The PC Gamer US team assembled in New York this week for a long meeting and, allegedly, beers (the UK team, meanwhile, drank slightly cheap wine a day later in response). During this event, it was revealed that three members of the team have gaming-related tattoos, which has led to this edition of the PCG Q&A. The question is: if you had to get a gaming-related tattoo, what would it be?

You'll find our answers below, but as ever, we're more interested in reading yours in the comments at the bottom of the page. Let us know which character, symbol or whatever else you'd choose to have live on your skin forever. 

James Davenport: Has a Portal 2 tattoo

Surprise. I have a gaming-related tattoo. At 20, a good friend of mine got dumped and said, 'Let's get tattoos.' I said OK, and off the tail of Portal 2's release figured I'd capture what a funny well-written game meant to me, an aspiring writer. I was also drunk because it was summer in Missoula and that's what you do: drink, float the river, and make bad choices. I picked the Aperture logo without text for the design, something simple that doesn't scream videogames. My pal got something on her foot that wore off in a few weeks. Mine's still there, still mistaken for an affinity for photography, but it's fine overall. Glad I wasn't into comics at the time, I'll say. Now, when a photography bro shouts 'Canon or Nikon?' from across the river, I'll just shout the first that come to mind back. Play along and forget it's there, out of sight on my shoulder until my partner reminds me I should get it touched up. 

As for more hypothetical gaming tattoos, I think it'd be easy to pull something from Dark Souls and play it off as some medieval-era woodcut design you see on hipster black metal heads like myself from coast to coast. Something occult made of thin black lines. This shit, but Dark Souls. I'll fit right in at the Deafheaven show.   

Joe Donnelly: Dark Souls

I have three gaming-related tats: a 1-Up mushroom from Mario, health hearts from Zelda, and a design loosely drawn from Fallout: New Vegas. 

The first two are admittedly pretty shit, but I like the third. The design originally included a T-Rex and a skull and crossbones. For me, the dino represents the statue from NV’s Novac, and the mask depicts the nuclear apocalypse. My tattoo artist added the colourful mushroom clouds for effect, which I think are pretty cool. 

In future, I’d like something gothic tied to Dark Souls.

Jody Macgregor: Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher series of roleplaying games, but in a bathtub

Tub Geralt, obv.

Actually, no, I wouldn't want a tattoo of Geralt. I feel a bit weird about the idea of getting a consumer product I have enjoyed permanently attached to my skin—I'm conflicted about owning Fallout socks, for god's sake—but I do like when people get tattoos of things they've been involved in making. Like how most of the actors from The Avengers have matching tattoos, or the cast of The Lord of the Rings with their Elvish numbers. That shit is heartwarming. So I'd either have to join a game design studio, make a videogame, and then get a tat of that, or convince everyone at PC Gamer to get matching ink of something we've all had a hand in making. You know, something iconic. Oh shit, it's Tub Geralt, isn't it?

Chris Livingston: Already has one (kind of)

I have a tattoo on my shoulder of Max from Sam & Max—though it's based on an image from the hardcover comic collection and not the Sam & Max games. I do love the original Sam & Max Hit the Road game, though I never really got into the 3D sequels much. And, generally, I regret the tattoo and would probably never get another one. If I had to, and it had to be game tattoo, I guess I could do Sam on my other shoulder, so I'd have the complete Freelance Police. And then I could regret both of them. 

Phil Savage: My Hitman review scores

I don't have a tattoo—the closest I've got is watching my brother tattoo his own knee for about half an hour of what appeared to be constant excruciating pain. Still, if I did ever decide to put myself through that, I'd want my tattoo to be something personal. Something that spoke to some form of great trial overcome. Mine, I think, would be a list of numbers—seven percentage scores from the time I thought it'd be a good idea to review every Hitman episode (plus the full game), thus condemning myself to writing about the same thing over and over again for basically a year. If I'm going to permanently brand my body, it might as well be with a reminder against ever doing that again. 

Andy Chalk: A Keeper glyph from Thief

I had thoughts of getting an Eridani Light Horse tattoo back in the days when I was heavily into Mechwarrior 2 and the Netmech Registry. It's as close as I've come to ever getting a tat—but then the Registry fizzled, Activision lost the Mechwarrior license, there was the whole Unseen thing that I was mad about for 20 years, and that pretty much kiboshed the whole idea.

It's not something I've considered in years, but if Samuel came over and put a gun to my head I'd probably go with a Keeper glyph from Thief. Simple, discreet, I could maybe string a few of them together, and nobody has any idea what they mean, so I could act all nonchalant when people ask about them, in that very specific way that says there's actually something very cool and mysterious going on here but I can't tell you about it because you're just not on my level. 

Yeah, I'm sure that'd work out just like I imagine it. 

Samuel Roberts: Dragon Age 2 and its 94% score

I'm from a family where there's a real generational conflict on tattoos: my mum thinks they're totally unacceptable, and would probably remove me from her will if I came home with one, which is strange considering how liberal she is about almost everything else. That said, I'm not sure I could ever get a pop culture tattoo because my tastes change so frequently. If I'd gotten one of the Devil May Cry logo when I was 18, for example, I would be so embarrassed about it now, in a similar fashion to Chris's response above (though his choice was much cooler in my opinion).

I kind of want something from Deus Ex, but I don't want to accidentally get an Illuminati tattoo or something, because I just know a photo of it would get upvoted a billion times on Reddit and I'd be laughed at until the end of time. 

In that case, I'll stay on-brand, and get the words 'Dragon Age 2: 94%' drawn on my skin for the rest of my days.

Andy Kelly: Max Payne's face

I could pick something meaningful. A game that meant a lot to me, or was a formative experience. Or something from a game I associate with a fond memory. But what I really want is a full back piece of Max Payne's gurning face. You know, the Sam Lake version from the original game. That iconic grimace, etched forever into my skin, covering my entire back. Think of how cool I'd look in a swimming pool or a sauna.

Wes Fenlon: Bubsy

Editor's note: Wes just sent the word 'Bubsy' in an email with no other context and that was how PC Gamer's week ended. Please tell us your responses. 

