That's the longest I've gone without updating. I think we can say I'm past the feeling of being obliged to post regularly.

I had something else I wanted to post about but I ended up finishing a meme that's been sitting partially-completed on my computer for over a month instead. Post saved images that are related to twenty themes. I spent far more time on this than I know I should have but I wanted to make sure all the pictures were good.

( column width OBLITERATED )

I found out yesterday that my YouTube account has a limit of 650 Favorites.  I didn't expect this to happen since I'd seen other accounts go over that number already but I searched around and found posts about other users hitting this limit going back months so the rule seems to have been inconsistent.

Unlike what I'm sure other people are doing I can't be bothered getting worked up over this.  650 is a lot of videos which I justify by saying I was very generous with the Favorite button.  I was just curious to see how large I could make my list and I was able to cull about 70 filler videos straight away to make some room.  Now that I know there's a potential limit on the list I just have to be a bit more discerning about what I put on it.

If the limit still exists in the future there's every chance I'll hit it again but I'll worry about that closer to the time.

No Klonoa.  Yet.

I spent an afternoon going to every game shop in traveling distance and the only copy I found was preowned with an outrageous barely-less-than-new ripoff price that I refused to pay.  On the upside my shopping around got me a good deal on the Wii itself and saved me £40.  Since Plan A fell through I ordered a copy of Klonoa off Amazon, which is projected to arrive on my birthday and will make a nice little present if it does, and started Metroid Prime Trilogy while I wait.  As much as I like Metroid I think it'll be best to stagger the three and do other games inbetween.

So what I learned that other people knew years ago?

Wii hardware/software
* This thing is really tiny.  Cool and quiet too.
* Making Miis is a lot more fun than it should be.  I've gone back to fiddle with mine a few times already and will probably do so again in the future.  My current Mii captures my awkward vacant stare perfectly.

Metroid Prime (Wii)
* The motion controls make a huge difference.  On the Gamecube using the lock-on was the only viable way to shoot things.  Now with separate aiming and moving controls the fights are much more engaging.  I seem to have some sharpshooting skills (I have a little metagame of how far away I can snipe the doors from when approaching them) but when I'm not aiming my hand tends to be unsteady and this makes the cursor wobble around the screen so Samus has spent a lot more time admiring the floors and ceilings of Tallon IV here than on the 'Cube.  The new system for changing beams and visors is very awkward but other than that I can't see myself going back to the old controls.
* I remember thinking years ago how amazing this game looked.  Not so much now.  Now I can better appreciate the differences between what was cutting-edge 3D modeling in 2002 and now.  It's not as drastic as the difference between PS1-era 3D and PS2-era 3D but it's there.
* I didn't notice this before, since it was less of an issue to me back then, but somehow the Space Pirates already know Samus is a woman in this game.  I don't know how they could have learned that without knowing other things that would be much more relevant to them, like Samus having a vendetta against the Pirates or being connected to the Chozo.  Having this information doesn't even change the way they interact with Samus so it feels pointless.

Posted at 9:09 on 9/9/09.  Beat that.

I was planning to go buy my Wii tomorrow but I had a surprise visit today from a man who inspected the boiler and told me I have a leak somewhere so now my boiler is shut off and I'm going to have to stay in tomorrow while more people come around and cut a hole in the ceiling to replace a loose pipe.  I'll make the trip on Friday, hopefully.  Klonoa still has top priority because I like the irony of my first next-gen game being a remake of something I owned ten years ago but Metroid Prime Trilogy is out too and I've really wanted to replay the Primes or a while now.  The machine, incidentally, is going to be my birthday present from my parents this year.  Instead of them trying to send me one we agreed that I would just buy one locally and they would pay it off.

Normally I don't get things unless I consider them absolute necessities and being able to buy things over the internet is something that, for a few reasons, very recently became a necessity.  I had an eBay account years ago when I was more of a games collector but I haven't touched that for years.  Last week I got an Amazon account and ordered a few things using that and so far I've liked it a lot more than eBay.  I realise now I never liked the stresses of bidding and waiting and competing with other people to buy things on eBay.  I can't see myself going back to that anytime soon.

