John Zeitler

I often say that I’ve had a busy day, but today was among the most productive I’ve had in weeks. This is mostly because I managed to find a cheap, squat portable grill and fired it up for some outdoors culinary experiments. They went remarkably well, as I made dinner for the night and lunches for most of the rest of the week. I dare say it was even fun, in its own way, and I was looking forward to doing it again, probably with the veggie hot dogs I picked up while I was out.

And then it started raining… and it’s scheduled to rain pretty much the whole week through. So yeah.

At 3:36p, I defeated Yami, the final boss of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom for the Wii. This is the eleventh game cleared in 2010. Thirty-nine games remain to be cleared for the 50/2010 challenge.

At 7:33a, I defeated Red, the Kanto Champion, in Pokemon SoulSilver for the DS. This is the tenth game cleared in 2010. Forty games remain to be cleared for the 50/2010 challenge, and two main-line Pokemon games remain for the Three Ribbons 2010 challenge.

A lot of folks question my fond remembrance of the Dreamcast and its library of games. “It wasn’t that great,” they’ll say, or perhaps “the PS2 was better and had more support.” Both of those are, in point of fact, true… but at the same time, there were a few titles that just didn’t get brought over from the machine that I think should have. For whatever reason, I’ve often felt that the system’s version of the venerable Tetris game, The Next Tetris Online, was and is the best implementation of the game; Grandia II was ported terribly to platforms other than its native DC, rendering it virtually unplayable anywhere else; it took nearly ten years for a decent port of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 to be released; it has the only known console port of Railroad Tycoon II, etc. etc. The point is, for each one of these games, the argument that it has to be on the DC becomes increasingly subjective. When you get to some of its exclusives, like Evolution, Espionagents, or Super Magnetic Neo, you can find some genuine crap (even if Espionagents has a certain charm to it).

I still think the Dreamcast has an important part in gaming history. Even though it died early, it had some good games that got ported over, some that didn’t get ported over, and it launched a series or two that endure to this day. Without the Dreamcast, the 2K Sports series would not exist– they were originally Sega’s in-house sports developers. The DC also played host to the home adaptations of Pop’n Music in Japan, leading the way for the Playstation and PS2 versions. Power Stone created a genre of brawler; Rez introduced Tetsuya Mizuguchi to the world; the first console versions of Unreal Tournament, Quake III, and (almost) Half-Life showed up on the DC… the list goes on.

Really, this is all tangential to my basic point– that the Dreamcast, while not a particularly spectacular system, holds a place in my heart worth the effort needed to collect for it. Now, pardon me, but I’ve had this game of Tetris on pause for far too long…

Long weekend ahead, folks, and that means I get some time off to do what I enjoy: playing games and writing. I did manage to reclaim a couple Dreamcast games this past week, and as a result I’m overjoyed, so there’s probably going to be a post about those soon. ‘Till then.

Opponent: “So, you’re a Mechanized Guard player. That implies you have a higher valuing of human life than the average Imperial Guard commander.”
Me: “Or it means I just like having a crapton of tanks on the board.”
Opponent: “…..”
Me: (huge grin)

This is what I did tonight. Well, this and laundry, but the laundry’s not on YouTube.

It’s a universally known fact that if I decide I want to write up a long post on a current-event topic, the only time that I’ll have to write said post is long after it’s relevant or even timely. So I’m saving the Lost post for an upcoming, to-be-scheduled Essay Week and calling it a night.

I make no promises as to the content of a post for tomorrow, save that there will be one.

Another long day today, folks, but tomorrow I should be back into my normal schedule. That long post about Lost and TV sci-fi will come then.

I have a big long spiel percolating about the Lost finale and how it’s effected an era of television sci-fi that’s unprecedented since the 70s.

It’s going to have to wait until after I get through spending 50% of my waking hours at work.

(Oh, and yes, I damn well did use the right “affect/effect” word there. To “effect” something as a verb means to spawn or to provide impetus for. If you effect a change on something, you have also affected it, and the net effect is not an affectation, but an effective act.)