the booklet. Most discoveries are now thanks to Youtube's handy way of having virtually every song ever - some real videos, but most through someone with far too much free time and some video editing software putting together "anime music videos" for them.

So, as pointed out to me by , Rhapsody of Fire are a band from Italy (a country which my album collection does not yet cover). I was vaguely aware of them before, and had previously thought that they were a classical/symphonic metal band with a slight leaning towards a fantasy theme. They used to be called simply "Rhapsody", but someone had decided that their name wasn't daft enough, or something along those lines.

But, name issues aside, their videos are what really make them stand out. Most power metal music videos are done in a silly, tongue-in-cheek or over the top way, but Rhapsody are something special - it seems that every video they make is so unbelievably terrible in concept, production and general execution that you'd be hard pressed to accept that they're the real ones and not the result of someone trying to get on to Beadle's Hot Shots.

My favourite of them has to be Power of the Dragon Flame. It opens with the lines "Our brave young warriors must travel to another dimension in time to recapture the Mystic Emerald Stone and restore the glory of the Kingdom", in a classic example of cutting up an RPG game master book and pulling random bits of it out of a hat. And as if that wasn't silly enough, it proceeds to show various shots of two baffled-looking girls descending stairs, wandering aimlessly through streets and riding on trains, intercut with shots of the band playing in the middle of a countryside railway. It looks like they found some old clips from a home video, stuck them together in Windows Movie Maker and added some explosions using MS Paint.

The one for Holy Thunderforce (I'm feeling rather embarrassed repeating these titles, by the way) is marginally better in that it looks like it was actually intended to be a music video and that the actors in it hadn't been kidnapped. But they tried to do an epic battle scene and hoped that no one would notice that they only had about twelve people to make it. The highlight comes at just before the three minute mark - it's not as obvious as I first thought because I must have just paused the video at the exact moment by coincidence, but during the brief flash of the knight on horseback, there's a medieval electric junction box clearly visible in the background.

Somehow they managed to get Christopher Lee involved later on in their career, and I can't describe the video for Unholy Warcry any better than did. It features narration from the White Wizard himself, done up in what looks suspiciously like a paper crown from Burger King, going on about the emerald sword of the crystal angels or some other such silliness, complete with a scene involving rubbing what is unmistakably tomato ketchup on a skull.

Even the shots of the band, which most other groups manage to make fairly normal apart from Hammerfall's infamous "curling rink" moment, are placed in front of blue-screen effects that Knightmare was doing rather better twenty years ago, with explosions or meteors raining down in the background. But it's Fabio Leone (who could hardly have had a more stereotypical Italian name unless he'd been called Spaghetti La Cappucino) who steals the stage, by gesticulating wildly while singing to the extent that he's nearly knocked everyone else over by the end of each video.

With the level of hilarity caused by the videos, along with other stupid titles like "Knightrider of Doom" and "Steelgods of the Last Apocalypse", it's obvious that this band is the one that the members of Dragonforce most look up to. But the most annoying quality of Rhapsody is that despite all of that, musically they're really quite brilliant. They seem to be more melodic and diverse than their closest counterparts, and from the songs I've heard, I actually enjoy their music a lot if I don't pay attention to what they're actually singing. , you'd probaby love them too.

Amazingly enough, Christopher Lee decided that he wanted to work with them again, and they recently performed a duet of one of the songs from the album that he had narrated. This performance sets a record in that it makes him the oldest metal vocalist ever. (Although, seeing as Iron Maiden are still going, not by as much of a margin as you might think.)

Knytt Stories released

You all know by now how enthusiastic I am about the general independent game-making community. Some things that are being done by non-published game makers can be genuinely more fun than a lot of commercial games now (especially being better than those endless Bejewelled clones that most online collection sites insist on churning out). And hopefully, with a few more releases like this, MMF2 will get a lot more recognition as a powerful 2D game writing environment...

Knytt Stories was released today. It's a bit difficult to describe - it's an atmospheric platform adventure game by Nifflas, a Swedish MMF2 user. "Atmospheric" is the important word there - Nifflas has an incredible talent for making his minimalistic and simple graphics come together to form worlds that have genuine charm to them, blending together a mix of light, airy environments and claustrophobic unsettling ones.

