Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in ProTH's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 10th, 2009
6:20 am	Continue the insanity So I'm writing this before the dream leaves my head forever. So ten years later, the cast of Step By Step has been joined by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager. They now have 3 increasingly high tech levels of basement, sub-basement, and sub-sub-basement. While admiring the vast open spaces of the lowest level, things start fritzing and the power goes out to leave them in darkness. Emergency services arrive, lead by this week's guest stars, the cast of Coach. Current Mood: wat (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
1:21 pm	RPGee So with Dragon Warrior VII out of the way, I've started up a few other games. Contact: I've started and finished it. Disappointment. Things start out simple, and then... never really take off. You get new outfits with new kinds of moves, but they're rarely radically different, and since you've got to go back to your "base" to switch them, even the ones with unique skills (like lockpicking or fishing) are a pain to access when you need them. Battle is nothing special, like an FF XII where the only gambit is "Attack selected enemy". Story starts suddenly, adds some element of mystery, and then basically resolves nothing. From a thematic point of view it's just possible they were trying to make the player share in Terry's feelings of being used and having wasted his time, but that doesn't make it a good thing. There are some positive parts to the game. Mostly some really nerdy humor and references that assured me I was indeed part of the game's target audience. If you understand what the phrase "Worm get!" parodies or would appreciate a faux-retro-game section having a map shaped like a Famicom with two controllers attached (including microphone) you may be too. But I still can't recommend it. Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled This is what I started up after Contact. This is a game developed by a Canadian team that really really wants to be an SNES Square game c. 1995. At about 6 hours in I'd say they haven't done a bad job, though it's not exactly going to knock Chrono Trigger off anyone's favorites list. The battles are really pretty cool once you get used to the few options the game doesn't try to teach you (read the manual for a change). Control is mostly menu-based, but there's also movement around the screen. Attack a distant enemy and your character will have to spend a bit of time running there. If another character is in the way, they're blocked and can't even select to attack a character on the other side. Hold L in battle to manually move people around, which is really useful for magic-based attacks that are centered on the caster. On the down side is that random battles are pretty frequent, and sometimes the game can be mean and stick you in a place without a save or heal point nearby. But after playing Dragon Warrior VII for half the year even that doesn't seem so bad. More annoying is that the transition to battle looks the same as changing screens or entering a town, so sometimes you can't even be sure which is happening. Just a little sound and visual effect like the SNES games this game attempts to mimic would be nice. Even more troublesome is that I got a game freeze. Only one so far, but since I'm not the only one who has reported such a thing, it seems they're not as rare as they should be. Soooo I'm saving even more often than I usually do (which is often). Bonus love for the top screen while on the world map. Some games will show a larger map or something, but this game goes beyond and shows a lot of the stuff one would usually want to go to a deeper menu to find out. Party members' HP and MP. A bar showing how close they are to the next level. Money. A map with a legend showing caves/towns/craft by colored dots. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door: This is what I'm doing on the console side. I'm probably about at this game's half point... but it just hasn't really grabbed me. I can't really place something in particular as wrong with the game; it is well made. However, it seems a little too much like playing the first Paper Mario again. The second Mario & Luigi game probably wasn't as good as the first, but the addition of Baby Mario and Luigi to use with the two new face buttons did add a real twist to the game. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
9:20 am	Dragon Barrier WHEW. Finally finished Dragon Warrior VII last night. Timer was over 90 hours, though most of the last 20 or so was grinding. This took about six months. Also finished Final Fantasy IV DS a few days ago, though the game time was less than half that of DWVII and it was only over the course of 4 months. I thought VII would go first, but with The After Years waiting, I wanted to finish this one up. So now I need to pick a new portable RPG to replace those two. Not that my backlog doesn't provide plenty choices. Contact, Valkyrie Profile, or The World Ends With You on DS being most likely. Also have DQIV DS, but I don't want to jump straight from a PS1 Dragon Warrior to a DS remake of a PS1 remake of an NES Dragon Warrior. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
