Categories
Internet

Final Fantasy 8 (FF8) Perfect Savegame for PC

I’ve spent ages looking for a ‘perfect’ savegame for the PC on FF8, but it’s harder to find than you’d think. The vast majority of results are for a console version of the game (that will remain nameless to help with searches to this page).

So DOWNLOAD the savegame here if that’s all you’re looking for. Plonk the file in your slot1/slot2 folder within the ‘save’ directory of your FF8 installation.

Some notes about what this save is:

  • It is not my savegame, I didn’t make it. I just found it and I’m reproducing it here with some useful information about it.
  • All stats for all characters are maxed out, as in Str, Spr, Mag, Luck, etc. are all at 255 or otherwise junctioned with the strongest possible magic available for that stat. The only stat that is missing are for those GFs which do not have a Hit-J ability – I don’t believe this can be learned so it only exists for the GFs that have it by default.
  • All characters have a GF junctioned which allows junctioning for all magic, all status and elemental attacks, plus elemental defense x 4 for all.
  • The save has max gil (99999999999).
  • The character has a ridiculous number of items. Looking at the items it looks like a heavily editted save file as every unique item possible appears in the list, including things like 99 Rosetta stones and other things which are impossible to retain during the course of the game. Also included are things that can only be obtained via Chocobo world and other things you could only ever get on that Japanese handheld version of the mini-game.
  • This save loads at DISC 3 on the ESTHAR PLAINS directly before entering Lunatic Pandora for the last time. In other words this is the last point in the game where you still have access to the whole world without restrictions. If you fly into Lunatic Pandora from here, you are then bound into the plot which continues into Disc 4 and the time-compressed world.
  • The characters themselves are only at Level 60 or so, although this is somewhat irrelevant as all stats are already maxed, so levelling up further gives no benefit.
  • This game is imperfect as the player does not have a full complement of cards. Many decent cards are included but many are missing. Several of the cards could no doubt be obtained from the CC Group which are on the Ragnarok by this point, but that would be something you’d need to do yourself.
  • Please feel free to redistribute (but not hotlink) this save – it isn’t mine, I have no rights to it, I’m just trying to be helpful.
  • If you can ‘improve’ on this game, either by adding the rare cards, topping up all the items to a quantity of 100, or otherwise put it in a state that is markedly better than it is now, please send me a copy and I’ll update the version contained here, and give you a credit.

DOWNLOAD the savegame here

Categories
Anger Thoughts

Hold the phone

I take back everything I said about Hewlett Packard having decent technical support.

After I reported on the error I’ve had on my replacement unit I rang HP support and spoke to a nice IT guy. We ran through all the troubleshooting problems and when they didn’t work, they agreed to replace my unit.  They took all the details and assured me my replacement would be delivered within 5 working days. Great!

Except, not great. After receiving and hearing nothing for more than two weeks, I rang HP back. I foolishly assumed that giving my name and address would be sufficient to identify me, but they wanted the customer number and insisted it was impossible to find me any other way. I didn’t have the number handy so I had to hang up and call back after I rooted around and found it.

So, I call back armed with my customer number, but it turns out this isn’t enough to identify me either. Or rather, they know its me, but they don’t have a record of the serial number of my printer (which I provided during my original tech call), and so cannot help me at all unless I provide that too. Unsurprisingly I don’t have that to hand either, so I hang up yet again and call back when I’ve read the number from the printer.

Except this time when calling back to their delightful and barely comprehensible indian call centre, I find out that actually, no, I can’t replace the printer because they have determined that its out of warranty. I can’t remember the exact date I received the replacement but I’m pretty sure its been about a year, so if I’m not in warranty, it’s only by a whisker.

But wait, hang on, the lady then tells me that my replacement unit only comes with a 3 month warranty from the date it’s replaced. What? The original printer was covered for a year, and the replacement is only covered for 3 months? Given that my original printer fucked up only 6 months after getting it, this means my total warranty has been a mere 9 months. How the hell does that work?

Since they’re not moving on the idea of replacing it, I ask what my options are now. I’m told that I can either get it repaired, or they’ll give me a discount voucher to buy a replacement. So, I ask, ‘How much to repair it?’. ‘ one three one pounds sir’. £131?! THE FUCKING PRINTER DOESN’T COST THAT MUCH TO BUY NEW.

With little other option, I then ask about the voucher. Turns out that’ll grant me a mere 20% off an HP printer I can buy elsewhere. 20% off a printer that might fuck up within 6 months, only to have a replacement under warranty fuck up less than a year later? Fuck that.

