Just Doing a Bit of Maintenence Tonight

Because I'm a bit bothered by stuff tonight as usual, as well as having a bit of troubles with my allergies, I think I'm just going to spend a few hours going through the backlog of posts and doing a little work with them.  Resizing/relinking pictures, just doing a bit of tidying up and the like because I do see the virtue in doing that, in going back and treating old posts like the newer ones.  I also have just been putting off dicking around with old posts in general for far too long unless I link to them in a new post or something of the sort.  Simply because it is a bit of a chore to go into the blogger....-thing-, whatever it is where you have access to everything and tick off post after post after post.  But doing them all now might just get me in the habit of keeping up on them in the future so I don't have to do another big thing of this.

The pictures is really one of the more important bits for me, as I've toyed around with resolutions and figured that, for my current layout which I'm likely not going to change dramatically, tweaking the resolutions of most pictures to 520x293-ish (depends on the base picture, generally 400x225 is how it is when you set it to large, then manually altering the HTML to the new numbers which are just 1.3x bigger a piece) is the sweet spot.  They're nice and big at that size without being, I think, -too- big, and they definitely do not break the barriers at that point as setting them to X-Large or, in most cases, Original Size, would do.  This is also where my Flickr for Kupowered comes in handy, as some pictures (generally the ones I take on the Vita) are hosted through that thanks to the mostly terrible Flickr App for Vita.  (Seriously, if you try and look at a picture in the app, it crashes it.  It's only good for uploading.)  They have a resolution that is 500 by something which, as you can tell, is just about in line with what I figure on anyway, so that certainly works for me.  Anything to make it easier on my end, I guess, since I can throw those in, slam "Original Size" and be done with it just that simple.

Something else I'm considering is cribbing an idea from Chance and getting together a post that is where I keep the reviews I've done.  Or, rather, handy links to the actual review posts themselves so you can just take a look, click, and find out just how the game tickled my fancy.  Since it may also tickle your fancy in much the same way.  And then there will be much fancy tickling.  ...I'll stop that now.  Thing about that is that I haven't actually done very many proper Reviews (the actual number as of this writing is, in all honesty, probably 9) so it seems like some work to do for what is, basically, "Here is what I think of nine games."  Perhaps when I get a few more up, I'll do up the post or I'll take some of my other posts that are -basically- reviews and do up a section in said Review Repository thread for that purpose.  I mean, I'm getting close to 600 posts here, so I'm well-beyond the point where a little more organization and quick-reference is necessary.

Beyond that, I probably won't mess with a whole lot.  Now that I've done this for a while, my Tags list has piled up so I might throw a few extra ones onto posts where required, but that's about it.  Really, I've been putting this off much like the other stuff to do with the blog itself.  For at least two different posts, I just need to do a bit of research and a bit of effort into some things before I can actually just bring them up as posts, but I just haven't done them because I've found it easier to just pick something out of the news.  Of course, the news has been a bit scarce through the summer, less the deluges of things here and there, so it has been a risky strategy of late.  Though I still maintain that it's a good sign that I can sit here and -want- to write something, even if the what seems a bit sketchy for far too long because nothing interesting or relevant personally has happened and/or is pointed out at places I trust.  So, with any luck, I'll be able to get at least a bit of that stuff worked out so I can do something a bit different than lately.

Power Up!

There's no real reason for this picture aside from the whole power theme of the first couple paragraphs.

So!  As you may or may not know, people on the east side of the States have been getting hit pretty hard with some pretty rough storms lately causing massive power outages and the like.  That is what's been up with me since, uh, Friday.  It was not fun.  It continues to be not fun because it's still hot as hell despite the fact that we actually have power and thus Air Conditioning again, and it will remain not fun because it's still friggin storming like every day.  It will continue to do that for a while, so some disruptions in Kupowered is still possible and if at all possible, I will actually forewarn of them this time.  Of course, the only reason I didn't this last time was because the Meteorologists with their fantastic weather machines that cost more money than most small businesses earn yearly didn't really predict that the storms would unfold as they did.  And they're like "Oh, how could we have ever expected it to be this bad?", to which I just have to kind of scoff at.  Because I don't know, it's kind of your fucking job.