The best bit about this one is that it includes a world editor so that you can make your own "Stories" - this is something that has been commonplace for commercial games to some extent but it's a very new feature in MMF2 creations. There's already one bonus pack out, and I'm hoping that player-made worlds will start springing up around the Internet shortly.

It's not for everyone - the game is slow-paced, thoughtful and peaceful rather than having non-stop action. But if you're at all interested, go to Nifflas's site and try it out - it's a 33MB download and it's well worth it. (And there's a tileset by me in it... not that that affects my enthusiasm for it.)

Youtube improvements

I noticed at the beginning of the week that Youtube have now added comment ratings to the site. It's a nice idea - on most sites that allow comments, this gives some idea of the worth of a reply by allowing users to vote them either "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". But given Youtube's population I think my idea is rather better:


(NB. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, that comment is real. It's on a video of the moon landing, in which most of the comments are giant leaps for sheer idiocy.)

I don't know if I've just noticed it more recently, but people like this are spilling over into everywhere even though that site and Myspace (truly the trailer park at the back of the Internet) have done quite a good job of rounding up the people who would lose a battle of wits with a glass of orange juice. It makes me wonder how they use keyboards without accidentally eating them.

"Astronomically stupid" would have been a cleverer pun, actually.

Music News

I had forgotten just how amazing Sonata Arctica's "Reckoning Night" was. Even though I thought it lacked some of the speed of their earlier albums at first (apart from the remarkably Weballergy-like "Ain't Your Fairytale"), it grew on me eventually. "White Pearl, Black Oceans" is still among the best and most powerful songs that I've ever heard. Perhaps what I've heard of the even more new-styled "Unia" will grow on me yet, but I can't really see it happening - Sonata Arctica may have started off being a Stratovarius rip-off, but that was what they were good at - and in this decade they've been rather better at being Stratovarius than Stratovarius were.

Speaking of Finland's pioneering metal band, they seem to be in trouble at the moment. Most of this is due to Timo Tolkki, who is rapidly becoming the Prince Philip of the power metal universe in his ability to say increasingly stupid things whenever he opens his mouth. (Choice example: "You foreigners should once listen to metal sung in Finnish".) This interview in particular has to be seen to be believed, reading more like a scene from Spinal Tap than anything else. It was written shortly after their announcement of a change of direction in 2004. Their bassist also proved that he could do it if he really tried, with the comment "I don´t know about the reaction, I have been drinking Jack Daniels for the whole week".

A couple of years ago the band managed to get Timo Kotipelto back from his catastrophically dreadful solo career to record a catastrophically dreadful album with Stratovarius again. A pecularity of this album was that it was about the band themselves (hence being self-titled even though it was their tenth album) apart from one certain song in the middle - Götterdammerung. According to Tolkki, he had originally planned for this song to be called "Hitler", but hadn't considered that that might not go down too well with their record company... in Berlin. And I imagine that saying "I wrote a song called Hitler because I am extremely interested in him" is fairly high on the list of "Things not to say in interviews if you don't want to seem dangerously mental". According to him, the latest album was recorded completely wrongly and he wants to make a return to the old style - and surprisingly, from looking at this Youtube video, it seems that he just might have got something back. (Kotipelto's voice always sounds rather a lot better than that on the albums.)

Silent Force have somehow slipped another album out under my radar - "Walk the Earth" has been available since the beginning of the year and I never realized (parly due to their rubbish website). Some of the lyrics have already been put on Darklyrics, and it seems that DC Cooper's talent for writing songs that make no sense has not diminished despite the three-year gap. And in what might be called an original choice of subject, the traditional fast-paced opening track slot is filled with a song about dying in a car crash. Now that I come to think of it, having a band with "Silent" in the name is a bit weird no matter what.

And I still haven't got around to getting Iron Savior's "Megatropolis" yet (albums from this type of band are even rarer in America than in Britain, and most online stores seem only to have the superior-but-expensive Japanese versions). With this release it looks like Piet is continuing the transition away from a storyline-based band, which was a fantastic gimmick but is a fair enough choice if he wants to be able to write lyrics more freely. After all, there are only so many times you can blow up the Earth in one storyline (three at the last count, as it happens). But this time, I think he's gone as far as permanently writing the Iron Savior itself out, which I genuinely found quite disappointing.