2:11 pm	Electric Eel Excitement So thoughts on various E3 things, big and small. No particular order. Golden Sun DS: I thought the GBA games were decent. But they also were some of the few serious non-port RPG efforts on the system. The DS lineup puts up a biiiit more competition. PS3 Motion Control: Looks pretty cool. More precise than the wiimote and Motion Plus, though that's not quite unexpected for something coming years later. Still a lot of unknowns, though, from button layout to price to support. Project Natal: Whereas Wii and PS3 Motion Control are heavy evolutions of standard controls with motion/pointing capabilities added, Natal's movement tracking through purely its fancy camera device is quite more abstract. More potential in some ways, less in others. It can work in conjunction with a player using a regular controller, but I'd still say they need their own two handed controller solution to work best with this, too. Final Fantasy XIV: I think this is the only time I've heard a game announced and literally said "What the fuck?", considering this is the fourth E3 that FF XIII and The Crystal Bearers have been shown at without release. Considering it's the new MMO, though, it's not so shocking that they'd reveal it far before the release of XIII. I mean, they announced the last MMO at the same event as the previous two single-player Final Fantasy games. New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Cool. Some people are bummed that the art style looks so much like DS's NSMB, but to me something that's between a high resolution NSMB and the 2D sections of Super Mario Galaxy looks pretty decent. The multiplayer stuff is interesting and that was definitely the focus of what they showed off, so I'm a little wary of what this will mean for a single player. On the one hand it could just leave certain things more difficult, which for an experienced player might actually be nice. On the other hand it could make some things impossible, which would be a bit of a pain. Super Mario Galaxy 2: Through spywork NSMB Wii was pretty much known about the night before, but I didn't think they'd be revealing new home console 2D and 3D Marios at the same event. SMG was pretty completely awesome, so I'm very looking forward to this. Some are disappointed that it currently looks so similar to SMG, rather than going in some other direction. I say the world has seen a hell of a lot more 3D platformers not based on players traveling across a series of planetoids, so a second one 3 years after the first doesn't seem so bad. Monado: This wasn't even shown at the Nintendo press conference, but was just one of those stealth things they stick on their webpage. Not even much known about it yet, but it's an RPG from MonolithSoft. Certainly this is more the sort of thing I figured they'd be put to doing, rather than Disaster: Day of Crisis. PSP Go: So here's another thing that was known about a bit before the actual press conferences. But hey. It's the new PSP redesign, and... ehh. I had some issues with the DSi redesign taking out the GBA game slot, but at least it left the damned DS slot. So this is the PSP for people who want to not be able to use UMDs, have a smaller screen, and pay more. It does have more built in storage, though that's something you can increase through cards regardless of version. Smaller size does lead to taking less pocket space, so maybe this is for big GB Micro fans. I also dislike the screen sliding method. It slides to hide the buttons to make it even smaller when not in use... but why that way? From GBASP through three versions of DS, it's saved space by allowing one to fold the system and also protect the screen. But the PSP Go leaves the screen on the outside and hides the buttons. Scribblenauts: This game has always sounded awesome, but now with hands-on impressions we can see that they're really living up to the claim of this game having... darn near everything in it. I'm hard-pressed to think of another upcoming DS game that's got my attention as much as this one. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
7:49 am	It came from the sewers Some people ask why. I ask why not. I say this not to inspire, but merely to preface that I got a little plastic alligator that grows in water, and put it in the reservoir of our toilet. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
2:50 pm	ST, TS, TV So having this month watched Star Trek 2009, Terminator Salvation, and the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles reinforced a couple things that I already thought. 1) Fans are harder to please. Both ST2009 and TS had some crazy illogical stuff going on, but it's Star Trek that bugs me. I'm invested in it so anything that seems weird is like someone... I dunno, putting an uncomfortable couch in my house. Whereas with Terminator it was like... putting the couch in the house of some friend I rarely visit. I'm more happy to see they've finally got a new room that isn't just trying to copy their old room than to care about the couch. 2) TV > feature films. Sure a TV show isn't going to provide you with the excitement-per-minute of a big-budget movie, and you end up with casts of Brian Austin Greens rather than Christian Bales, but for the cost of one of these major summer movies you can have a pretty high budget TV season that can tell more stories and/or go into much more depth following a single one. Enterprise was much maligned, but it's almost a sure thing that its season 4 will have provided me with more entertainment than 3 Abrams Trek movies can. And while I enjoy the Terminator films well enough, allowing the concept of people/machines sent to the past with varying objectives to develop for more than a day or two of action before they get crushed or melt or whatever is much more appealing. Pretty bittersweet, though, that I'm into this big Terminator kick when the series has just been cancelled and the movie is underperforming at the box office. Is it the franchise's own judgment day? (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
