Remakes and Remasters: The Case of Final Fantasy VII

Posted on February 28, 2026 by JC

I’ve shared some observations about video game remakes and remasters a couple of times including in my post on the games I played in 2023 but never had a post dedicated to it. Something I think still needs to be often clarified is the difference between a remake and a remaster which can be blurry. The latter should be the same game only modified to play on modern systems. Textures and the user interface can be upscaled or redrawn and there can be other quality of life improvements, but it should be the same game. These releases are usually welcome as there are quite a few great games that can not be easily obtained or played at all anymore on modern hardware. It helps also that re-releases are much cheaper than making entirely new games so many publishers are opting to re-release older games. Sometimes these are excellent and sometimes they aren’t but on the whole, it is a good thing to make classic titles more widely available.

Remakes on the other hand are a bit more controversial. After all, if a game is really great, does it need a remake? I would say that the remake of Resident Evil 4 was not necessary as the first one still looks and plays great from my perspective. But then, I have to remember that I played it when it was new and know the game really well. Newer players used to constant tutorials and yellow paint spread everywhere to guide progression, might find the original harder to appreciate today. I recall back as early as 2009 there being complaints about not being able to move and shoot in Resident Evil 5 which mostly adopted the same control scheme. And just a year after Resident Evil 4, Gears of War gave players much better third-person mechanics with an intuitive over-the-shoulder combat and cover system that became widely copied. The Resident Evil titles that followed even incorporated some of these mechanics in subsequent titles as the series became more action orientated. So games can age quickly and it is true in some sense that “you had to be there” for many popular titles and this even applies to me with many old PlayStation titles including the original Resident Evil games.

One title that has seen calls for a remake since one was announced and aborted in the early 2000s was 1997’s Final Fantasy VII for the original PlayStation. The 2020 remake is the main subject of this post.

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Send a Maniac to Catch One

Posted on February 15, 2026 by JC

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone spent the better part of the 1980s in friendly competition with multiple now iconic action films released during this decade. Schwarzenegger started with Conan the Barbarian and had continued success as the titular antagonist in The Terminator then Predator and Commando among a number of others. At the same time, Stallone continued his Rocky series into the 80s which also embraced the decade’s muscular machismo as did the Rambo films after First Blood in 1982. They continued to dominate the genre into the 1990s but it was also around this time that they took on more comedic and sometimes a more “family friendly” turn. Although still containing plenty of graphic violence, even Terminator 2: Judgement Day was unsubtly marketed towards pre-teen boys with ten-year old John Connor and his own personal killer robot. I know this is true because I loved Terminator 2 when I was around the same age and my mother (very reluctantly), allowed me to watch it with my brothers. If my personal anecdote doesn’t convince you, the toys and video games produced at the time of the film’s release should. 

Some more examples of the family-friendly (but not really), films are Kindergarten Cop and Sylvester Stallone’s bizarre but somehow still  forgettable Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. Both actors continued doing action films but many of these had a more light-hearted tone. For Schwarzenegger, there was the poorly received but still entertaining The Last Action Hero and Stallone had the more memorable Demolition Man; the latter which is the subject of this post. 

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review

Posted on February 8, 2026 by JC

Having finished my playthrough of this game a few weeks ago, I decided my thoughts beyond those I wrote earlier were worth a separate post. As this game has been out for almost a year and has been widely discussed, I will not be delicate about spoiling the story especially as the “big reveal” around the game’s climax is something I want to write about. I will also do some of the conventional analysis of the gameplay, visual and sound design as well. But if you’re someone who might want to play it and doesn’t want the game “spoiled” then you have been warned. Continue reading →

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A Terminal Future?

Posted on January 31, 2026 by JC

If you follow the PC components market or gaming even casually, you would no doubt have noticed the large increase in the price of memory beginning late last year. The reason for this (as I understand), is the demand from AI data centres with companies like OpenAI pre-buying from the major memory manufacturers like Micron. This may (if not already), lead to a similar surge in the price of solid-state storage too. To understand how much the price has increased, the memory kit I bought in February, 2024 is now over three times the price I paid from the same retailer and there is no sign that this will change any time soon. It is a relief for me that I did build a new PC when I did as prices had fallen about as low as they would before a new generation of GPUs were released. I did so when I saw GPUs prices finally drop after the surge in demand in 2020 from crypto miners and bored people trapped at home by the fake pandemic. What is currently happening with memory may end up being a similarly short-term issue but there are some indications there could be more to it.

