John Zeitler

I have been dealing with the stress of the situation that I’m in at the moment by trying to keep myself busy enough that I feel like I’m being productive, even if I’m not actually being so. To that end, I’m probably making some pretty effective use of the weekend; I’m clearing out a few Xbox achievements I’ve been meaning to get to, including some Rock Band ones for vocals and guitar, and maybe actually getting to the end of Time Pilot. This is being done in between painting some miniatures I’ve been procrastinating on.

Even still, I’d love nothing more than to not have quite this much free time at home…

At 8:46p, I completed Incident 16, the final stage of Mighty Switch Force for the 3DS. This is the third game cleared in 2012. Thirty-seven games remain for the 2012 goal.

In an attempt to try to reverse some of the inevitable and irreversible focus decay that the site has been suffering, Kotaku introduced Kotaku Core recently. This is a secondary feed for the site that basically filters out all of the “this isn’t video game news, but it’s related to your interests, we hope” posts that had been littering the main feed.

It’s funny to note that this was unnecessary, as I’d already managed it a year and a half ago when I dumped Kotaku out of my RSS feeds; but perhaps stranger still is that it happened so soon after the departure of certain individuals from the leadership of the site. Makes you wonder.

Submitted without comment.

At 8:00p, I completed the final puzzle in Professor Layton and the Last Specter for the Nintendo DS. This is the first game cleared in 2012. Thirty-nine games remain for the 2012 goal. Final clear time is 10 hours, 52 minutes with 117 puzzles solved.

So, today seems to be rather more open than I had initially anticipated. I’m not surprised, of course, but it does leave me in the interesting position of not really having that much direction for the evening and weekend. I do have some plans, though.

Before that, I should probably mention that I finally got around to seeing How To Train Your Dragon last night. It’s a gorgeous movie, and extremely well-paced. I had some serious issues with the voice acting– seriously, why does every Viking sound Scottish? Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson are great actors, but c’mon, there’s a freaking limit. And I have to wonder why Hiccup sounded like he was thirty-seven. But, in truth, all that was forgiveable by the fact that it was just so wonderfully written for the most part. The progress of Hiccup and Toothless’ friendship never feels forced and never feels one-sided; you can see that they’re genuine friends by the end of the film. The rest of the village children… not so much; Astrid in particular does a personality-180 at such dizzying speed that it completely wrecked her character. Still, the final battle was suitably impressive, and its resolution a nice change of pace from most other kids’ fantasy these days. I’d heard rumblings that there was to be a spinoff television series and possibly more movies, both moves I’d greatly support.

Speaking of well-written children’s fantasy, apparently Season 2 of Wakfu is also well underway. So that’s good. It’s appalling to me that there’s been no talk of a North American localization for the series, even as Square Enix is handling the MMO. Appalling, I tell you.

Anyway. Last April, after Tekkoshocon was over, I took on what I called the “Rush to Judgment”– a pair of posts where I went through a dozen anime series’ first episodes, and wrote down first impressions. This was the second Rush– the first one had been for video games, which unfortunately didn’t work out so well. Anyway, this weekend I’ll be doing a new Rush with ten series I haven’t seen the full first episodes of. It’s worth noting that, of the twelve I watched last year, I only got through three full series (Baccano!, Slayers Next, and Ah! My Goddess Season 2), so a 25% rate isn’t that bad.

The list for this year is as follows:
Day One: Key The Metal Idol, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Strike Witches, Nerima Daikon Brothers, Gao Gai Gar
Day Two: Slayers Try, Haibane Renmei, xxxHolic, Squid Girl, Shattered Angels

The posts should be up on Saturday and Sunday; I’ll likely be liveblogging them, so if you catch the first RSS feed update, be sure to come back later in the day.

Next, I set out my list of games that I was going to try to get through during 2012. I’m shooting for a goal of 40 Clears again, and I hope to get through one or more of them before the Tekkoshocon Flyer Rally on the 14th. I’ve also set up ten additional “Extra Credit” games. The thing is, fully 25 of the total games on the list are long-form RPGs or SRPGs, so I’m not entirely sure how I’ll manage to get even half of the number of expected clears. I have a backup, though, what I’m calling the “Trump Card”: Demon’s Souls. If I manage to complete that nightmare of a game, I’ll call the year an unqualified success. But first, though, I’m starting to get deeper into the new Professor Layton title.

As an addendum: there’s someone in my apartment complex with a 3DS as well. The only reason I know this is because I managed to get a StreetPass tag from this person when I left my machine at home in the charging cradle. This is a remarkable coincidence, I think. I kind of wonder if I know this person… probably not.

