@Wolfe: SMT IV is really good too! Atlus took a lot of what they learned from making all the side-series game and squeezed it into a tight little package. Maybe we’ll se SMT V come out on an aging PS4…

. . .

Wait, is that how that goes?

A coworker and I had a $5 bet as to whether Persona 5 would release this year. I was the loser. Not upset by the delay though, just means that I’ll likely be playing it on ps4 upon release rather than ps3.

But I bet if you contacted Atlus by e-mail, they might be willing to exchange it!

I will buy Persona 5 when it comes out and I will probably never play it.

So far I’ve played about 10 hours of Persona 1.

‘Upscaling’ doesn’t automatically result in better quality than the original. In fact, it doesn’t actually result in any change if one has relatively modern equipment. The games only have assets for, and only output to, SD resolutions. Most consoles can do some or all of these three things:

1. display the SD game at a 1:1 ratio (so it faithfully reproduces the original SD output in a small box on the HD screen).
2. upscale (that is, take the output and scale it up so that it fills the appropriate amount of the larger HD pixel area). This does not increase quality; it just makes the extant textures/images larger whilst preserving aspect ratio.
3. switch to outputting in SD, at which point most modern TVs automatically enlarge the image whilst preserving aspect ratio anyway. (so, it looks just like 2; if they don’t do this, it will look like 1).

An ‘upscaled’ version of FFXII would not look any different than the original release. You might as well play it on your PS2 connected to your HD TV for the same effect. The output will be at 1080p, but the game’s assets and output are still SD, and will just be enlarged. They will have precisely the same level of detail that they had to begin with.

Another way to think about this is like this: You can view a 640×480 image on a 640×480 VGA screen just like you can view it on my 2560×1440 iMac screen. It will be fairly small on my HD screen, although it will fill the VGA screen. But the exact same data is contained in both images.

To ‘upscale’ it, we could open that picture in GIMP, scale it up to 1920×1440, and save it. We will now have a 1920×1440 version which would fill the HD iMac screen top to bottom. But it wouldn’t have any more detail than the original picture did.

The only way to get more detail is to have higher res assets and use those, but that’s not going to come from a straight PS2 game. It’s not even on the disc. You will need a new version of the game where those higher resolution assets are available–like the FFX/X-2 HD Remix collection.

These on top of lots of other niche gamer goodness have left me feeling very optimistic about next year. And of course there’s Dark Souls 3, which I’m hopeful will rekindle the soul that 2 left somewhat less radiant.

Nice to hear the possibility of PS2 classics being released. There’s a handful I missed out on. But I don’t want a port of FFXII, I want that long rumoured HD remaster. If we can get every mobile incarnation of Kingdom Hearts remastered, they can throw me a goddamned bone.

As the resident Prison School fanboy, I’m ecstatic about the live action take on it. Particularly how well the actors/actresses match their respective counterparts.

Just a quick note: both Funimation and Crunchyroll stream live-action shows: their speciality in that area is (as you might expect) live-action versions of anime properties, although they do stream other stuff as well.