VegettoEX Dot Com

Author: vegettoex

  • Games We’re Finally Playing: Final Fantasy VI

    OK, so technically Jeff has already played it (and you heard all about it back on episode two). However, I had never actually played beyond the first five minutes (I thought a full hour, but no, not even…) of Final Fantasy VI, considered by many to be the pinnacle of the series. I’ve had Anthology (PS1) since it came out, and I’ve had Advance (GBA) since it came out… but… never played…

    This post is actually two-fold in purpose. The first is like the title says; I started playing the game. However, in order to be playing this game, I had to do one other thing.

    I dropped the Pokemon habit.

    That’s right, I’m done (again… for now). Despite putting the majority of time these days into Pearl, just the fact that Pearl was in Slot 1 and FireRed was in Slot 2 was enough to keep me from playing anything else on-the-go. Once I started up my new job and had an hour lunch to go off and do whatever I wanted, I was all about starting up a new game.

    Final Fantasy VI

    I decided to make that game Final Fantasy VI, and I’ve been quite enjoying it. That’s not to say that I’m falling all over myself with how amazing it is, but it’s totally perfect for what I need it to be right now. The distance between save points is always just right for a lunch break (something III on DS did amazingly well, might I add). The characters are quirky and hilarious. The music is… well, I haven’t really hit anything yet that’s flooring me, to be honest (yes, I’m playing with headphones so I don’t miss anything). I also understand that the GBA audio isn’t quite up to the level of the SNES, but it has nothing to do with the audio quality; I’m talking strictly composition and arrangement.

    I’m just under seven hours into the game, and I just did my second round of split-up-the-team and fight-lots-of-oncoming-soldiers, concluding with Kefka at the end (that shouldn’t be all that spoilerific, I think).

    So while I’m enjoying it, there’s nothing knocking my socks off just yet. I know I still need to wait for the inevitable “world beyond the world” realization, and something about an opera scene…

    I’m quite petrified of Pokemon: Platinum coming out in the US, because I’m kinda enjoying playing other games for a change…

  • 360 Woes: Update #5 (Final…?)

    So my 360 is finally back. Insert huzzah upon huzzah here.

    They tried delivering it on Tuesday to the future-in-laws’ place, but no-one was home, so right back on the truck for the next day it went. Thankfully, someone was going to be home all day the following day, and it was indeed scheduled for re-delivery the next day… so I basically refreshed the tracking page all day to make sure it got there on time. Of course, just like the last package I tracked, it didn’t show up as being delivered until half an hour after the fact… long enough for me to get an e-mail confirmation from “home” saying it was there before UPS could :P.

    Opening up the box it came in (which was identical to what it went back for repairs in), there’s not a whole lot to speak of. System’s in there, papers in there, card for a month of Xbox LIVE, etc.

    I didn’t do my analysis as well as I should have. I’m basically blind. I wanted to know if the system was a replacement unit or if they actually repaired it. If I actually read the papers that came with it, I would have immediately seen that it was indeed a replacement unit. The instructions also give you the process on how to “re-license” all of your Xbox LIVE downloads (more on that in a second).

    What should have tipped me off was an entirely new console serial number. Of course, that’s not something you immediately look for… Or is it…?

    I’m not quite sure what this says about the problem I had (initially detailed back here). Does the problem go so deep that they’d rather just give me a whole new system? I guess so. I really think someone should make a site all about the green splotchies problem. I wish I had the initiative to do so. You, over there. Yeah, you. Get right on that.

    I couldn’t just crack open Rock Band 2 and play, though. Nooooo, sir. Since it was a whole new system, and Xbox LIVE content is tied to the hardware (in addition to the gamer-card/name), what you have to do is re-license the content for the new hardware. This means you go to your “Download History” and click “Redownload”… on every single last one. Every. Single. Last. One. OK, so you don’t have to do it on demos if you don’t really want those anymore, but for things like actual XBLA games and add-on content that you would like to be able to access either offline or by other users (gamer-cards/names) on the console, you absolutely have to do it.

    For material that’s sitting there on the hard-drive, it doesn’t actually re-download it. What it appears to do is check and see if that content’s there, and if it is indeed there, just re-apply the new license to it (the download will hit 1% and then just be done, regardless of the file size). If there has been an update to said content (for example, I think one of the Police songs/packs I had downloaded had a fix applied to it), it actually will indeed re-download the whole thing again (presumably replacing it on the hard-drive, rather than downloading a duplicate).

    So I basically went through that process for all my Rock Band downloads (which is… uhh… a lot), and then all my XBLA games (which aren’t a lot, but enough to be obnoxious).