I feel another letter coming on.

Categories
Thoughts

“Who’s Watching You?”, no-one probably

The BBC are running a show at the moment called “Who’s Watching You?”, hosted by Richard Bilton, about privacy concerns in the UK. Because it makes good TV, the show does its utmost to convince you that not only are you being watched right now, but you’re also being watched the rest of the time too. Despite the fact that you, reader, are in no way interesting, significant, or unique, you’re actively told that someone out there has a vested interest in what you are doing.

The idea that the BBC presents things in an impartial manner is just laughable – this show is completely skewed towards portraying all of the negative aspects of technology, making out like ‘big brother’ (and christ, how I hate that term) is watching you at all times. You’re told that you’re being tracked, that every use of your phone, your credit card, your tv, your movements by CCTV are all being monitored, building up a picture of your life.

See this camera? This camera doesn't give a shit about you.
See this camera? This camera doesn't give a shit about you. Unless you're raping a pensioner in a public place, perhaps.

I feel a powerful need to hold up a giant UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT sign to help counteract this absurdly inaccurate portrayal. Yes, banks hold transaction data, phone companies store call data, your Sky box might anonymously transmit usage data, and CCTV might be in public streets and thoroughfares for a variety of, mostly security-related, reasons, but none of this means for a second that any of it will be nefariously used against you. Think about it – it’s not like someone is sitting at a computer and all they need do is type ‘Tell me everything about Bob Simmons’, and boom, they know all about your life. The fact the data exists somewhere doesn’t mean it can be easily analysed into a single, coherent profile. The fact that a myriad of different companies hold this information makes it near impossible to get it all together in one place, and even that would have to be after some kind of police warrant or demand that circumvents data protection legislation.

Assuming they went through this mammoth task just to get a look at all this information about you, what are they going to find? That you bought some salt & vinegar crisps at the station before getting on the bus to work? Horror! Privacy invaded! No, they’re not going to do that. Unless they have some extreme reason for suspecting you of something seriously criminal, nobody is going to bother working out what you get up to on a daily basis. You are not important, and the suggestion that someone has already collated your personal data, and is sitting on a complete breakdown of your life and habits is just a complete fallacy. It’s a well-used adage but true, “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”, mostly because it’s too much fucking hassle to investigate you unless there’s a seriously compelling reason.

The show also implies “Don’t search on Google, they’re watching you! They record all your searches and build up a profile of YOU!”.

Ugh. It’s just so stupid. Google might record the fact you’ve searched for ‘dogs’ and ‘pet chocolate’, and so you might get automatically generated ads for dog chocolate, but there isn’t someone sitting there, looking at your search terms and working out what you’d like. It’s a complicated and automated algorithm that applies itself anonymously to millions of people, purely for the purposes of showing relevant adverts. Since I never click on adverts, I don’t really care what they show me or how they’ve worked out that information, because I know it’s not really recording anything about ‘me’ at all. It’s all metadata, stored, analysed, with results returned all without human intervention or prejudice.

This guy actually purposefully has secret cameras installed in his flat to show how terrible it would be to be filmed without knowing it. What? Yes. He had cameras installed with his knowledge, and then expresses his ‘shock’ later when he was shown images from those cameras. The ones he knew were there. The point he was trying to make, I think, is something about how if someone did put cameras in your house, you’d feel your privacy had been invaded. Thanks for that Richard, if you weren’t here to tell me these things I’d never be able to realise them by myself. Remembering again that you’re a boring, average individual, how likely is it that someone is going to install secret cameras in your house? Please try to scare us about things that have a remote possibility of actually happening. Squirrels could conceivably be trained by the government to knife me if I fail to renew my car tax, but I’m not going to make any tv shows warning against it yet.

The big problem this show has is that it muddies the distinction between the ‘big brother (ugh) nanny state (double-ugh)’, where the government is apparently interested in what you bought at Sainsburys this week or how long you spend pairing your socks, and personal surveillance and identity theft. These are two distinctly different concepts but its just all mish-mashed in together without any proper definition. They’re too concerned with trying to scare your balls off about who is watching you, while failing to say ‘these are public data collection methods, those allowed by law, aren’t they scary?’, or later say ‘Hey now, these are private data collection methods, some are legal but you might not know about them, and others are the illegal purview of criminals’.

