The Skillster:
Indeed. FF7's world map looked nicer and ran faster on my P250MMX + Voodoo than FF8's map does on my Celeron with GF2. I wonder what they must have done to slow it down so badly.
The SaiNt:
1. Agreed. Although I could live perfectly happily with 1024x768 there's no real reason to stop there, games like NFS: Porsche Unleashed and Supreme Snowboarding can do resolutions like 2048x1536.
2. Yep. FF8 had perfectly good movies, but if they want to go bit further they could use MPEG-2 with very high bitrates, as DVD does. Note: FF8's videos do have pretty high bitrate already, IIRC.
3. Of course. 640x480 is good enough, especially if they want to save some space.
4. And it should also move smoothly.
5. With mp3's, preferably. I mean that FF8 has enough music to fill 4 CD's... Of course DVD would hold more. But I think that Winamp's CPU usage is somewhere around 2 or 3 percents in P2's, so good mp3 player shouldn't really slow the game down.
6. Actually, I'm happy with the way it is.
7. You can do that with any game, kind of. Just make images of your discs and use DAEMON Tools (or something similar) to load that image as virtual CD-ROM. Won't help with editing, naturally.
8. Naturally. (I'll take your word about using PSX's effects, as I know nothing about that)
9. I can live with the text as it is, I can read it from far, far away.
10. I wouldn't mind that at all. But for the PC market... Does anyone know sales figures for FF7 and FF8 PC versions ?