For some reason we have a lot of opinions about every Final Fantasy game at PC Gamer and this sometimes causes argume—er, energetic discussions that we now feel the need to share. It happened with Bioware companions. It happened in weirder form to Sonic, now it's happening to Final Fantasy. Which companions annoyed us? Which companions made us want to wear a cool red cloak and pose on rooftops like Batman? Read on to find out.

Samuel Roberts

Likes...Ignis (Final Fantasy XV)

This was a hard one. I originally picked Auron from Final Fantasy X, because he's a dead guy who clings onto life just so he can save Spira. That's pretty damn cool. On reflection, though, Ignis makes food like the above, and I'll be friends with anyone who can cook me a wonderful dinner. Plus, the ludicrous British accent doesn't hurt things either. I think the more detailed interactions of the FFXV characters means they're easier to like than some of those from the older games.

Hates... Seifer Almasy (Final Fantasy VIII)

There are some really obvious choices for this one: Hope from Final Fantasy XIII, the whiny teenager who, to be fair, loses his mother early in the story, but is super irritating in all ensuing cutscenes. There's also Cait Sith, the one party member I completely ignored in FFVII, and FFVIII's Irvine Kinneas, who makes the terrible error of dressing up as a cowboy. Unfortunately, his limit break is far too cool to put him on this list, and his freakout as he's meant to headshot the Sorceress is one of that game's best character moments, so he doesn't make the cut. 

I instead picked Seifer for several reasons. He's technically a member of your party for the Dollet mission at the start of Final Fantasy VIII, and even has his own limit break, so he meets the criteria for this list. After that, he becomes the game's primary antagonist and his dickishness spirals out of control. 

His dream of being the Sorceress's knight—a dream based, seemingly, on a bad movie that you as Laguna Loire in flashback get to help create—means he almost destroys time and space by awakening Sorceress Adel. And instead of being punished for that, he cuts Odin in half (which I'm still mad about), then gets a happy ending where he's stood on the docks at Balamb looking pretty pleased with himself. A bad man.

Tom Senior

Likes... Red XIII (Final Fantasy VII)

He is a good boy who is my friend. Red is a wise and level-headed doggo when you break him out of the Shinra lab, but he really comes into his own when you visit his home at Cosmo Canyon. The reveal of his father’s fate, which causes him to howl at the moon—because he is a dog and not a cat—is one of the game’s most poignant moments. Also, when he howls in battle during limit breaks he bombards enemies with stars and space lasers. 

As much as I like him, he’s not great in combat and I do tend to drop him for other party members. I’m always happy to see him pop up in cutscenes though, because he is one of the few truly heroic characters in Final Fantasy VII’s team of broken misfits.

Hates... Hope (Final Fantasy XIII)

Children in games are almost always annoying because they don’t behave like kids at all. Hope is the perfect example. He is earnest and pure of heart and has an infuriating voice. 

He’s a good counterpoint to Lightning’s battle-hardened attitude, at least. I particularly like the bit of the game where she tries to inject some nihilism into his worldview. I hoped she would crush his spirit and knock the shrill weepiness out of him, but in the end he ends up making Lightning a more caring person instead—oh no! 

Now I think about it Snow, also from Final Fantasy XIII, might be worse, but he’s so boring I can’t think of anything to say about him, the useless trenchcoated lump. God, why did I spend so many hours of my life playing this game?

Andy Kelly

Likes... Vincent Valentine (Final Fantasy VII)

Sullen, brooding, and draped in red, Vincent is one of the two optional party members in Final Fantasy VII. Thanks to the genetic meddling of the villainous Professor Hojo, he can transform into powerful monsters including DEATH GIGAS, a weird Frankenstein thing that has a move called GIGADUNK, and HELLMASKER, a chainsaw-wielding dude straight out of an '80s slasher movie with an attack called SPLATTERCOMBO.

Aside from all that wonderful silliness, there's a tragedy to Vincent too. After a series of events involving a woman called Lucrecia that are far too long-winded to go into here, he locks himself in the basement of the Shinra mansion in Nibelheim, spending his days sleeping in a coffin and lamenting his sorry existence. That is until Cloud and the gang free him and he joins them on their quest to save the world.

Vincent is one of the most melodramatic characters in VII, and that's saying a lot in a Final Fantasy game. "Hearing your stories has added upon me yet another sin," he moans after Cloud fills him in on their mission. "More nightmares will come to haunt me now!" Alright, mate. Calm down. But that's why I love Vincent. He's theatrical and bloody miserable, but he can also turn into a daft cartoon monster and chainsaw people to death.

Hates... Selphie Tilmitt (Final Fantasy VIII)

I feel a little bad for this, because Selphie is essentially blameless and quite lovely, really. But that's actually why I never bothered including her in my party when I played VIII. She's just too bouncy and eager to please, and almost sickeningly friendly and good-natured. I like my Final Fantasy characters to be sullen and moody, with a bit of an edge, and I never found Selphie's constant squawking and chirping all that endearing.

To be fair, she is responsible for some of the game’s funnier moments, particularly when she's trying to force Squall to crawl out of his impenetrable emo shell. But her cries of "Let's PAAH-TAY!" and chanting "SeeD! SeeeeeD! SeeeeeeD!" when she passes her field exam are just annoying. Although I will admit that it's pretty funny when she annoys cowboy sniper Irvine Kinneas by repeatedly calling him 'Irvy Kinnepoo'.

Selphie is the upbeat, light-hearted Final Fantasy character who gets hit extra hard when something tragic inevitably happens, and I'm generally fine with that archetype. But she has no chance when there are characters like Zell and Quistis to team up with instead, and given the chance, I'll always bench her for someone better. But maybe I'm just being a misery guts and she’s actually the heart and soul of the game. Nah.

Joe Donnelly

Likes... Tifa Lockhart (Final Fantasy VII)

Tifa Lockhart is a badass. Not only is she an expert in martial arts, her slot machine-style, multi-hit Limit Break attack is super powerful. Even if mistimed this move can deal copious amounts of damage. But, if timed right, wow, it's a joy to watch unfold. 

