John Zeitler

Gonna have to keep this short because I didn’t get to sleep until late last night– or rather this morning– but I did go see Iron Man 2, which was awesome, and I managed to snag a copy of Picross 3D for the DS as well. If you’re into puzzle games at all, or have a DS and a commute or some time to kill now and again, this game is well worth the budget-level layout (and I was very surprised to see Nintendo priced it at $20). Be warned, though, it’s really, really hard.

Later, kids.

So I spent this night in anticipation of the “lucky” Final Fantasy… by watching the “unlucky” one, The Spirits Within. I still maintain it wasn’t a bad movie, just one that (like, well, most movies) over-promised and under-delivered. The project was ambitious and unfortunately ten years ago the tech just wasn’t there. It is now, which is why we have stuff like the gorgeous (yet, in terms of story concepts, absolutely wretched) Avatar.

That’s part of why I can’t bring myself to hate TSW or Avatar nearly as much as I “should”. To me, those films represent technological leaps that might be a bit over-reaching, but at least they’re trying something different. Would I prefer that a good (or, hell, let’s split the difference and say “not awful”) story go along with them? Of course. But the thing is, if you can only put your money in the writing or the visuals, while writing might get you Oscars, the visuals are going to get you butts in seats.

Let me say this, though. I don’t hate James Cameron. I can’t. The guy directed Aliens. I mean, that alone should be good for at least two or three stinkers. Then he did The Abyss and Terminator 2. The guy’s earned his right to write obnoxious furry wish-fulfillment, if you ask me.

In 2002, I started what would eventually become the capitalized “The Collection” from some pretty humble beginnings: I had a single “CD tower” of Playstation 1 and 2 games, probably about four feet tall and barely a foot wide. I also had a handful of boxed up retro systems, and maybe a dozen or so anime DVDs (with a modest amount of VHS tapes as well). Obviously, I expanded; as most of you all know, I also had to sell off roughly 95% of my games and anime during a downturn between jobs. Today, the Collection is the largest it’s ever been, and it’s in no danger of having to be sold off anytime soon.

I don’t like to brag– particularly not about stuff that I own– so that’s not the purpose of this post. Most folks don’t see their piles of video games and movies and suchlike as collections– they see them, primarily, as just “stuff”. If they want to get fancy, they may refer to it as a “library”. Really, though, these are cop-outs: if one is really serious about becoming a collector, then there can never be a point where you just have a pile of discs. You have to start early, so that it doesn’t get away from you. I’ve been throwing around terms like the Reclamation List and all that for years now without really explaining the thought process behind it all; I figure, now that the majority of the work is behind me, it would be a good time to take a look at how I built up even this modest collection and how I go about expanding it.

I should note, though, that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to be a collector of DVDs, games, whatever. That’s fine. It’s not something that everyone can do or has an interest in doing. The thing is, of course, that some folks out there do want to be collectors, and there’s some stuff that I wish I knew when I was setting out. That’s the purpose of this post (actually, by the time I’m done, it’ll probably feel more like a lecture).

So, without further delay, let’s start with ( The Ten Commandments Of Collecting… » )

In the end, taking up media collecting as a serious hobby can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be really nerve-wracking if you’re not prepared for it. Obviously, I’m not setting myself up as an authority or anything, but these are all just stuff I’ve found out since starting the Reclamation project. It all comes down to what you get out of it; if you want it just to have it, or if you want it to watch/read/play it all at some point.

Okay, so I now have the three new pieces of furniture I wanted in order to do the living room redesign, and to make the best use of the space (plus to open up room for the third, and very probably final for this apartment, media shelf once the Collection warrants it, which is probably going to be around January or so). Not only did I employ mad spatial estimation skills to get all the crap into my car in more or less one trip, I also rocked the raw nerd strength needed to get the boxes down the stairs to my apartment. (Those of you just joining me, this means pretty much the exact opposite of how badass I made it sound.)