Anyways, no power and also no internet kind of puts a damper on maintaining a thing which requires both power and the internet to run, hence why there was another one of these unplanned hiatuses (which is apparently a word, according to spell-check) that sucks.  It has also left me with kind of a clusterfuck of issues considering there was a ton of news in my absence and I am also sort of rusty after the whole not writing for six days thing.  Since for some reason I am just not as good writing things physically as I am with typing them.  That is....kind of an issue that I have never really considered too much since I -have- been able to write things physically before, it's just a little easier to lose what I'm going for.  Also it's almost never an issue unless it's a -big- issue which, well, if it's a situation wherein it's a big issue, it's a bit too late anyways.  Oh well, something else to think of in the future.

Anyways, living without power aside from the assist of a generator simply there to power a little TV with local channels available is about as interesting as it sounds in that it's not interesting at all.  Passing the time in the extreme heat was something of a challenge since it seemed to crawl by and my hobbies didn't really facilitate an expedition of the flow of time whatsoever in feel.  Putting together jigsaw puzzles, doing sudoku puzzles or simply watching TV shows that I don't like (aside from a few that I -do- like now, like The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson because it's awesome) made me feel like....well, that I wasn't actually myself, really.  Granted, I -like- doing all those things, but not because there simply isn't anything else to do.  The only Mogs-like thing I found myself doing was using the DS Lite's battery of the Gods to replay Chrono Trigger DS as my other DS games are all....well, a bit played out.  No less than Chrono Trigger, of which you all know my fondness for, but at least CT is one of those 'timeless' (no pun intended) things that I can play pretty much whenever thanks to my attachment to it.

Well, to the original, at least.  As you all may or may not know, my fondness for the Chrono Trigger DS port is well documented and playing it again basically cements that.  I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anything that went into this port actually happened.  The new script, the new gameplay sections, such as they are in the loose sense of the word, none of it really makes sense in any shape or form.  The staple answer, of course, is simply "Money", but I have to question the validity of that when it was A.) simply an enhanced port of a well-liked SNES-era JRPG (making it more or less just a 'Cult hit' almost by definition) and B.) the same price (or more) as every Pokemon and Mario game on the shelves.  You know, the games that actually sell, thereby making it easy to have that price-point.  There is no reasoning, no actual logic (not even flawed logic) to have expected that Chrono Trigger DS, at the $40 pricepoint it was introduced at (and remained for....quite a while) would sell anywhere above moderately at best.

So if not money, then, what?  Brand loyalty?  One could assume that the intention of Chrono Trigger DS was an attempt to gauge the popularity of the franchise to see if it was further exploitable or something that was simply better left alone.  If that's your aim then, for the above mentioned reasons, it was a rather poor attempt, which suggests that that....might not have been the goal either.  It was certainly -a- goal, I should say, since Shinji Hashimoto, Senior Vice President of Squeenix or something was quoted as saying "If people want a sequel, they should buy more!" meaning that Chrono projects were certainly on a board somewhere, but only half-heartedly at best.  It almost seems as if it was an in-joke for the company; someone put down a bet that said a Chrono Trigger revisit would sell gang-busters and, if it did, they could build on that with even more unnecessary revisits and remakes and sequels that don't make any sense whatsoever.  Clearly he was wrong in that, as apparently everyone -but- him expected, and the end result is 2008 being the last time we've seen anything out of the franchise, both since then and likely indefinitely.

Which, for my part, all I can say to that is good.  If Chrono Cross and even the DS port of the game is any indication, Chrono Trigger is simply bigger than the sum of its parts.  It's lightning in a bottle and Squeenix has no idea what to do with it, if in fact, anything -can- be done with it at all.  I understand that I'm extremely biased in this, and it simply seems that the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia are clouding my perceptions, but for my money, Chrono Trigger in its original form is simply a level of quality that Cross, the DS port and even Radical Dreamers simply cannot compare to.  And it's not for any one particular reason, but, as I said, because it is just greater than all of its components.  The story isn't spectacular, the characters aren't as wonderfully developed as we've seen can be done, and the gameplay of it is, well, archaic -now-, considering how things have simply grown.  But it has a quality to it that simply cannot be harnessed to be placed into other things bearing the same moniker.  So I would surmise that anything new to be entered into the Chrono franchise would simply not be able to carry that, even if it was made by the Square of old.  Simply because the Square of old tried already and failed on most levels.  But we'll never really know for sure, as all we have is the original, the port, and the sequels (is it plural if one is a really really big re-imaging of the other?) will likely be the only things we have as evidence to either side.