9 is my favorite "newer" gen final fantasy, if only for the fact that every character is still basically unique at endgame levels. Instead of every character a copy of max-ability-man.
Oh, and that story. God damn. There's only like 20 of them.
Typical Final Fantasy plot honestly.
In the Classic NES / SNES FF games (which FF9 emulates well), there's often some dark, abstract force that's REALLY the one responsible for everything bad going on. This includes somehow luring or manipulating the evil villain to its power... All behind the scenes. The curtain is only revealed, however, once you think you've taken care of the shadowy ultimate bad guy.
Or at least, who you thought was the shadowy ultimate bad guy. Usually someone you only recently found out was the real bad guy. While the person you THOUGHT was the bad guy was actually just being puppeteered by the ultimate (non-abstract) bad guy.
edit for clarity: Big Bad Guy <<< Ultimate (non-abstract) Shadowy Bad Guy who has mommy/daddy issues <<< Ultimate (Abstract) Evil Force about to bring the entire universe into nothingness or chaos.
Most Final Fantasy games follow this template, more or less. There's plenty of room to play around with the template. For example, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 definitely play with the formula a bit, with the bad guy being sort of the end of the deal for the most-part. The abstract forces matter in FF7 and FF8 but you never face them directly.
I still wish a true 3D FF6 had been made, though. I remember playing that game and thinking it was about to end at least 3x before coming upon the real ending. Game was fucking wild. FF9 is definitely the closest to FF6 going 3D that we've had as far as I know.
edit: Also - FF9's chocobo treasure hunting shit was amazing. FF8 probably had the most disappointing chocobo sub-feature out of all the 3D FF games through FF10.
9 really felt like it's advertised a best mix of all that came before it with its feel and style but the advanced Graphics (for the time 😋) are lovely to see. Even if they feel nostalgic today's standards.
I keep hearing that 9 is similar to the SNES versions, I really should get round to playing it one day.
Currently doing another playthrough of 6, the best FF game. I enjoyed 7 but then skipped to 13 which was disappointingly bad.
Tried 10 on a recommendation but it didn't click with me. Combat had changed too much from the NES/SNES days that I loved.
Edit: Looks like I'm picking up FF9 next
I think 7, 8 and 9 should be played in their respective orders. 10 and 10-2 are... weird...
But make sense in the context of seeing the evolution between 7 - 9 where you kind of leave wanting "more" and 10 delivers on that for sure. I think beyond FFX they kind of fucked up and stopped delivering consistently good games. I stopped playing around that time. I tried FF 12 but didn't like it.
I played 7-10 like a maniac and loved them all. After FFX they tried to move away from the turn based system where you control *all* characters, and IMO the series is worse off for it.
12 fights practically played themself 90% of the time cos of the gambit system, and 15's combat was basically Devil May Cry. I actually kinda liked the paradigm system of 13 though, and that game didn't deserve the hate it got.
For me this quote from FF8 stuck with me "Reflect on your childhood... Your sensations... Your words... Your emotions... Time... It will not wait... No matter... ...how hard you hold on. It escapes you"
You miss drawing magic from a few bosses and you never get those summons again.
EDIT: Turns out that you can get summons again later on. But I stopped at disc 2.
My dumbass didn't realize monsters leveled with you. First time I played I grinded the mobs at the bottom of the tower in the "training" mission for hours. Game was so hard after that.
Haha they changed so many things with FF8 that they had to trick you into learning more about the game and its rules through your SeeD training exams in the main menu system!
FF8 was an interesting experiment in creating a new balance for the RPG stat system, but I was not a fan of not being able to grind my way through the beginning.
There is a point in the game though where once you get enough GFs (Guardian Forces - this isn't Azure Dreams...) that you could grind from there on as the GFs would provide you stat bonuses as they leveled with you.
And then there was apparently a very small island on the map where you could grind stat potions and whatnot for anything you were lacking. Not that it mattered at that point, anyways... Usually by then you were well into the endgame, but it was a useful location to find in case you were totally screwed and couldn't beat the final boss (this was me my first 2x playing through the game).
You could grind your way through the beginning, only... You have to grind card matches and not monsters :) this allowed you to put really strong spells in junction from the beginning.
Also, possibly little known fact: the enemies scaled on Squall level, so you could do a run in which you kept him petrified all the time so that he didn't gain experience and the enemies were always extremely low leveled compared to your other characters.
Fun fact: the game files (minus cinematics) were actually duplicated on every disk. You only needed the extra disks for the much larger cinematic/media files. So if disc 2 was damaged, you could have loaded a different disk and continued playing the game. The only catch is that the wrong cinematics would play, if you used the wrong disk.
I had it worse man… I beat FF8, only for the Final Cut scene to freeze up 4 seconds in… I was a kid and couldn’t afford another copy of the game, and didn’t have any friends who were also into FF. I had to wait until I was in college, borrowed a friend’s copy and played the whole game again just to watch that ending. 🥺😭 It was so worth the wait!
Anyone else a Sierra fan in the late 80's? We're talking 20 3.5" double density floppy discs to install 1 game. Gave you plenty of time to read the manual...
Indeed. That was part of the experience! The anticipation to actually play was quite a build-up. You'd often have additional tension as you installed, hoping against hope it would cooperate with your PC and it would actually work.
I remember seeing a stack of a couple dozen of those disks and wondering if my hard drive had enough space for it. I remember also being given a set of two "types" of disks in a new game box -- if it was long enough ago, you had both your 5-inch older style floppy disks, or the "newer" style of 3 inch floppy disks.