Moreover, Tifa's role in pretty much every story branch she features in is interesting. Her tour guide persona in the Nibelheim flashback frames her relationship with Cloud, Sephiroth and Zack. Her place in Avalanche as fighter-cum-gang hideout proprietor depicts her life before the events of FF7. The way she assumes control of the group in Cloud's Mako-induced absence highlights her leadership skills. Escaping a gas chamber before kicking Shinra exec Scarlet’s arse shows her resilience. Even her optional quests are good fun––not least fetching her Premium Heart Ultimate Weapon from the Sector 5 slums, which lets you both revisit an otherwise forgotten area and crack one of the game’s earliest puzzles.   

Unlike, say, I dunno, Final Fantasy 10's Wakka, Tifa is crucial to so many parts of her game’s story. And she also carries a real weapon.

Hates... Wakka (Final Fantasy X)

There have been some right duff weapons in Final Fantasy over the years, not least Cait Sith's megaphones, Lulu's dolls and Edward's harps. But who brings a ball to a fight? Don't bother unsheathing that Celestial Caladbolg, mate, Wakka's brought his Mitre Tactic with him. I don't think so. Worse still, Wakka's weapon of choice is a Blitzball—the most tedious fictional sport in the history of videogames, by the way—which are light enough to be kicked and thrown around, yet this guy somehow reckons them more powerful than his counterparts' repertoire of swords, staffs and lances. Even with spikes tacked on, I'm not buying it.To make matters worse, Wakka's rubbish at Blitzball till Tidus turns up. And he appears to dislike the the Al Bhed simply because they follow a different religion. And he's a pain in the arse. Wakka is the worst.

Phil Savage

Likes...Yuna (Final Fantasy X/X-2)

This is cheating, right? I'm pretty sure it's cheating. Yuna's character arc is the heart of Final Fantasy X's story. Without her, it's just a game about an obnoxious sports lad and his father who's now a space whale. I mean, that's a perfectly fine basis for a JRPG plot, but Square went the extra mile and made a character who grew and found hope and learned to enjoy life and all of that good stuff. And yet despite that, Yuna's only my favourite because she's also the protagonist of Final Fantasy X-2. (And yes, if you're reading this, chances are you think X-2 is a bad game. You're wrong, but let's not have that argument right now.) X-2 works because it gives Yuna a sense of normalcy. She saved the world in FFX, and was then free to do pretty much whatever she wanted. She chose to hang out in an airship with her cousin and an emo warrior. That's pretty baller, and a well deserved life after the emotional ruin of the first (tenth) game.

Hates...Cait Sith (Final Fantasy VII)

Samuel has this thing where he's almost constantly furious about Winston from Overwatch because of how quirky and naff his character design is. Cait Sith is my version of that. He's a cat, right? But he's on a fat Moogle, yeah? And, get this, both of them are robots remotely controlled by some dude in an office. It's a seemingly random assortment of design traits that amount to a giant trash mess. In-game, the polygonal character model is just a bouncing off-white pile of garbage nothing. On the Final Fantasy wiki, his occupation is listed as “Toysaurus”, which is awful. I was actually glad when he betrayed Cloud and co., because it meant I had a genuine excuse to want him to burn in a big fire. I hate his whole situation, completely and forever.

Final Fantasy's hardest bosses are usually hiding somewhere, waiting to wipe out your party immediately. For Final Fantasy 15's PC release, the developers added a big spider robot called Omega, which is buried in a part of the Insomnia city map near the close of the game. It's described as a weapon forged to fell the gods—and when I ran past it on my way to another objective, it wiped out a party member's health in one hit.

I haven't beaten Omega, and I'm not sure I ever will. Final Fantasy 15's combat doesn't demand enough strategy to make for interesting boss fights, only long ones—exemplified by the slog that is the battle with mountain-turned-angry-turtle, Adamantoise—but in some ways the effect of knowing it's there is the best thing about Omega. That part of the city is no longer safe. It's ready to kill me.  

This has always been the case with the 'Weapons' and superbosses from Final Fantasy games of the past: they're usually giant horror creatures, representing the game's ultimate challenge. It's not the idea of a long boss fight that's exciting to me—it's how they're presented. 

Final Fantasy 10 was the first entry I played, back in 2002—I've since played them all. I'd gotten pretty good at the game's complex progression system and learned how to take down every boss quickly. It's not a hard game, as long as you don't skip random battles and keep your characters developing—but then I returned to Besaid Island, one of the game's opening areas, and met my first Final Fantasy superboss. You can see the scene play out above: the sky changes colour, a bald man screams 'infidel!' and a dark version of one of your summoned allies arrives to demolish your party. It's actually a bit spooky. Or at least, it seemed that way when I was 14. 

That almost horror movie-like reveal technique is used in a few other Final Fantasy games, too. One of the most memorable for me is Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy 8. You fly to an area known as the 'Deep Sea Facility', mysteriously placed in the middle of the ocean as a secret dungeon for the player to find. Once you reach the bottom of the facility, things get more bizarre: an alarm goes off, the rocks resonate and this thing suddenly attacks. The build up to the boss and the eerie sense of place is what makes it a great boss fight—not the fight itself, which is pretty easy if you've got Squall levelled up appropriately. Check out Bizkit047's video below to see what I mean (note: Squall has been renamed 'Kevin'). 

Go, Kevin, go! This is why I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy's superbosses. They're endgame content, not tied into the main story, so they offer value to keep playing after you've seen the credits—but the developers clearly think hard about the way such enemies are introduced, and what kind of atmosphere their presence creates. Omega is just the latest in a long line, and I love the way it's explained as a god killer, created by man. I can't be bothered to fight the thing, sure, but it's a cool explanation for why it exists. 

Final Fantasy 7 has arguably the spookiest superboss of all: Emerald Weapon. Even though the game's dated visuals mean the creature doesn't have the same impact that it used to, this thing swims around the world's dark oceans, and can only be encountered in the submarine you obtain deep into the game. Sometimes it'll just hover right in front of you, and its location will be revealed by little bursts of air coming out of its sides, emerging from the dark. Like most Final Fantasy superbosses, it'll pretty much kill you in moments unless you've mastered the game's combat and progression systems.  