Ancient

Yesterday was a very special event. As of midnight I'm off the documented member ranks on GameFAQs and have got the title of "Ancient". Hardly the most flattering of names, but that means that my karma count is at over 2000, having had an account there for nearly six years. That represents a virtual eternity as far as most message boards are concerned.

And what happens when you get that? Very little. You get access to one more message board, and the uncomfortable image that everyone pictures your account going around with a massive white beard and walking stick. I was secretly hoping for a special option that allowed you to change the username that you thought was funny when you were 16 and still in school, but that wasn't to be.

All I post on these days is the Classic Gaming board, and that looks to be going soon, as the new site owner had the bright idea of changing it into five thousand smaller boards for each "era" of games. He didn't bother to inform the inhabitants of the board, and instead we got a generous three and a half hour time span to discuss it while the people on the Next Gen board filled up all five hundred available posts with their thoughts on whether NGG should stand for "Next Gen Gaming" or "Next Gaming Gen".

At this point it may seem appropriate to go "LOL INTERNET" and post one of those stupid cat pictures, because illiteracy is quite fashionable these days, but I'm still quite annoyed about it.

Oh, and it was Whitney's birthday. I knew there was something else.

Crystal Towers 2 - Combo Display

Even though I set this thing up as a Plus account so I could use the Scrapbook, I've taken to storing images on my other webspace instead because it's so much easier than going through fifty different pages just to upload a picture and then find out where on earth the link is.

What you can see above is an early version of a combo display system, which shows the things you've hit during the time in the air. I've improved it a little since the screenshot was taken, with a counter at the top saying how long your string of enemies is. It looks great (if only slightly reminiscent of one of the Tony Hawk games), although I can see how some people might find it irritating to have it there constantly so I'll probably add an option to the main menu to allow you to turn it off.

The real point of it is to allow you to more easily identify what you're doing in the "Get a combo of X points/enemies" missions. With that in mind, the aim now is to fix it so that the result you actually get at least remotely resembles what's shown in the string - somehow I'm using a needlessly complicated formula for working the whole thing out, but I think I just about have it done in the latest iteration. What I really need to do is work out how to display the bonus given by hitting a spring, which is more torturous than you would have any right to expect.

That's the second Walnut Creek level, by the way. There are now six levels in all, but I never bothered doing the graphics for one of them and it looks like Tron.

Beard of Hilarity +4

For a while, Whitney has been saying how good I'd look with a beard. I didn't believe it myself, and after a few failed efforts during fourth year of university where I just looked like I was in some dreadful nu-metal band, I gave up for a while, but as a first wedding anniversary present, I've tried again.

I have always hated shaving. I'm still genuinely afraid to use "real" hand razors for fear of peeling my skin off, and have used an electric one for as long as I remember, which does the job but doesn't give quite as close a shave, and it's awkward to get your face completely clean with one without leaving stupid-looking tufts of hair on the underside of your chin. You would think that after about ten years of cutting it off every day, facial hair would get the hint and stop trying to grow, but it still pushes out of my skin relentlessly. So I've let it form a sort of goatee thing. (I wasn't going for this because of the hideousness of the word, but that's what Whitney told me I had.)

This is what I look like. (We took about eight hundred photos, and the best one we got was one where my eyes were pointing in opposite directions - I am not a photogenic person.) I've actually got more used to the feeling of it on my face than I thought I would, but I'm still not entirely happy with the way that hair simply refuses to grow on one side of my mouth, making the beard into a strange C shape. And I don't know what colour it is - Whitney says it has red in it.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep it. Part of my aversion to beards is that it's so easy to get them wrong. I wasn't aware until Whitney told me that just having a moustache without a beard was known as a "molest-ache" in America (There's no way to spell that word that makes it pronounceable at first glance - I've gone for the one that sounds like an embarrassing pain rather than the one that sounds like you have a small burrowing creature on your upper lip.)

Beards make the face look very different, and a lot of the time, it seems that what you think works can just look appalling to other people. Perhaps I'm not looking at the right demographic here, but I know that Marco From Nightwish (hereafter referred to as King Forkbeard III) has a beard in a style that went out of fashion a couple of hundred years before the days of William the Conqueror. And Roy Khan managed the impressive feat of having an even more record-breakingly stupid beard for each album since "Karma".

But for the truly adventurous, you can't look further than this page.