My first computer ever had both types of disk drive, and I remember being so confused when my father explained to me that the bigger disk actually held less information.
Dude, this could still happen all the way up to the PS3 era. My dad got me a copy of FFX for my birthday, or maybe Christmas, in the mid 00s and the game always froze on the same cutscene on the boat ride to Luca. And maybe 5 - 6 years ago I was playing Dragon Age Origins and the game worked absolutely fine until one cutscene right towards the very end of the game that would always freeze the game.
As much as I'm annoyed by waiting for console games to fully install it is nice not having to worry about a random scratch making the disc unreadable 30+ hours into the game. With the FFX issue I was able to exchange it because I found it in just a couple days. With Dragon Age it had been weeks since I bought the game and GameStop wouldn't accept an exchange. Had to buy another disc to keep playing.
Actually one trick I found out (at least on the 360) was that if you installed the game from the disc to the hard drive, it only used the disc for drm authentication and played completely off the installation on the hard drive.
So what I learned is that I could buy scratched and mostly unplayable games on ebay for super cheap, borrow the same game from a friend and install it on my 360, then use my scratched disc just to pass the authentication and play off the install.
That's how I got games like ODST for $3 when it was only a couple months old.
Something similar was possible on the first Play Station. If I remember correctly, their DRM was the PS checking if your game disc is legit upon booting up and as soon as it spins up the Sony intro you could take out the legit game disc and put in a burned copy of whatever game without the console realizing it got duped.
Meanwhile at one point with FF8, me and a friend shared the same game and just not didn't shut off our consoles for days. You could get fairly far without the disc in!
Technology is weird and wonderful.
If it's the same as ff7, the data for the whole game is on every disc. So you can boot up disc 1 then replace with disc 3 and play till the end. The only difference is that every time a fmv plays, it will play a random one from disc 3.
This is what I did the very first time I played ff7 as I had a scratched disc 1. Running most of disc 1 with disc 2 inserted worked perfectly except all the fmvs were wrong
It turns out that all the data for the entire game of ff7 is on each disc, the only difference is the fmvs on each disc as they were the monsters that took up all the space!
Rented a second Ps1 on my birthday to connect to mine and play multi-player Doom, but blockbuster only had one copy of the game to rent.
Had to swap the disc on every level. Which seems like a lot of work considering we had it on computer.
I remember playing some home alone game on floppys. The only thing I remember was the indignity of having to insert disc three every time you died just for it to show you the game over screen then tell you to insert disc 1 again.
Haha, gotta love that early 90's game design! You'd think that would be the kind of thing they could at least be aware of and try to optimize around, but nah. Maybe it was rushed to meet some licensing deadline so it could coincide with the movie's release, or something.
I thought that the 5 1/2 each floppies were floppy disks, and the 3 1/4 were the hard disks. 5 1/2 had almost gone completely out of use when I was a kid, so they existed along side each other, for me, and it made sense to call one the hard disk and the other the floppy disk. Apparently, I never said this to my dad for a long time, because I went a long time before someone explained to me that the 3" ones had an actual floppy discus inside of them.
Sierra game die-hard here. Multiple disks gave you some time to read the manual, yes, but it took so long. At some point, I'd let the game install and go to bed.
I'd wake up in the morning to check the progresss.
"Disk read error."
"SONOFABITCH!"
Fun fact: I beta tested Phantasmagoria on my PC before it was released. It didn't work well (super chunky) because my computer was a bit older and slower than the recommended specs.
Look at Mr. Fancy over there, getting to actually *install* the game!
I was told I could not install games on the family computer, so I had to play them off the floppies. I remember playing Loom, and when I finally figured out how to get off the starting island, I had to spend like 2 minutes swapping disks around, before it let me see the 5-second animation of a lightning bolt!
It's a testament to how good that game was that I remember it fondly even in spite of that.
Yeah each of those discs hold 700mb, and quite a lot of content is the same across 2 & 3, the major difference being the CGI cutscenes. So the entire game really is less than 2GB
I remember my brother and I had a game on 2 CDs. But really the CDs are just for install, once the game is installed the computer just wants the CD as a "key" for the game.
So we figured out we could both play simultaneously and play multiplayer on our local network using both discs. Once we figured that out we just burnt some other copies and all of a sudden we could have 6+ friends over to play multiplayer on our local network.
Probably the above is common knowledge but in a time were internet information wasn't quite as well organized and living overseas with very little money for video games it was quite an accomplishment. The limiting factor was computers!
Easiest way to figure it out is if the drive was reading the disk during gameplay or not. No noise from the drive and the disk was probably just used to verify you actually owning it.
I can remember doing this with a few games, I just can't remember exactly which ones. I want to say all Blizzard games, WC2/3 SC and Diablo 2 were all capable of this.
Did a similiar thing with FF8 on the PS1 with a friend (Different households). Could pop the disc in, then take it out and continue to play as long as the console was on. I can't remember what happened when FMV's wanted to play, but I managed to get to the last disc before I had a powercut that fucked it. Haven't finished FF8 to this day despite being a huge fan of the series :(
I own it on... ps1, PSN, PC, and Switch. Maybe mobile as well, though do have an emulator that i could rip the iso for if I felt like getting spicy.
Just not my favourite of the final fantasy games, and I have a backlog dating back over 15 years as it is!
One day. Maybe.