The poorly formed message obscures what are the actually useful parts of the show – the bit where it reminds people that they’re spack-faced morons who don’t protect their own data properly, and so leave themselves open to identity theft or having their bank accounts compromised. If the producers stopped shoe-horning in the ominous ‘sneaky’ background music, and the constant and annoying cuts to pictures of cameras overlaid with lens-zooming sound effects, they might have thought to give you, the viewer, a few basic tips on how to better secure your personal data. But that doesn’t fit in with the ‘scare you shitless’ message the show is about, and so is ‘conspicuously’ absent.

At best it’ll give those groups who are surveillance-phobic something to hoot about and stand behind, while once again failing to properly convey the reality of mass data-collection. Most businesses have a hard time querying their own, small databases without cocking it up, so the idea that the government could effectively query huge amounts of information about you is pretty unlikely.

The part about criminals and phishing is interesting, although for some reason they call phishers ‘blaggers’ and while they give a small example of someone ringing up on the phone trying to ‘blag’ private information, they omit the widespread phising on the internet. The only nod they give to the internet is that it too is WATCHING YOU in some vague but omni-present manner, oh, and if you download illegal stuff you might actually get collared by the copyright owners who log your IP address with their evil and unscrupulous surveillance techniques.

It’s just very poorly-done bit of ‘investigative’ tv, mostly because it’s all over the place, presenting inaccurate, scaremongering information in a disorganised haphazard manner that’ll just leave the average person feeling scared. Probably because the government now know they occasionally buy white bread instead of the healthier brown option, or that local CCTV shows you going into JJB Sports and coming out wearing a white shellsuit and chavcap. Admittedly, these are things to be ashamed of, but since nobody is actually paying attention I really wouldn’t worry about it.

Categories
Internet

Cartridge Error: Cartridge on Right must be replaced

If you’re getting this error on an HP Officejet 6310 or another of Hewlett Packard’s ‘All-in-one’ series of printers, then I have some bad news for you.

Your printer is broken, perhaps irrecoverably. HP cartridges have expiry dates on them (check yours) after which the printer will not accept the cartridge for use. The error appears to relate to this ‘feature’, except it is erroneous because the carts are still very much in date. It looks like a hardware error that makes it think that all carts are invalid. I first experienced this error about 6 months after buying the printer, and dilligently followed the instructions and replaced the right-hand cartridge (the black one). Imagine my annoyance when the error remained, because HP cartridges aren’t cheap.

Officejet 6310 All-in-one
Officejet 6310 All-in-one

I rang HP technical support, and after trying a few obvious troubleshooting measures, they agreed to replace the unit under warranty. A new unit arrived, I gave the old one back, put my old cartridge into it and everything was fine.

Then, a year later, the same error pops up on my replacement unit. Again I ring HP tech support, again we can’t fix it, and again they agree to send out a replacement.

Obviously there is something fundamentally wrong with the HP All-in-one series, as I’ve seen this error reported for a variety of models. In fairness to HP, their tech support responds quickly and are generally happy to replace the unit without too many questions about when you bought it. If you tell them it’s still under warranty, you’ll be ok. I personally assert that since this isn’t a wear and tear failure, but some design flaw that eventually appears regardless of how much you use it, then they’re honour-bound to replace it regardless of whether it’s in the warranty period.

If you’d like to save some time before ringing HP, try their troubleshooting tip: Hold down the 6 and # (also the ‘space’ key) keys on the printer’s keypad, and turn the printer off. Keep those keys held down, and turn the printer back on. This restores everything to factory defaults and you’ll be asked to reselect your language options. Let go of the 6 and # keys and do that. In some cases this has cleared the error, but has never worked for me. A couple of people have also reported that replacing the cartridge does clear the error, but that didn’t work for me, and I’m opposed to the idea that you’d have to junk a half-full and otherwise perfectly good (expensive) cart just to satisfy a quirk of a buggy printer.

I’ve had a look around the web for more information on this error, and there isn’t much to go on. There is a suggestion that the internal memory of the printer (and thus the memory which holds information about invalid cartridges) can be reset by removing a battery on the internal chip-board. If my theory about what causes this error is correct, resetting the memory might fix it. I’ve seen this as a successful ‘fix’ for other models of HP printer, but can’t comment on how effective (or legal) it might be. If you have any experience or feedback on this error or fixes, please leave a comment.

Categories
Review Thoughts

The ‘new’ Star Trek

I  seem to be strangely alone in my intense dislike for the new Star Trek film. The critics have bafflingly given it an enthusiastic bumming, but I really can’t see why.

