Now that I think of it, the first Digimon series were indeed very good. It had more good moments than bad ones. Pinnochimon stands out as one of the best. By the gods, he killed without thinking twice and used real guns, I wonder how that got through American censorship. Also, the backgrounds in Digimon were beautiful. They took a risk, making it look so much like water painting. It probably cost them a lot, but the result was amazing. The backgrounds themselves are a reason to watch Digimon.
Also, the characters, especially the enemies, are not bad. You can come to like some of them - Pinnochimon in special, as I already mentioned, but other villains were rather good. I remember hoping that Hydramon would show more often, for example. The main kids were obviously commercial, with those big glasses and hats and gloves, though. No good, although it did give them some charisma and personality as well. Hard to imagine Mimi without her hat, even though she looks cute either way.
The Digimons themselves were nice. We had the ultra cute Poyomon, for instance, the controversial Tailmon, and the ultra cool Angemon and Angewomon, with their evil counterparts Devimon and Lady Devimon. There was Togemon the catcus that eventually became Lilymon; that was a bit odd at first, as every other 'mon tended to grow bigger with each digivolution, but she, who was the biggest, returned to human size on the next step.
Also, the original theme, Butterfly, was not bad at all, although the ending could have been better. But Brave Heart, the digivolution theme, is among the best BGM I have ever heard in any anime. And, funny, it went very nicely with the 3D CG for the transformations.
Finally, somehow I really liked the Brazilian dubbing for it. Leaving aside, of course, the opening theme, which albeit addictive was doubleplus bad.
Notice, first series. I could not stand Digimon 02, and the rest is true overkill.
It was late 1995 when I first saw an SNES emulator. VSMC was its name, if I am not wrong. Shareware. It could run Super Mario World at a laughable frame rate, with the strangest colors I ever came across. It had no sound. But I was amazed that it was possible to play an SNES game in my computer.
In the next year, Snes96 was released. That was a gigantic step forward in emulation. It still had no sound, but it ran at a reasonable speed and had a high compatibility rate. Its main competitors were Nerlaska, known for being entirely coded in ASM (and thus very fast, but that was its only quality) and Esnes, which was slow, but had good compatibility. Later Nerlaska and Esnes merged, creating NLKE, which I always called Nelke because it was cute. NLKE was not too good, however, so Snes96 remained as the best emulator that year.
It was in Snes96 that I first played Chrono Trigger, without sound. I remember it was quite troublesome, but I was fascinated. Frame skip of 1 to 4, I kept adjusting it via keyboard depending on what was on screen. The emulator had three methods to fool the game into thinking there was a sound chip there, and that was selectable in a command line parameter - there was no GUI yet. Chrono Trigger was an evil game, because in some screens it required bypass method 2 to be used, while in most of the game it was method 1. So each time I wanted to switch a character in my party, for example, I needed to save state, exit, restart with bypass 2, switch, save state, quit and restart with bypass 1, otherwise it would lock up. It took me ages, but I went very far with it.
That "it took me ages" reminds me of my experience with Genesis emulators, but that is another story entirely.
Back on topic, in spite of the new year being 1997, the emulator remained Snes96. Snes97 was the name given to its Windows version. Snes97 was always one version number behind, and it was very slow, so the only point of using it was for the GUI - but it was no good, anyway. There were also two versions of Snes96 at any given time: the latest, without GUI, and the one previous to it, with GUI.
At the second half of 1997, they merged the two emulators, creating Snes9x, both for DOS and Windows. It was great, it had reasonable sound. Every sword hit in Chrono Trigger sounded identical - in fact, everything in Chrono Trigger sounded like a bird with ashtma. But it was great and I finally finished the game that way, not having to restart each time I needed to switch a character. Oh, and Snes9x also introduced automatic frame skip. I was twice as happy.
1998 saw the dawn of zSnes, and a bad incident involving their team and the Snes9x team. Fortunately everything was cleared up, but the image of zSnes was scarred for a long time. In any case, the competition between these two emulators, and the French emulator SNeESe, made SNES emulation rocket up. In the two following years they covered nearly every basic aspect of the system. zSnes gained an advantage due to speed somewhere along the line.
Today, both Snes9x and zSnes have good Windows versions, using DirectX, running with no frame skip at full speed and terrific sound. The Snes9x GUI is a bit uglier and it tends to fail sometimes, though. Savestates are interchangeable, both support multiple graphical engines for beautiful screen output. In few words, SNES emulation is near perfect, with very few games and features not yet emulated, and with the right hardware it is a better experience than the actual console.