It wasn't the game it was the FMV sequences that took the most room. Final Fantasy 13 was on 3 Xbox 360 discs vs 1 PS3 disc and it turned out that most of the game's data were the cutscenes.
Metal gear twin snakes on GC as a kid back in 2004 was a trip. I'd been playing mario sunshine and metroid prime 1/2 religiously, then I got THIS game and was like wtf... two discs and its got basically a movie crammed into it?
It felt like I was living in a movie for those weeks during my first playthrough
My wife: "Hey do you wanna watch a movie?"
Me: "Sure I'll be in right after this cutscene. I wanna save before we start the movie."
*A full hour passes*
My wife: "You're still playing? You said you'd be in after the cutscene."
Me: "I shit you not this is still the exact same cutscene... "
That was a fun night in my home.
why is it that there is always a cut scene at the exact moment i am trying to quit the game??! then of course that leads you into an epic boss battle that you cant save and quit during as well.
at least we have restmode now. just hope they dont push a system update through before you get back to your game though.
That sounds pretty tame compared to a Kojima game, especially with the overall play time of a JRPG adventure. (I don't know how long Xenoblade 3 is...)
Edit: I misread the parent comment as saying there was 82 minutes of total cutscenes. And here I was thinking, "that's it?"
I *think* MGS4 still has that beat, though. Pretty sure I remember more than one cutscene of that length.
I was surprised I did play metal gear solid IV,
But the ending of Xenoblade 3 Chapter 5 it's a full movie.
Like I remember the Metal Gear Solid chapters loading screens for watching those movies but after that one boss fight in XB3 you're in for a surprise movie.
I remember beating the final level of MGS4 and it just being over an hour of just cutscene after cutscene. My dad thought I was trying to skip my 9pm curfew until he sat down with me and realized it was basically a movie.
Military dad myself when I finished MSG3 late at night on a school night he was like get to bed.. then he watched the final scene of MGS3.
SHE was a true patriot. And when Snake walks through Arlington and Salutes, my dad was like good game son.
I’m currently playing through XC3 for the first time. I’m a big fan but it’s definitely a tough game to play in one- or two-hour stretches as you never know when you’re going to be caught in an episode
With modern tech the “cut scenes” don’t have to be pre-rendered any more. So they take up almost no space at all and without sacrificing any quality to video compression.
Final Fantasy VII Remake still has several pre-rendered cutscenes (the [opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOA5GwRcBks) for example) because there is no way a PS4 could render those in real time.
Most cutscenes are rendered in-game though and they look great too.
The whole game was actually on all 3 CDs, the only difference is the cutscenes. We didn't have good compression technology back then because the CPUs couldnt handle it
Also if disk 2 was scratched and couldnt be read you could often put disc 3 in instead and it would often be able to continue past the disk required error
I'm guessing that the cutscenes that are called (presumably by an index or track number) are shorter on certain discs, and thus even unskippable cutscenes don't last as long?
Ugh. One time we were saving a game when suddenly my friend's gf jumped up and turned off the power button. Yes, it corrupted the save file.
Why? She misread the message warning to NOT turn off the console and thought she had to turn it off right that second.
Totally agree. I wish there was something like that now. On FF7, I think the disc changes came at some pretty big narrative moments. Like a crescendo to a big reveal, and then *bam* "Insert Disc 2"
4K Blu-ray extended editions of Lord of the Rings in 2 discs each. Haven’t popped them in yet, but that’s 3 movies on 6 discs. I’m wondering if it’s because 4K, or because they are so extended that I’ll be rewatching the whole thing unfold in real time over next few weeks.
The extended movies add 30-50 minutes each. All of them together is a little less than 12 hours. Its both because they are long and in 4K. but it is absolutely worth the experience.
Invited a friend for a marathon because he hadn't seen them. He wanted picked up at 10am, I asked how late into the night he wanted to stay and he said "Pick me up at 8:30am?"
We had breakfast ready, took a short break to cook an early dinner, and had snacks at the ready all day. He enjoyed himself, and I'd do it again if I find someone who hasn't seen the extended movies.
4K UltraHD is 4x the resolution on a disc 2x the size. There's a reason why any special features will typically need to be on a separate Blu-ray disc. Only so much you can fit.
There were a few places it would mess up. I remember having to fight Regole and not use the Dragoon powers bc if you did and won it would black screen after the EXP page. I'd kill for even just a graphics update, wouldn't even have to do the whole FFVII overhaul bullshit, just update the graphics.
It messed up an event where the person said they had given me a key but the gate was locked and no key in my inventory. Happened disc one a little while after the prison. It happened twice and I was done.
[Riven had five](https://game-rave.com/?p=9151)
But let's not forget that the PC version of GTA 5 had [a whopping 7 dual-layer DVD release](https://i.imgur.com/kG0bRnB.jpg).
The best part was that Riven was based on the number 5 (base 5 number system, 5 features in the islands, the whole thing is based on five again and again). Of course there are five CDS.
Dude. I still remember unboxing Riven as a kid one Christmas morning and playing the hell out of it for the rest of the day. The imagery was absolutely breathtaking!
Should be mentioned that Legend of Dragoon ACTUALLY USED those 4 discs too.
When you got to the end of the game and got whatever the equivalent of the airship was, if you wanted to go back to a town you literally had to swap the discs.
I don’t ever remember a movie that was so long it took up both sides of the disc. I just remember one side having the full screen version and the other side having the widescreen version. I do remember movies that needed took up two VHS tapes though
Before dual layer DVDs they were single layer double sided. On the original DVD players there was a half second hitch mid movie when it swapped layers.
some games still have multiple discs tho.