What follows will be speculation and like with many topics I cover here (including my very last post), I hope I am completely wrong!

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What will Australia be called in 2100?

Posted on January 18, 2026 by JC

Over three years ago I wrote a post titled, ‘China is in Charge‘. This wasn’t a celebratory post welcoming our new Han overlords but simply a recognition of the new geo-political reality that will become more and more evident in the coming decades. I am not one of those naïve Communist sympathisers that posts videos of light shows in Chinese cities on X as evidence of this either. The city in which I live has pretty LEDs on bridges and buildings and a competent videographer could easily produce a similar video in this city. The harder evidence is that China has a very large population, a huge industrial capacity and an advanced and very well-equipped military. This is the stuff that matters and it is now more openly flexing this power around the world. 

The problem when you speak with even otherwise serious people who are capable of thinking beyond their own backyard is their unwillingness to accept this. “But isn’t China bad?” and “But China is Communist?” are simplified rejoinders as if morality has ever had much of a say in the great games world powers play against each other at the expense of weaker nations. One can also point out that the United States actions to this very day are hardly that of an empire motivated by any philanthropic internationalism but this too falls on deaf ears. It is true at least that most Western nations still treat their subjects better than most others do and are more pleasant places to live. Though this is also changing fast with younger generations now unable to afford to buy into the property market and sometimes even find an affordable place to rent. Although only part of the wider problem of mass immigration, one reason for this is that rich Chinese are able to buy up a lot of property in many Western nations; including valuable farmland and desirable urban properties. The average citizen can not compete with this — and shouldn’t have to.

Indeed, the way the world is headed, the early history of both Australia and New Zealand in particular may one day be a small piece of trivia in the much longer history of China. In fact, it would be miraculous if these two nations don’t fall under open Chinese control before the end of the century. Continue reading →

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The Games of 2025

Posted on January 6, 2026 by JC

After last year’s generally bland offerings, I didn’t expect 2025 to be much better but it turned out to be an excellent year for releases. As I noted in the liked post, part of the reason was the expectations for what is now well-known as the Nintendo Switch 2. This was the expected name but it wasn’t confirmed until early 2025. I shared my thoughts on the console back in July partially in response to general criticisms about the launch and especially the pricing. Part of this was valid but most of it wasn’t and as of writing, I haven’t felt the need to adjust my opinion and I wrote this prior to the release of many of the titles covered below. 

I will be covering eleven games released this year (a record for me), and will begin with the new Nintendo releases followed by three other releases and the two remasters I played.

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Film Reviews and Articles

Posted on December 30, 2025 by JC

Similarly to my collected video game and book reviews and articles, I have now written enough about film and television series to create a separate catalogue of related posts. The way I’ve had to structure this is a little different as many of the films I’ve reviewed combine multiple genres and unlike video games, there are also no platforms or companies to easily divide them. I also often have different titles for various reviews and so will be just naming the film or television series below. Where I have covered multiple films, they will just be included in ‘Articles & Commentary’. Many of these articles are also rather old and so are not of the same quality as what I try to achieve in more recent years. Finally, I don’t always follow a conventional review structure as I cover a specific aspect or element of a specific film whether from a socio-political or other perspective.

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Foreigners Kill People: Australians to Blame

Posted on December 24, 2025 by JC

On the evening of Sunday the 14th of December, 2025, a father and son named Sajid and Naveed Akram killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach in Sydney Australia. The people targeted were people celebrating Hanukkah on the beach and most of the fifteen victims were Jewish and many of these were born overseas. Depending on where you count, this is about the tenth such attack since 2014 and certainly the deadliest so far this century. It is hard to argue that all these attacks were not motivated by Islam or an “extreme form of Islam” for the squeamish. That the targets have also generally been Jewish or connected to the state of Israel in some way is also hardly a coincidence.

