10.15.06
Explosive Decompression
So things have been Busy over the last few weeks. I mean, really Busy, the kind of Busy that gets capitalized for no apparent reason other than the fact that it’s that much busier than busy. Busy is busy enough to get capitalized even when it’s spoken. Yeah, I’ve actually been that Busy the past month or so. I figure I ought to tell you all why.
The Super Secret Project (which really isn’t all that secret anymore) is finished; it was a web site for Atlus USA for the Super Robot Taisen Original Generation games. Earned me a nice significant amount of money, competitive in the industry (at least, I think it was competitive). Plus, well, I have officially been in the industry in two roles now– as a sales clerk and as part of the marketing machine. Once I get the word that the site is live, I’ll link to it– likely in the forums. Working on the site has really kept me excited for the game, and so it’s nice that I am going to be getting a copy of OG1 and picking up OG2 once that hits in November.
I did finish Xenosaga a few days ago, and the ending was… I don’t really want to put too many spoilers right here on the front page but there’s so much that can be said about it. It’s equal parts of Xenogars and The Da Vinci Code, which I can honestly say wasn’t exactly unexpected what with all of the Judeo-Christian, Kabbalist, and Gnostic influences. Still, it sort of renders the entire struggles of the last three games kind of moot when you realize just who has been in your party since about three hours into the series. I shouldn’t need to spell out who. I am a little disappointed that there’s not going to be any more games in the series, as the story hit an interesting stride and was left very open-ended. Still, it provides enough closure for the purpose of making the ending satisfying. My next big project will be to get out of my hesitation to keep playing Wild ARMs 4.
As for my rush to Level 50 in City of Heroes, that was a mission I finally accomplished just about two weeks ago. Playing as a Kheldian– an archetype which plays like a super blaster– has been really interesting, and while I’ve not been playing as much as I was in the weeks running up to the big ding, it’s only because I want to wait for Issue 8 before I go through the low-level content again. Most importantly I want to be in position to check out Faultline 2.0. I glanced through it when it hit the test server last week; as I’ve only had ten minutes’ exposure to the new issue and I’m not aware of any major game-wrecking power nerfs, I feel a little unprepared to make any snap judgements. We shall see. The ‘new’ Pocket D seems… well, unusual. Let’s leave it at that.
This evening I fired up World of Warcraft for the first time in a month. It’s hard for me to say what drove me to it, but I just felt like doing it. In any event, I am glad I did– Anvilmar, my usual haunt, was full so I fired up the character I’d started on Kirin Tor. Getting her to Level 6 took a couple hours, and I played around with a handful of UI mods as well. These mods certainly addressed some of the issues I’d brought up during the Unbelievers trial (and confused me in a couple other cases), but overall I came away from the session with one thing stuck in my mind. Kirin Tor is an RP server, while Anvilmar isn’t; and I was approached by a couple of people during my travels who spoke to me, and weren’t strictly asshats. They weren’t the brightest bulbs I’d ever met, but they at least responded to me with the respect due a fellow human being (ie, they didn’t just call me a noob and ignore me or challenge me to The Most Lopsided Duel Evar). Bolstered by that kind of positive reinforcement, I’ll likely be continuing that for a few more weeks.
There’s been a lot of discussion in the forums lately regarding Final Fantasy XII, which hits the US in fifteen days. The most skepticism seems to be centered around the Gambit System. It’s been proffered as a way to delegate the responsibility of some of the more tedious aspects of dungeoneering (such as keeping the party healed between battles), and what I’ve played so far sort of exhibits that fact; at the same time, however, the comparisons to the dot Hack series are certainly valid and deserved. I’ll be honest, I am excited about the title– excited enough to be set up for the Collector’s Edition and to head down to Macedonia for the midnight release party– but I still have my reservations about the game due to the fact that it is so different from previous FF titles. Different can be good, yes, but it’s a risk that the series may not be able to recover from if it turns out to be a flop.
And, the job hunt continues apace. I’ve been away from home on the past couple Fridays, first to Madison, Wisconsin and then to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both trips were marked by some reading being done; in transit to Wisconsin I read a CSI: New York novel, which was an interesting little distraction, and coming back from Pittsburgh I picked up the first novel in the Crest of the Stars trilogy. I read through it in about two hours the next morning. My impressions are… well, the book certainly sets up an interesting plot and a very detailed universe. However, and this might just be the way Tokyopop chose to break up the novels for more money or some other reason, but the book has a really nasty little cliffhanger at the end. Not coincidentally, that cliffhanger happens to be the climax of the one episode of Banner/Crest that I’ve seen to this point, from WAY back when it was on TechTV (back when there was a TechTV– oooh, and I have some interesting things to say about that, too). Anyway, I’m digging it so far but I need more. I’ll likely be picking up the Banner box set this week or next.