12:09 pm	Star Trek rant So Star Trek comes out tonight. It may be good; reviews are very positive. But I don't like the Big Thing J.J. Abrams has done to the franchise. Obviously we come from different points of view, but I think his lack of information on the franchise relative to nerds like me gave him some misconceptions, and the solution he went with seems superfluous as well as limiting for what he may want. This is not a complaint along the lines of the recent Onion story which had Trek fans disappointed that the movie was fun and watchable without being obtuse enough. I'm not positive how I'll like their take on Star Trek, but I can deal with the existence of said take. Abrams has said he focused on making a good movie rather than obsessing with what works for the franchise as a whole, whereas I care more about the franchise as a whole than what suits 2 of its hundreds of hours slightly better. I just want to blurt this stuff out before I actually see the movie. Perhaps my perspective afterward will be different. First, one of the comments I heard from him about Star Trek a year or two back about why he went with the original cast. He said it was because that show was so much more about the character relationships. Whaaa? Having seen at least a supermajority of every Trek show, that seems dead wrong. EVERY show after the original put more emphasis on character relationships, particularly Deep Space Nine. TOS did have a very strong Kirk-McCoy-Spock thing going on, but they were the ONLY significant characters! The other four we think of as main characters never made it onto the title sequence, and other than Scott rarely had anything important to do in an episode. They'd disappear from swaths of episodes in a row without explanation, and trying to even get a first name for any of them was like pulling teeth. This is definitely an aspect that was improved upon in the movies, particularly II and on. However, if that's what J.J. has in mind, I think he's put the cart before the horse. The reason they were so gelled for Star Trek II-VI was because both the cast of actors and crew of characters had been working with each other for ~20 years! If his goal is to try to emulate a similar feel in what's essentially an alternate origin story, that won't seem right. So when shots from the movie started being released... it was apparent they'd gone with a very different look than the original, and changes even beyond the aesthetic were large. In what is probably not a spoiler if you're the type of person who's either paid any attention to the movie or care enough about Star Trek/me to read this far into the post, it turns out time travel is to blame. This is a heavily altered version of a time shortly before the original series. Something like 90% of Trek as we know it happened beyond that point. I happen to be a pretty big fan of a lot of stuff in that 90%, so to essentially see it wiped off the table so that J.J. can make the nacelles look funny and Kirk able to look at the Enterprise's construction from a motorcycle rubs me a very wrong way. At least they've taken the position that this didn't just erase the previous timeline, but is an alternate reality. However, what does this mean for future Trek? Worst case scenario: We never again see the Trek universe fans came to enjoy over the last half century or so; at least in live action. I guess at least that would allow the novelists and comic book writers to go hog wild. Best case scenario: both continue, but causes a confusing mess when people have to figure out which show belongs to which reality, and thus which past events apply. There's also the fact that if future "original universe" Trek follows the backstory the writers established with the Star Trek Countdown comic... well, without getting into specifics, they left a pretty damn big dent in the universe. Not that the repercussions of it couldn't be interesting to see. Silly scenario: I've read an interview with the writers where they write off a change like this as being similar to other Trek time travels that didn't significantly change the present once things got back to normal. However, I find it a streeeeeeetch to believe that two realities with crazy different ~2260s could end up with identical ~2360s. Angel's advocate: from a purely sci-fi point of view the idea of having two parallel "main" realities in a franchise is interesting, but I doubt it works out that way. By defining this version of Star Trek as an altered version of the old one, it seems to put a limit on how crazy J.J. can get in the future. If some major event happens in a "Star Trek II" a few years down the line, the obvious question will be: Why didn't that happen in the original universe? Or did something like it happen that we just never saw? Or is it a result of the changes to the timeline, again going to show how having a similar ~2360s would be crazy? If they really want to go whole hog, mightn't a real reboot have worked out better? No doubt, in the parallel reality where that happens that Josh is pretty pissed about that happening, but at least it would give them free reign to do pretty much anything, without the need to take down the tower of existing Trek with it. I have sometimes wondered what Star Trek would be like if rather than maintaining one interconnected universe it was like Gundam, where various new ones pop up now and again with a few necessary elements like the mobile suits themselves holding the metafranchise together. Or there's always just the solution of... not going back to 40-year-old Trek. But for whatever reason they seemed to dismiss out of hand using anything but Kirk and company, with crazy statements that sound like "They've done that before, so the most original thing would be to NOT do something new!" Current Mood: anxious (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