Crystal Towers 2 - NVO Conversion Done

Surprisingly, the conversion to NVO has been going faster than I expected - after doing the saves I got started on the game's data files. Virtually everything is stored in comma-separated value files now rather than INIs, and they can easily be changed over to encrypted files by changing a couple of global events when the time comes. I've started writing a save game editor as well, so that saves aren't absolutely unmodifiable by me if I need to test them again. The only thing I'm worried about is the synth list, which works well enough for the most part but I'm fairly sure that it can't remove blank entries correctly (they can be set to 0, but can't be actually deleted from the file and will still show up in the count). Still, that can be dealt with later on as they only affect one frame.

The only things now remaining in unencryptable files are the list of players (which I'm not too bothered about because there's nothing to be gained from modifying it) and the little INI file that tells the game who the last player was, which just isn't worth converting over because deleting it will do absolutely nothing. The change was a good thing in the end because it allowed me to go over things again and correct them if I'd done them slightly stupidly at first. Little things like the synth items relying on their direction to decide what type they were instead of storing it in a real value, and so on. And now that the conversion's done, I've been experimenting with allowing score sheets to be uploaded through a mildly insane conversion algorithm I put together - I'll link to one once I've got the page neatened up.

And with that out the way, I've finally got down to doing some planning of the way that the player will take through the game, when to introduce certain elements and what will be offered as rewards for completing each level. The OpenCalc file (or whatever it's called) has been growing larger by the day, and it's got to the point now where I would have no idea what I was doing if I didn't have a record of it all, so I have to be careful to keep the changes in the game in line with what I have in the plan.

I downloaded TFM Maker the other day, by the way, as recommended to me by Nim in the Clickteam chatroom - I'm trying to go for an authentically Genesis sound for the music, and even adding the drum samples from the Sonic games has brought an incredible mood to it. (Trouble is they're very quiet and I have to double up the channels because ModFusion doesn't understand VST effects...)

There sometimes seems like there's so much to do that doesn't visually progress the game in any way. But this time, things are definitely going ahead - I think I'm fairly safe to add a few new levels before the testers get their hands on this new one.

More dreams

Last night I had a dream about Sean Connery and Samuel L Jackson (as Mace Windu) defending a branch of Tesco by using sachets of those American fruit flavour powders that you put in water (swallowing each flavour gave each one of them gave them a different superpower, or something). It went on with them fighting a giant head that could only be defeated by doing a large Join the Dots, and Kingdom Hearts got involved later on somehow. I knew I'd eaten something a bit funny in that Italian place.

I used to keep a dream journal for this sort of thing on my hard drive, but thanks to my unique note-taking style (and an attempt to write them in a way that I understood but no one else could) it was impossible to work out what any of them meant after about a week, as most of them were lines resembling "Satsumas, Tuesday - pancakes, two packets".

Things I Didn't Know

I think that after four years of putting up with my habits of not clicking on every "You're a winner" advert I see, not downloading Gator or BonziBuddy and generally avoiding daftness like Internet Explorer unless I really have to use it, AVG must have just got bored at the beginning of the week, because it's throwing up meaningless virus warnings now. Has anyone else had problems with it recently?

The problem started when it detected a DLL for "LogMeIn", a web-based remote access program that I use (which is brilliant, by the way) as Obfustat.something - I was prepared to believe that this was just a false positive, because I can understand how bits of a program that lets you into a computer from anywhere on the Internet can be regarded as suspicious. But this morning it also detected something in WinRAR, which I would have thought was fairly innocent, though looking around on the Internet does reveal that it's happened before.

Anyway. I was looking up directions for a restaurant today, and I don't know if I'm the last person on Earth to realize this, but Boston's Back Bay has to be the most organized part of a city ever. I must have looked at Boston in Google Maps hundreds of times, and I never realized that the streets in that area are named alphabetically East to West - Arlington St, Berkeley St, Clarendon St, Dartmouth St... The streets running southwest to northeast are a little more unimaginative, being numbered "Public Alley"s that make people not so much have addresses as co-ordinates, but it's a fascinating street layout all the same.

