Yes, I admit it, I have put off updating the blog while I played Tron 2.0 solely because I wanted to use that as a post title.

I’m a sad, sick man.

Anyway. I’m happy to report that patching the game to 1.042 does make it a heck of a lot easier – it’s either that, or the act of applying the patch somehow boosted my FPS skills. I don’t HAVE any FPS skills, so it wouldn’t take much…

Solid game. Helped considerably by the sheer nostalgia-fest combination of the visual style and music. My only complaint, really, is that the ending highlights one of the big mysteries of the game and then doesn’t actually answer the question for us. Presumably if they’d gotten to do a sequel it would have been wrapped up but, meh.

Roughly three weeks to go until I head to Japan for a week of Comiket and sightseeing and general immersion. I need to be done with at least the first season of “Let’s Learn Japanese” by then; right now I’m at episode 19 so I have 7 to go. I am very glad to have found out about this series; it’s a little corny but it really is helping fill in the gaps.

Let’s see… my TurboDuo seems to have developed sound problems during a period of non-use. Rather vexed about that; apparently it’s a pretty common problem with the capacitors in the sound section. It’s actually the console I expected to have problems, but I really thought it would be the CD or the back up memory that failed, so having the sound go out was a shock.

Debating whether to deal with sending off to get it fixed or whether I should just deal with emulation.

The only other console I’ve had a failure on (except from, you know, dirty cartridge slots) was our original Xbox. I had to buy a replacement power supply from the sadly defunct Lik-sang, and it was pretty easy to replace.

The long process of recording laserdiscs to MPEG-2 files is almost complete. I have a few discs of Dirty Pair episodes, all of Gandala, and Gamera vs. Zigra to work through and then I can dismount the LD player from the rack and think about the VHS hell to come – we have about 100 tapes left, and lots of them have 3 or 4 things on the tape so they’ll take extra work.

Time to cross another game off the “to-play” stack, watch the episode of Lucky Star I have sitting on my desktop, and call it a night.

Life is good.