5:33 pm	Aye, DS So as a Nintendo whore, it probably does not cause shock to hear that I purchased a DSi on launch day, April 5. What is more surprising is that it took me this long to see that its browser works with LJ. Unsurprisingly due to RAM, processor, and resolution realities, the DSi browser doesn't quite boast the compatibility of other game machine-based browsers. However, touch screen use is nice, especially for typing like this. No way in hell I'd go this long on PSP/PS3, and with Wii it would be slower. With an image of a QWERTY layout to use my stylus on, I feel like I'm back to old days of hunt and peck. Since my sites aren't so complicated, they view pretty well on here. Considering the possibility of making DS-friendlier mode of Garaph, though, that would do things like change default image sizes to a DSi browser-friendly 256x176. That done, being friendly to other resolutions (for PSP or whatever) would probably be an easy step. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
2:38 pm	@everyone re:twitter. what the hell. I've been not-understanding Twitter for quite some time, but now that for some reason it's all over the news my not-understanding of it is happening in a big way. I don't understand. Is it not just a complete subset of a regular blog's functionality? Hey, let's remove the body of text, remove the ability to have a comments section so people must respond on their own page, and limit the length of the subject line. This idea is so shit hot it deserves its own verb for when people are using it! (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
12:15 pm	"It's time to slay the Ding Bats!" So recently non-Congressperson Chester Kelsey convinced me to try Final Fantasy XI. Since our connection tends to suck for online gaming I figured massively online gaming would suck even more, so it's not something I ever even tried. But he had the disc to install from, so it didn't seem like wasted time. Of course, I then ended up having to do some bigass updates before I could even attempt to do anything anyway, BUT HEY. I sent him this email yesterday, but really there's nothing personal in there so it does a fine enough job of giving some initial thoughts. ---------- You seem to check your email infrequently, so you may hear this from me through other methods before reading this, but oh well. Finally got the updating finished last night, and have been playing it today. Though there's obvious lag, I'm surprised at how little connection trouble I've had. Considering how most online games are pretty bad with this connection, I figured something like this that depended on connecting so many people would work pretty poorly. But so far so good. I've put some hours in, but haven't gotten far in distance. Just the woods of San d'Oria. I occasionally /sea 'd for you today and didn't see you on. I was forgetting to use the "all" with it earlier, but I doubt you were playing at 8 AM. If you want to check for me, I'm Procht. Long O, soft ch. Not that the game cares how I imagine it's pronounced. Tinkering with the configuration improved things a lot. At first it was displaying things in a horribly shitty stretched low resolution, and I couldn't walk in a straight line with the mouse to save my life. Now things are much clearer, and I've got it using a USB game pad for walking around. Actually, since a lot of the time I end up playing using a joystick with my left hand and the mouse with the right, it feels a lot like using the wiimote and nunchuk. ---------- So... it works, surprisingly enough. Since then I've actually run across him in the game, and the lag is a bit more apparent when trying to cooperate with someone else. It always looks a little lame when my guy seems to stand around for a few seconds before pulling out his sword to help in a fight. And sometimes (especially in crowds) people will seem to hop around from location to location a lot rather than walking. But it works, and I haven't once been knocked off due to connection problems. Whether I'm still interested enough in a few weeks to pay a fee to continue... weeeell, there's a long time to go to decide such things. EDIT: By the way I'm on server Phoenix, if for some reason you needeed a San d'Oria-area low-level newbie thief in what would be considered ungodly hours for most Americans working first shift. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
2:46 am	Amazon Swindle 2 So the Kindle 2 is out, and Amazon is making a big deal out of it. But... I don't get it. It seems way the hell too expensive for what it does, and what it doesn't do. The thing costs $360. For that price, one could get a low-end laptop. What if you don't want to spend that much, or lug around something that won't fit in a pocket? Well, in 2005 I bought a PSP for $250, and they're now available for under $200. I use it for reading all the time. The problem is because Sony doesn't see it as a reading platform, my options are limited to public domain text and piracy. But with it I can read plain text or PDFs and bookmark wherever I want, along with all the other features the machine has. So what does the switch from a PSP to a Kindle at twice the price get a person? *Loss of COLOR in favor of 16-color grayscale (up from 4 on the original model) *Loss of self-provided LIGHT, which is one of my favorite features of reading on a machine *Loss of ability to play videos *Loss of ability to play PSP games or other homebrew programs *Gain of battery life *Gain of accessibility to an Internet-based store without needing to be near a Wi-Fi connection *Larger screen for less page flipping Not that the alternatives like Sony Reader are much better; I knock on Kindle because it's the most visible. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