I have a story to tell. Eons of internets ago I was linked to the site of a Japanese remixer called Saitama Saisyu Heiki. I put it in my bookmarks for later because of the site's unintuitive layout that makes you download the music before you can listen to it and because I was still on dial-up at the time anyway. It stayed buried there for the next few years until last week when, instead of doing things that needed to be done, I decided to spend an afternoon downloading what the site had to offer. And so I discovered what other people have known for years: his music rocks. Literally, as his focus is rocking out on a guitar. Also because his remixes are very, very good.

Since almost all of the tracks showed up in my music player with garbled names, and I don't like that, I started to rename them all correctly. And after that was done I realised these translations are something that could benefit others since many of these track names are untranslated or come from games only released in Japan. It could also help you find particular songs you want but I would really recommend downloading everything here because it's so good.

I don't have any knowledge of Japanese besides a few dozen terms I've picked up over the years. Most of this work comes from a shamefully comprehensive knowledge of video games and game BGM along with the help of auto-translators and one other source I found that translated the track names, which I shamelessly lifted from at points. Some liberties were taken to make the names more presentable and Japanese names were exchanged for English ones where appropriate. There are a few points I'm still unsure about and those are marked with footnotes. Any help I get with these, or any other title that could be translated better, would be appreciated.

( let's get rocking )

I'm back from my break.  Still getting caught up on things.  Normal service will resume soon.  Possibly more cat pictures.

Went to see Half-Blood Prince and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  It's the most I've enjoyed a Harry Potter film since the first two, which is ironic because I remember not liking the Half-Blood Prince that much as a book.  It feels like it was changed to work better as a film instead of just trying to film the book with scenes cut out.  I'm sure lots of content was still left out but at least now the story flows better and doesn't feel as awkward.  And it's much more colourful too - muted colour, but still more appealing than the depressingly dark look of the last two films.

I've realised I need to pay more attention to the gaming news so I'm going to try and visit Kotaku regularly.  I'm not putting it in my feeds because having new posts to read every 20-30 minutes is quite oppressive.  It's easier for me to just browse the front page and pick out headlines that interest me.  Like this.  I actually thought Blazblue was already out here but now I remember I saw it in a stop that sells imports.  They usually keep imports on a separate rack but they might have been mixing PS3 imports with local stock.

I'm not going to try and draw any conclusions here.  It sounds like the usual fluff you get from a spokesperson trying to assure you how great a game is going to be while they contractually aren't allowed to tell you anything concrete.  This isn't the first time a European release has gotten extra content or been based on a later version of the game and there's supposed to be a new version of Blazblue in development right now but that hasn't even been officially announced yet.  Unless it comes out very soon it's unlikely PAL version will be based on it.  Failing that I can't see where else new content might come from.  Part of me thinks 'new characters and moves' means EX modes.  It wouldn't be the first time I've seen the truth bent like that.  But if it does turn out to be a revision I'll be happy, I'd rather have that than a version I'll know is already outdated.

I went out today because I needed to buy something and came back to find the cats in the most perfectly photogenic positions ever in the porch. I ran upstairs for a camera and quickly took amateurish pictures until one of them moved away.



Cats do not pose for cameras. Cats do not do anything they don't want to. I was very lucky to get these pictures.

( more pictures )

I passed through a games shop last week and saw boxed copies of Blazblue and the Klonoa Wiimake on sale for the first time. This is the world's way of telling me I can't put off buying modern systems any longer.

I have a habit of waiting a few years before buying new systems. Besides the obvious advantages of lower price and more games to choose from what I'm usually waiting for is a 'personal killer app', which is a game other people may or may not care about. In the past these have been; Secret of Mana for the SNES, Final Fantasy 7 for the PS1, being able to play Guilty Gear X in English on the PS2 (after I'd already done the whole thing in Japanese on the Dreamcast - yes I used to be that crazy over the series), Metroid Prime for the Gamecube, Panzer Dragoon Orta for the Xbox and now Klonoa for the Wii. Blazblue was my motive for getting a 360 even though the PS3 has it as well.  The 360 was cheaper, had exclusives I wanted (GG2 Overture and Crackdown) and played most of the same games.  I wasn't interested in getting a PS3 until recently when Ico 3: A Boy and his Giant Baby Gryphon finally made a very compelling reason to own one. I realise the choice isn't really that simple as all the current machines have online capabilities and downloadable content but I won't be able to get my head around that until I've actually used it so I'm just going to judge them the old-fashioned way, on the merits of their games.

