tempest in a teacup

I stopped watching new shows for the last year or so, because my DSL connection has so little bandwidth that using BitTorrent ties it up completely. However, one thing I have been able to do is watch streams (not necessarily HD streams, but they’ll do for watching older stuff), and sites like Crunchyroll have proven to be useful in this regard.

So what am I watching over these streams? K-On? Guin Saga? Senjou no Valkyria?

Actually, it’s something a bit older.

Yeah, it’s Hokuto no Ken. The original ‘80s TV series, not the OVAs (yet) or the hilariously bad Hollywood movie. I’m about 50 episodes in (right up to Kenshiro’s first fight against Raoh), and honestly, in spite of the inconsistent animation (it IS an ‘80s show after all), it’s great. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to watching it, but I’m glad I did. Great fights, great characters, and overall just really damn fun to watch. Watching Kenshiro explode body parts like they were nothing never stops being entertaining.

(Or watching Rei slice people into bite-sized chunks, for that matter. Damn he’s awesome)

I’m pretty sure I’m going to run up against the wall of filler that tends to infest just about all shounen adaptations at some point, but until then I’m going to keep enjoying the ride.

Quick question to anyone who’s seen the whole series – is Hokuto no Ken 2 (aka the post-Raoh stuff) worth watching at all? From scattered impressions and such I get the impression that it isn’t. That, and the artwork seems to take a turn for the worse…

I could say much about what I think of King of Fighters XII (and indeed, I have, multiple times), but if anything the most telling thing about the game is the complete lack of high-level match videos in spite of the game having come out more than two weeks ago. We got a couple of batches of videos out of Portland where the game first showed up, and a small set of lousy videos off Nicodouga, and since then, nothing.

I mean, even bad games like SvC Chaos and KOF2003 had tons of videos in the weeks immediately after their release. On top of that, if you check the tournaments of places like A-cho, TRF and Game41, there are no KOF XII events scheduled at all (and if you look at TRF they in fact have regular Hokuto no Ken tournaments, and that’s a game that’s basically retarded at high level).

If anything all signs are pointing to a complete lack of interest in the game (moreso than usual for a new KOF game, at least), and part of me can’t help but think that someone at least should have seen that coming.

(Before you ask, I’m still getting the PS3 version along with BlazBlue, if only because they’ll look nice on my HDTV)

And just like that, my PS3 unbricked itself last night. For some reason my fifth attempt at a soft reset did the trick.

You know, at least if my PC starts malfunctioning I can make a decent guess as to what’s broken and fix it. With consoles I’m not nearly as lucky.

Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 gets put through the blender en route to PS2

I was under the impression that the era of lousy ports was behind us. Apparently I was wrong.

(By the way, it’s not just graphical problems – there’s apparently lag as well)

In other news, I was playing some KOF’98 Ultimate Match on my PS3 today and it locked up when I tried to exit the game. Turning it off and restarting it basically yields…nothing. Looks like it’s bricked.

I wonder how annoying Sony’s repair process is…

Once again I’m finding myself casting around for something to write about. I’ve got a few ideas, but I honestly don’t think that I could do any of the subjects justice.

So I figure I’ll just start writing stuff and see where it goes from here.

Work has been pretty hectic lately – the project that I’ve been working on for about 4 months now had its first production milestone last week and my team was involved in a last-minute scramble to get everything in place. The first milestone is now done, in that my team’s contribution is more or less over, and after my week oncall I’ve shifted over to working on our next milestone. The last few weeks have been pretty hellish because of some mistakes we made early in the project, and I’m doing my best to ensure that we don’t run into the same problems on our second milestone.

As for what sort of project it is, I’m not sure I’m at liberty to say – suffice it to say that it’s a company-wide initiative that will have a pretty big impact on how all the teams in my organization do their jobs.

I actually had a dream last week where I was interviewing with some other team within the company, although for some reason the team worked in an indoor playground. Not going to bother trying to interpret that one…

I’ve started looking at apartment listings, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, Amazon is going to be moving to a new campus downtown, and I’d like to move somewhere closer to the new campus, even if it means I have to commute to work by bus for a few months. On top of that, while my current apartment is really close to work, it’s not particularly close to anything else, meaning that I have to take a bus to do pretty much anything important. And let’s not forget that the effective duopoly on Internet providers in my neighbourhood means that I get to choose between crappy cable and crappy DSL. I currently use the latter, and it’s the #1 reason why I haven’t watched any of the new anime that’s come out in the last…2 years or so. 1.5 Mbps means that even Youtube ends up being a bandwidth hog. Not to mention my pings in TF2 and L4D are awful, even to servers that are relatively close by.

My dad suggested buying an apartment, which is probably not a bad idea seeing how prices seem to be heading lower every day, but I haven’t contacted any realtors yet. Part of me is wondering if buying a property when I’m on a visa that might not be renewed in 2011 is a really good idea or not.

I guess I’ll think about it some more.

On a side note, the CEO of the OnLive service that I talked about in my previous entry has apparently been on the PR warpath, offering interviews to a lot of big gaming sites about why all the naysayers are wrong. Apparently they’ve spent seven years developing a video compression algorithm that can get frame data down to very small sizes, which is great, but that also means the stream is going to have compression artifacts, reducing image quality overall. On top of that you’re apparently locked to 720p or 480p, so if your monitor’s native resolution is something else, you can’t play in full screen mode without blurring the image.

So yeah, it’s not for me. Or for anyone with taste, I’d say.