9:13 am	MUUUURDER. Also dung. What a disturbing dream. Somehow myself, my mom, and her mom decided on a plan to somehow kill some people and get millions of dollars of insurance money. This is not a plan that makes a great deal of sense. Anyway, Mom and I got cold feet, but Grandma went through with it and was perturbed that she had to do all the work. I didn't think she was serious until I was browsing the news online and found out she'd murdered Stephen Colbert. That put me in a messed up mood until I was awake enough to realize its falsity. Dragon Warrior VII update: I recently hit 50 hours in the game. What does this mean? If you guessed I'm near the end, you perhaps haven't played a Dragon Quest game since the 1980s. If you guessed I'm still on disc 1 (of 2) and just ran into the last playable character mentioned in the instruction booklet, you are correct. Also I have yet to figure out why I occasionally find the item Dung around the game. There better be a Dung King or something where I can trade these in for cool items; knowing that my group of world-savers was hauling it around in a bag having to put up with it for no reason would be a real downer. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
8:15 am	Refero Iterum Emendo More lesser game impressions. The Dukes of Hazzard: Return of the General Lee: Not one I'd pick by myself, but a client at work is a big fan, and I've had cause to play some of it and watch him play more of it. The gameplay is not too surprising. They've created a virtual Hazzard County, and you spend most of the game trying to get from point A to point B to point C quick enough, usually driving the General Lee. What I think is most fun, though, is the voice. They got the surviving cast members to reprise their roles, so it's authentic. However, unlike the show it's possible for the heroes to fail. This gives them the chance to have some really silly upbeat dark humor acted out, though. A couple fun examples. *The player fails to stop Daisy Duke's out-of-control car from going off a cliff* Enos: No, not my Daisy! Not my sweet Daisy! *sobs* No, not Daisy! Luke: I hope Enos doesn't jump in, too! *Later on, the General Lee fails to make a jump and falls into a ravine* Balladeer: It looks like the Duke boys are headed to the pearly gates, for that big race in the sky. Endless Ocean: It's... harmless diving. If you want to just swim around in the ocean and check things out, this game works for that. Objectives are completely optional, and usually just there to make you go check out a new area. My biggest complaint is probably that for all the unrealism of always being completely safe, it still forces you to not venture far from your boat. Areas seamlessly stream so it's not like a technical issue; they just force you to stay within a certain radius. If you want to go elsewhere, you must head back to the surface, move the boat, and go back down. Samba de Amigo Wii: It works... sort of. In the practice modes, getting the hand positions right to be registered as up/sideways/down isn't bad. You can always see a circle over whichever you're currently on, so it's easy to adjust yourself until correct. While the circles are still there in the main mode, sometimes getting it right while having to shift from one position to another quickly just doesn't work as well as you'd hope. Luckily the game doesn't tend to demand 100% perfection to pass a stage, but it still kinda sucks to miss when you think you've done it right. However, that happens in every game, so part of it could just be my early suckiness. There's a calibration mode, which I thought might help this issue... but it seems to be worse. Rather than calibrating the control input, it feels like it's trying to calibrate the player. It'll tell you to put your controllers in a certain position. I might do that, hold still.... and it doesn't accept it, because that's not what it's expecting. In particular I had this problem with when it wanted me to point both controllers left. I ended up having to push the right controller at an angle that was beyond what came naturally. I understand that the wiimote is not a perfect tool, but this makes me curious as to how really hard it would be to make a better calibration. I've toyed with using it on PC before, and it's easy enough to get it to display the data it's getting from the accelerometers... I wonder if I could feed that out to another program and try to set up a calibration thing myself. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
12:01 pm	Iterum Emendo More game impressions. Bully: Scholarship Edition: I had a lot of fun with this one, but part of it I think is that I was... receptive. In the past year my gaming habits are pretty much a reverse of what they were a decade ago. The "heavy" stuff like RPGs and strategy games goes on the portable, while most of my home console stuff has been lighter stuff. Puzzles, music, Animal Crossing, Endless Ocean type stuff. So I guess I kinda forget how much I can enjoy a meaty home console experience until one slaps me in the face, like Fable did a few months back. I was expecting something young-GTA-ish of this game, and that's [i]vaguely[/i] correct. It focuses on different things, though. I can suck pretty bad at games, and with GTA I can pretty easily run into missions that I have trouble passing, or at least are more hassle than I'm willing to put into it at a given time. However, there's still a lot of value from just hopping into a random car, listening to some tunes, and traveling the city seeing what mayhem can be wrought. Bully doesn't very much excel in that regard. Cop chases could be quite lengthy in GTA, but in