There are some rare moments that the phrase “OMFG” was designed for. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children has several of them. You may be aware that the film recently leaked onto the net. Usually I would try to hold myself back and wait for the big screen experience but in this case it seems questionable whether we will even get a European theatrical release. Having been waiting literally years for this gem (and possibly forcing you to sit through several trailers), my strength faltered and I snapped up the hi-res DVD rip as swiftly as humanly possible. Bad, I know, but I’ll be buying the DVD and seeing it the cinema if it does emerge and so help me I just couldn’t handle all these delays. The subtitles we produced by fans who have already translated it into several languages: it’s a real labour of love for something they’re clearly passionate about.
The film itself is like a homage to the fans, giving them a chance to see some of their favourite characters rendered in truly stunning detail. Due to Square-Enix’s long-running partnership with Sony, I’ve had very little opportunity to play the FF games, but as that alliance seems to have ended with the next gen consoles, perhaps things will change.
Although I knew very little about the preceding game, I was drawn in by 2000’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a film of unsurpassed realism in digital animation. What they achieved at a time before Monsters Inc. and the other Pixar big guns, is nothing short of phenomenal. While that was a standalone project, for Advent Children it does help to have a working knowledge of the FF7 universe, its storyline and characters, since this is basically a continuation, following Cloud two years after the game’s events.
On this outing they have opted for a less realistic look than the previous film, remaining truer to the anime style of the games. The story unfolds slowly in the first half and while always beautifully rendered, things often seem to drag between the few moments of blinding action. In fact, it’s the perfect build-up, because once all hell breaks loose in the city…OMFG!! Describing the visual acrobatics, the style, the immense, majestically sweeping fantasy of it all is impossible; this truly must be experienced and felt to be understood. Penny Arcade’s fanboy warning is damn right.
Please play fair: watch it now but make sure you buy/see it later.
When hunting for photos for our theme title page in The Globalist, Steph and Alvin pointed me to 
Toby was rather incensed that Tycho over at Penny Arcade 
Wow, it’s done! Finished. Over. There’s a distinctly strange feeling associated with naming a file, “CG Issue 1”. That’s right, I’ve just finished producing my first magazine. The next step is to send copies off to Yale for the Foundation bods to take a look over, along with proofreading by the rest of the team here. But I now have a full Acrobat file with the entire magazine. Well actually I have two: the high-definition version for the printers is too large to move around, weighing in at a little under 38MB, so most people will be seeing its sprightlier 2MB cousin.
Meanwhile, with the electoral roll data collection forms flying around once more, people are discussing the unfair system of expecting the head of the household to be responsible for submitting details of all adults living there. The alternative is, of course, to make it a criminal offence for anyone not to be on the register, rather than simply the nominal head of the household (it may be somewhat telling that no other country shares our system). The ancillary suggestion is then to make it compulsory to vote. Whilst Chima will naturally blanche at the very suggestion, I’m not entirely opposed to this. However, people must be aware that the only thing worse than people not voting is uninformed people voting. Currently a large portion of the apathetic voters do not bother to politically educate themselves either. I would hope that that once people realised their time was going to be “wasted” by being forced to vote anyway, they’d feel they may as well find out what’s going on. So if you’re worried about democracy being subverted by all those extra votes, I encourage you to display one our new “Careless Votes Cost Lives” posters. After all it was those people who voted Labour back in and just 
A brand new copy of the digpak UK release of 
The Globalist is taking shape properly now. I think we’ve passed the halfway mark in finalising article layouts. The photospread is done which is the part I was dreading in terms of painstaking positioning and text wrapping. Steph and I have been keeping each other going and make a pretty good team. A huge thanks to Lucille at 
Every gamer knows that summer is inevitably a