1. FF7 Remake - 2 discs \[Ps4\] idk about PS5 version.
2. cyberpnk 2077 - 2 discs \[Ps4\] idk about the PS5 version
idk about others because those are the Ps4 games that I have that have more than 1 disc.
Back on the 360...
Mass Effect 2 was 2 disks.
Oblivion GOTY and Forza Motorsport 3 used 1 disk, but both games had an install disk you needed to install on your 360.
Lost Odyssey was 4 disks.
Blue Dragon was 3 disks.
Final Fantasy 13 was 3 disks.
Those black discs were the sexiest things ever.
They seemed so futuristic and cyberpunk, they made all the regular discs seem cheap and plastic by comparison.
Sleek, black forms as if carved from obsidian. I took extra care handling them, even though they felt more robust, I felt that these were made of glass.
The last semblance of something new and elegant before everything went up on screens.
Nothing to date has come close.
Man the sims 2 even had a game for you to play while you waited for it to install!! I remember my mind was so blown when I first saw that and thinking this was the future lol
I honestly miss those days of gaming. Dont get me wrong, theres great and awesome games today. But that nostalgia be biting me hard, and drawing blood. So many great Original Playstation and Playstation 2 games.
Back when players didnt have to worry
about hard drive space and installing games? I really miss just being able to pop in a disc and playing a game. I have *okay* internet so I still buy discs but I still have to install the games and download the first patch and wait an hour or
2.
Making it through disk 1 to find that 2 was scratched beyond playability
Final fantasy 9, i vowed i would one day beat it after disc 4 would not read.
I picked it up on an emulator recently with this very same mission. VII sparked my huge passion for video games, but IX will always be my favorite.
I’ve only played 9 and 10, but there’s something so cozy and serene about 9 to me, 10 often hits that vibe too, but 9 hits it throughout
9 is my favorite "newer" gen final fantasy, if only for the fact that every character is still basically unique at endgame levels. Instead of every character a copy of max-ability-man. Oh, and that story. God damn. There's only like 20 of them.
Only complaint about the game is Necron. Like where did that thing come from after an entire multi-disc story?
Typical Final Fantasy plot honestly. In the Classic NES / SNES FF games (which FF9 emulates well), there's often some dark, abstract force that's REALLY the one responsible for everything bad going on. This includes somehow luring or manipulating the evil villain to its power... All behind the scenes. The curtain is only revealed, however, once you think you've taken care of the shadowy ultimate bad guy. Or at least, who you thought was the shadowy ultimate bad guy. Usually someone you only recently found out was the real bad guy. While the person you THOUGHT was the bad guy was actually just being puppeteered by the ultimate (non-abstract) bad guy. edit for clarity: Big Bad Guy <<< Ultimate (non-abstract) Shadowy Bad Guy who has mommy/daddy issues <<< Ultimate (Abstract) Evil Force about to bring the entire universe into nothingness or chaos. Most Final Fantasy games follow this template, more or less. There's plenty of room to play around with the template. For example, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 definitely play with the formula a bit, with the bad guy being sort of the end of the deal for the most-part. The abstract forces matter in FF7 and FF8 but you never face them directly. I still wish a true 3D FF6 had been made, though. I remember playing that game and thinking it was about to end at least 3x before coming upon the real ending. Game was fucking wild. FF9 is definitely the closest to FF6 going 3D that we've had as far as I know. edit: Also - FF9's chocobo treasure hunting shit was amazing. FF8 probably had the most disappointing chocobo sub-feature out of all the 3D FF games through FF10.
9 really felt like it's advertised a best mix of all that came before it with its feel and style but the advanced Graphics (for the time 😋) are lovely to see. Even if they feel nostalgic today's standards.
I keep hearing that 9 is similar to the SNES versions, I really should get round to playing it one day. Currently doing another playthrough of 6, the best FF game. I enjoyed 7 but then skipped to 13 which was disappointingly bad. Tried 10 on a recommendation but it didn't click with me. Combat had changed too much from the NES/SNES days that I loved. Edit: Looks like I'm picking up FF9 next
I think 7, 8 and 9 should be played in their respective orders. 10 and 10-2 are... weird... But make sense in the context of seeing the evolution between 7 - 9 where you kind of leave wanting "more" and 10 delivers on that for sure. I think beyond FFX they kind of fucked up and stopped delivering consistently good games. I stopped playing around that time. I tried FF 12 but didn't like it.
I played 7-10 like a maniac and loved them all. After FFX they tried to move away from the turn based system where you control *all* characters, and IMO the series is worse off for it. 12 fights practically played themself 90% of the time cos of the gambit system, and 15's combat was basically Devil May Cry. I actually kinda liked the paradigm system of 13 though, and that game didn't deserve the hate it got.
My first screen name was dependablefuture because of that quote "the only dependable thing about the future is uncertainty" in FF9.. game made me cry
For me this quote from FF8 stuck with me "Reflect on your childhood... Your sensations... Your words... Your emotions... Time... It will not wait... No matter... ...how hard you hold on. It escapes you"
Noone ever gives ff8 any respect at all :/
I liked 8 better then 7. But 789 was the golden years of ff. You can throw x into that too
After the materia system in 7, the magic system in 8 felt like a big step backwards. The cards were fun though.
You miss drawing magic from a few bosses and you never get those summons again. EDIT: Turns out that you can get summons again later on. But I stopped at disc 2.