Bully it's usually over pretty quickly. Either you outrun them pretty easily after a "minor" offense like fighting or vandalism, outrun them and find a hiding place with a bit more trouble for a "major" offense like attacking an adult/child/female, or are "Busted" the moment they touch you after one of the major offenses. The music is also very much like a normal games, rather than GTA where there are many stations with all kinds of music, fake talk, and fake commercials to enjoy. However, Bully does provide missions that are fun, and much easier. Perhaps a bit below even my needs, as most of them I could finish on the first attempt. But it provides variety and there's plenty to do, so I felt like I was making progress. However, I haven't had the game a week, have already beat the main game, and overall have over 80% completion. So while this is a burst of fun, it's something I'll go through and not have much reason to just come back to and mess around. There are also classes to attend. You can generally skip these unless you're Busted during class time, at which point you're forced to attend. However, they're short, generally slightly to moderately amusing, and allow you to earn extras. Some are pretty useless and give you extra t-shirts to pick from. Others give you better taunting/apologizing abilities, let you see collectible items on the map, give you increasing health benefits from kissing--things like that. I never played the other versions of the game so I can't compare to the original pad controls, but the wiimote controls work quite nicely. Waggle and pointer are used well, and button assignment is generally handled well. The only thing I don't much like is that for bikes/vehicles "Go" is the A button, while "Break/Reverse" is up on the d-pad; not exactly right next to each other. However, more convenient buttons were already used up. Fighting with waggle is pretty satisfying--as long as you're using the controls in a righty position. Nunchuk waggle controls left punch (or kick if the opponent is on the ground) while remote waggle controls right punch. Timing of these and additional application of Z or B buttons adds variety to attacks. Pointer makes aiming your slingshot or other projectiles simple. Well, at least after you've completed a few gym classes so your aim is steady. Final Fantasy IV DS: HEY, I say to me. ISN'T IT A BAD IDEA TO HAVE ANOTHER JRPG GOING AT THE SAME TIME YOU'RE STILL PROBABLY NOT HALFWAY THROUGH DRAGON WARRIOR VII. Yeah, but the PSP battery sucks and I had a few hours away from home to kill, so it sounded like the funnest option. I'm a few hours in (just past Damcyan, going for the antlion) and this is pretty impressive. Final Fantasy III took an NES game, flashed it up, and tried to add a [i]little[/i] drama to the story. Final Fantasy IV already had a lot more going for it on the story side, so the same "flash it up" process along with a bit of voice acting takes it a lot further; the presentation is really great, and finally takes FF IV out of 1991. The only negative is that Dark Knight Cecil seems a lot less of a threatening figure. Rather than a simple sprite, he's a thin polygonal man with a soft voice and a pale mouth showing. It also makes better use of the two screens than FF III DS. Rather than one screen going black during battle, FF IV gives one screen to the actual battle view, and the other to character HP/MP, battle menus, and other descriptive text. In dungeons the bottom screen shows a map--but only as much as you've uncovered of the given area. Once you've completed a map, you get a few items as a prize. Patapon: This is a weird one. I've just played it in little spurts so far, so while it's got some neat ideas it's quite impossible to tell whether in the end I'll deem it shallow or genius. The basic idea is that you indirectly control a group of characters with properly-timed drum beats. Different beat patterns give them different commands. Attack, defend, move on, things like that. Keep your timing right and don't fumble your buttons, and they'll get further bonuses as your combo goes up. With gained money and items, you can improve your group of followers. So it's pretty fun at the beginning. Questions remain, though. How many command patterns will I learn? Will it become a pain to remember what pattern I want to use in a tense moment? Without the gimmick of drum patterns, would the game be very shallow with just a few command choices to give to the entire group? (Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2009
11:50 am	"What's My Appeal?" I am often most proud of myself when I think of something completely ridiculous, then follow through with it. Using a wagon wheel as a Wii accessory, wrapping a gift into a ball of yarn, things like that. However, in recent months this has turned slightly more expensive and stupid. Sometimes the ridiculous idea has to do with a domain... which I can then get for a year for $10. Since the site hillaryis44.org is balls nuts and hillaryis45.org is "reserved for 2012", in August I made sure to grab hillaryis46.org, though I haven't come up with much decent to do with it. Most recently, I decided to get a joke domain for my brother. This then connects back to some article I read in the mid-90s about movie names turned URL, and how Independence Day's weird shorthand of ID4 allowed for a memorable shorthand. The article mentioned how ridiculous something like theenglishmanwhowentupahillbutcamedownthemountain.com would be. Weeeeell, Zach is a pretty big Hugh Grant fan, something which I give him much ribbing over. So yes, we are now the powers in charge of TheEnglishmanWhoWentUpAHillButCameDownAMountain.com. Originally it just had the text and this image of Zach dressed as John McCain with Snit appreciating him, but it's actually becoming a bit more interesting. Having gone through our old digital images I picked out several dozen old Zach images, cropped/resized them, and have it randomly pick one. Not all are bad pictures, but they weren't exactly picked for being flattering, either. Current Music: Rolo Tony Brown Town (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