Final Fantasy has many obvious traditions: chocobos, cactuars and a guy called Cid all spring to mind. But this is probably my favourite. I love the idea that mastery is hard fought in Final Fantasy, and that there's always the chance there's something else out there in the world, waiting to murder your party. 

Welcome back to the PC Gamer Q&A! Every week we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about games. This week: which game character do you hate? Okay, 'hate' is a strong word, but we all get annoyed by characters in games, for a variety of reasons—bad dialogue, voice acting, or whatever else. Here we've simply spotlighted the characters (and one car) that we can't stand. We'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments, too.

Wes Fenlon: Basically every character in Final Fantasy 8

I feel slightly guilty for writing this, because I know our editor Sam Roberts likes this game (even I won't defend a man with a ponytail wearing a cowboy hat, though, Wes—Sam), but I can't stand pretty much anyone who opens their mouth in Final Fantasy 8. It's been so long since I played it, I'm struggling to articulate the depth of my loathing. But it definitely started with Squall, the poster boy for aloof, emo JRPG protagonists. Aka bad protagonists. At least Cloud had the decency to have a total mental breakdown, turn out to be a total fraud, and find time to say totally out of character dialogue like "Let's mosey." (Thanks, bad translation).

But Squall? He was a boring stick in the mud from the first cutscene, and maybe he had some character growth by the end of the game but I was too busy rolling my eyes and going "UGH" to notice. Then the whole amnesia thing—the worst plot twist of all time outside a Shyamalan movie—made me write off most of the rest of the gang. I do still have a soft spot for Laguna, who was basically Squall's missing personality, and I always kinda liked Zell, who I believe is the character most Final Fantasy 8 fans actually hate, themselves. Looking back, my reason for liking him seems pretty clear—he annoyed the shit out of everybody else, and that made him the true hero.

Philippa Warr: Warren from Life is Strange

The thing about Warren was that his character seemed tangled up in something the developers were leaning towards. I remember a feeling that no matter how many times I, as Max, tried to just be Warren's friend and keep my boundaries set to "we are just friends and that is all we will ever be" the game would then show cutscenes with him sitting close and hugging Max and so on. The sense of a character you get with a game like Life is Strange is built out of how those cutscenes and the actual interactive sections play out and so, for the way I was playing Max, that led to this idea of Warren as a guy who doesn't really understand boundaries and isn't taking hints. 

I think there are elements of that in the game deliberately—Warren clearly likes Max as more than a friend and there are resultant awkward encounters and cringeworthy texts and so on—but I'm not sure whether Dontnod actually wanted people to see him as a creep. I see him as a creep. I hated being around him in the game and the more the game didn't give me the freedom to be really clear about where he stood the more claustrophobic and upsetting I found him. Maybe that's the point? It's certainly a horribly faithful part of the teen experience. Anyway. Warren is the WORST.

Jody Macgregor: Ego from The 7th Guest

Henry Stauf is the villain of The 7th Guest. He's the guy who murders someone for 20 bucks, makes toys that kill children, fills his mansion with malicious puzzles. But I don't hate Henry Stauf. I hate the protagonist of The 7th Guest, the disembodied amnesiac spirit trapped in his mansion named Ego, because he will not shut up.

Sometimes while you're solving Stauf's puzzles the old man taunts you with his spooky-dooky voice, all "I wonder if he will get the point of this!" as you solve another dumb puzzle. But it's Ego's narration, which is supposed to be helpful, that's far more galling. "Which way should I go now?" he says, as you move another queen across a chessboard. "That tune seems familiar!" he says as you try to recollect an 18-note sequence on the piano. "Is there a pattern to this?" And every time he talks, the cursor vanishes and you have to wait for him to finish. I've never finished The 7th Guest, always leaving Ego trapped in Stauf's mansion forever, and I'm glad. I hope he rots.

Andy Kelly: Tali from Mass Effect

Look, I know Tali has a devoted fanbase. When she died in his playthrough, former PC Gamer writer Rich McCormick replayed 15 hours to save her. But man, whenever she's on the screen my eyes glaze over. The quarians are an interesting race with a cool backstory, but I wish they had a better representative in my party. I find Tali's overly earnest manner exceptionally dull. And her awkwardness, while probably written to be cute and endearing, just annoys me. In a game stuffed with interesting characters, she's by far the most boring, and I spend as little time with her as possible when I play through the Mass Effect trilogy.

Joe Donnelly: J'Zargo from Skyrim

J'Zargo was the first Khajiit NPC I met in Skyrim. He came with cool fire scrolls and reminded me a little of Tygra from the Thundercats. I was totally into it. Stat-wise he was a beast, and was one of the game's few NPCs without a level cap. Destruction and Restoration spells were his forte which made him best suited to close-quarters combat support. Moreover, after hitting level 50 he maxed out his One-handed and Heavy Armour skills—both of which made him an absolute tank. 

But, my god, he was such a pain in the arse. As if constantly referring to himself in the third person wasn't infuriating enough, he was full of irritating self-aggrandising quips—to the point where I preferred fighting flocks of Legendary Dragons on my own, if it meant getting shot of him.

"Oh, but you are wrong. The only reason you could disagree is because you are losing so badly you cannot see it." This was the straw the broke the camel's back. I led J'Zargo deep into a cave full of Draugr and stood back. He died in battle. I resurrected him as a faceless zombie cat. He sauntered off a cliff. I didn't mourn him. Good riddance, J'Zargo.

Samuel Roberts: The DeLorean from Rocket League

I almost picked Winston from Overwatch for this. Not because I have any particular problem with the character's personality or anything, but more the 'wacky' thinking behind the design, that's about as generically 'hero shooter' as it gets. Every game in this genre has at least one novelty character like this—Paladins has a walking tree and Battleborn has (had) a large, armed mushroom, for example. What if a gorilla did science? Woah! What will they think of next? 