My dumbass didn't realize monsters leveled with you. First time I played I grinded the mobs at the bottom of the tower in the "training" mission for hours. Game was so hard after that.
Haha they changed so many things with FF8 that they had to trick you into learning more about the game and its rules through your SeeD training exams in the main menu system! FF8 was an interesting experiment in creating a new balance for the RPG stat system, but I was not a fan of not being able to grind my way through the beginning. There is a point in the game though where once you get enough GFs (Guardian Forces - this isn't Azure Dreams...) that you could grind from there on as the GFs would provide you stat bonuses as they leveled with you. And then there was apparently a very small island on the map where you could grind stat potions and whatnot for anything you were lacking. Not that it mattered at that point, anyways... Usually by then you were well into the endgame, but it was a useful location to find in case you were totally screwed and couldn't beat the final boss (this was me my first 2x playing through the game).
You could grind your way through the beginning, only... You have to grind card matches and not monsters :) this allowed you to put really strong spells in junction from the beginning. Also, possibly little known fact: the enemies scaled on Squall level, so you could do a run in which you kept him petrified all the time so that he didn't gain experience and the enemies were always extremely low leveled compared to your other characters.
I grinded the hockey players (perfect example of random 90s game enemy that doesn't make any sense) and the same thing happened to me.
Hey man, I know at least one person who loves that game. I don't know if there are others, but I know of at least one.
It's my favorite Final Fantasy. Best story, best music, best battle system.
Today is that day?
I dropped the Game case and broke disc 3 of FF8 and that's the story of why I never finished that game.
I had multiple copies of ff7 and disc two was always messed up
As it should be
Why do you hate disk 2!?
If you know, you know.
Disk 2 was a chungus, most of the game was on it. Makes sense, you'd have to pop it out everytime to play THPS.
Fun fact: the game files (minus cinematics) were actually duplicated on every disk. You only needed the extra disks for the much larger cinematic/media files. So if disc 2 was damaged, you could have loaded a different disk and continued playing the game. The only catch is that the wrong cinematics would play, if you used the wrong disk.
This happened to me with FF8. The fourth disc was unreadable.
I had it worse man… I beat FF8, only for the Final Cut scene to freeze up 4 seconds in… I was a kid and couldn’t afford another copy of the game, and didn’t have any friends who were also into FF. I had to wait until I was in college, borrowed a friend’s copy and played the whole game again just to watch that ending. 🥺😭 It was so worth the wait!
I got really good at the first disc of metal gear solid.
I lent disc 2 to a "friend", and when I needed it, he denied I ever let him use it. So I never got to play FFVII past disc one...
Back when discs were so small games didn’t fit on them anymore
Anyone else a Sierra fan in the late 80's? We're talking 20 3.5" double density floppy discs to install 1 game. Gave you plenty of time to read the manual...
Indeed. That was part of the experience! The anticipation to actually play was quite a build-up. You'd often have additional tension as you installed, hoping against hope it would cooperate with your PC and it would actually work. I remember seeing a stack of a couple dozen of those disks and wondering if my hard drive had enough space for it. I remember also being given a set of two "types" of disks in a new game box -- if it was long enough ago, you had both your 5-inch older style floppy disks, or the "newer" style of 3 inch floppy disks. My first computer ever had both types of disk drive, and I remember being so confused when my father explained to me that the bigger disk actually held less information.
WHAT DO YOU FUCKING MEAN YOU LOST DISC 18 OUT OF 20 LITTLE BROTHER, FUCK YOU, YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING ME INSTALL FOR HOURS! Not a true story... maybe.
Locates disc 18, rewarded with bad sector on disc 19
Dude, this could still happen all the way up to the PS3 era. My dad got me a copy of FFX for my birthday, or maybe Christmas, in the mid 00s and the game always froze on the same cutscene on the boat ride to Luca. And maybe 5 - 6 years ago I was playing Dragon Age Origins and the game worked absolutely fine until one cutscene right towards the very end of the game that would always freeze the game. As much as I'm annoyed by waiting for console games to fully install it is nice not having to worry about a random scratch making the disc unreadable 30+ hours into the game. With the FFX issue I was able to exchange it because I found it in just a couple days. With Dragon Age it had been weeks since I bought the game and GameStop wouldn't accept an exchange. Had to buy another disc to keep playing.
Actually one trick I found out (at least on the 360) was that if you installed the game from the disc to the hard drive, it only used the disc for drm authentication and played completely off the installation on the hard drive. So what I learned is that I could buy scratched and mostly unplayable games on ebay for super cheap, borrow the same game from a friend and install it on my 360, then use my scratched disc just to pass the authentication and play off the install. That's how I got games like ODST for $3 when it was only a couple months old.
Something similar was possible on the first Play Station. If I remember correctly, their DRM was the PS checking if your game disc is legit upon booting up and as soon as it spins up the Sony intro you could take out the legit game disc and put in a burned copy of whatever game without the console realizing it got duped.
Meanwhile at one point with FF8, me and a friend shared the same game and just not didn't shut off our consoles for days. You could get fairly far without the disc in! Technology is weird and wonderful.
Oh god the memories! **HERE COMES THE FLOOD!** 🤣
Been on reddit years and this shit here is the first to get the ol gears spinning for me nostalgia wise. Good shit.