2:42 pm	Little. Blue. Different. So I got a new music player recently. Multiple reasons why and why I picked this one in particular. 1) To upgrade my old one will be a pain in the ass. Three or four years back I bought a 20 GB Creative Zen Touch. That's still plenty of space. However... I can no longer transfer anything to or from it. You see, to use it with Vista, I have to upgrade the firmware. Okay. But since it can't connect to Vista... one must do this upgrade from an XP computer. Okay. But all the computers I or near family use are Vista, or in a couple outdated cases Me. This makes upgrading it a pain in the ass. Though I'd still like to transfer some stuff off of it that I'm not sure I have saved elsewhere. 2) I haaaate the Zen Touch's touch bar. It's been a pain to use since day one and I never fully adjusted to it. However, since it was a decent price (for the time) and played the music like it was supposed to, it was just something I lived with. However, when there are other problems, this one just adds to the pile. 3) Amazon was having a sale on Creative media players. It's not what I ended up going for, but that the prices were so decent made me realize that getting a replacement would be cheaper than I realized, so I started hunting around for other things. Video was a feature to a greater or lesser extent on most, but was not a priority. Even those leaning on video strengths were worse in this area than the PSP I'm already using for video. 4) As you may have noticed from recent posts, I'm on a bit of a microSD kick lately. So seeing there were some players where one could get a cheap low capacity base unit but beef it up with a microSD, that seemed pretty cool to me. Also the ability to directly transfer things to/from microSD could prevent future problems like the Zen goofiness. No forced need to upgrade the firmware if I can just transfer files straight to a standard card. So I ended up getting a 4 GB Sansa Fuze Blue for about $70. Though once I get some 8 or 16 GB card the total will probably tip over $100. Other than being able to transfer things to it, other improvements this has over my old player include... *Plays more file formats like Ogg Vorbis *FM radio *Scroll wheel and buttons soooo much nicer than the touch bar. *Color screen *It is tiny Here's an image of my previous player, though without a frame of reference it's hard to appreciate the size difference, and it's impossible to see the thickness difference. Well, OK, maybe it's worth looking up some hand+player pics to make things a bit clearer. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
10:26 am	What's old is newish again. Dragon Warrior VII: It's Dragon Warrior. Pretty straightforward thus far, but even without hearing reports of it being over 100 hours long I can tell I've got a loooong way to go merely by how many incomplete maps there are in the ruins. One thing that seems missing so far is roaming the world, but at least at this point I'm still rebuilding the world. But each section seems mostly discrete with its own little land, then off to the next. The only trouble is if you miss a map shard somewhere, you won't get to that next area, and unless you've got a FAQ for reference it could be bloody well anywhere. I've only had to look up a missing piece once in 15 hours, though, so that hasn't been too much a problem. Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions: Final Fantasy Tactics is one of my favorite games ever. This feels like mostly a quick port. A couple years back the original FFT was my first test of playing PS1 games on PSP, though I didn't play very far into it, but it's surprising how similar the PSP version looks. With the larger resolution of the PSP I was expecting the area shown on screen to increase, which is true to an extent... but it also has the slightly zoomed-in look of a PS1 game being slightly blown up to fit the height of a PSP screen. It's like instead of expanding the game from 320x240 (-ish) to 480x272, they instead expanded it to 424x240 and then stretched it to 480x272, so everything looks a bit blurry. This was somewhat anticipated and even welcome for certain aspects of this heavily spritey game compared to what PS1 did with resized sprites, but... couldn't you have at least redone the text and icons, guys, or left them at their original sizes? Having every bit of plain text in the game look blurry is baaaaaad. There are a few other possible port issues, though I'd need to go back to the original to compare and confirm. It seems like some sound effects I was expecting aren't there (the end of Gafgarion's main attack in the first battle sounded too silent), and there are some parts that seem to suffer from unnecessary slowdown... but mostly it's just the PS1 game in a new shell. What about the redone translation? you ask. Well, so far so good, but I'm just a few battles in. I haven't been to the tutorial, so I don't know how the infamously bad play tips come across in this version. While I was expecting the new translation, though, I wasn't expecting such broad changes to proper nouns. Algus is now Argath, for instance. I believe Gafgarion used to have just one f, but he's now Gaffgarion. Balbanes is now Balbaneth. Lots of things like that to get used to. The new CG looks pretty great. It's got a style very in keeping with the original game art. The only thing is that it seems choppy at times. I don't know if this is a side effect of the ripping and slight compression the game went through before being put on memory stick or if this was always there, though. There are some multiplayer modes added in, but there's even less chance of me ever getting to use them than using the similar modes in FFTA and FFTA2. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
