John Zeitler

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.

I’d suspected that my copy of The Usual Suspects was a bootleg for quite some time, but had no real proof. Tonight I encountered said proof: shakycam transfer, audio so quiet that I can’t hear it with my player turned to maximum, no menus, no subtitles, and the date on the case– on further reflection– reads 1996. (DVDs weren’t commercially available in the US until 1997, and then only in test markets. Even if it was legit, it would have to have been a Japanese disc, making it Region 2 and therefore unplayable.) It kind of screws up the 30/30 thing, but then again I’ve been making substitutions as needed, so there’s no real problem.

On related business, I have now discovered that I like the Marx Brothers.

Couple things. I’m watching movies on the 30 days list in no particular order; however, indecisiveness got me into this mess to begin with, so I’m using a 30-sided die to determine what I want to watch if I can’t decide. So far it’s come up with the movies that are crossed off on the list, so you can tell– as if the constant stream of “My iPod is Trying To Kill Me” posts from before didn’t already clue you in– that the Random Number Gods do not look with favor upon my works.

Also, it really frustrated me that of all of the tracks claiming to be on The Shadow Out Of Tim, “Shhh…” wasn’t actually on the disc because “it didn’t fit with the narrative”. As I said, frustrated– for all of seven seconds, before I remembered that Google exists.

And now, another film. Ciao.

Today, I’m starting a little project to get me to watch a lot of the movies that I’ve collected but haven’t yet seen. From today, December 27th, 2008, until January 25th, 2009, my goal is to watch 30 movies. This has been in the works since late October, but only now that I’m satisfied with my game clears am I ready to stop all most gaming for a while and start watching. In any event, I’ve set up a page for the movie list; you can find it up there with the rest of the pages. Wish me luck, folks!