Then there was Playstation emulation. And instead of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 5, the two games I suffered the most to play in Snes96 and 9x, I now have Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Profile.
Multiple problems are starting to appear in Valkyrie Profile, including one where I have to save state, exit, configure another sound plug-in, restart, and play around with in-game setup for half an hour until I get through some scene with spoken dialogue. Then I save state, exit, reconfigure and go back.
Also, today I ran into a strange problem, where sound gradually disappears. One spoken line here, then some drums from the background music, then the magic attack sound, and eventually the game is completely silent. I have no idea what is causing it, let alone how to fix it. Truth is I played through some dungeons four times today with multiple settings seeing if anything would solve the problem, and nothing did it.
This is all very nostalgic, but I am getting a bit too old for this kind of thing.
In the last few days, two horrible historical mistakes were corrected: I played Valkyrie Profile, and I watched Evangelion.
Let me expand on the second item. Evangelion is composed of one series of 26 episodes, plus the movie "Death & Rebirth", plus another movie called "The End of Evangelion". It is not so simple, of course, but I will leave the many details aside.
I watched the 26 episodes, alright, "Death & Rebirth". So I am downloading EoE right now, only thing missing. Meanwhile, because my copy of D&R was so bad, barely watchable, I was also downloading it again, so I do not feel hurt when I put it in a CD. I found one version of very high bitrate from the Renewal of Evangelion DVDs, which feature remastered image; gigantic file. And, I was also downloading it in .ogm format, because this format has multiples dubbings and subtitles.
Both finished downloading on the same day. Today, I checked them. The gigantic file from the Renewal edition had its dubbings in Korean. Joy. It is in fact becoming common to find subtitles in Korean with not one single mark stating it is in Korean. It already happened with two different copies of the Inuyasha movie, "The Love That Transcends Time". Really, if I download a file named "Inuyasha - The Movie (subtitled).avi" I am to expect, given "subtitled" and "the movie" are English terms, that the subtitles will be in English; but no, they were in Korean.
One gigantic file less in my HD, I moved on to the .ogm file, with its multiple dubbings and subtitles, just like a DVD. In theory. If the rippers are kind and honest. As I checked the sound and subs, I realized it had no subtitles at all, and the only dubbing available was in Spanish. Why, for the sake of all gods, why use the OGM format to store one single dubbing, in Spanish, of all languages? Why not "Nuevo Genesis Evangelion - Muerte y Renascimiento.avi" instead of "Evangelion - Death and Rebirth.ogm"? Why not put a "dub" or "dub_spa" or "dub_esp" somewhere in it?
Why did they make me download over one gigabyte of data over five days just to delete it afterwards based solely on the incompetence of whoever named the files and those who did not delete it from their systems or rename them themselves?
And above all, why was the Renewal of Evangelion limited to so, so, so, so, so few boxes produced (it is so rare that it is not found on eBay, imagine that!), and without subtitles in English? In fact, why release a special, limited edition box of Evangelion, with full remastered image and sound, special casing, costing more money than I made the whole last year, in a dozen DVDs, with only the sound in Japanese, and not one single set of subtitles?
Back on topic. I truly wish this was a new tale, by the way, but it is not. My problem with things being in stupid languges without any indication of it comes from before, as can prove two CDs I have here, one containing Visual Basic 6.0 in German, another holding Suikoden 2, also in German.
It is very easy to spot something in Italian, French or Russian. They always, always, always have something to differentiate them. Fra, FR, Rus, Ita. But I never saw one single De, or Ger. I only came to know what things were when I was greeted with the Installationprogramme für Visual Basic 6.0. Each time I remember it my circulatory system loses thirty minutes of its lifespan.
Only Japanese girls should be allowed to speak in German.
Uma dúvida: por que todos as coisas artificiais que tentam ter gosto de laranja (eg, sucos, Cebion, sal de frutas) têm gosto de laranja passada?
Outra dúvida: como foi que aconteceu, que o centro de São Paulo ficou dividido em áreas onde se encontra tudo de determinado tipo? Por exemplo, a Santa Ifigênia e tudo relativo a eletrônicos (e elétricos no entorno), a Rua do Gasômetro e todas as suas serrarias e afins. Isso foi planejado ou simplesmente aconteceu? O que quero dizer é que não vejo razão para todas as lojinhas de eletrônicos migrarem para a Rua Aurora - então por que raios elas estão lá?