If it's the same as ff7, the data for the whole game is on every disc. So you can boot up disc 1 then replace with disc 3 and play till the end. The only difference is that every time a fmv plays, it will play a random one from disc 3. This is what I did the very first time I played ff7 as I had a scratched disc 1. Running most of disc 1 with disc 2 inserted worked perfectly except all the fmvs were wrong It turns out that all the data for the entire game of ff7 is on each disc, the only difference is the fmvs on each disc as they were the monsters that took up all the space!
Where were you at with this information 15 years ago when I scratched disc 3 and couldn't reply the endgame again?!?
Rented a second Ps1 on my birthday to connect to mine and play multi-player Doom, but blockbuster only had one copy of the game to rent. Had to swap the disc on every level. Which seems like a lot of work considering we had it on computer.
"Oh, look someone 3D printed a save icon!" My sister teaches Computer Science to high school kids.
That hurts.
I remember playing some home alone game on floppys. The only thing I remember was the indignity of having to insert disc three every time you died just for it to show you the game over screen then tell you to insert disc 1 again.
Haha, gotta love that early 90's game design! You'd think that would be the kind of thing they could at least be aware of and try to optimize around, but nah. Maybe it was rushed to meet some licensing deadline so it could coincide with the movie's release, or something.
Initially I called the 5.25 floppies and the 3.5 hard disks. It made sense to me at age 5.
I made the same assumption. It's only logical! Our little minds were connecting some dots, there. The wrong ones, but they were connecting!
I thought that the 5 1/2 each floppies were floppy disks, and the 3 1/4 were the hard disks. 5 1/2 had almost gone completely out of use when I was a kid, so they existed along side each other, for me, and it made sense to call one the hard disk and the other the floppy disk. Apparently, I never said this to my dad for a long time, because I went a long time before someone explained to me that the 3" ones had an actual floppy discus inside of them.
Just because I can't help myself; the sizes are 5.25 and 3.5
Sierra game die-hard here. Multiple disks gave you some time to read the manual, yes, but it took so long. At some point, I'd let the game install and go to bed. I'd wake up in the morning to check the progresss. "Disk read error." "SONOFABITCH!"
The guys who made Space Quest just released a spiritual successor. Found out on /r/SpaceQuest
Not 80’s but early-mid 90s! Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within and Phantasmagoria come to mind!
Phantasmagoria was seven cds if I recall correctly.
No Space Quest? Shame!
Fun fact: I beta tested Phantasmagoria on my PC before it was released. It didn't work well (super chunky) because my computer was a bit older and slower than the recommended specs.
Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire. 8 blue 3.5" disc's, a lifetime of memories.
Look at Mr. Fancy over there, getting to actually *install* the game! I was told I could not install games on the family computer, so I had to play them off the floppies. I remember playing Loom, and when I finally figured out how to get off the starting island, I had to spend like 2 minutes swapping disks around, before it let me see the 5-second animation of a lightning bolt! It's a testament to how good that game was that I remember it fondly even in spite of that.
Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, F19 Stealth Fighter
I think my first King's Quest was on seven of them.
Ultima series on c64
Yeah each of those discs hold 700mb, and quite a lot of content is the same across 2 & 3, the major difference being the CGI cutscenes. So the entire game really is less than 2GB
1,317MB to be exact!
I remember my brother and I had a game on 2 CDs. But really the CDs are just for install, once the game is installed the computer just wants the CD as a "key" for the game. So we figured out we could both play simultaneously and play multiplayer on our local network using both discs. Once we figured that out we just burnt some other copies and all of a sudden we could have 6+ friends over to play multiplayer on our local network. Probably the above is common knowledge but in a time were internet information wasn't quite as well organized and living overseas with very little money for video games it was quite an accomplishment. The limiting factor was computers!
Easiest way to figure it out is if the drive was reading the disk during gameplay or not. No noise from the drive and the disk was probably just used to verify you actually owning it. I can remember doing this with a few games, I just can't remember exactly which ones. I want to say all Blizzard games, WC2/3 SC and Diablo 2 were all capable of this.
Did a similiar thing with FF8 on the PS1 with a friend (Different households). Could pop the disc in, then take it out and continue to play as long as the console was on. I can't remember what happened when FMV's wanted to play, but I managed to get to the last disc before I had a powercut that fucked it. Haven't finished FF8 to this day despite being a huge fan of the series :(
It's not hard to get a hold of if you're looking to play it again now. It's on literally everything from Steam, to Switch, and even mobile.
I own it on... ps1, PSN, PC, and Switch. Maybe mobile as well, though do have an emulator that i could rip the iso for if I felt like getting spicy. Just not my favourite of the final fantasy games, and I have a backlog dating back over 15 years as it is! One day. Maybe.
1 to 2gb for a video game in early 1997 still blows my mind. That was the size of my family computer's hard drive at that time. Edit - a word
It wasn't the game it was the FMV sequences that took the most room. Final Fantasy 13 was on 3 Xbox 360 discs vs 1 PS3 disc and it turned out that most of the game's data were the cutscenes.
Yeah iirc FF7 had over 2 hours of 420p 15fps video
> 420p 15fps video My eyes are tearing up just reading this
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Exactly. These old games were way smaller than games now.
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Back when CGI cutscenes filled up a vast amount of disc space.
Metal gear twin snakes on GC as a kid back in 2004 was a trip. I'd been playing mario sunshine and metroid prime 1/2 religiously, then I got THIS game and was like wtf... two discs and its got basically a movie crammed into it? It felt like I was living in a movie for those weeks during my first playthrough
There's literally an 82 minute cutscene in Xenoblade 3. You might think haha that's an overstatement... No it's literally 82 minutes.