I like putting things together, so ordinarily I would say that the hard part is over, and the fun was just starting. Unfortunately if I did that, I would be a liar. Y’see, I’ve kinda, well, lived in my living room for the past three years, and in all that time I still haven’t taken down the folding table that I’m currently using as a computer desk. The only improvement, really, has been that I replaced my very sketchy console-rack-bridge-thing with a proper media stand at the beginning of the year. As a result– and a natural consequence, completely justified by my being a single guy– there’s a lot of stuff here that needs to be organized and put away into my small and nearly empty storage space across the hall. I initially thought I was going to be able to just do the rearrangement all on Sunday without any stress. Yeah, that might not be happening. I suppose that if I’m really lucky and handy with getting the stuff packed away tomorrow night (read: I don’t decide to just blow it off and go see Ponyo like I had originally planned) I could still have a workable living room on Sunday evening. The odds of this actually happening are ridiculously slim.

Ah well. It’ll get done eventually. In the meantime, listen to the sweet serenade of the origin of my new desk.

Okay. Really, I’m going to bed early. Fortunately I have someone who can take calls in my absence tonight…

…uh, on second thought, maybe you’d be better off e-mailing me, and I’ll get you back in the morning.

I finished up watching Moon Phase last night and this morning. Overall I liked the series, but overall it had some serious problems with pacing and staying even-toned. The constant whiplash between comedy and terrifying situations– for example, pans dropping on peoples’ heads during one of the major fights near the end– made it difficult to pay too much attention to it. However, taken as a whole, the series has some great moments, and it’s acted very well by everyone involved. If you can take the back-and-forthing, it’s worth a look. As I’d mentioned before I unfortunately trailed off, Full Metal Panic is next on the list. There’s certainly some whiplash involved there, but overall it sounds pretty darn good.

I’m also considering, once I’m through more of the anime list, going through Babylon 5 again– I’ve been watching bits of it here and there since last summer, only getting me near the end of Season 2, but it’s been a good use of time regardless.

The Collection page needs a serious update… however, I’m probably going to hold off on that until I’ve got everything documented in Delicious Library. What worries me most is that I may need to, eventually, add a third shelf– which requires not just putting it together, but likely a complete re-layout of my living room. I’ve honestly been meaning to do that for a while anyway, but I’d expected that I’d be in a different apartment when laying it out again… Ah well.

Catch you folks tomorrow.

I’m approaching the halfway point of Tales of Vesperia, and it’s still as interesting and fun as it was on day one. The battle system hasn’t yet worn out its welcome (though I expect it might after this weekend’s major binge), the characterization is only getting stronger, and the whole thing just feels very well done. If I’m lucky, I might be able to wrap the whole thing up in another ten or fifteen hours, and move on to… well, what I’ll play next, I’m not certain. I want to get back to the movies, I want to go on an anime bender… There’s still a ton of things I want to do, and very little time that I can spend on them. At least for now.

Catch you folks later.

Player V: Wanna play Tales?
Player J: No, man, I don’t play 3D.
Player V: What, you casual?
Player J: No, I ain’t casual, I just don’t dig on polygons, that’s all.
Player V: Why not?
Player J: Polygons are blocky and live in the uncanny valley. I stay out of the uncanny valley.
Player V: But Legendia is goooood. Skies of Arcadia is goooood.
Player J: Yeah, and Haze might be Game of the Year, but I wouldn’t know because I ain’t playin’ the #$@#$er. Polygons are crude and unnatural. That makes them ugly. I won’t play anything that don’t have enough sense to look right.
Player V: How about Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy’s got polygons.
Player J: I won’t play Final Fantasy either.
Player V: Yeah, but do you consider Final Fantasy an ugly game?
Player J: I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ugly, but there’s room for improvement. But Final Fantasy’s got a history. A legacy goes a long way.
Player V: Ah, so by that rationale, if Tales had a better history in the West, it would cease to be an ugly game.
Player J: Well, we’d have to be talking about one long #%#$ing history. I mean, it’d have to have a legacy ten times longer than that Pong on Atari, you know what I’m sayin’?