The most important thing to realise is that this is not supposed to be Star Trek canon. While it is set in the time between ‘Enterprise’ and ‘The Original Series’, it features time travel and irrevocable changes to critical elements of the established trek universe, and so everything that happens must be considered an alternative reality, where all the events contained therein have no bearing on the integrity and continuety of the star trek we’ve always known. This is just as well – to attempt to rewrite nearly 50 years of established canon, where everything that’s ever been written suddenly becomes non-applicable, would never be accepted by the fans.

That being the case, this isn’t really Star Trek then, is it? It’s a reimagining (or ‘reboot’ as the tedious nerds call it) of Star Trek from square one, that merely diverges into an alternate reality where everything happens differently. It has the advantage of being able to create a new and diverse plot without having to establish the underlying principles of the universe in which it is set, but conversely isn’t something in which you can really invest yourself. Plenty of episodes of TNG dealt with alternate realities (‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ was particularly good), as well as the ‘alternative universe’ referenced in TOS and DS9.

Kelvin, both a USS starship and an angsty teen.
Kelvin, both a USS starship and an angsty teen.

Those were good episodes that added a little spice now and then, but they were nothing more than an occasional curiousity that didn’t really affect the overall core of the series.

So why do we care about an alternate reality where Kirk starts life as a bit of a reckless arsehole? Where is this going? Are we going to have a series of new films that go down this alternate path? When the producers tire of reinvented ‘original series’ cast, are we going to have some kind of absurd alternate TNG later on?

We’ll ignore that for the moment and have a look at a few basic elements of the film itself. While a modernisation of the original design was a given, the Enterprise looks like it was made by Apple Mac. It’s not technologically gritty (which, for all its failings, ‘Enterprise’ was), everything is a little too crystallic and clean, and in me doesn’t engender a lot of familiary with the original. I could get used to it, I suppose, but as a long time and moderately faithful fan, I wasn’t immediately drawn in by it.

Let’s have a look at the characters. Kirk has gone from being a serious consideration to a rebellious dick with a superiority complex. The transition just doesn’t fit – Kirk is a temeritous cadet and a late starter, but for some reason gets promoted to acting first officer by a captain that just happened to like his dad. That wouldn’t happen, for fucks sake. Picard was breaking the mould when he made Weasily crusher an acting ensign in TNG, so the idea of making a cadet an acting, ranking officer is just not credible.

The United Federation of Planets has a fairly well established hierarchy of command that rewards performance and experience over the course of many years, so suddenly bumping someone up to a high rank is just absurd. Moreso the fact that this cadet somehow manages to wangle becoming the acting captain by pissing Spock off momentarily, and the biggest objection we get is from Uhura; “I hope you know what you’re doing”.

It just doesn’t work, and in that vein Bones the cadet is suddenly Chief Medical Officer after the other one gets killed. Do these people have no hierarchical redundancy? Isn’t there a Second Officer, a Deputy Medical Chief, someone slightly more senior than mere third year cadets?

The new Enterprise uses fast-moving swarms of fireflies to transport matter across space.
The new Enterprise uses fast-moving swarms of fireflies to transport matter across space.

As I watched the film, hoping and trying to like it, a growing sense of bullshit came over me. Nothing I was seeing was believable, even if you take into account the alternate reality wonkiness of it all. I mean, Spock is banging Uhura.

I say again, Spock is banging Uhura. Where on earth (or Vulcan, for that matter) did this come from? It’s like JJ Abrams was sitting around with dolls of all the major characters, idly musing about how he could shake things up for the purposes of the movie, and casually picks up the Spock and Uhura doll and pushes them together, making kissy-kissy noises. I can’t fathom any other basis for these two characters suddenly being in a relationship.

I understand the crop of available characters was small, with very few female roles to choose from, but to create this utterly unlikely partnership just heaps another shoval of shit on my perception of this film. It’s doing something for the sake of it, and it certainly doesn’t add any value. Spock banging Uhura, by god.

I appreciated the attempts at interlinking previously established trek history with the emergent parts of the film. Sulu fencing made me chuckle, and Christopher Pike being the original captain, with his experience on the Romulan ship being the cause of the paraplegia seen in his appearance in TOS. Still, it doesn’t feel natural. It smacks of a writer trying to link together things that were never intended to be linked. Explicitly shoe-horning in explanations of classic trek lore, because you happen to have the opportunity in a prequel film, detracts from their worth.