My mother asked me three years ago if I wanted a Wii as a birthday present and I said no because I didn't see the need for one yet.
I told her more recently I'd take that offer now. Wii gets priority because of Klonoa, new NiGHTS, new Metroids and A Boy and His Blob, which recently made a big jump up my most-wanted list. See, a blob isn't quite as impressive as a giant baby gryphon, so the developers of the new ABaHB must have figured they needed to offer something major to compete with The Last Guardian. So they added a button for hugging the blob.



I'm going to use this button a lot

Continuing the theme of 'so overdue it hurts' two memes. skuldnoshinpu and zarla respectively.

Comment to this entry and I'll pick three of your fandoms. You must then update your journal and answer the following questions:

01: What got you into this fandom in the first place?
02: Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on?
03: Favorite episodes/books/movies/etc.?
04: Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)?
05: Do you think that more people should get into this fandom?

( slash )

and #2

1. Post a picture of your wallpaper.
2. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
3. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on

( chop )

To celebrate my newly-earned unemployment I spent the whole weekend playing Final Fantasy IV Advance.  The entire whole weekend.  I started it on Friday and cleared the final dungeon this morning.  It's been about ten years since I first played this game on the PS1 and just over five since I've touched any of the main Final Fantasies.  It might be a little embarrassing to think of how addicted I got to such an archaic game with a plot that's as shallow as it is random and wildly erratic difficulty but I think, hidden inside for all those years, there is a part of me that still genuinely, unironically loves this genre.

I didn't actually mean to finish it when I did, that was kind of an accident.  I was running low on healing in the last part of the final dungeon where the enemies just got ridiculous so I decided to run to the last save point ignoring treasure, because I had dealt with a lot of chest monsters up to that point, save and restore there and then backtrack for the treasure before fighting the final boss.  Only there was no save point and I ran straight into the boss instead.  There was no save point anywhere in the final dungeon, which was kind of a shock after years of expecting a save point before the final boss as a right but Final Fantasy IV comes from the tail-end of an era when the genre wasn't really known for user-friendliness (EDIT: there are two save points in the final dungeon, and I missed both of them because I was running straight ahead and not exploring the side paths.  How ironic).

Other modern ideas from the series being added elsewhere probably didn't help my false sense of security.  In FFIV Advance instead of being party-locked to Cecil/Rosa/Kain/Rydia/Edge at the end only Cecil is fixed and the others can be swapped out for any of the surviving PCs (Cid, Yang, Edward or the twins).  I took this opportunity to switch out Kain for Yang when it turned out he was even faster than Edge and had a new Holy-element weapon that wrecked a lot of enemies in the last dungeon.  The changeable party isn't quite as liberating as it sounds on paper though because it seems like I'll have to stick to the Cecil/fighter/fighter/W. Mage/B. Mage template to make a really effective team which makes Edward very awkward to use since he's a mage with no magic.

Meanwhile Card Sagas Wars released a new video and the project continues to be the purest form of gamer nerd porn in existence.  There's a new Zelda stage on display along with the fancy flying tiles at the start and end of each round that all 2D fighters need to have and a marquee that pops up from the bottom announcing attack names which surely raises the potential for references even further.  I like how they've managed to make CSW Link distinct from Smash Link.  There's no two ways about how the bow/bombs/hookshot/spin should work but there's a few more unique attacks on top of those to make him stand out.  One of his moves in particular (you'll know which one when you see it) is so brilliant Nintendo should be ashamed for not using it themselves, even though I'll admit it doesn't fit with the ZELDA IS SRS BSBS LET'S DEBATE THE TIMELINE AGAIN direction that's been forced on the series over the past few years.  Cloud's unique ability is Real-Time Materia Change although I'm still not sure how it affects his moves.