Well, all right, so maybe I’m not nearly as good a screenwriter as Tarantino. But the point is still in there, a little. I don’t really consider myself a graphics whore by any stretch of the imagination, but from what I recall, I was underwhelmed by Tales of Legendia’s graphics when I first put it into the PS2 some months ago. Now, granted, the game is old, and I have been very spoiled… witness Eternal Sonata, Tales of Vesperia, hell, even Tales of Symphonia. Legendia was in that weird transitional period between the PS1 and the PS2, when developers were coming to grips with the fact that they didn’t have to have blocky, chunky models anymore. Also, as a reference, I put in Grandia around New Year’s. The graphics were crude even by the PS1′s standards, but writ large on an LCD widescreen, the 3D segments looked positively abysmal. Contrast that to the recent spat of remakes and rereleases. Chrono Trigger is largely unchanged on the DS, and yet its graphics look no better or worse than they did thirteen years ago. They’ve been outpaced greatly in terms of animation, to be sure, but even that’s forgiveable as very few purely 2D games of late get it right, to say nothing of being made (Castle Crashers is almost good enough, but not quite– it’s still largely Flash).

I suppose it’s just me, but maybe I am really spoiled by all the more recent games, to the point where I don’t think I could manage to go through Tales of Legendia, Grandia II, or even any of the old Breath of Fire games without the graphics irritating me. I don’t hold that to be a good thing. What might happen is that once I get through Tales of Vesperia, I may have to go all the way back to the PS1 for my next game just so I’m not used to such a high bar.

Vesperia, in fact, got me thinking about this. I remember looking at the graphics for Final Fantasy X way back in the day and saying, “OK, that has to be pre-rendered.” Nowadays even the pre-rendered scenes from FFX are being outpaced by what’s being generated in real-time. I started wondering if there really was an upper limit to how realistic the visuals could get or how smooth the animation and motion-acting could appear so as to elicit the same kind of reaction to Vesperia a few years down the line. Of course, the answer is semi-obvious: some games look good no matter how old they are because they’re styled to maximize the strengths of the hardware they’re on. That’s a fancy way of saying Vesperia is too stylized to be considered ‘photorealistic’, and therefore it’s most likely immune to this sort of retroactive obsolescence.

Boiled down even further, and to make this even more apropos: personality, it seems, really does go a long way.

Another quiet day, folks. Overall I’m just dealing with life day-by-day, so there’s not much to report beyond the fact that I’m still loving Tales of Vesperia, and that the ability to download music on-demand via the iPhone is very, very bad for me (despite the fact that I will end you if you try to take my phone). More as it comes along, folks.

The movies thing… is probably not gonna be finished in time. I’m resigned to this, because Vesperia is just that damn awesome.

It’s almost two months now, or rather going on over two months, since the XM/Sirius channels merged. And by “merged” I mean “Sirius gutted all the good stuff”. I wound up cancelling my service that day, after discovering that their “classic alternative” station, Lithium, which replaced the genuinely quirky and very college-radio-like Lucy, was in fact just every album recorded by Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana lumped into an MP3 player set to shuffle. There might have been something else in there but when I heard three songs by the same artist in the span of an hour, that’s bad. Lucy at least mixed things up a bit, reminding me of some tracks I hadn’t heard in years– or at all (I was a sheltered kid, so I didn’t get into alternative until, well, I was actually at college, playing it myself). To make a long story short, the news that a combined Sirius/XM receiver is at last on the market utterly fails to impress me and in fact makes me wonder why they even bothered, if they were going to just make everything Sirius-y.

And I’m still royally pissed off that The System is gone. Best damn place to find new trance and progressive short of going to clubs for it which don’t seem to exist in Pittsburgh, and what happens? Gone, no real replacement, just pop-tronica that all sounds the same. (Think Freezepop, only irritating and not even half as clever.) In the end it’s all a wash; I have the Pandora client for the iPhone but haven’t used it as much as I should, and when I’m home I usually turn on the cable’s music channels, but they’re poor replacements.

Other things went very wrong today in terms of customer service, but they’re not important. What is important, really, is that I discovered that City of Heroes’ Mac client, just released out of beta today, runs beautifully on my machine. I indulged in a month pass, just to sate the desire to enter Scrapperlock again. I never much enjoyed the villain side of things, but all the same it’s just a fun game. I might not continue it after the pass expires, but one way or another it’ll all work itself out.

As for the movies, I’m still working my way through those when time and patience permit. I’m not likely to make it through the 30 in 30, but I’ll have taken a good chunk out of them. Which, really, is all I wanted to do.

Later, folks.