Let’s talk about G4 for a moment, then. Friday came the announcement that G4 was going to be consolidated with E!, which oficially makes them the Cable Katamari of Suck. Seriously, they’ve rolled up two networks in their ball of abysmal programming, and while admittedly E! doesn’t exactly have that far to fall it’s entirely possible that someone will wake up and see that the numbers on TechTV were far better than G4. Wikipedia’s saying that G4 is in fact the LEAST watched channel on cable TV. Let me put this into perspective: C-SPAN, which shows Capitol Hill, gets better ratings. The Home Shopping Network gets better ratings. The freaking Reality Television Network gets better ratings. If you’re losing out to reruns of Survivor, maybe it’s time to consider going back to what worked, eh?
I’m not saying get Leo Laporte back. That’s impossible now. It might have been an option a year ago but now? Forget about it. What I’m suggesting is bring together some intelligent and funny people to produce a show akin to the Screen Savers. I suppose I’m a little obsessed about it, yeah, but the fact of the matter is that TechTV from 2003-2004 had the single best tech-oriented TV lineup to date. Those folks just plain got it.
Ah well. With any luck I’ll be making my own contributions to the world of quality tech television very soon. And the GAMErica project, which I’d put on the back-burner this time last year, might be coming together again. We’ll see. One way or another I will begin bringing teh fünni on a regular basis again.
Oh, yeah. Last year I was hyping National Novel Writing Month pretty much constantly, and badgering everyone I knew to do it. Well, the badgering is a bit less this year, as is the hyping, mostly because I don’t rightly know if I can participate this year. I have an idea– a vague one, anyway– but the whole job thing and the possibility of moving might wreck my ability to devote time to it or nuke my efforts halfway through. I hope that I’ll have an answer to both of those problems here in the next two weeks but it’s still up in the air right now.
I think that about covers everything that’s safe to discuss openly. There are a few other things that I’d rather not have plastered around the world, and some things which I need to keep to myself for right now, but those who need to know already do know. And to be honest, there’s a lot here already. Later, folks. We’ll have to do this again some time.
Ismail Saeed said,
10.16.06 at 12:36 pm
Hey John,
The Crest of the Stars novel is Crest of the Stars novel 1. “Crest of the Stars” the anime conflated the first *three* novels in the series into a single brisk anime series.
If you buy the Banner box set, you’ll be jumping ahead about three years and miss good content.
Buying the CREST box set, though, is an idea.
Anyway, novel 2 is on the release horizon for Tokyopop, and novel 3 after that. Just saying; if you want more, go with the next novel or buy the Crest anime series - Banner isn’t next chronologically.
Kain said,
10.16.06 at 5:21 pm
Honestly, the list of cable stations which have gone seriously downhill in the last four or five years (or which were at the bottom of the hill to begin with) is essentially a Who’s Who of the offerings of my local branch of Comcast, so that somehow a basement door has been found at the rock bottom G4 has hit is not as surprising as it ought to be. (Although I give it points for being the only American televisual outlet for “Top Gear” co-presenter Richard Hammond, who is on British television on at least one station all day every day but who on American television only appears as the frontman of “Brainiac” - and he finally did the sensible thing and moved on from that programme anyway, so this one good point is now gone.)
Seriously though, a cable station forgetting its roots and being left with nothing to set it apart from other cable stations, while always enfuriating to see, is not exactly new. AMC went from being a fraternal twin brother of TCM to Just Another Film Station showing awful films with censorship and endless ad breaks. (Ludicrously, the head of programming at AMC defended that shift by saying that that’s how people are used to watching films on television. Yes, but THEY HATE IT. That’s why they watched AMC in the first place, because THEY DIDN’T DO THAT.) Nick at Nite and TV Land now show syndie re-runs of programmes which already air syndie re-runs on half a dozen other stations. A&E used to be PBS with advertisements, now they air docu-reality programmes about bounty hunters, stock car racers, and tattoo parlour employees. (None of which qualifies as art or entertainment in my eyes, but I’m a snob that way.) And then there’s the classic lament about how MTV and VH1 have completely forgotten their roots as music television. (Along similar lines, the British satellite station VH1 classic used to air primarily music videos from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but when I last lived in England it had forgotten what “classic” meant and started airing videos from songs released mere months earlier.)
Long story short: cable television is a wasteland. But it does have TCM and syndie re-runs of the three “CSI” series, so I have a subscription anyway. Oh well.