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media diary - august 2024

[01/08/2024] WILD AT HEART

after watching a ton of david lynch earlier this year and revisiting his work last month with THE STRAIGHT STORY, i figured i'd also check out another film of his i didn't check out yet. this time it's WILD AT HEART, which released around the same time twin peaks began airing, meaning it's difficult to ignore certain parallels, overlapping themes and the fact half the cast is the same. the Other half of that cast is really unusual for lynch though, names like NICOLAS CAGE and WILLEM DAFOE that i'm not used to seeing in this way.

the parallels to twin peaks, both spiritual and direct, naturally got me good but that aspect set up the way i ultimately felt about the rest of the movie. it was a distraction, in a way, but gave the whole thing a surreal feeling that i. uh.

okay i explained in the previous blog post that i needed to temporarily stay with my family for the summer, and that's fine, but it meant staying in a town i generally feel unwelcomed by. the subtle evils of such a place began to get to me in ways i have a hard time formulating but it can be described as an insidious lingering stench. truly, the world can be a nasty place, no less a random town in the middle of a country that hates my guts by default for arbitrary reasons beyond my control. i'm dumping all of this on WILD AT HEART in particular because it is, in part, about generational trauma and how weird and gross and tragic things can be, and i found some solace in the weird way it presents morals, but i could be totally misremembering and projecting my own feelings onto it based on what i remember from something i watched a month ago as of writing.

i assure you, things did get better though, and a temporary stay at bumdump nowhere away from all my friends didn't last that long in the end -- later in the month i moved back to [ADDRESS WITHHELD] and now i'm feeling better, but i'll probably mainly associate the feeling of being in said nowhere with the last movie i watched there. i find nic cage's constant elvis impression pretty funny.

[13/08/2024-] FINAL FANTASY X

i've had multiple reasons to check this game out over the past year-ish due to the ongoing KINGDOM HEARTS video series i'm working on, and this time i decided to play more of it because Wow, final fantasy X is Poisonously Chill.

i'm in awe of the way this game feels high-tech and cutting-edge while being of its time while not aging a day and being beautiful regardless of circumstance. i gotta inform you that i'm playing the original PS2 game (through an emulator with display settings as close to the PS2 as the emulator gets) so the visuals shine through. i own the remaster on nintendo switch and i played that version first last year while preparing for the KH2 video, but the HD-ified visuals kinda look cheap or mismatched due to the developers having to recreate most of the game after losing the source files. if some grifter youtuber tells you the best way to play FFX is to get it on PC and install a mod that upscaled the graphics to 4K with waifu2x textures, they're wrong! there's no best way to play a game just play it in the way that best suits your tastes!!!

i'm not that experienced with final fantasy. i beat FFVII in 2020 but with the worst grasp of RPG systems that led to my using cheats just to reach the ending with no regard for the play experience or atmosphere. i've been meaning to replay it for ages, but instead i've gravitated towards X for its close relation to kingdom hearts and just how pretty it is in general. i've had a lot of spare time, from staying at my family's place to finally moving into my new house, and i've stuck with this game throughout the month. over time it's become a comforting activity, the game is so easygoing for an RPG that i have no trouble jogging through it casually and basking in its gorgeous-ass artwork.

compared to SMTV, a more mechanically intensive game i've been playing lately (and wrote about last month), FFX evidently intentionally holds your hand in case you're new to the series and in doing so it prioritizes story, characters and environments over typical grinding loops which i can imagine blew peoples' minds back in 2002. it's not afraid to be a cinematic show-off, but that doesn't detract from its genuine beauty, a balance i feel has maybe gotten out of hand in so many other cases. also tom kenny is in it and thats funny

[XX/08/2024-] GAMECENTER CX

this is one of those situations where i'm kinda cheating because i've been watching this show for well over a year now, but this month a switch was flicked in my brain and i went into full GCCX-mode in the hopes i could possibly someday catch up.

GAMECENTER CX, if you don't know at all, is a FUJI TV variety show that started back in 2003 and has been on the air since. the entire premise of the series is that each episode is dedicated to arino, the main guy, beating a retro game in one day (if he even manages to). the whole show is a celebration of japanese game culture, its interstitial arcade trip segments for example bringing attention to the kinds of games you'd see out in japan along with other segments that often take a look at parts of game history under varying comedic premises. if you're at all familiar with gaming youtuber culture, you'd probably be shocked to learn that these guys perfected how to entertainingly cover retro games in a respectful way that's straight up backed up by icons of the industry *before youtube even happened*.