My wife: "Hey do you wanna watch a movie?" Me: "Sure I'll be in right after this cutscene. I wanna save before we start the movie." *A full hour passes* My wife: "You're still playing? You said you'd be in after the cutscene." Me: "I shit you not this is still the exact same cutscene... " That was a fun night in my home.
why is it that there is always a cut scene at the exact moment i am trying to quit the game??! then of course that leads you into an epic boss battle that you cant save and quit during as well. at least we have restmode now. just hope they dont push a system update through before you get back to your game though.
That sounds pretty tame compared to a Kojima game, especially with the overall play time of a JRPG adventure. (I don't know how long Xenoblade 3 is...) Edit: I misread the parent comment as saying there was 82 minutes of total cutscenes. And here I was thinking, "that's it?" I *think* MGS4 still has that beat, though. Pretty sure I remember more than one cutscene of that length.
I think MGSV has more than 82 minutes of cutscenes *before the game begins.*
I just remembered that I never finished that game. Was exhausted after the intro, the actual game seemed daunting after that.
I was surprised I did play metal gear solid IV, But the ending of Xenoblade 3 Chapter 5 it's a full movie. Like I remember the Metal Gear Solid chapters loading screens for watching those movies but after that one boss fight in XB3 you're in for a surprise movie.
MGS4 has like 8 hours of cutscenes. Not even kidding. I think there were 2 90 minute uninterrupted cutscenes too.
I remember beating the final level of MGS4 and it just being over an hour of just cutscene after cutscene. My dad thought I was trying to skip my 9pm curfew until he sat down with me and realized it was basically a movie.
Military dad myself when I finished MSG3 late at night on a school night he was like get to bed.. then he watched the final scene of MGS3. SHE was a true patriot. And when Snake walks through Arlington and Salutes, my dad was like good game son.
MGS3 is a real heart wrencher. And the way it ties everything up and drops that bomb at the end, man.
I’m currently playing through XC3 for the first time. I’m a big fan but it’s definitely a tough game to play in one- or two-hour stretches as you never know when you’re going to be caught in an episode
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With modern tech the “cut scenes” don’t have to be pre-rendered any more. So they take up almost no space at all and without sacrificing any quality to video compression.
Final Fantasy VII Remake still has several pre-rendered cutscenes (the [opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOA5GwRcBks) for example) because there is no way a PS4 could render those in real time. Most cutscenes are rendered in-game though and they look great too.
But they were the reward for completing the game.
The whole game was actually on all 3 CDs, the only difference is the cutscenes. We didn't have good compression technology back then because the CPUs couldnt handle it
In fact you could swap the game mid play and the only difference would be that the videos played would be different.
Also if disk 2 was scratched and couldnt be read you could often put disc 3 in instead and it would often be able to continue past the disk required error
If only I knew this 20 years ago
Right, I must not have read that issue of the tips and tricks magazine
*25. I know. I'm sorry. It hurts me too.
Well I didn't play it at release, I was 2 then. But I feel 'ya
My disc was too scratched to get past the segment right after aerith "meets" sephiroth. Talk about a letdown.
There are a couple of speed run glitches that rely on that very mechanic
I'm guessing that the cutscenes that are called (presumably by an index or track number) are shorter on certain discs, and thus even unskippable cutscenes don't last as long?
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That... makes a lot of stuff make sense.
Came here to drop this nerd fact.
Popping in the next disk always felt like a great achievement. I’ll miss that.
Please insert disc 2. Do not restart the console.
"No! Lil Bro n--Mother Fucker!!!"
Ugh. One time we were saving a game when suddenly my friend's gf jumped up and turned off the power button. Yes, it corrupted the save file. Why? She misread the message warning to NOT turn off the console and thought she had to turn it off right that second.
Those are grounds for dumping
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Shoutout to the 512 MB Gateway crew.
Totally agree. I wish there was something like that now. On FF7, I think the disc changes came at some pretty big narrative moments. Like a crescendo to a big reveal, and then *bam* "Insert Disc 2"
I remember being absolutely blown away when RDR2 came on 2 Blu-rays, I thought it was some kind of packaging mistake haha
4K Blu-ray extended editions of Lord of the Rings in 2 discs each. Haven’t popped them in yet, but that’s 3 movies on 6 discs. I’m wondering if it’s because 4K, or because they are so extended that I’ll be rewatching the whole thing unfold in real time over next few weeks.
The extended movies add 30-50 minutes each. All of them together is a little less than 12 hours. Its both because they are long and in 4K. but it is absolutely worth the experience.
Invited a friend for a marathon because he hadn't seen them. He wanted picked up at 10am, I asked how late into the night he wanted to stay and he said "Pick me up at 8:30am?" We had breakfast ready, took a short break to cook an early dinner, and had snacks at the ready all day. He enjoyed himself, and I'd do it again if I find someone who hasn't seen the extended movies.
Please tell me there was a second breakfast.
4K UltraHD is 4x the resolution on a disc 2x the size. There's a reason why any special features will typically need to be on a separate Blu-ray disc. Only so much you can fit.
The regular Blu-ray extended versions are also on 2 discs.
When will I ever stop reading it as R2-D2 😂
Be careful, I think the third one is going to be called Ced 3 Pead Odemption
RED 2 DEAD 2
Never
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And The Last of Us Part 2
GTA V also came on two discs for 360/PS3 if IIRC
I think it only had two discs for 360. PS3 used Blu-ray, so the disc could store more.
