Final Fantasy 8 is being spruced up in HD for the PC

I frittered away many an hour on Final Fantasy 8's card minigame, Triple Triad, as a teenager. Now it seems I'm going to lose even more of my life to it, thanks to today's announcement that a HD do-over of Final Fantasy 8 is coming to PC.

The news, originally reported on Japanese-language gaming site Famitsu , comes to us via Kotaku , who have generously translated the thing. The HD version of the 1999 classic will be hitting Japan first, and we can assume an English-language version will be on the way after that; no word of a release date, or whether this new version will come with any additional content, but Square Enix has released two screenshots of what we're likely to see on PC.

And, uh... Hum. While the re-release is promising high-resolution graphics, it doesn't seem that associated high-res textures will be included. That's not necessarily a bad thing—after all, not everyone was thrilled by Monkey Island's graphical makeover in 2009—but don't expect any miracles to save the characters' overly blocky looks. (Save that for the lovingly detailed fan mods .)

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