Fans upset with Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster’s font style

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster text disaster

Final Fantasy fans aren't terribly impressed with Square Enix's Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, which comes to £70 or $96 for the whole collection (6 original Final Fantasy games).

It was announced at Square Enix's E3 event, and fans were initially delighted by the idea of definitive ports of the classic series.

Highlights

• Soundtrack arrangement by composer Nobuo Uematsu
• Bonus “bestiary, illustration gallery, and music player”
• Features “improved gameplay” like auto-battle and modern UI
• Features “universally updated 2D pixel graphics” and designs

Typographically challenged: Unfortunately, the excitement rapidly evaporated once screenshots appeared and it became clear that all the games used a narrow, condensed font making it incredibly hard to read the text.

Fans have since started tweeting jokes on Twitter about the font style, which could ultimately harm what would have been an exciting port of a beloved text-driven series. We've contacted Square Enix for comment but didn't receive a response by the time of publishing.

New blood: The old remasters are expected to vanish from storefronts as the new ones are launched. You can pre-order Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II on Steam right now, or you can pick up all 6 games as a bundle. 

Which failed console add-on was Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods developed for?

a) Sega CD
b) Panasonic M2
c) The 64DD
d) Atari Jaguar CD 

The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today's issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.

A proud American, munching brains for liberty

Stubbs The Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse includes a hidden farm level where Stubbs gives a rousing speech that would inspire any cold-blooded patriot to munch brains for America.

The scene is a reference to the movie Patton where General George S. Patton gives a speech in front of a huge stars-and-stripes banner to rouse his troops for battle.

Join our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss today's fact.

Microsoft fleeced by fake gift cards

Microsoft assigned a young engineer in his mid-20s named Volodymyr Kvashuk to test the security of the Microsoft Store by making dummy purchases, and he made a startling discovery.

No orders should have been fulfilled when dummy purchases were completed, but it turned out that Xbox gift card codes were actually generated. Kvashuk decided to keep this to himself, and embarked on a long and slow heist that would eventually siphon around $10 million in Xbox sales.

Gift Card Monopoly: Kvashuk used colleagues' profiles to obfuscate his actions, and wrote custom software that automated the fraud. Since gift card codes are simply generated according to a mathematical formula, there is an essentially limitless supply of them and no one would notice them go missing.

21st Century Heist: Before he was caught, Kvashuk had built himself a lavish lifestyle and invested in real estate. He generated codes worth $10 to $100 and sold the codes via cryptocurrency markets. "Kvashuk got carried away by his chance to become an instant millionaire”, said the lead attorney Michael Dion, before the judge sentenced Kvashuk to 9 years in jail.

Pokémon Wonder event in Japan

The Pokémon Company is hosting a special ticketed event called Pokémon Wonder in a forest in Yomiuri Land in Japan on July 17th. There will be 50 Pokémon to discover across two courses: Ancient Stone Wall and Whispering Bamboo Grove, which will take around 90 minutes to complete and accommodate 6 participants at a time.

Pokémon Go

• July Community Day
  • July 3rd from 11:00AM to 5:00PM local time
  • Tepig will appear more frequently in wild
  • Shiny Tepig will also appear
  • Evolved Emboar can learn move Blast Burn
  • Incense and Lures last 3x longer
  • 3x earned Stardust by catching Pokémon
  • Special Research story Roasted Berries
  • Tickets available for purchase at $1
  • One-time Community Day Box for 1,280 PokéCoins

Pokémon Masters EX

• Bidoof Day log-in bonus June 30rd to July 7th
  • 400 Gems a day for total of 1,200 Gems
  • Maximum 3 days bonus can be claimed

Pokémon Sword & Shield

• Water Paradise competition July 16th to 18th
  • Registrations open until July 15th
  • Single Battle with Water-type only
  • All Trainers earn 50 BP

Golf After the Apocalypse in Golf Club: Wasteland

Golf Club: Wasteland is a darkly humorous tale of the apocalypse where the Earth is no longer habitable, and the remnants of mankind have all fled to Mars. Earth is now nothing more than a giant golf course for the wealthy.

The game is not just about coaxing balls into holes, it's also about life on Mars and the story of how Earth was abandoned. We talked to Creative Director Igor Simic at Demagog Studio to learn more.

According to Simic, the goal was to make a quirky and ambitious yet compact game. The project started as a side-project for a group of friends, who were eventually able to form a studio and bring Golf Club: Wasteland to a wider audience with help from publisher Untold Tales.

• The Inherent Silliness of Golf: Why a post-apocalyptic golf game? I often joke that because my idols are Larry David, the creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, who is an avid golfer, and Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of sci-fi films such as Solaris and Stalker, we just married the two.".
• Publisher’s Push: Untold Tales convinced the team to bring the game to multiple platforms. “Once we started working with them, it turned out they were really good people – friendly, responsive and professional."

The game is not shy about tackling issues like climate change and inequality, and despite its wacky premise there is a serious message at its heart:

“It’s darkly comical that the theory that climate change will end humanity on Earth has finally entered the mainstream and in response we have a handful of billionaires competing to get to Mars, which doesn’t even have oxygen,” said Simic. 

Golf Club: Wasteland is scheduled for an August launch, and will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch. There are no plans for DLC at the moment, but the PC and console ports expand on the mobile version with new levels, some cutscenes, and a graphic novel.

• Metroid Dread dev blog looks at E.M.M.I., the highly agile research robot that hunts Samus
• Diablo IV quarterly update from Blizzard reveals hero, monster and ally art
• Profile picture updated on Dead Space YouTube account, which all but confirms that Dead Space is being revived
• Nintendo worries that pirate ROM sites will relaunch after US court denies permanent injunction against them
• Dedicated Zelda fan loots impossible chest in Breath of the Wild while racing against the clock

Which failed console add-on was Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods developed for?

ANSWER: Jaguar CD!

If you wished the Sega CD should have been just a bit more prone to hardware failure, then the Atari Jaguar CD will definitely satisfy you! A failed accessory for a failed console, only 11 games were ever launched for the Jaguar CD. One of them was Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods, based on the 90s Highlander cartoon.

Although the premise of Highlander is that powerful immortal beings seek to hack each other's heads off to steal power, Last of the MacLeods was more like Alone in the Dark. A slow-paced adventure game with clunky sword-fighting and FMV from the cartoon, it was supposed to be the first game in an epic trilogy – but instead ended up being the last Highlander game ever made.

Today's issue of DailyBits was written by Gavin Herman, Nick Akerman, Erlend Grefsrud, Simon Priest, and Jamie Davey. If you have any feedback or news tips for the team, please email us!