    I then moved on to doing the whole Rock Band export thingie from the first game, which lets you play all (well, 55 of the 58) songs from the first game right in the second game. That took a while, so I ironed some shirts for work while it did its thing.

    Then I downloaded a whole bunch of songs I’ve missed in the meantime, which ate up some more time (still ironed shirts).

    By the time I was ready to finally use my (new) system, it was 10:30 pm, and I had to get my rear end to bed for work the next day. Played through “Hands Down” on expert guitar one time through, mostly just to say “nyah-nyah!” to the console.

    So the big guy is back. I wonder if I’ll ever actually get back to DragonBall Z: Burst Limit, or if it’s just a lost cause. If I’m going to play a fighting game, I’m going to pop Soul Calibur IV over in the PS3. Regardless, it’s wonderful to have it home.

    Hopefully it won’t die one week after my one-year warranty, again, with a problem Microsoft refuses to publicly acknowledge and fess up to. Grar.

  • DRM-Free Is The Way To Be

    This has nothing to do with Spore. Sorry.

    One of the funnest (see what I did there? It’s topical!) things that Meri and I do after AWA is create some kind of “mix-tape” (well, an MP3 playlist that may or may not be burned to CD for my line-in-less car audio system) of our favorite songs-from-AMVs over the last year.

    I’m not going to lie and say I don’t just grab a song or two from friends when they’re the ones that have done the videos (Hell, half the time they’ve sent me the song long ago, anyway). This isn’t going to be any kind of general defense or offense one way or the other on file sharing, though.

    However, at the same time, I’m not going to not try and legally pick up some music every so often. I think it’s pretty important. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. I guess it’s as much for me as it is for the artists. Regardless, my point is that the Amazon MP3 service is awesome and you should use it. Right now. Here are the couple songs I grabbed last night:

    Asobi Seksu – “Walk On The Moon” (from Koop’s/Jay’s video “Twilight“) – 99 cents
    DJ Spoke – “Watch Them Fall Down” (from Xavier’s/Nostromo’s video “Auriga“) – 88 cents

    What was really interesting to me was that the first place I looked was still the iTunes Store. For whatever reason, that’s still where I go first. However, I absolutely will not purchase any music from there, these days, unless it’s iTunes Plus (DRM-free and higher bitrate… I think it’s 192 kbps AAC, as opposed to the standard 128 kbps AAC). The compression is better and more efficient with the AAC, so if I can get that version DRM-free, it still makes sense to me to get that above the MP3.

    Sounds like the new Android phones are going to have the Amazon service built-in. Oooooh… it’s on, now.

    What about you guys? Best source for music? Preferred format? I know you’ve got some thoughts, Mr. Campbell :P.

  • Direct Visit or RSS Reader?

    I suppose this is something I could get answers to if I felt like looking at and analyzing some server logs, but comments are much more interesting.

    For this blog (as well as vgconvos, and perhaps any other blogs you read)… are you directly visiting the website, or are you reading it in some type of RSS reader (be it Google Reader, an e-mail client, or something else)? Why? Does it affect whether or not you’ll come leave a comment on a blog?

  • Low-Price Hilarity

    I could have sworn I posted about this game and its price(s) previously on the blog. I even took pictures of it. Guess I never did anything with them. Regardless, as you can see in the below picture, that’s three red stickers placed over each other, indicating a clearance price-drop each time.

    10 Bucks at Target

    Yes, that’s right. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, the apparent cause of Gerstmanngate, is down to a hilarious $9.98 on clearance at Target.

  • What’s a podcast…?

    So I was down at Anime Weekend Atlanta (or just “AWA”) this past weekend doing all sorts of wonderfully nerdy things with a whole bunch of seemingly-equally-nerdy people. Saturday afternoon I happened upon a couple DBZ cosplayers, and felt obligated to take a few photos. Here’s the first one I snagged (off the ol’ iPhone):

    DBZ Cosplayers at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2008

    After I took a couple pictures, I started up a little conversation with them, and found out there was going to be a larger gathering of DBZ cosplayers at 12:30 pm. Awesome! Not only people of my own kind, but multiple super-nerdy people of my own kind! Once we got a little dialogue going, I figured it was as good a time as any to mention the website. I asked if it was OK to put the image up on my site, and then if they had ever checked out the DBZ podcast that we do.

    Yajirobe (the one on the far left) stared at me blankly for about four/five seconds, and then replied, “What’s a podcast…?”

    As the guys over at GeekNights have said time and time again, it’s all well and good that we are trying to get other podcast listeners to check out our own shows, but what we really need is for more people in general to listen to podcasts in general… not specifically our own shows. If they don’t even know what the word means, how on Earth are we to expect them to listen to our piddly shows?

