Month: November 2010

Categories
Video Games

On Final Fantasy Demystified.

If you know anything about video games you probably know that the American numbering system for the Final Fantasy series is less than ideal. Back in the “golden age” of gaming of the 8-bit and 16-bit systems Japan was the #1 producer of video games. That usually meant there was lag time for localization from Japan to the States. During localization things got a little confusing, and most people were non-the-wiser. The Internet was pretty much non-existent and video games rags (see magazines) were the only source of information available and since they mostly aware of the localization, there was very few leaks of information in the differences. This lead to some pretty crazy changes in games, changes that would not fly today because they would be smeared all over the Internet.

One notorious culprit of localization gone mad was the Final Fantasy series. In America, we had Final Fantasy I,II,III, then VII. What happened to IV, V, IV? I remember that was a big question when VII came out. Where were our missing games and why didn’t we get them!?! There also was the possibility that Square just jumped to VII, but then why do that?  Turns out there isn’t a really easy answer and you have to wade through some information to get the whole story. (I know I’m not the first to do this, but I aim to be the best) Luckily, I did that for you and did it in easy to understand graphics.

First here is the timeline of mainline Final Fantasy releases through today.

Now you will notice that the North American releases are pretty spread out up until VII, but thats because some games were left out in the numbering. Basically, Square or Nintendo decided that the Japanese Final Fantasy II and III were not OK for American release so they skipped ’em. With Japan on III and North America still only having I they released Final Fantasy IV on Super Famicom (SNES) in Japan and it came over to the states as Final Fantasy II as it was our first Final Fantasy since the first one on the NES. Then Japan released Final Fantasy V, but again it never made it over. So, Japan is now on V and we still have only 2 releases. Come Final Fantasy VI in Japan. This actually did see a western release as Final Fantasy III. Then it defaults to normal as the next North American release is Final Fantasy VIII; same as Japan. It’s pretty ridiculous to follow so I made another graphic to illustrate it. All the red lines tie their Japanese to North American counterpart. I included all the Japanese and North American box art to show the contrast.

Eventually, all the Final Fantasy’s have made their way to the shores of North America, in some form or another. Here is an image that shows when and in what forms the missing Final Fantasy’s made their debut in North America. (I also included the lag time we had to wait for them. Thanks Square!)

I hope this cleared things up for some people even if you couldn’t be less interested. This is not only for you guys, but it helps me remember too. Thanks for reading. Check back if you need affirmation that I indeed don’t have a life.

Categories
Website

On Upcoming Content.

This isn’t going to be a long one, just an update to tell you what will be happening shortly. I am currently between computers, but when I get one that is half-way decent I will be able to really get going on this new content. I recently bought a new camera! My first new one in 7 years if you can believe that. It is the most budget, but it does do one thing well and that is video. Luckily, purposefully, that is why I bought it. I will be starting a new piece here on the blog called “A Week in Video” in which I will splice, edit, mash, and extrude any and all videos I find worthy that were taken during the week. It won’t be every week, but I am trying to make it a regular occurrence. I have enough footage for about 3 videos now, but the computer I’m on can’t handle all the H’s and D’s it was shot in so I will have to keep stockpiling it.

Second, there is a pretty neat concept in the works that I will be partaking in when everyone’s computer isn’t broken called “24-Hour Blog Day.” To my knowledge this started as a joke off of the 24-Hour Comic Book Day, but it has kind of manifested itself into something real. Basically it’s 24 blog posts written in 24-Hours with topics that are far-reaching, random, and most importantly, chosen by the participants. It should be a good time.

Just keep checking back; I still have loads to write about, and stay tuned for the new content. Killer Tofu is still finishing 2010 with a bang.

Categories
Nonsense Projects School

On Random ISBNs or How Not To Do a Stats Project

books

This semester I am taking a course called Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists which is actually pretty cool. I’ve yet to take a class in stats so this stuff is mostly new to me. It’s a powerful form of Math and probably one of the most relatable and useful in “real life.” This post isn’t about stats as a class though it’s about stats as a project.

We were assigned a project in which we had to come up with a way to find the average date of all the books published in our library. You couldn’t brute force it either by checking every book and recording the copyright date. You had to come up with a method to take a random sample of data (how many to sample was also part of the project) and then using that, do calculations on the data. Here was my plan:

The library has all its books cataloged online.

All books (in the catalog) have ISBNs.

Randomly generate ISBN numbers and have it auto-search, parse, and record book dates.

Viola! Tons of randomly selected years from books.

In theory this is great! It is impartial and once setup can be repeated as many times as needed with minimal effort on my part. Before I get into why it’s the worst plan, let me show you how I accomplished randomly generating ISBNs because it’s not straightforward at all.

Let me preface this by saying I now know way more about ISBNs than I ever wanted to. I will give you the abridged version as not to bore you to tears. (Although the thought of any of my writing bringing you, the audience, to tears is tempting)

Here is a breakdown of a ISBN13 number (13 being the number of digits)

9781999186135 <—Random ISBN

so the first 3 digits

978

This apparently refers to a fictitious place called “Bookland” where all books come from, no joke. It’s called the “country code.” It can also be the industry, in this case book publishing.

The next number, 1, denotes language. English is either 0 or 1.

The numbers that follow are weird because it’s not like 3 numbers are the publisher code, it varies a lot, but suffice it to say the next numbers are publisher and title numbers.

The last digit, 5, is a checksum value. It basically makes sure the number is valid, by performing a checksum calculation.

Without getting into too much detail, they are very strict values and do not just vary from 0-9 for 13 digits and this made my MATLAB script go from 10-15 lines to about 100 lines. I worked for about 3 hours researching and creating the script and it works! The problem, and I feel really stupid for having missed it, is that having that many combinations of numbers, even if they are within guidelines produces a ton of possibilities. This means that almost every value I generated, while being valid within the confines of the standard, did not produce a number that was assigned to a real book.

Using only books in English there is a whopping 199,920,000 different combinations to be made. The chances of me hitting on a real book, especially in a small university library are slim to none. Needless to say, I didn’t end up using this method. Even the best laid plans can go awry. On the plus side I have all this useless information on ISBNs now; come on Cash Cab.

*Edit*

I feel like the dumbest. I did my math wrong and there is actually more combinations than I had previously stated. It’s not 22,952,230 different combinations, it’s 199,920,000 and this has been reflected above. I should really be better at math.