The other thing that I didn't know is that drive letters can easily be changed in Windows XP. I discovered this because someone in the Click community mentioned that some of his portable programs weren't working correctly because every computer he plugged his USB drive into recognized it as a different drive letter. (In my experience, my computer recognizes my pendrives as anything from F: to J: at random.) But the computer keeps a record of the signature of each USB drive and the letter that it should be associated with, which can be changed with a bit of hunting...

Right-click on My Computer, and go to "Manage" (an option of which I wasn't aware until today, but it just brings up "Computer Management" that can also be started through 94 easy steps in Control Panel). Go to the Disk Management section near the bottom, right-click on a hard disk and select "Change drive letters and folders". Then hit "Change" (it also gives the option of adding multiple letters or mounting as a folder) and select your new letter. X, for instance.

Then close all that and you'll find that your C: drive has changed to X:. You will probably also find that Windows explodes because of not being able to find any of its vitally important files, so I wouldn't recommend that you do this to your hard drive - but it's very handy for things like USB pen drives, the original reason I went off and found this out. Even just now I'm ridiculously excited by the fact that I now have an A: drive for the first time since about 2002.

Crystal Towers 2 - NVO, XML, CSV, other TLAs

To deal with the requirement of unmodifiable saves for the online aspect of the game, I've finally got down to converting the entire save system from INIs into using the Named Variable Object. This is probably the single biggest refinement I've put into the game, but it's going surprisingly fast - the level progress loading and saving is completely finished, and even the pause menu is about halfway done. The records of picked up items needs some work, as I'm going to have to decide on a way to make sure that I can keep track of what rewards are on offer for each level.

The great advantage of using the NVO is that, in combination with global "functions" called using fastloops, I can switch easily between human-readable saves (handy for testing) and obfuscated ones (for the release). Eventually, the level data will also have to be converted to NVO rather than INI so that it can't be modified either, but if I write a fastloop to do each of them, then I can switch them all over (pulling them through a conversion tool, probably) and just change the events to point to .CT2 files instead of the .CSV that I'm using for the plaintext saves. (I did try XML at first, but the Named Variable Object seems to have huge problems loading those up reliably).

In doing this, I'm consolidating the four very obvious plaintext files (items, progress, spells, synth) into one combined save file for each player. Items and Progress are easy to do - in fact, I've no idea why I decided that these should be separate files in the first place - but the real challenge is keeping track of lists in a format that only allows keys and values. I've done this for spells in a way that is dangerously close to pointer arithmetic, with an index value being added to the key name depending on where I'm reading from.

That's fine for things like spell lists, where you put things in and never, ever take them out, but the Synth list is going to need some extra thought. For removal, I'll probably have to hack in a fastloop like what they teach you when you're beginning to learn about arrays - take one out, copy the rest down one place, obliterate the one at the end.

So I have to try and not be disappointed that all this work is going to lead me eventually to being in exactly the same place that I was before - because after things like this are done, I'll eventually get to level-building. (There's another one on the way.)

Masspirgear Solid

(Theme music)

First anniversary

In an addition to the important dates in my life, Whitney and I have now been married for one year (and a day), and it really doesn't seem that long at all. It seems like only a few weeks ago that we unlocked the unfamiliar door to our apartment, stepped into a completely blank set of rooms with some cables strewn about the floor, and went off to buy some furniture from IKEA. It also means that it's not long until I've had my first real-life job for a year (almost exactly three months, actually).

After plans for going to stay in a bed and breakfast in the Cape to the south didn't work out because no one was offering them for less than a week at a time, we didn't really do much on the day except give each other presents (an hour in the afternoon was spent pushing a large potted plant through the pouring rain on a shopping trolley, as part of my presents to Whitney). My other present to give her was a watch - one that I had spent ages to find, that had the right size of face, thin strap, and in the end I even found one that had a window with the sun and moon in it depending on what part of the day it was. She opened it up yesterday morning and it turned out to be exactly the same as her old one.

Whitney got me a collection of books by Dave Barry, an American columnist who I don't know anything about (does anyone reading this recognize his name?) and, to make me feel more at home, The Settlers of Catan (or "Die Siedler", as I'll always know it). If you haven't heard of it, it's a bit like a reduced Civilization in board game form. I imagine that part of the reason why it's not so popular here is that the American box art makes it look like the most boring game to have ever been made (although "Diplomacy" is always going to be hard to beat in that respect). But underneath that it's the same game, although the newly drawn texture-like tiles render me totally unable to tell the difference between most of the spaces. We sat down to have a game of it in the afternoon after drying off from the rain, and as chance would have it, Whitney beat me at it first time.