Finally, in addition to the nerdery nonfiction writing, I’m also going to take some time to revise some of my older fiction outlines in order to prep them for eventual rewriting. I took a look back at the very first NaNo I attempted to write, a fantasy story, and found that, while it was flawed, it was still salvageable; I just need to think back about some of the ideas that I’ve had in the meantime and see which are worth welding onto the original plot, and to see what bits that I patched on are no longer necessary. I also want to take another stab at fleshing out the sci-fi universe I was working on, and seeing if it should or already does fit in with the universe set forth in “A Civics Lesson” and “Frangible Time”. Actually, writing that last chapter of “Frangible Time” might be worth doing, too– likely in February.

Anyway, that’s the plan for this weekend. Things are going to get very busy very fast with regards to the rest of my activities, so this may be one of the last few weekends I get to myself before Tekko prep causes all hell to break loose. I intend to enjoy it.

Today, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 22000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “I’m Batman (10G)” from Batman: Arkham City. My current count for achievements, according to the Xbox 360 dashboard, is 1307 individual achievements across 145 games, totaling 22050 points. The average value of each achievement is 16.87 points, with an average count of 152.07 points per game (the Xbox Dashboard reports 21.27% gamerscore completion and 27.3% achievement completion, with seven fully-completed games). It took 38 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 21005 on November 22nd, 2011. 63 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 1045 points, with an average value of 16.59 points, and a collection rate of one achievement approximately every 14 hours, 28 minutes, and 35 seconds.

At 12:55a, I unlocked the final prize blade in Fruit Ninja HD for the IPad. This is the twenty-fifth game cleared in 2011. Ten games remain for the 2011 challenge.

The year gone by has been… difficult for my gaming hobby. I’ve often railed against the idea that the strident cries of those individuals who feel the need to bitch and moan on various gaming blogs about every little thing should speak for all gamers, but it’s become increasingly obvious that either my opinion is wrong, or I’m fighting a losing battle.

The problem with just ignoring comments on the blogs has become akin to that which has plagued the comics companies– the inmates are running the asylum, and gaming news blogs are increasingly inflammatory. It’s not a matter of targeting one platform for ridicule, but the fact that the tone of the blogs have become dramatically more negative over the past few years. What makes it worse is the tacit approval of this trend while at the same time people decry that sort of behavior from mainstream news. I’ve even seen that behavior in the same damn comment– approving of the game blog’s bias while denouncing Fox News. This profoundly disturbs me.

However, there’s another aspect to it. I took a look at the trends for the games that I bought, and found that in many cases, by the time I got around to playing them, they were in the bargain bin. This was after buying the game at or near their launch date. I defend doing so in the past by supporting games that I wanted to do well, but it’s to a point where I don’t think it’s really worth the extra expenditure. Things happening in the foreground and the background are putting a little bit of a strain on my budgeting, and something’s gotta give.

The fact that my backlog is currently longer than the list of games that I’ve completed in my entire life to date only had a little to do with it. The fact that I even have a backlog notwithstanding.

So, in 2012, I’m declaring an amnesty program on my gaming purchases. I’ve been talking about this plan in certain circles, and I’m pretty much ready to set it in writing. I’m not going to buy any video games for myself in 2012 with two exceptions, and I’m limiting myself to a strict interpretation of my “paint it first” plan for miniatures figures. Board games won’t be restricted, per se, but there’s not much that I really want right now short of the next expansion for Super Dungeon Explore (which might actually count more as a minis game). I’m also shooting for 40 Game Clears again, even though I fell short this year. And, regardless, I’m unsubscribing from the gaming blogs’ RSS feeds on the 1st.

Note that I said “for myself”. My work with Tekkoshocon is as a purchasing agent and asset locator– my whole job right now is buying up games and equipment for the game room, under the expectation that I’ll be paid back later on. So, any buying I do will strictly be for the Tekko crew, and there’s some tricks up my sleeve that I can use to try to mitigate how far in the hole I get. More on that later.

But I did also say that there were two exceptions, and I think they’re reasonable: my birthday, and the end of summer. I’m restricting those to used games, though, and only if I’ve beaten at least 10 games since the last buy.

This is going to be a really hard thing to stick to, because there are actually a few games that I’m looking forward to in 2012: Kid Icarus Uprising, Metal Gear Rising, and others. Plus, missing out on immediate E3 news and the WiiU launch is going to sting. But, if I do stick to it, I’m confident I’ll be a lot less stressed about being up-to-date. Besides, being a year behind will save me money for other projects, and even if I don’t stick to it, I’ll have made a significant dent in the backlog, and won’t feel so overwhelmed by it.

That’s the plan, and we’ll see if it holds. Ciao, folks– more in a day or two.

At 10:32p, I defeated Dr. Robotnik, the final boss of Sonic CD for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade. This is the twenty-fourth game cleared in 2011. Eleven games remain for the 2011 challenge.