I like most of the other character designs in Overwatch, but man, it's not too hard to come up with an idea for an animal or plant-related one, or indeed anything that can talk that doesn't in real life. What if a talking mongoose was a political strategist and a support hero? What if a Dutch fox was a taxidermist and was deeply ironic about his profession, but also had a grenade launcher? Hot damn, we've got us a hero shooter! Let's get this baby into Early Access. Pre-order the founder's package now to get the David Schwimmer announcer pack. 

I guess Winston is just Beast from the X-Men, really. Anyway, I'm over it.

Instead, I'll pick this DLC car. Back in 2015 when I was deep into Rocket League, I remember being irritated by the seemingly tens of thousands of people who'd bought the DeLorean in Rocket League around the time of the merchandising tat nightmare known as Back to the Future Day. As well as marking a new low for the kind of event you could stick the word 'day' onto in order to sell toys to adults, this car started popping up all over the game, and its '88MPH' acceleration noise seemed to be the only thing I could hear in matches for months afterwards.

I know it's just people trying to have fun in a game they enjoy, by marrying car football with one of the best movies of the '80s. Who could resent that, really? Well, me, apparently. 

Phil Savage: You, when you pick sniper

To my mind, snipers are the most irritating class in any multiplayer shooter—and I main Scout in TF2, so I know a lot about what's irritating. Yes, there's some skill in knowing a map's sightlines, and not standing in areas where a sniper might pick me off. But being instantly killed from halfway across the map is, for me, the least interesting interaction I can have in a shooter. In a team-focused, objective-based FPS, snipers seem only to reduce the possibility space in which I can be doing cool things. And for what, so you can squat in a bush, clicking on heads?

As for snipers who aren't killing me—the ones on my team—you're not much better. The requirements of sniping are often antithetical to the objective at hand, and, even in deathmatch, snipers are rarely mobile enough to top the leaderboards. Sniper is a bad class for bad people, and my feelings on this matter have nothing to do with my inability to accurately aim a crosshair. Sniping is for jerks, no exceptions. Except Battlefield: Bad Company 2, where they were actually pretty good.

Tim Clark: Anduin Wrynn in Hearthstone

 "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" complained King Henry II, shortly before some knight bros took this as an invitation to go ham on Thomas Beckett, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. And grim though the Wikipedia entry marked 'assassination' might be, let me also assure you that that fate would be far too good for Anduin Wrynn, Hearthstone's priest hero. Anyone who mains Priest in Hearthstone, unless they use the Tyrande Whisperwind portrait or run a dragon deck, is a despicable degenerate. Combo and control Priest is for the kind of fedora-wearing player for whom it isn’t enough just to win, they have to do it using your cards, over the course of what feels like an ice age. Don’t even get me started on the emotes. One more “Wow!” and I’m sending in the knights. 

I'm obsessed with the mouths in Final Fantasy 7. If you first played Square's groundbreaking 3D Final Fantasy on a PC, sometime after 1998, you might be thinking: the characters have mouths. So what? But if you played Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation, you're more likely thinking: Wait a minute. Mouths? What mouths?

On the PlayStation, the lumpy-limbed character models of Cloud and Barret and the gang had big anime eyes, square fists and absolutely no mouths. The more detailed battle models did, of course, but out on the field? Nope. But when FF7 came to PC a year after the PlayStation, suddenly there they were: little mouths, in the form of a terse line or a comically large, gaping black O. 

Why are they there? Who added them, and who decided they should be there? I started searching for the answers to those questions after looking into the history of the PC ports of Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8, two rare, early examples of console games being ported to the PC. Because Eidos's name was on each box, I'd always assumed that the British company had ported Square's games itself. But after coming across this Gamefaqs thread and doing a little digging into Final Fantasy 7's PC credits, I realized that all of the development staff had worked at Squaresoft USA. So I set out on a quest to learn more about Final Fantasy 7's infamously quirky PC port: what it was like to port an early PlayStation game to PC, why new localization errors were introduced while others were fixed, and mostly, why the hell Cloud has a mouth.

It didn't go well at first.

"I'm not really sure," programmer Jay Fong wrote to me over email when I asked why the character models have mouths on the PC. Fong works at Obsidian now, and his gig as a software engineer on Final Fantasy 7 was his first real job in the games industry. "I recall we worked on the port for just a little over one year. After the project, I was promoted to a Senior Software Engineer position and when it was decided to go ahead and port FF8 to PC, I served as Project Lead. Some of the programmers had left right around the time when work on FF8 PC began so we didn't have as large a programming team as we did on FF7. But we also had more experience porting the FF PlayStation code base."

Total strikeout on the question that mattered most, but Fong still had plenty to tell me about the process of porting the Final Fantasy games to PC.

Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 for PC were developed at Square Soft, Inc. in Costa Mesa, California. The original development was done by Square Co, Ltd. back in Japan. According to Fong, on FF7 they had a team of eight programmers. There are nine software engineers listed in the Mobygames credits, though as Fong explained later, at least one engineer joined partway through the project. On FF8, Fong says it was only five programmers, but they finished the port in about a year, slightly faster than FF7. (There are five software engineers and two senior software engineers, including Fong, listed in the credits.) 

Porting Japanese PlayStation games, at the time, was no easy task—language was a serious barrier, and 3D graphics accelerators were in their infancy on PC. Here's Fong describing the development process:

"As far as tools, we were just using Visual C++ and Direct3D 5 at the time. The Playstation architecture was obviously different and some of the code was written specifically to take advantage of that hardware platform. For example, I recall the UI programmer had some unique challenges because the original Battle System UI update was hooked up directly to the Vsync which would update just the UI portion of the screen (bottom), something the PS hardware allowed you to do. This enabled the original UI portion of the screen to be updated at refresh rate making interaction feel very responsive, while the rest of the Battle System screen refreshed at a much lower rate. 

"Different programmers did have areas that they were responsible for: world map, field system (ie the pre-rendered area screens), UI system, battle system, mini games, etc. We tried to get as much of the original system's code compiled and running. All the data assets (models, textures, pre-rendered field backgrounds and FMV) were from the original PS versions.