On the other hand seeing CSW use a piece of music straight from an actual game suddenly makes me feel a lot less secure about it's existence.  It feels like the sword of Damocles is hanging over a project that's unofficially used material from so many companies - although I'm mostly worried about Square-Enix here, since they have a record for doing asshole-ish things in this territory.

BANG HAS FALCON PUNCH

AWESOME

This is a new personal record for an overdue post but I already put too much effort into this to just dump it.  This month was very distracting but in all honesty my laziness was still a bigger factor.

( E3 impressions )

You know you must be getting older when the people you remember being huge stars in your childhood start aging and dying off.

I thought it would have affected me more but I can't really think of him as gone.  The man Michael Jackson is dead but the legend is immortal.  The two had become very different entities over the last few years.  I hope much of the mockery dies with him so he can be remembered more fondly.

I broke a controller by throwing it at the weekend.  This isn't the first time, I'm only human after all, but it was the first time I decided to see what I could do about it so I went down to B&Q and got a screwdriver to open it up.  I replaced the shoulder button that popped out on impact with the floor (and the rest of the buttons as well when I turned the pad over by mistake and they all spilt out.  It was very easy to put back together because all the buttons have different tabs sticking out the bottom so they can't settle in the wrong slots.  It's all very idiot-proof) retightened the screws and it works fine.  You'd almost never know it was broken.

Driven by the thrill of success and the masculine urges that had surfaced from tool use I tried my hand at another broken controller I had stored in the cupboard.  With this one a corner broke off the shoulder button so it hangs loose.  It should still work but it's awkward to hold, and while the other one was just an ordinary pad this was a rare transparent controller with coloured buttons and I felt guilty about manhandling it so I kept it (and the broken chip of plastic) for years in case I could get it fixed.  I planned to take the button out, glue the broken piece on and reassemble it but I couldn't get the screws out.  The screwdriver couldn't grip the slots even when I pressed hard and turned, like the screws were in too tight.  Back into storage it goes.  That pad was an old shame of mine so it's more of a letdown that I thought for just a few minutes I finally had the power to fix it.

Meanwhile in gaming news the laws on UK games ratings were changed again.  Now the PEGI (Pan-European Gaming Information) ratings are going to be the only source of rating information, mandatory for all games and legally enforcable.  Being older than 18 and not having children it doesn't affect me but I suspect the news reports about it were trying to play up how much of an advancement this is by a) not mentioning that virtually every game released in the UK over the past six years has voluntarily been rated by PEGI anyway so the information has always been there, and b) the reports only focus on the problems of children playing age-inappropriate games or retailers selling them to children.  The continuing issue of parents who ignore the ratings and buy age-restricted games for their children isn't mentioned.  Fancy that.

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Said person is probably seeing a lot of this meme.

I took a break from posting for a while because I caught whatever the blogging equivalent of writer's block is.  Everything I tried to type was so awful I decided not to inflict it on other people and went to play games for a few days.  I have a 75% complete post on my picks of E3 that I'll finish sometime this week.  I might have been posting that now but instead I want to post about how I struck gold on Friday night and found a bunch of game soundtracks I've been after for years.  This was most of my most-wanted game OSTs found all at once.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold was the last revision of Street Fighter Alpha 2.  Like any fighting game revision it had a bunch of subtle changes but the most important one to me was the music, which was apparently re-arranged from regular SFA2.  There are at least three version of the OST (arcade mix, with the bass and sound effects turned up loud enough to vibrate you off the floor and so unsuitable for home listening, regular SFA2 and SFA2 Gold) and this is the rarest and hardest to find.  The instrument balance isn't exactly the same as I remember from playing the game on the Saturn years ago but it's close enough.  Most of the characters who started in SF2 and appeared here have some of my favourite official versions of their themes, except Cammy, who lost her SF2 theme and gained an amazing new one instead.  I can't describe how much that theme floored me when I first heard it.  The thought of having it on file has kept me wanting this soundtrack for years.  I never got round to playing SF Alpha 3 but I sampled the music and found it underwhelming compared to SFA2G and only kept a few tracks.