We went out to dinner at Anthony's Pier 4 seafood restaurant after that. I should say that I've never been able to understand overly expensive food, the kind where everything comes in tiny portions piled up like a game of Jenga on massive geometrically improbable plates. Thankfully this wasn't like that at all, and even though the menu included mega-lobsters weighing about four stone, steaks going well into the $50 range and a variety of port from 1970-something that cost $950 a bottle, I was able to enjoy their sashimi appetizer down at the more reasonable end of the price scale a lot. I'm beginning to get used to the way that all American restaurant portions are immense, and I overate chronically at the Cheesecake Factory at the beginning of the weekend, so a starter was more than enough for my small and weak stomach.

And afterwards, we retired back home to play some more of Final Fantasy XII. I know that's not an activity that many couples would do on their anniversary, but I love the fact that it's perfectly normal for us.

For <lj user="kjorteo">, <lj user="wolfekko">, not much else

As happens to all of us, I was MSNed by a complete stranger out of nowhere today. After some attempting different languages and finally settling on English, we worked out that he had found my address from the set of Silent Force lyrics that I submitted years ago, and are still the only set of those lyrics available on the Internet. (All the lyrics sites steal from each other - I put in some little signs so I could check, you know.)

Anyway - he wanted my help to identify some songs that were played on a Japanese martial arts programme and sent me a collection of samples. And sadly for me I failed to identify virtually all of them - the voices over the top don't exactly help, but some of them are annoyingly familiar and I can't put names to them.

There is one with lyrics, and from Googling the bits and pieces of the words that I could make out I eventually got this as Harem Scarem - Higher. Some of the others sound fantastic and I'd quite like to know who wrote them too - it's possible that they're all the same band but I've really no idea. Can anyone else with knowledge of this particular area of music help?

Japanese + power metal attack

It's possible that if you speak Japanese it would help too, but as I've no idea what they're talking about that's a complete guess. He's just sent me a clip of the programme, too. You never know, it might help.

Fainaru fantajî XII

Last weekend, after the PS2 not getting much use after we completed Kingdom Hearts 2 last month, Whitney and I picked up a couple of new games. We've decided that Japanese-style RPGs/adventures are our preferred area but weren't quite sure what we would get out of the local Gamestop - the purchase that I wasn't expecting when we went in was Resident Evil 4 (or, as is bizarrely written on the box, 4 Resident Evil). I've never played a Resident Evil game before,which admittedly didn't stop me being part of the smug Silent Hill superiority movement a few years ago, but I had heard good things about this one from and . However, that one's been put aside for the moment, because for $25 we also found a second-hand copy of XII Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy 12 is the thirteenth, tenth or fifth game in the Final Fantasy series depending on what part of the world you were born in, and much was made of the changes to the series this time around. The most significant one is that random battles have been done away with entirely, instead allowing you to see enemies as they approach your party and fight them or bravely run away as you please. This idea was used by Square much earlier in Chrono Trigger on the SNES, and I'm surprised that it took so long to emerge in their most recognizable series. Fights don't take place on a separate screen any more - instead, when you approach an enemy you can attack them directly.

Well, actually you can't - not quite. The battle system remains turn-based rather than directly involving the played like in Kingdom Hearts, so instead of running up to an enemy and walloping them then running away before they can attack back, you have to approach and stand around for a while while your bar fills up, then attack when you have the chance. This is again similar to Chrono Trigger with its "ATB2" system that never showed up again in any other game. The clash of styles was a pretty major sticking point for me when I first played the game, but over the first hour or so, I slowly began to realize how much sense it made.

FFX's fights were entirely turn-based, which ironically sped up the whole process - rather than waiting for a time bar to fill as in all other Final Fantasies (back to 4, at least) before that, the system instantly fast-forwarded to the next character that would get a turn and waited for player input. Especially compared to the sluggishness of FF9's system, this was incredible - it gave you time to flip through menus without worrying about accidentally letting the opponents get a turn in before you had the chance, and the annoying tendency of FF9 to perform actions several "turns" after you gave them out was entirely eliminated. This new one is a combination of the two systems - it's back to waiting for bars to fill before you can do anything, but you can pause the action at any time and decide what your next actions are going to be. And like FFX, the type of action you're performing affects the speed with which you can carry it out as well as the recovery time afterwards.