Take the Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk ‘cheats’ on. This is a well-referenced piece from what remains the best film of all time, The Wrath of Khan. Kirk cheating to win the unwinnable test was believable with Shatner, but seeing the new upstart eating an apple and chatting casually really ruins my original impression of what it was ‘really’ like.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

We must remember this is an alternate reality, and so I have to hope that the original Kirk whose father didn’t die was much less of an insufferable twat, and my precious ideals will be preserved.

Let me just skim over a summary of the plot before I finish up this piece, which is dragging on already.

In the future, at a point a few years after our last ‘known’ experience of the Trek univerise, Spock attempts to save Romulus from the supernova of a nearby star. To do this he uses a never-before-seen element called ‘Red Matter’, the physics behind which are not explained, except that it creates a singularity in order to absorb the energy.

Spock cocks up and the Sun goes Nova early, and destroys Romulus. For some reason a singularity is created anyway, and is now a convenient time-travel device that ships can travel through without being destroyed by the gravitational forces. Spock goes through along with a pissed off Romulan miner, whose ship is, for some reason, enormous beyond the scale of anything previously seen in your average alpha-quandrant species, along with powerful fragmentary weapons that beat the shit out of anything it feels like.

For some reason, this miner is entirely clued up on both Red Matter and how to use it, and despite the fact his passage through the singularity was accidental, is unpeturbed by the knowledge that he has gone back in time, and contentedly waits around somewhere in space for 25 years, awaiting the eventual appearance of Spock. Why he’d have any reason to think Spock would appear at all isn’t explained, but suffice to say that 25 years later he’s still just as motivated by anger and angst as he was before, and plans revenge.

To this end, when Spock appears, he captures him, and instead of killing or imprisoning him, merely chucks him on an ice planet so he can see the destruction of Vulcan (via another singularity, c/o the captured Red Matter) from a great distance.

Christ, this explanation is taking too long. Blahblahblah, Kirk and young Spock make another singularity and the miner ship goes in it and presumably explodes, THE END. Kirk, despite only being a cadet, is promoted to full captain of the Enterprise and Spock is perfectly content to sit under him as first officer.

The whole thing is just ridiculous, a million miles away from the realms of possibility. The writers have made up a load of non-sensical shit and thrown it together into a claptrap of plot macguffins and needless exposition in order to create a film that is essentially a lot of standard bang-bang explosion action. Phasers now apparently shoot in pulses instead of beams, by the way. Funny that.

Roddenberry, hopefully spinning fast enough in his grave to create a singularity that'll suck this bag of shite out of existance
Roddenberry, hopefully spinning fast enough in his grave to create a singularity that'll suck this bag of shite out of existance

One of the things that has always run through Star Trek like lifeblood is its awesome and instantly recognisable music (‘Enterprise’ as the major exception). James Horner and particularly the Star Trek II soundtrack is a feat of sheer brilliance. In that film when the Enterprise clears moorings (and has a theme track of the same name), my hair stands on end and I’m completely entranced in the majesty of the scene. It’s just fucking awesome.

However, in the new film (and who thought to call it ‘Star Trek’ anyway? It’s stupidly indistinct), the music just ran right off me. It was immemorable and insignificant, and fuck me if I didn’t think I’d wandered into a repeat of Spiderman, so similar that it sounded. Throughout the entire film there was not one faithful melody to the original music, save for the end credits where they play a re-styled TOS theme, except by that point I’m already on my way out of the cinema cursing the film as a fucking joke.

The Romulans aren’t well represented here, because to look at them they don’t look like any kind of Romulan that’s ever been seen in Star Trek before. Why they all needed to look like bald-headed, tattoed white guys was lost on me. Throughout the film I had trouble identifying captain Nero (famous on Romulus for his CD-burning skills) from any of his other cloned crew members. As a character he’s badly explained, and to use the word again, not believable. The whole combination of the random plot elements is just stupid.

So there we go, my ‘review’, which its really not, sounds like a bit of a rant, but so confused as I am as to why this film has received almost universal critical acclaim has compelled me to set the record straight, at least in one tiny corner of the web. I can’t see anything in the film that I’d want to see again in an alternate-reality sequel, and if you’re the kind of drone who is impressed by fluffy nonsense like the new transporter effects, or the standard staple of ‘special effects’, then you’re welcome to it, but I hope to christ I’m not the only fan who regards this as another trek installment that has flown far wide of the mark.

To my mind there are only two trek films worth watching. Wrath of Khan, obviously, and First Contact, although if the two were in a footrace, the latter would be far behind.