The next one is another Capcom fighter, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.  The physical OST is apparently super-ultra-rare limited and the unpopularity of the game (or the license in general) has kept it obscure even though it has some really great tracks.  It's not as good as I expected on the whole because it's a little uneven.  It has lots of grandiose but similar-sounding incidental tracks in blaring arcade synth but some amazingly hard rocking themes for the heroes and the villain.  These standout tracks justify the whole soundtrack for me.  The bad thing is the OST is only for the first version of the game so it didn't have the themes for the characters that appeared in the update (Hol Horse, Mariah, Pet Shop, Anubis Polnareff and whoever I'm forgetting).

Castlevania: The New Generation (most people reading this would know it as Bloodlines) is another I've wanted for a while but actually getting it wasn't the thrill I expected.  Castlevania reprises themes a lot and most of the tracks from it had been done better in later games.  The exception is Calling from Heaven which I think I remembered quite fondly and mythologised as the great lost wonder of Castlevania music over the years but after Curse of Darkness and Order of Ecclesia the music of New Generation doesn't rank quite as highly for me.  But Calling from Heaven has never been reprised in another game to my knowledge and I'd still like to see it again sometime.

Sonic Rush Adventure isn't something I've wanted for as long as the others because I only played it last year but that just meant the memories brought up by the music were all fresh.  Still the best Sonic game ever.

I also added the music of SaGa Frontier, which isn't something I've searched after for years but I had some samples in my playlist and I liked them so I took the opportunity to get the whole thing.  I did actually play this game years ago but I found it very confusing and never got very far.

Also last week GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 came to an end.  I didn't care that much about it after my bracket made a ton of mistakes from the very beginning and I assumed that meant I would never make it on the leaderboard (and even less after I saw Super Metroid only staying ahead of Super Mario Kart by a margin of about a hundred votes) but whenever I checked my score I was usually around the 80th percentile (i.e. scoring better than 4/5 of the other brackets).  My final score was 455 which scored at the 92.95 percentile but I think it was 96 point something on the day of the finals.  The highest scoring entry was 653.  Very disparate results.  Bring on the safe ol' predictable character contest...

Here's a bit of non-E3 gaming news that might have been obscured by the big event.  Secret of Mana is coming to mobile phones in Japan, although the proportion of straight port to remake isn't obvious yet.  Now while Secret of Mana was, from what I remember, a rough diamond that could benefit from a touched-up release and had co-operative multiplayer that would be perfect for modern wireless handhelds I'd much prefer to see the game on a system that doesn't exclude anyone without one of those famous future-tech super mobiles they have in Japan.  The DS would have been preferred.

Nice art though.  It's my new wallpaper.

Sega looks at the sales figures for Mario Kart and thinks "I want some of that".

The really awkward title ("Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing") highlights a difference between Sega and other companies.  Companies like Nintendo and Capcom have many different franchises with well-known characters but Sega just has one cast-heavy series that all their most famous characters come from, the Sonic series.  In last year's Sega tennis game the non-Sonic parts of the roster were filled out by C- and D-list Sega characters, most of which had been effectively retired for years.  Yes I like Ulala but that's not making her any less unpopular in general.

The real news is I'm told that Richard Jacques is going to score the game.  The last time Richard Jacques made the music for a racing game with Sonic in it the result was amazing.  I await the OST with a hundred times more enthusiasm than the game itself.

I also saw this today via Penny Arcade.  I think it's amusing, many other people don't.  I suspect JRRT himself would actually have been among the latter.  If I remember the documentaries I watched around the time the movies were coming out he didn't like the idea of Lord of the Rings being presented as a comedy or a cartoon.  It was a serious thing to him.  I believe he wasn't fond of the Disney style and made sure Disney could not acquire Lord of the Rings for use as a feature film.  But that's what Aragorn's Quest makes me think of, Tolkien á la Disney.