The real advantage, though, is that because of the lack of switching back and forward between screens, you feel like you're making far more progress throughout the game world rather than taking a few steps only for the screen to explode and another random battle to come up. FFX sped up the existing system, but FFXII put it back and tried a different angle of speeding it up, which works too. Although it's still weird seeing your characters wait around getting beaten up before they take the opportinity to take a swing themselves.

The Final Fantasy games are only very loosely connected together, in that a couple of species keep reappearing and there's always somebody called Cid. (Two supporting characters from Star Wars called Biggs and Wedge also usually make an appearance, but this happens in most Square games). Apart from this and a couple of in-jokes in FF9, nothing connects them at all - even the game system is very different between them. FFX was probably the most radical step away from typical RPG concepts, removing the entire concept of "levels" and replacing it with the terrifying-looking but actually simple to use Sphere Grid, which acted slightly like a board game in that you earned moves by getting experience and then moved your counter a certain number of spaces to cover new abilities. The twelfth game does something similar but relies on area instead of distance (I promise you, this all makes sense if you've played the game). Before being able to use items, abilities or spells (irritatingly called "Technicks" and "Magicks" in-game) you have to learn how to use them by spending acquired "licence points" to spread out the area that you cover on a chequered board. Different areas open up different classes of weapons, accessories, and so on. With the return of levelling, licence and experience points have been separated, and on the whole the system works well, though it's difficult to get your head round at first when you don't remember that unlocking a certain ability doesn't instantly give you it, and you have to actually acquire the ability separately.

Strangely enough, the "area instead of distance" idea also applies to the game world itself. In previous games in the series (but most noticeably in FF9 and FF10), the gameplay swung very clearly between two modes - towns where you had a safe place to rest and buy up equipment, and dungeons that you had to get through to reach the next safe place. This time, as far as we've played, you're given one big central city and a massive amount of land around it to wander about as you like. To keep things interesting, the amount you can actually do has been increased from just battering things - there are a lot of side quests and rewards to discover, and at the moment we've only really been taking part in the actual storyline sections when we happened to come across them, instead happily wandering the countryside maiming small animals and grabbing their loot.

In that way, the game is almost reminiscent of Diablo, where you venture out to try and complete quests that you've heard about in the town or just to increase your profits (but with more gameplay than just clicking on people). And like in that game, in another unexpected but logical change, very few enemies drop money now - instead, most of them leave behind items that can be taken back to the town and sold to make a profit. It adds an extra step to the process, but it makes a lot more sense than getting 100 Gil off a wolf, cockatrice or gelatinous blob. They don't even have pockets.

Even the acting is of a better quality than before, though if you've played FFX or X-2, you'll know that this isn't exactly an astounding achievement. The trouble with FFX was that most of the voice artists were just given a list of lines without any indication of context, speed or tone, and the resultant lines were cut up and edited back together by an overworked sound team - I'd really like to know who decided that that would be a remotely good idea. It's a mystery to me why other animation has been able to get spoken dialogue right since the 1950s but games are still struggling with it so badly. Even given the difficulty of lip-synching two entirely different languages convincingly, some of the lines from that game ("That's 'Macalania'." "AAAAIIIIYYY!") have achieved rightful infamy. I think that after Kingdom Hearts, Square are managing to scrape together a few actors that people have actually heard of now, which always helps.

But by far the greatest improvement over FFX is the opening sequence. On startup, the tenth game confronted you with the most rubbish title screen ever, looking like it was slapped together by Derek Riggs after coming home one night with eight pints in him. It looks almost as if something was meant to go in that blank bar across the screen but they forgot to change it before release. (That dodgy image was stolen from someone else, it was the only one I could find as I imagine most everyone else thought it too ugly to show.) But FF12 really shows off the Square graphics people's incredible ability with computer-generated cinematics. And that music! Like most things popular on the Internet, Nobuo Uematsu (who I assume originally composed it) does suffer from a bit of a bad image because of his rabid fanboys, but on the whole I think he's severely underrated as just being a "game musician" - that theme at the end easily rivals the themes to Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

We're nine hours in now. Just another hundred or so to go.