"Obviously for low level systems that interfaced with PS hardware (eg, rendering, sound, FMV) we had to replace with PC-specific versions trying to mimic the original functionality. Something that the console programmers were able to do was to meticulously lay out the memory usage. This allowed their code to make certain assumptions about resource locations (such as specific regions of video memory for character textures) and they were able to do tricks like changing color look-up tables (ie, a palette) and manage dynamically streaming of data, like large Summoning effects while the character was playing the casting animation. We had to reverse engineer what they were doing and recreate the effect under Direct3D.

"The documentation was the code itself, and the comments (if any) were mostly in Japanese. We had a translator who we could ask to help us try and understand what the comment was referring to but that was still challenging since he was not a programmer. What really helped was when one of the original Japanese FF7 programmers [Kazuma Fuseya] moved to the US and joined our team. He was the perfect bridge between the two teams, being able to directly ask him questions and if he didn't know the answer he was able to get in touch with the original programmers, which helped immensely."

Today we typically expect the PC version of a game to be prettier, and run at higher framerates, than its console counterparts, but that wasn't always the case. Fong's comments help illustrate how console games, especially in the era before dedicated graphics cards were common, could make precision use of the hardware. Developing a PC game that ran as well across different systems was challenging enough at the time, before you added the complexity of translating the PlayStation's code to the PC. It's no surprise that the development team was mostly programmers, with only a single artist listed in the port credits: Jason Greenberg. Hoping he'd remember more about those haunting mouths than Fong, I tracked him down.

Greenberg now works as the animation director at Infinity Ward and has fond memories of his time at Squaresoft. 

"I was originally hired onto the project as a 3D artist," recalled Greenberg. "One of my main roles was supposed to be to help them with performance issues by reducing the polygon counts on many of the character and creature models." Luckily for the game, though less fortunate for Greenberg, the programmers were able to develop a PC renderer efficient enough to use the PS1's original models, without compromising on polygons. Instead of working as a 3D artist, Greenberg ended up doing touch-up work on the 2D art, increasing the resolution of assets from 320x240 to 640x480. 

"Mostly I focused on all the fonts and menu icons, and any textures used in the UI. Doubling the resolution of the Final Fantasy finger icon was actually a pretty cool thing to work on. It's literally iconic. There were no fancy upres-ing algorithms to use back then so I was basically filling in a ton of pixels by hand. You could imagine it wasn't all that creatively challenging and not the best use of my skillset as a 3D artist."

Greenberg also worked on Final Fantasy 7's FMVs, which were compressed for the PC release rather than improved. "Unfortunately we didn't have access to any higher resolution renders and they wouldn't provide the original assets to re-render, so sadly I had compress most of the FMVs from the 320x240 versions.

Making them fit in the disc space required and playback properly was quite a challenge. In the end, I don't think they looked as good as they could have. If only Sqaure had been able to provide higher resolution frames. We had the same issue with many of the backgrounds. These were simply too dense to double resolution and touch up by hand so most of them I think were the direct PS1 versions."

In 1998, you couldn't do the kind of 3D graphics work that went into Final Fantasy 7 on a normal PC. Greenberg had a $30,000 Silicon Graphics workstation on his desk "with probably Ssoftimage and Nichimen Graphics software on it to do the low-poly modeling" he never ended up actually working on, but he did put the hardware to use once. As a big chocobo fan, he created a new Squaresoft logo cinematic for the PC version. That's one bit of Final Fantasy 7's history we can definitively put a name to.

The rest of his graphics work was done on a typical PC with Photoshop; given the timeframe, I'd guess an early Pentium II system with a CPU in the 300 MHz range. Greenberg remembered that compressing the FMVs was excruciatingly slow, and any issues meant "hours and hours" down the drain. 

I asked Greenberg about some of the differences between PlayStation and PC cataloged here, like some objects strangely being larger or smaller. He said that at least on the art side, they were likely mistakes that never got caught in testing. The triangles used to point to exit points on the pre-rendered backgrounds, for example, are smaller in the PC version, perhaps due to the doubled resolution. That's "probably an asset that I missed," said Greenberg. "I probably should have up-resed those, but my guess is that they look OK at original size so no one asked for that."

Both Fong and Greenberg remembered the challenges that came with testing FF7's PC port. With translators on the team, the PC version benefitted from some cleaned-up English, which fixed some blatant mistranslations like "This guy are sick." It also amusingly introduced some new errors, but Fong and Greenberg recalled more pressing issues.

"We had a dedicated QA team on-site helping us test the game as well as do compatibility testing. PC compatibility is vastly better nowadays than what it was back then!" wrote Fong. "They had a guy whose job it was to essentially speed-run through the game, creating save games which were then used by the other QA members to hammer through each section of the game.

"I recall one bug that occurred intermittently was a crash at the start of the game, after the intro FMV as the train pulls into the station and one of the guys side-kicks a soldier. QA reported this bug as we were finalizing, which had all the programmers scrambling to repro and debug it asap. Exciting times!"

Greenberg recalled a crash bug that happened during the final boss fight, during Sephiroth's supernova summon. "Near the end of the dev cycle, many of us were done with our work, and simply had to help test the game as much as possible… If totaled I've probably spent at least a full 24 hours playing that one battle."

Fascinating stuff, but what about the mouths, right? Why does Cloud eternally look like an emoji-before-emojis? Why does Sephiroth look like he could swallow an entire hot dog whole? Did Greenberg know? 

"Great question. I'm wracking my brain to try to remember," he said. Uh oh.

"This is not something that we added on the art side since I never changed the model files in any way. I believe I remember that the mouths were just sitting there in the original texture files for the characters. I'm pretty sure the code to drive them was probably there as well, and we just enabled it or something. I wish I could tell you more, but I just don't remember it."

