Final Fantasy XIII-2 actually looks like an improvement on the original

If that pans out, it'll be quite a change from Final Fantasy X-2, which failed miserably (see this post, third paragraph). Though, to be fair, Final Fantasy X was a much higher standard to meet (I'd still rank it the best of the lot).

I live in hope that there will be a) towns and b) a user-controllable airship. The lack of the former wrecked the flow of the game; RPGs aren't first-person shooters, there's supposed to be time to go around talking to people and getting a feel for the plot. In FFXIII it was just a rush of ultra-linear* dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles that required way too much button-mashing for their near-automatic mechanics followed by a cutscene followed more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling followed by a cutscene followed by more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles followed by a cutscene... you get the idea. Come to think of it, if just strung the cutscenes together with new onces detailing the major battles, it would work better as a movie than a game.

The lack of an airship was just an unjustified breach of Final Fantasy tradition that further undermined the cohesion of the series. And in this game, unlike Final Fantasy XII, an airship would have actually been useful! Activating all the Cie'th teleport stones on Pulse is a huge pain in the ass! Getting an airship to fly between Orphan's Cradle, Edenhall, and Pulse instead of portals would have been easy as pie for the developers, would have made more sense, and would have been a boon to the players if it could drop you off at different points in Pulse. Or, God forbid, fly freely like in FF I-IX! And yes, you can do that in games without the ability to walk on an overworld map; see Secret of Mana I & II, or Lost Odyssey for that matter.

Back to the subject at hand, the trailers has gotten me looking forward to the game. Hopefully they'll improve the battle system. The plot looks more interesting than the original, though its hard to tell at this point (I'm sure one couldn't have predicted from the trailers that the heroes would do everything the gods Fal'cie wanted every step of the way while knowing they were doing it even to the point of killing Orphan and releasing a genocide only for said genocide to averted by a massive Deus ex Machina). Oh, and Kaias still reminds me of Cid Reines, though apparently he's unrelated. Also, his identity as a Time Agent Who Can Never Die sounds familiar.

*Final Fantasy X took linearity as far as it could go and pulled it off brilliantly. Final Fantasy XIII took it much further and didn't.

Yahoo Pipes is awesome

I'd heard of Yahoo Pipes many times, but I hadn't used it until now. I have to say that it is a fantastic product. There are some sites that still haven't gotten into the 21st century regarding site feeds. They've for what is all intents and purposes a blog, but it doesn't have a feed. Half an hour fiddling with Yahoo Pipes for the first time and I gave a site like that (Suikosource, a website devoted to the Suikoden series of video games which doesn't update regularly) an RSS feed. It's crude--I haven't figured out how to separate title and body--but it does what I need it to do: tell me when there's new content.

Eureka to premiere July 11

This is a bit disappointing, though not unexpected. The net effect of Eureka moving from a short 13-episode season to a long 18 and then 20 episode season is to get fewer episodes per year. That's perverse.

MGM just went under

This can't be good news for Stargate Universe, with it's disappointing ratings. Or could it? It sounds like restructuring could free the company from limbo, so who knows?

Court Rules that EULAs Trump First Sale Doctrine

The AP and Slashdot have the story. From the AP story:

There are also fears that book publishers, music labels and movie studios will try to come up with their own licensing agreements to restrict the rental or resale of their copyrighted material.

That's what's terrifying about this ruling. It is easy to see how knowledge and art could be lost to the public through this kind of extreme copyright system. If the company holding the rights doesn't feel like making it available anymore, and you're not allowed to sell used copies, that work is essentially banned as effectively as if the government had censored it.

Now, I don't see this as likely applying to books, movies, or music in the too-near-term. What I'm more concerned about is video games, which are just another kind of software after all. Masterpieces could simply be lost. This will also fuel the fires of piracy.

And yes, people resorting to piracy is worse for software and other media vendors than buying used. The copyright holder might not get any more money from the sale of a used program or game than a P2P download, but that person buying a used program or game is far more likely to buy more new items than the pirate. He's playing by the rules, don't rob him of the that avenue.

I was right about one thing, though

The iPod Classic lives, though without a rev, just as I said. I expect it to die as soon as a 128GB iPod Touch is available, which will probably be a year from now.

Color me surprised about the Apple TV

It's HD and $99, making it the second piece of cheap merchandise, after the iPod Shuffle, that Apple's ever peddled. Like the Shuffle's missing screen, it has the oddest limitations: it is HDMI+Optical only (with no converter on sale at launch), but it will only do 720p video. So if you want to watch Netflix or purchased video on an SDTV, or in full HD (after the forthcoming 1080p update), you'll still want to get a Roku.

At least some of the content is apparently going to be protected by HDCP, which indicates that any converter, third party or not, would not work, at least for all content.

The only way that $99 Apple TV is real...

is if it is stripped not only of its hard drive, as everyone says, but also of its HD capabilities. I just can't see the new Apple TV being on the same price level as the newly price-cut Roku. That would be totally out of character for Apple. But a Roku SD level device for $99--a 66% markup--would be absolutely believable.

Roku Drops Prices - Awesome!

Since I got my Roku, I've been firmly of the opinion that it is the perfect companion to every TV. Now it is even more affordable than it was before, with prices ranging from $59 to $99. Now let's see what Apple really comes out with, if it is really as cheap as they say, and if it can do everything the Roku can do and more.

I suspect that it's abilities really will be as stated, but the price. That's something I have trouble with. Apple does not sell cheap merchandise, ever. Their lowest end Mac was never less than $499 (back before the switch to Intel) and is now $699.

Netflix Streaming Far Cheaper than Mailed DVDs

I recently ran across a very old story, that it costs Netflix about one-tenth as much to stream a movie as to mail one, but it got me thinking. If that's so, it isn't automatically to Netflix's benefit to stream rather than mail, though it seems like it would be. After all, you can watch far more movies streaming than you can via DVD, at least on most plans. If one has the minimal plans, one or two discs, one could easily watch ten times or more streaming than one could get with those one or two discs.

My guess is that most people have more than the minimum, so it is a net profit if people with four or five discs spend more time streaming.