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From the Final Fantasy wikia on Laguna Loire:

“Various examples of unused backgrounds hint that Laguna may have possessed a lime-green convertible truck during his time in Winhill. Laguna’s black-and-white intro picture depicts him driving said car and the artisan in Shumi Village, one of the places Laguna spent time in, has a miniature model of it. The car can be found in the garage in Ellone’s parents’ house where Laguna resides during his stay at Winhill if the location is hacked into the game. The car, however, is never used as Laguna’s car in the final game.”

Wait… What?

I knew about the truck showing up as a toy model in the Shumi Village and that it was something that was connected to Laguna during FFVIII’s development. It also explained why the shops sold fuel, even though you rarely used a car in the game. I did not know about the garage, or the full-sized model, or the rendered background version of it. How late in the development was this piece cut?

I always figured that Laguna’s story had suffered some major cuts by the final release. In a way, I can see why. A story about some dude and his war buddies traveling across the world to save a little girl from an evil sorceress and ending a war (perhaps even saving the world) in the process really is a game that could and should stand alone. To see that it was pared down after so much work was already put into it makes me wonder if someone on the higher level looked at the development and said, “Wait, why are we doing two games at once? Which one are we making? The teenage romance or save the princess?” Looks like Laguna had a habit of stealing spotlights even before the game’s release.

Squaresoft (later Square-Enix) seems to have a chronic problem when it comes to preproduction. It’s like they get a group of guys together, throw around really cool ideas, and then start making the game, hoping that enough of the ideas will gel together into a coherent whole by the time they get to the release date. Every Final Fantasy from FFVII onward has been plagued by this and it seems to get worse as the years go on.

As to the green truck, it does look like a cheap little rig that’s been owner-modified for some adventuring. Rather fitting for Laguna. It’s too bad that we never got to see the entirety of his story.

I’ve been playing around with the character creator and benchmark for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

This utility is one of those things I wish more MMOs made available. It certainly piqued my interest in the game. I’m a sucker for detailed character creators to begin with and the benchmark test takes the character created and puts it in a series of scenes, so you can see it in action.

If only this wasn’t a subscription-only game, I would give it a chance. Sure, the word is out that it’s just okay in gameplay, but it would be nice to play something that felt like a Final Fantasy again. The environment of the game is strongly reminiscent of the Ivalice setting. I’m already gravitating to the chance to play the Dragoon and Summoner classes. However, it doesn’t strike me as a game that’s worth $30 for the base PC version, plus $13 per month minimum to play, unless I played it hard for a month or two, then dropped it.

I’ll keep watch for news of the game going buy-to-play with micro-transactions and a likely VIP subscription model. If it takes that route, I’ll pick it up and give it a try. Who knows, maybe by then, the devs will have turned the game into something fun and engaging, worthy of an AAA title.

First Look: The Sims 4 Official Gameplay Trailer

So far, this looks intriguing. I didn’t get into the Sims 3, because of the more narrow focus of gameplay versus the god-mode of Sims 2. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the gameplay is like for Sims 4.

The character creator with the push and pull action is a nice change from the sliders, allowing for the builds that many mod-users looked for. Some people complain about the cartoonish appearance for Sims 4, but I think that it works in its favor by avoiding a dive into the uncanny valley. Besides, the Sims has always had an active modding community. Someone or three will come up with realistic skin and hair textures to download.

The emotional aspect looks interesting too, but I wasn’t much of a soap opera player in the previous iterations. It’s also nice to see the crazy, over the top elements pop up, like the voodoo doll. Hopefully, the emotional aspect is a harbinger of an improved overall AI for the Sims. Having to micromanage the survival functions of the pixelated lemmings was not my favorite aspect of the game. Sometimes I would just throw my hands up in the air, declare Darwinism, and let the morons die.

Onto the aspect of the game that I liked the most: Construction. Faster and easier house building with the option to move entire rooms around? Yes, please! Diagonal furniture without a cheat code? Finally! That the decor affects moods will be an interesting thing to play with.

My biggest reservations about the game come from the publisher being EA. So far, the site states that Sims 4 won’t require a persistent online connection and that it’s designed to be played offline. It looks like EA learned its lesson from the spectacular fail that was the SimCity launch earlier this year, but there’s no full guarantee of that. It will require an EA Origin account to install the game. So, there’s still the risk of having to deal with login server overloads just on that point. While the game is designed for offline play and no persistent online connection, that doesn’t exclude the possibility of the game requiring an online “check” to begin playing each session and flirting with the disastrous server overload message.

With the game slated to come out in 2014, my first instinct is to wait a month or two after release to consider purchasing it. That will let me see how EA will try to control their game, plus allow for patches for the inevitable release bugs.