A look through ‘Terrorism in Australia‘ on Wikipedia will demonstrate that most examples in Australian history have not been perpetrated by Australians and by “Australians”, I mean the people that would have been considered Australian by those present for Federation on January 1st 1901. This is Wikipedia of course but in this case, the bias helps because the editors have clearly included as many examples as they could that conform to their political biases. Despite this, most terrorism and all incidents in recent memory, were perpetrated by people professing Islamic beliefs and who have a paper-thin connection to Australia. The names alone should tell you these aren’t people with an ancestor brought here on a prison ship or even someone that freely immigrated from the United Kingdom in the early part of last century. 

Yet for all this, the response thus far of both the NSW state and our Federal government would suggest this attack was carried out by home-grown-neo-Nazis. Continue reading →

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Australia’s Social Media “Ban”

Posted on December 19, 2025 by JC

As of December 10th, Australia introduced it’s social media ban on certain websites for children under 16. I do not have accounts with any of the affected platforms and I had assumed that this effectively requires everyone who uses them to prove their identity going forward. So far at least, I have no noticed any change at all. The websites affected as of writing are:

Facebook
Instagram
Kick
Reddit
Snapchat
Threads
TikTok
Twitch
X (formerly Twitter)
YouTube

With many of these such as Reddit, YouTube and Kick, you can still access them and see much of the content but under-16s are restricted from creating accounts and account features such as commenting, private messaging etc. With many of the others, they would now not be able to access the platform at all. As for people over 16 with existing accounts who get caught up in the restriction: they will have to confirm their age. For Facebook, the instructions are:

Users aged 16 and older who mistakenly receive a notification or lose access to their accounts have the option to confirm their age through Meta’s third-party partner, Yoti, by providing a video selfie or government-issued ID. Yoti deletes this information once the age check is complete.

By “have the option to confirm their age”, it means they have to do this or will not have access to their account whether they are 17 of 50 year old. I am sure with Facebook at least, that it is not much of a problem. I haven’t used Facebook for almost a decade but given I was an early adopter and am now in my forties, they may as well be banning under 16s from MySpace. Others on the list like TikTok and Instagram will hurt a lot more.

Like many, I have no doubt that this ultimately is a trojan horse for forcing digital ID as Western governments continue to chip away at basic civil liberties. It certainly isn’t to protect children as I will quickly demonstrate with the platforms that have been exempted from the ban below. Though I certainly believe all of this, I don’t in principle have a problem with doing more to protect children online. 

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The Twelve Winners of the Game Awards 2014-2025

Posted on December 12, 2025 by JC

A few years ago I wrote a post about on the Best Sim/Strategy category of the Game Awards, where it was clear that little diligence had been put into the nomination process. A few years have passed and little has changed with a remaster of the original 1997 PlayStation title Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles taking out that category at the 2025 Awards; the very day I began writing this post.

In reality, nobody really cares about the categories outside of overall ‘Game of the Year’ and many winners continue to be announced in the pre-show with very little fanfare. This year it was the French “JRPG” Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that was the big winner; receiving the award in almost every category the game was nominated.

This included the two categories for Independent or “Indie” games which is questionable give the developers had a reasonably big publisher and a number of the developers formerly worked for Ubisoft. These two categories probably need to be more clearly defined as a smaller publisher than say Electronic Arts, Ubisoft or Activision — is still a publisher. In any case, I haven’t actually played this game so I can’t speak to its quality but it had a lot of buzz leading up to the show and the result is not a surprise.

UPDATE: (13/12/25) I’m far from the only one that was suspicious. This great article at Fandom Pulse is well worth your time.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was hilariously snubbed in every category though being nominated for three. As expected, the significant compromises they made to their original vision didn’t win them any “official” praise.

What was also noticed is that Sony Interactive Entertainment received nineteen nominations across the categories with Kepler Interactive (the publisher of Clair Obscur), receiving fourteen. There is a big drop between these two alone but it drops further and Nintendo received only four though it had a big year for new (and well-received) releases and did win in two of the categories it was nominated in. 

This year was the twelfth Game Awards and so there are now twelve games of the year since 2014. I thought it would be worth going over these and offering some analysis. Though not for the winners for the last few years, hindsight has been quite instructive. Continue reading →

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