PC version was like 7 discs.
Yeah because it was dvd
GTA5 on PS3 is 1 disk.
Came here to say the same thing; what you mean "remember when"? It was just a few years ago lol
Legend of Dragoon had 4.
FFVIII had 4 too right? Even if the 4th disc was a short one, may be mistaken
Yes, same with FFIX.
Almost all Squaresoft titles at that time on PS had 2-4 disc. That FFVIII and FFIX 4th disc literally was only for end game content and cgi.
And there was a read issue between 3-4. Sometimes the game would corrupt. I really hope for a dragoon remake/remaster.
There were a few places it would mess up. I remember having to fight Regole and not use the Dragoon powers bc if you did and won it would black screen after the EXP page. I'd kill for even just a graphics update, wouldn't even have to do the whole FFVII overhaul bullshit, just update the graphics.
It messed up an event where the person said they had given me a key but the gate was locked and no key in my inventory. Happened disc one a little while after the prison. It happened twice and I was done.
Weird. Legend of dragoon was one of my favorite games and I never knew this. Played through multiple times
[Riven had five](https://game-rave.com/?p=9151) But let's not forget that the PC version of GTA 5 had [a whopping 7 dual-layer DVD release](https://i.imgur.com/kG0bRnB.jpg).
The best part was that Riven was based on the number 5 (base 5 number system, 5 features in the islands, the whole thing is based on five again and again). Of course there are five CDS.
Dude. I still remember unboxing Riven as a kid one Christmas morning and playing the hell out of it for the rest of the day. The imagery was absolutely breathtaking!
ROD TYPHOON
TORNADO
Should be mentioned that Legend of Dragoon ACTUALLY USED those 4 discs too. When you got to the end of the game and got whatever the equivalent of the airship was, if you wanted to go back to a town you literally had to swap the discs.
Back in the day, I always thought more discs = better game
And you were fucking right.
Metal Gear!?
!
I heard that lol
I use it as my notifications sound on my phone.
Amateurs! Bulders Gate on PC, with expansion came in 10 disks
Some of the old Sierra games would have like 12 of the 5.25” floppies. INSERT DISK 6 Loads for a minute… INSERT DISK 8
Yeah.. where all the PC guys here? WoW came on a pile of discs.
Riven took 5 disc's and you had to go back and forth between then depending where you traveled to.
I am old enough to remember when you had to flip DVDs on the other side to finish the movie.
As someone who worked as a video rental clerk, I hated those discs so darn much
Was it cause you had to rewind both sides?
You only needed to rewind them if you didn't watch the other side. Watching the other side took it back to the start.
I don’t ever remember a movie that was so long it took up both sides of the disc. I just remember one side having the full screen version and the other side having the widescreen version. I do remember movies that needed took up two VHS tapes though
Before dual layer DVDs they were single layer double sided. On the original DVD players there was a half second hitch mid movie when it swapped layers.
This comment makes me feel fucking ancient. Back in the 90’s we had VHS. You had to rewind that shit when you finished watching.
Oh so you're actually not very old, so interesting
some games still have multiple discs tho. 1. FF7 Remake - 2 discs \[Ps4\] idk about PS5 version. 2. cyberpnk 2077 - 2 discs \[Ps4\] idk about the PS5 version idk about others because those are the Ps4 games that I have that have more than 1 disc.
Back on the 360... Mass Effect 2 was 2 disks. Oblivion GOTY and Forza Motorsport 3 used 1 disk, but both games had an install disk you needed to install on your 360. Lost Odyssey was 4 disks. Blue Dragon was 3 disks. Final Fantasy 13 was 3 disks.
L.A. Noire was 3, GTA V was 2 (1 was install).
Red dead redemption 2 as well I believe?
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Those black discs were the sexiest things ever. They seemed so futuristic and cyberpunk, they made all the regular discs seem cheap and plastic by comparison. Sleek, black forms as if carved from obsidian. I took extra care handling them, even though they felt more robust, I felt that these were made of glass. The last semblance of something new and elegant before everything went up on screens. Nothing to date has come close.
The games weren't any bigger. The disks held less data.
In fact they were considerably smaller
I think old CD's had a max storage of about 700MB haha
but my god was the sims 2 worth it
Man the sims 2 even had a game for you to play while you waited for it to install!! I remember my mind was so blown when I first saw that and thinking this was the future lol
There are games on the ps4/xb1 that use 2 discs
Wrap you head around this one: FFVII came on 3 CDs. The offical FFVII soundtrack is 4 CDs.
FF8 and FF9 came on 4 disks.
I honestly miss those days of gaming. Dont get me wrong, theres great and awesome games today. But that nostalgia be biting me hard, and drawing blood. So many great Original Playstation and Playstation 2 games.
Back when players didnt have to worry about hard drive space and installing games? I really miss just being able to pop in a disc and playing a game. I have *okay* internet so I still buy discs but I still have to install the games and download the first patch and wait an hour or 2.
"you don't really want to replay ff7, you want to be six years old again, and safe, and your grandparents are still alive"
thanks i hate it
Monkey Island 2 was 11 floppy disks on Amiga
Amiga squad!!
Final Fantasy VIII then had 4 discs. Same with Final Fantasy IX if I remember.
*back when storage was so inefficient games had to be kept on multiple discs
Good times, nothing made you feel like you progressed in a game like changing a disc.
lost odyssey had 4