Non-magical Final Fantasies: FF7 and FF8 contrasted

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:40:28 +0200

Neither game has good world-building by today’s standards, and perhaps not even by those of the 1990s. I will argue, however, that with respect to magic, the world-building in FF8 makes sense and it’s superior to FF7’s. You don’t need to have played either of the two games to understand this post, but of course it’ll be more relevant if you played at least one. The spoilers are few and small on purpose:

The rules of Go for mathematicians

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:16:07 +0200

A lot of people in the West are first exposed to Go with the Japanese ruleset. However, it’s a bit of a mess, with several patches, and worse, some books seem to try to hide the complexity. Go is a complex game as-is, but the rules don’t need to be, the complexity is an emergent property that makes it fun. If you are comfortable with first year undergrad math and want to know a well-defined set of rules, keep reading. We will be discussing the Tromp-Taylor ruleset, which is perhaps the most elegant and short of them all. But don’t worry, Go with Tromp-Taylor is Go, and in practice any ruleset yields the same result in almost every case. This is not a fringe thing to learn, it’s just the simplest.

Games on Pablo Parguiña's Website

Non-magical Final Fantasies: FF7 and FF8 contrasted

The rules of Go for mathematicians