January 11th, 2000 - Electronic Arts Square (EAS - the Japanese publishing partner of the North American Square Electronic Arts) recently announced that the Japanese Windows 95 and 98 version of Final Fantasy VIII will be released in March in Japan. The western PC version of the game that has already shipped six million world-wide on the PlayStation, will therefore pre-date the Japanese version, rather than the Japanese version pre-dating the western release as is always the case with console Final Fantasies.

In North America, a date has been firmly set at January 25th by Square EA, even though some outlets, such as Electronics Boutique, are quoting January 26th.

In Europe, the market will be getting the English, German, French, Spanish and Italian PC version sometime in February, with no firm date yet set by Square Europe.

North America January 25th 2000	European February 2000	Japanese March 2000
Publisher: Square EA System: Windows 95/98 Price: $39.99 Storage: Six CD-ROMs	Publisher: EIDOS System: Windows 95/98 Price: £29.99 Storage: Six CD-ROMs	Publisher: EA Square System: Jap Windows 95/98 Price: 8,800 yen Storage: Six CD-ROMs

System Requirements:

• Windows 95/98 Compatible System
• Intel or 100% Compatible CPU
• Pentium 200 (Pentium II 266 recommended)
• 32MB RAM (64MB recommended)
• 8MB 3D Accelerated Graphics Card (16MB recommended) (highly recommended)
• 8x CD-ROM
• DirectX 6.1 (included)
• DirectSound and DirectMusic Compatible Sound Card

The longly anticipated PC version of Final Fantasy VIII has a lot to make up for after the shambles that was Final Fantasy VII PC. Although it sold 530,000 copies world-wide, it was quite possible the poorest professional piece of software released on the PC platform in terms of compatability - luckily patches were available over the Internet, but lets hope that they have learnt from their mistakes.

The port will be exactly the same as its superb PlayStation counterpart, even including the mini-game Chocobo World (see previous news article). The only notible exception will be the graphics, which will be improved upon incredibly with 3D acceleration - especially in battles: