John Zeitler

I know that I am very easily frustrated by my own general incompetence. I am also aware that I come down harder on myself than anyone else ever could when I come across a situation that, through my own fault, causes me extended grief. I am further aware that complaining and angsting about it does little good in the long run compared to actively working to remedy the problem.

Today I forgot all those things for about an hour and a half.

But now, on the other side of it, all I’ll say is that I am going to run a game of Paranoia very soon and I am going to gleefully inflict the bureaucratic hell that I have just endured upon an unsuspecting world ten– no, a hundredfold.

Last night, Capcom announced that Mega Man Legends 3– a game I’ve been championing for over seven years– has been cancelled, with no hope of being picked back up. They were very formal and clinical in the announcement.

Related, I would like to make an announcement of my own. Effective immediately, I have cancelled all plans to purchase games bearing the Capcom name, including but not limited to Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition, Street Fighter III XBLA, Ghost Trick, Okamiden, and Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. Capcom sadly has not met the required criteria for my continued business, and it’s with regret that I have to make this decision. Below, I have provided an FAQ for this matter.

Q: Are there plans to purchase Capcom games in the future?
A: Currently there are none.

Q: I want to keep playing the Capcom games I’ve purchased.
A: Capcom games will not be played (by John, at least) during “everyday” usage, but will be brought to conventions and other special events for a limited time.

Q: Is there a chance that game announcements from Capcom will be taken seriously in the future?
A: No, I am afraid not.

Q: Will it be okay to give John special access to Capcom games in exchange for a reversal of his position?
A: I will not refuse delivery of any free games that Capcom may send, but until certain criteria are met, they won’t be played, reviewed, or acknowledged.

Q: Will the money that was going to be spent on Capcom games be used to buy other games?
A: Yes; already, plans are in the works to support companies like Atlus, Nicalis, Aksys, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Media.Vision, Natsume, Sega, XSEED JKS, Mistwalker, Monolith, Bioware, Carpe Fulgur, Beyond Madness & Genius, Treasure, Q? Entertainment, Ubi Soft…

Q: Can you please give me more information as to why the Capcom purchasing plan was cancelled so close to the announcement of Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3?
A: The project was cancelled for the reasons outlined in the statement.

Q: Is the cancellation of the Capcom purchasing plan related to the departure of Inafune-san from the company?
A: The cancellation of the project is only tangentially related to Inafune-san’s departure.

Q: Will there be any future reconsideration of this cancellation, or is this a final decision?
A: We certainly welcome Capcom to provide a compelling reason for me to reconsider my decision, including resumption of the Mega Man Legends 3 project, a sincere apology to the fans who supported MML3 before its announcement by buying the limited-edition Servbot and celebrating the game, a detailed explanation of the reason behind the cancellation beyond “certain criteria”, the release of a Breath of Fire game in North America, and/or relinquishing the rights to the Mega Man series to Inafune. But, until one or more of those criteria are met, the decision will stand.

Thank you.

I think there ought to be a prohibition against upgrading a browser early in the morning on a weekend. Or at the very least, some kind of alert box coming up, saying, “You’re about to install software that will break more things than it fixes in order to check to see if it fixes the one little thing you wanted it to fix months back. This will cause you to go on a wiki-walk-like hunt for another piece of software which does fix what you found annoying, maybe, but can’t import your settings from the old piece of crap software because they decided they just didn’t want to. More than that, every single new piece of software you find will have some minor little sticking point that causes you to run it once, dislike it, and then forget it’s there until weeks or months later, when you need to free up three gigs of hard drive space and can’t for the life of you remember if you installed all that garbage for a specific and critical reason. In short, you’re about to ruin the next seven to ten hours on a fruitless search which will leave you unfulfilled, unproductive, and ultimately waste the day so that you go into work tomorrow upset and irritable. Are you sure you want to do this?”

And then the options should be “No”, “Hell No”, and “Screw All This, I’m Going Outside”.

I’m back from Otakon, and while it was a very fun experience, it was truncated due to the jackass who set off the fire alarm during the middle of Saturday– as in, the time when the con is usually in full swing. Oh, and it probably completely disrupted one of the highlights to the con (the Hetalia premiere).

I’m also ridiculously exhausted right now, so I’ll spare you the details until later. But let’s just say that it’s a good thing I don’t eat meat anymore or else Fail Pig would have been bacon. Oh wait– he was, AND IT STILL DIDN’T HELP ARGH

I hereby renounce anything good I ever had to say, and pre-emptively renounce anything positive I might say, about the US Postal Service.

I know many folks out there reading this here blog come from different walks of life. I’m sure some of you even work in retail. I’d like to believe that all of you are smart enough not to need reminded of this particular little training hint that I’m going to provide, but on the off-chance that it comes up, well, don’t say nobody ever warned you, OK? Here goes:

When a customer says to you, “You have made me look like an idiot three times today because your staff did not perform their jobs to anything remotely close to the standards you claim to have for their photography department,” the correct response to this is “I am deeply sorry, sir/madam, for your embarrassment and will process the refunds you requested right away.” It is most emphatically not “*scoff* I didn’t make you look like an idiot. I’ll talk to my manager but you ain’t getting a refund.”