9:45 am	PSP + 1 + 1 So I recently got a 4 gigabyte card for my PSP. Going to that from a 1 gigabyte card seems almost as big an upgrade as going from the 32 MB pack-in to a 1 gigabyte card years back. With the 1 GB card I was able to fit on a decent amount of stuff, but eventually got a set of things that I considered good go-to emulators/ROMs/other homebrew that I didn't want to be shuffling off, which left the amount of space free for putting on more temporary stuff rather small. Doing PS1 emulation or ripping PSP games from UMD to memory stick was pretty much out of the question. However, with quadruple the space I've currently got everything I did before, plus rips of PS1 Dragon Warrior VII, PSP PaRappa the Rapper, PSP Final Fantasy Tactics, and still more than a gigabyte free. Plenty of room to temporarily store a few episodes each of TV series I'm currently watching through. ---------- Actually, it wasn't a 4 gigabyte Memory Stick Pro Duo I got, but a 4 gigabyte microSD card that came with several adapters, including one allowing it to be used in MSPD slots. I'm still pretty amazed at how much storage is available with such a small physical presence (Wikipedia says 11mm x 15mm x 1mm), and at cheap prices. This one was about $25, but most of the cost I considered due to the adapters. Look around and you can find such things on their own for less than $10. I'm curious as to how much further these things will drop in the next few years, and what it will mean for future gaming systems. If rewriteable cards are getting this cheap, would similar non-writeables be even cheaper? PSP using discs to get up to 1.8 gigabytes of storage for a portable seemed pretty huge a few years back. DS cards getting up to 256 megabytes by now is pretty decent for what the DS is. But will their successors be using small cheap cards that have more storage space than a DVD as a standard? Could even consoles be using the bigger brothers? Not that Blu-ray should be very expensive by then, but there are still some advantages to fewer moving parts. I've heard someone suggest that for cost reasons they think all the next generation of systems will go the Wii route with some built-in flash storage while allowing further expansion for more space. Wii's half gig of storage is pretty pitiful, but even including a few dozen gigabytes for the base units should be quite cheap next time, and be plenty of storage for the base user. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
12:20 pm	Dragon Carrier Written December 29: So I finished up Golden Sun: The Lost Age, freeing up a play slot for another oldschool RPG. In this case, Dragon Warrior VII emulated on PSP. Even on the go, though, I think this is the most console-y Dragon Quest experience I've yet had. I, II, and III I played on Game Boy Color, and they all had the one-use instant saves so you could stop playing without seeking out a king/church to save as in the originals. IV, V, and VI I played on amateur emulators (the last two on PSP), so I could always do a save state if I wanted to quit. Since I'm playing VII through finagled use of Sony's official PS1-on-PSP emulator, though, it doesn't add in a save state option, and VII didn't have the save-anywhere feature to begin with. So no quitting at arbitrary times without losing progress it seems. Last night it wouldn't let me walk out of an area without progressing, and there was no save immediately available, so my choices were either to continue on or lose progress to use PSP for other things like watching video or reading text. Since I couldn't quit, I spent much more time than normal working on what I took to be a crazy puzzle. Took me forever to realize I was only looking at half the situation; once I looked at the related room things clicked pretty quickly. At any rate, with my game clock at something like 3.5 hours now, I've had one non-random battle, so I've made some progress. ---------- Written December 31: PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION. As I have recently pointed out, I have a ton of DS games. To the point where it starts to become a logistical problem. Carry a fraction of my games about and lose instant access? Carry them all around and have a hell of a time finding a particular one? In practice it was somewhere in between; not a good situation. However, most game case solutions I saw tended to be puny (holding 2-6 games) or over-the-top (also holding styli and GBA games). However, Hori's Game Card Case 16 is just right. It has two "pages" that hold DS games 2x2, front and back, with a plastic shell around it all. 2x2x2x2 = 16 games, in a form factor just a bit larger than a closed GBASP. I ordered one as a test, but will now be ordering several more. Now the only decision is how to split things up. For the one I've got so far I decided to put my 8 Square Enix games in order of release on one side, with the 4 Ace Attorney games on the other side. It's available in clear/black/pink variations, though not all seem to be equally in stock at all times. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 20th, 2008
3:50 pm	Zoom: Double Speed And DS takes the lead! One that I imagine it will keep for quite some years, as long as I'm not putting downloaded purchases on that list. (Comment on this)