Is this victory? Or defeat? Greenberg gave me what may well be the story behind the character mouths in the PC version: they were actually there the whole time, but had been disabled in the PlayStation version before it shipped. Why? My guess is that a PlayStation plugged into a typical CRT TV with a composite cable resulted in such a fuzzy, low resolution image, you couldn't really see them, anyway. The eyes were bigger, and more expressive, and so the mouths were cut.

But it's possible there's more to the story—maybe the developers wanted the mouths to animate but never got around to it, or simply ran out of time to properly implement them. They're still there in the 2012 PC re-release, which fixed up the 1998 port to run at higher resolutions and play nice with modern Windows. I took one more stab at finding out, contacting William Chen, another engineer on Final Fantasy 7. His response? “It has been so long that I don’t have any memory of it."

That's where the story ends for Final Fantasy 7, though I did ask Fong if he knew why Square stopped porting the Final Fantasy games to PC after finishing FF8. "I recall Square decided to pull all development back to Japan shortly after FF8 shipped, but I'm not sure why they decided not to port FF9. If I had to guess, I imagine it was a business decision based on what they project the endeavor would cost versus the potential return in sales," he wrote. "FF10 was the first on PS2 so I'd imagine they had their hands full just developing the game for the new platform, let alone worry about porting it to PC."

There's precious little history around the PC versions of these games, and that's a shame—they're two of the first 3D Japanese games to make the jump from console to PC. That history deserves to be documented. What was a simple programming task in 1998 is now a mystery we may never know the answer to, because no one thought to ask. And this is for Final Fantasy 7, one of the most beloved games ever made. Few games have had 30,000 word oral histories written about them, and we still don't know the full story behind the damn mouths. What other fascinating bits of history have already been forgotten? (If you worked on either port and have stories to tell, or know why everyone in FF7 has an O face, drop me a line!)

And according to Jay Fong, while the developers were forbidden from adding easter eggs to the PC ports, there may be a unique version of Final Fantasy 8 floating around on a CD, somewhere deep in the bowels of Square, if it wasn't tossed out in the trash.

"We did play a prank on one of the FF8 producers. We edited the intro logo FMV, which started normally but after a few seconds it would briefly flash an awkward picture of him (let's leave it at that) and the frequency would slowly increase until it completely replaced the logo. We put it on a set of discs marked as 'Release Candidate.' Of course QA was in on this and they did have the real Release Candidate discs on hand as well. And no, it never made it out to the wild!"

Final Fantasy VIII was originally released 20 years ago today on PSone. Here, then, is a tribute to its fantastic card game, Triple Triad.

The emergence of the card game Gwent as a key part of The Witcher 3’s success immediately made me think of Final Fantasy VIII’s own TCG, Triple Triad. As with Gwent, you can power through the main quest without getting into the card collecting or AI-battling at all, but if you get involved in the scene, it only enhances your adventure. 

Final Fantasy VIII is an RPG set in a kind of academy for young soldiers, starring moody orphan Squall, his rival Seifer and a bunch of other kids. As that premise suggests, it’s very anime in style, and transforms from a relatively simple tale of war between two nations to a sprawling sci-fi dumpster fire about sorceresses from the future. I can’t defend it, and by the end it’s tricky to still enjoy it. FFVIII makes up for it in the smaller stories and character moments, as well as typically excellent worldbuilding from the team at Squaresoft. 

No matter where you find yourself, the people there play Triple Triad. FFVIII has an alternate talk button that challenges NPCs in each environment to a game. The scene then cuts away to a 9x9 grid, where ludicrously catchy, jaunty gambling music kicks in. 

Each player picks five cards from their deck. Each card has four numbers on it from 1 to 10, pointing up, down, left and right. For example, one of the game s better cards, Ifrit, has 9 (up), 6 (right), 2 (down) and 8 (left). The goal is to flip as many of the player s cards as possible until the grid is filled up placing Ifrit below a card with a number 5 pointing down means the card will flip in my favour, because 9 beats 5. The score is then 6-4 to me. If my opponent has a card with a value of 3 or more pointing upwards, they can place that below Ifrit and flip my card in return, putting the score back to 5-5. If I end the game with more cards flipped than my opponent, I win and I get to take one or more of their cards.

It s simple to get to grips with, but the arrangement of numbers on the better cards means you can get pretty tactical. If it s my turn first, I ll always place Ifrit in the bottom left corner, because it s unlikely the AI will have any cards that can flip an 8 or 9 from there. The ideal hand you want to build has a card you can play in any corner of the grid and dominate.

That point takes a long time to reach. Initially, you re given a pile of rubbish cards. Gradually, you start challenging other students and building up a deck. Almost every NPC in the world will play Triple Triad with you, which is cool, and that includes major story characters. I like the idea that this card game is the one thing everyone in a war-torn, varied world has in common.

Certain NPCs carry certain cards, and challenging better players becomes one of Triple Triad s larger goals. One small lad who runs around the school carries a Mog card, one of the first decent rare cards you can win. I like the idea of Squall outsmarting a small child at this daft card game then taking his most treasured card away. FFVIII would be improved exponentially if you could see the kid s crushed expression, and Squall offering a condescending them s the rules, son. Of course, if you take on this kid and end up losing your Ifrit card, like I did on my first time playing through the game, the salty tears will be entirely your own.

Later, the game makes it easier on you by handing over a few more powerful cards gratis the demonic Diablos, for example, is one of the rare cards with a 10 value, represented on the card as an A . This means it can t be flipped at all. From here, you can start challenging the secret CC Group at Balamb Garden, your home base and in a nice twist, the greatest Triple Triad player in the game is later revealed to be a member of your party. Triple Triad develops into a more complex and high-powered aside as better cards are filtered in by new opponents.

As are new rules. Elemental means that cards with a fire, ice, or earth symbol have their values increased if they re placed on a matching tile on the grid, and one means you can only win or lose one card at the end of the round, no matter the difference in score. Every region of the map has its own ruleset, and when you travel somewhere else, that ruleset comes with you for your next match and those rules may even become a permanent fixture in that region. Unfortunately, one rule random, which picks your cards for each game, so you surrender tactical control of your deck is so atrociously unfair it almost breaks the game. But even then, it s possible to abolish rules in each area, too.