i'd been watching this series semi-consistently ever since i saw it streamed in a pretty large discord server a couple years ago, finding it nice to watch episodes of a show i'd never seen at random in a way that made me reminisce on the programming of cable TV (i am Sick of binge watching things). i took to watching the show on my own via shockingly accessible fansub torrents and went from randomly picking episodes of the games i like to just watching in order from the beginning. if you do this too, be warned that season 1 has its own distinct format revolving around interviews & game company tours -- it was corporate from the start!

and it's important to state, this show Is corporate. it's a long-running TV show from a major broadcaster that literally started with an interview with tomohiro nishikado, the SPACE INVADERS guy. that might sound unnecessary to point out, but it's striking how differently people on a TV show with a budget from japan talk about games from their own country versus how random video creators online from english-speaking countries discuss the same subjects. after being so used to nintendotubers who unreasonably scrutinize & idolize guys like shigeru miyamoto or masahiro sakurai, it's refreshingly fascinating to see a show that just kinda goes and sits down to chat with those same figures. it's almost like these are people or something!

it's a topic i'll endlessly have on my mind because the perception of such famous games and their creators varies so drastically, but i already talked about this in a blog post from last month regarding the newest FAMICOM DETECTIVE CLUB game. for now i've been watching gamecenter CX daily, in the past month ish i went from season 8 to season 14, and i've been really enjoying it as a sort of routine part of the day. it also means i've repeatedly opted to watch an episode of this over a movie or something, but i've been busy regardless and it kept me in good company while i didn't have internet at my new house for a few days. i have an import copy of the tie-in game being shipped as i write, so maybe next month i'll talk about that too!

[24/08/2024] STOP MAKING SENSE (again)

i don't need to explain to you why i find this movie special, i literally already did so when i saw it for the first time last year, but this time i got to see it at an outdoor screening with my sister which quickly became an all-out dance party. i am Not Even Kidding, i danced to this thing more than i've danced to anything else in my life, and it was a transcendent experience man. the power of music, especially good music that i love with all my heart, goes wild. definitely a better time than when i saw it on my own in a near-empty theater the first time round, lol.

[25/08/2024-] I SAW A MONITOR GLOW

only a week and a half after moving into the new house, one of my roommates set up his CRT monitor downstairs since it couldn't fit in his room. on the very day we all moved in i crudely set up my wii u with my own PC monitor down there since everyone expressed wanting to play wii games and i no longer have the desk space for two full-size monitors (it's fine, i have a better-fitting drawing tablet in its stead). what this means is that once this CRT was set up, i realised the vast potential of using different consoles with it. the wii u is hacked, so i can play gamecube games on there, as well as wii and virtual console games -- the console supports 4:3 output in 480p so it's ideal for the really weird funky setup we have going on because it is in fact a CRT MONITOR and not a CRT TV.

the monitor only has a VGA output, but my roomie used it for his modern laptop so naturally he has a HDMI-to-VGA adapter, meaning (confusingly) that i can only use modern HDMI devices on this thing. what's worse is that there's naturally no audio output from the monitor, so any consoles without their own audio jack for speaker output just won't have audio. the nintendo switch lets you use the handheld's audio jack while it's docked, but that was designed solely for a 16:9 display, so it's not worth trying to use here. the wii u though? the wii u gamepad, too, has its own audio jack, so despite how imperfect it all is, the wii u solves every problem with this precarious CRT setup.

initially i only knew it could run gamecube and wii games in 4:3 -- setting the system aspect ratio to 4:3 means any wii software that supports it will default to 4:3, so most wii games look great on the screen and by default all gamecube games look great too. i tested out WIND WAKER, which you can see above, but additionally i tested out tons of other games i've got on this thing. i played MARIO SUNSHINE for a pretty long while, and began playing ANIMAL CROSSING CITY FOLK for the first time ever. city folk is the least-talked about animal crossing game because it's essentially a wii remake of WILD WORLD for DS, but that just means it's an enhanced version of a great game. i've had great luck with it so far by the way, i got my best friend TANGY straight away and fucking SCOOT showed up the second day, so truly this town (i named it fungus) is for me.

later on i found out the wii u's virtual console games ALSO support 4:3 -- i initially didn't think they would because for whatever reason N64 games specifically only display in bordered 16:9, meaning they're extra small on this display. i tried ocarina of time that way, saw it displayed wrong, and assumed they were all like this but NUH-UH!!! other consoles display properly, so i'm also able to play NES, SNES and GBA games on a CRT, which is sick actually.

i had a great week or so trying out all these games, and i'll continue regularly playing stuff on there just for how novel it is. everyone loves wii games so it's the default for if we all wanna play stuff together -- we tried WII SPORTS RESORT and MARIO PARTY 8, in fact, and had a lot of fun doing so :)