Por que as ruas não são todas paralelas, formando quadradinhos, num estilo de grade, sendo uma mão pra lá, outra mão pra cá? E por que pessoas vivem em Perdizes?
Por que todas as páginas brasileiras não usam encoding UTF-8, se é tão mais prático para acentuar nele?
Por que aboliram o teclado universal e insistem que eu tenho que usar um que tem o glorioso Ç? E por que não tentam ensinar teclado Dvorak nas aulas de informática das escolas?
Por que os processadores Intel custam tão mais caro que os da AMD?
Chega de dúvidas. Uma constatação: as duas melhores propagandas da TV brasileira dos últimos tempos foram a da Skol com a musiquinha, e a que sempre vinha logo em seguida, de um tênis com absorção de impacto, onde o cara cantava Lo-Lo-Love me t-t-t-tender. Pena que não passam mais. Caso eu me esqueça da musiquinha no futuro, coloco-a aqui.
"Se você vai num bar e o garçom diz que a Skol acabou
Mas tem outra que desce redondo também, resista,
Mesmo que ele insista um pouquinho.
Ele é comissionado, coitado.
Fale com carinho, seja paciente.
Garçom sem Skol fica muito carente."
Ótimo, ótimo.
I do not like the German language. It sounds ugly, rispid. If it was a movie scene, it would be the scene where someone runs through thick woods and thorns and get really hurt and keep tripping because the terrain is not plain and there are roots in the way. Plus, the words are far too long.
I do not deny, however, the need to speak German. Let it be know, I know nothing of it. But I admit I should learn. Someday, eventually, in the far future, after I am done with, hmm, Japanese, Italian, Latin, Russian. Maybe. Maybe applies to all five languages mentioned here so far.
Because, unfortunately, Germany is a powerful economy today. And many smaller countries in Europe speak some form of German, such as Austria and Switzerland. I understand the differences between what is spoken in Germany and Switzerland are enormous, but my point stands, no less.
Furthermore, there is the issue of reading the original. As I am sure Dostoievski is much better in its original Russian form, I do believe Kafka meant a lot more than our translations show. And unless the tales about the Japanese translation being better than the original are true, German is still the best way to read "Faust".
Lastly, there is one thing I noticed recently that has the potential to nullify my first point, about it being ugly. It is called Asuka. From Evangelion, which I finally, finally watched. German spoken by her sounds adorable, delightful. Of course, most languages spoken by Japanese girls sound cute. Saabisu, saabisu! Mayhaps, if it comes to pass, I shall learn German in Japanese.
Hmmm.
"Capturing a song" is an easy to grasp concept, but many people overlook it, and among those who do know of it, most have no faith in it.
It is rather simple, and it can be derived from a quick look at my directories of Mp3 songs, where many very bad songs lurk, never touched. They have been captured by me. But what does it mean, and why do I do it?
As I said, simplicity outlines the issue. Very often you get a bad song stuck in your head, and for some reason wherever you go you seem to hear it, which just adds to the echoes in your mind. "I hear it all the time, anywhere I go!" Obvious. Thinking that, one day I realized the next step: I needed to be able to not hear a bad song whenever or wherever I wanted not to hear it. So I downloaded it. If I am not mistaken, the first song I captured was "Truly, Madly, Deeply", by Extreme, which I prefer to call "the I'll be I'll be song". By having this song as an Mp3 file in my collection, I could at any time not play it, keep it out of my playlist, look at it and close the window, open the file and keep the volume down, change its tags - and yet never listen to it. I had control over the song, I had the ability to not listen to it at any time. And very often throughout the day I would not listen to it, and smile. As a result, it walked out of my mind, and stopped following me everywhere I went.
So the concept of capturing a song was created, and I have captured many songs since then. Troublesome song playing everywhere you go, just download an Mp3 of it and stare at it for two minutes, then remind yourself of how you are not listening to that song right now because you have the choice not to, you have control.
It is wonderful. And I just sounded like a self-help book. On such an important subject.
Bah.
I have not written in far too long.
Unfortunately, tonight will not see anything of interest here. I write merely to say this journal is not forgotten. It just fell out of my habits for a while.
I will see that I conjure something worth writing tomorrow.