Yesterday Ember bought me Final Fantasy XII. After getting home I popped it in. After about half an hour of awesome pre-rendered movies, I finally got to play.
Also, we're pretty sure that the final boss is a flock of seagulls. But we may be missing the mark just a bit.
So far, visually, it's great. My only real issue, Ember noticed it too, is how "flickery" it is. Especially while running around through environments (pre-rendered stuff is immune, or just not enough for me to notice like normal interlaced stuff) The flicker filter in the options menu does help with text, but it doesn't seem to matter with polygons. My technical explanation is that it's because we sit roughly four feet away from a 56" standard definition [rear projection] screen. So, very large pixels and screen interlacing is the problem.
There's not really anything we can do about it. Sitting further away would help but we can't move the couch back any further in our tiny place. An HD TV wouldn't really help because then everything would be upscaled, and sometimes that makes interlacing worse but some do have very good upscalers... Does the PS2 even do progressive scan? Wikipedia says yes (and even some HD!), but FFXII says no. XII does have a 16x9 mode, but that doesn't help on a 4x3 screen.
I do wish for interlacing to be a thing of the past. I was hoping the switch to HD would eliminate it, seeing how LCD is dominating the market and LCD displays are not interlaced. But all HD (in the US, ATSC) is doing is making more versions (720p, 1080i, 1080p), . All the HD work I do here is 1080i, but maybe the lines will be so much smaller that it doesn't really matter... The only "HD" monitor I've used for my work was not 1920x1080. Soon though, soon. I think I'll be moving to the other building this month. With new equipment. Yay!
Anyway, this post got transformed from "Yay Ember getting me FFXII!" to geeky stuff. So I'll stop this.
Also, we're pretty sure that the final boss is a flock of seagulls. But we may be missing the mark just a bit.
So far, visually, it's great. My only real issue, Ember noticed it too, is how "flickery" it is. Especially while running around through environments (pre-rendered stuff is immune, or just not enough for me to notice like normal interlaced stuff) The flicker filter in the options menu does help with text, but it doesn't seem to matter with polygons. My technical explanation is that it's because we sit roughly four feet away from a 56" standard definition [rear projection] screen. So, very large pixels and screen interlacing is the problem.
There's not really anything we can do about it. Sitting further away would help but we can't move the couch back any further in our tiny place. An HD TV wouldn't really help because then everything would be upscaled, and sometimes that makes interlacing worse but some do have very good upscalers... Does the PS2 even do progressive scan? Wikipedia says yes (and even some HD!), but FFXII says no. XII does have a 16x9 mode, but that doesn't help on a 4x3 screen.
I do wish for interlacing to be a thing of the past. I was hoping the switch to HD would eliminate it, seeing how LCD is dominating the market and LCD displays are not interlaced. But all HD (in the US, ATSC) is doing is making more versions (720p, 1080i, 1080p), . All the HD work I do here is 1080i, but maybe the lines will be so much smaller that it doesn't really matter... The only "HD" monitor I've used for my work was not 1920x1080. Soon though, soon. I think I'll be moving to the other building this month. With new equipment. Yay!
Anyway, this post got transformed from "Yay Ember getting me FFXII!" to geeky stuff. So I'll stop this.