Triple Triad is pretty much my perfect minigame it s simple to play and collecting cards feels as satisfying as it would playing a real-life trading card game, were I able to get away with that as a grown-ass man.

If you love Triple Triad, you might want to check out the fan-made version that's giving the minigame a new lease of life.

When Cyril Bondue first played Triple Triad, the peculiar card-collecting minigame from Final Fantasy VIII, he became slightly obsessed. For Bondue, like many other fans of Squaresoft s (now Square Enix) enduring JRPG of the late 90s, playing Triple Triad became more important than the main game itself. 

Flipping packs on the 3x3 grid, matching elements and snatching high-ranking cards proved far more intriguing than steering the oft aloof Squall Leonhart around Balamb, Dollet or Deling City—locales Bondue only cared to visit in order to seek out new NPCs with untapped and inestimable decks.

I remember winning cards but being unsure of how I triggered this or that effect, explains Bondue, about first playing the game in 1999. He laughs. I was very bad, especially before I understood the rules. But I was looking at magazines and speaking more with people about the cards than the actual game itself. It meant so much more to me.  

Ten years on, Bondue decided to take his love for Triple Triad a step further. While still attending school in his native Berlin, he tried his hand at programming. But with no experience, he decided to create a fan project based on an existing franchise. Naturally, Triple Triad was at the forefront of his mind and thus Triple Triad Flash Online was born. Today, TTFO has over 36,000 registered users and hosts approximately 140 games per day, not to mention fortnightly championships which see 150-200 players face off for coveted character cards. Back in 2009, however, TTFO wasn t as well established as it is now. 

Version 1 was simple in its makeup: as a neophyte coder, Bondue struggled with sophisticated design but quickly noticed a distinct interest in his creation as the user base began to slowly multiply. 

Like most card games, the speed in which any Triple Triad game plays out is variable, thus Version 1 s 30-second server requests meant bouts suffered tedious amounts of lag. Did the other player play their card? Which card? Where did they put it? This extended to the game s chat function, meaning messages also took half a minute to deliver, and there was no way of inviting players to join games. 

By 2011, Bondue realised the burgeoning community he had helped grow needed more from TTFO and decided to upgrade. Version 2 ushered in TTFO as it stands today, correcting all of the previous technical handicaps and punctuating the familiar interface with the equally familiar finger-clicking jingle which guarantees to set up camp in your head after first listen. Although keen at the time to overhaul its aesthetics, Bondue was clear to maintain the exact same ruleset.

There s the same rules, and I ve chosen not to add any new cards, explains Bondue. I wanted to stick to the 110 original cards in order to keep the original balance of every original card. Adding cards can break this balance.  

With the bimonthly championships, however—the site s main attraction—Bondue can be creative in order to generate interest in both existing and prospective users. By battling through four stages of competition, players can capture spoils with little experience. 

Championships at TTFO are the only way to earn character cards, says Bondue. Character cards are level ten and therefore the most powerful in the game—they are very uncommon. Most players won t have them but everyone wants them, and this encourages a lot of players to participate. Players don t play with regular cards. You are given a set of cards [that] I choose and every new championship has its own set of rules. 

Whereas when you join the game at first you ll only have level one cards, you can join a championship at any time and level. When you win a game you can take a card from your opponent. When it s your regular cards, ones you ve earned, you don t really want to lose them—but here, the cards are given to you, they re just there for the tournament. Championships make for more exciting games as you don t have as much to lose.

Recently, long-standing MMO Final Fantasy XIV introduced a reinterpretation of the Golden Saucer—a theme park-style area which featured in Final Fantasy VII—which boasts popular minigames from previous series instalments, including the revered Triple Triad. It d be natural for Bondue to consider the impact this may have on TTFO. Yet he feels it could be good for the community by virtue of introducing a new generation to the game, thus potentially raising the profile of his fan site. Bear in mind Triple Triad is a game within a game from last century, where schoolyard card swapping was (presumably) far more commonplace in a world predating the digital age. The idea of getting younger players involved who can then migrate to a more focused arena can t be a bad thing. 

Although not specifically tailored to suit anyone but the TTFO community, Bondue is in the process of upgrading again with plans to roll out Version 3 at some stage later this year. Having worked on the particulars alongside community members since mid- 2014, a 3D Garden-esque lobby is set to offer a far more contemporary Triple Triad experience—and Bondue notes future Twitch livestreams as a possible way of further enticing new faces. 

But the old faces are the pillars of the community. Peter Spencer, a moderator from Sydney, has been an integral member of TTFO since 2011. 

We ve got players from all over the world, he says as he praises the figurative closeness of the far-reaching group. The majority are Europeanbased but there s a strong North and South American presence, and there s quite a few players from the Philippines and South East Asia who play a fair bit.

Some of these players have got some really different ways of approaching the game. [They] are always thinking outside the box, which is really interesting. There are so many facets to it, all the rules and the way people approach it—you re always learning. I learned quickly that you can t expect to win every game. If you do that, you can t have fun.

Final Fantasy XIII's arrival on PC has been disappointing. It's confined to 720p resolutions, requires a 59GB download comprised of huge uncompressed cutscenes, and has been suffering player complaints about variable frame rates and stuttering.

Hundreds of negative Steam reviews have accompanied the launch, many citing the resolution issue and a chronic lack of graphics options.

It's a call to arm for modders, perhaps better known hereon as "fixers". Durante has stepped in with a quick first version of his solution to the resolution problem. It's set to be updated to fix existing compatibility problems. You can download it here. 

Durante also built fixes for Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition, which made him one of our community heroes of the year in 2012. He also helped out when the much-improved port for Dark Souls 2 was released earlier this year.

The flurry of Final Fantasy PC releases might well be laying the groundwork for a Final Fantasy XV PC announcement, but problematic releases that have to be knocked into shape by customers are unlikely to endear new newcomers to the series. Keep an eye on the GeDaSota blog for more FFXIII fixes, and check out the PCGamingWiki page, which has a few potential fixes for stuttering frame rates.