    What came next was the real killer. After briefly explaining that we do this cool show every week talking about what’s going on with news, in-depth topics about the series, etc., the same guy blankly stared at me again for a couple seconds and replied, “Well, I’m not that big a fan…”

    I did everything I could to hold myself back from saying, “BUT YOU’RE $%#@ING COSPLAYING GOD-DAMNED YAJIROBE~!!!!1”

  • 360 Woes: Update #4

    Holy crap! I checked early this afternoon, and Microsoft’s customer service / repair site said they hadn’t even received my console yet. Log in tonight, and what do I see? Completely skipped step #3 (“Device received at service center”), and went right to step #4 (“Device shipped to customer”).

    This is either a wonderful or a terrible thing.

    Heading down to Atlanta for AWA tomorrow. Check you funky people there… uhh… if you’ll be there.

  • General Maintenance

    Learning a little bit more about how WordPress actually works and farting around with some themes. The blog may continue to look completely different every single time you come (unless you’re getting it through something like Google Reader), so please excuse my breaking the code every so often.

    If you’ve subscribed to the feed for the podcast, you may have noticed something other than the first podcast episode appearing in the feed. Do you have any recommendations on how I may be able to link to an audio file within a regular blog post (such as in the “Top 10 Pokemon” post) without it actually showing up as an “episode” in the podcast feed? Any types of special “exclude” linkings?

    The web of today is so different than how I first got into it… it still remains so exciting to me, but it’s just as frustrating in a whole bunch of different ways!

  • 360 Woes: Update #3

    Before I get into the meat of this post, please note that when episode three of the podcast first went up, it accidentally had a random 10 seconds of silence before we read e-mails. It was corrected and reuploaded within half-an-hour of its initial posting, so in case you’re looking for a fixed version… it’s up there, now.

    So last week I (finally) received the empty box to send back my 360 for repairs (read here and here for more info). In case you haven’t (yet) gone through the process of needing to send back your system, I figured I’d document my own and allow you to live vicariously through me. Don’t get cocky, though… if you have a 360, you’ll eventually be sending it back for one reason or another…!

    The box it comes in is a rather plain, white, standard ol’ box. I actually wasn’t even sure it was the right box. I don’t know what I was expecting… I guess something that would hold a lot more cushioning…?

    Xbox 360 Repair Box Picture 1

    When you open it up, you get some pretty dummy-proof instructions, a plastic bag to put the system into, a styrofoam holder for the console, a return label to place over top of the one that was used to ship it to you, and a piece of packing tape to seal the box back up with. I should point out that customer service explicitly told me to tape a piece of paper with my name, address, and repair number to the system itself, while the included instructions made absolutely no mention of this.

    Xbox 360 Repair Box Picture 2

    Again, I was rather unsure about the contents, since the box was so small. I was honestly shocked to see that I was going to pack up such a clearly-volatile system with just these little foam inserts. No additional packing-peanuts, or anything like that. Huh.

    Xbox 360 Repair Box Picture 3

    When it’s all packed up, it is indeed rather snug. I can’t see this compensating for UPS guys tossing boxes around, though, and being that I’m actually PAYING for my repair (no red rings for lucky ol’ me!), I was hoping for something like… oh, I dunno… better packing to keep the system from falling apart to and fro.

    Xbox 360 Repair Box Picture 4

    Sent my system back last Thursday, and according to the customer service area of xbox.com, they still have not received it. Grr. I knew that if I was going to have system problems, it would be during the release of a game I’m dying to play (Rock Band 2).

    In conclusion, Tara was very upset that she was late to the recording session. She was all prepared, and everything. Unfortunately, it was complete, and we were no longer accepting recorded material for the show.

    Tara wants to record a podcast

    Better luck next time, babe.

  • Podcast Episode 001: Time and Project Management

    (or lack there-of)

    That’s right, I’m doing a third podcast (#1: Daizenshuu EX, #2: vgconvos.com, #3 this one). As you’ll hear on the show, this is going to be about whatever I want it to be about, whenever I want to do it, and whoever I want to do it with. I have a bunch of random topics flying around in my head that I would absolutely love to talk out with friends, and this gives me an excuse to get them over here for said topical discussions.

    For this first episode, I decided that Jeff (a familiar voice to those who follow anything else I do) would be a great guy to have on. We talked about how we manage to accomplish all these various things in life… things like going to work, paying bills, going out for a walk, and all those extra nerdy things in between.

    I don’t really have a whole Hell of a lot to say about it. If you’re here reading this (and listening to the episode), there’s a good chance you already know who I am and have at least a quasi-stalker-ish interest in following the things I do. If you don’t already know me…? Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m the most bad-ass person on the planet, and you’ll be a fan immediately. I think.