Uhg, Lack of Updates… Gaming and Baby Squirrels! DnD in there someplace…

So I’ve been fairly lazy in my ability keep up with my blog, however that does not mean there is nothing to mention. There have actually been plenty of happenings in the recent month!

I re-addicted myself to Call of Duty: World at War. I took the plunge and went prestige mode, which wipes out all of weapons and perks for looks and small bonuses. A small way for me to keep playing I guess. It has made me look at using other weapons and how effective they can be.

Another game I have also maintained an addiction to has been Agricola; however this addiction is much tougher to feed since I have only one person to play it with right now. Not to mention at this point an individual who probably beat me more than most. My copy came in the mail finally and I dumped a good $30 dollars more buying boxes and sleeves to keep all the pieces and cards in good shape for a long time. I have another $30 or so to spend to get the cooler pieces.

So my mom and I picked up 9 baby squirrels from my work. It was a little difficult for me to see the all die on a daily basis from other predators and the equipment we must use around work. I figured if I took them home they would have a chance. So I did the research and discovered we have everything to keep them alive and going. Now they are doing incredibly well and hopefully in a month or so we can release them!

I play Dungeons and Dragons on Saturdays now, officially inducting me into the realm of nerdy-ness. We have a blast every afternoon playing with 6 people plus a dungeon master. A dungeon master engineers a story line and moderates how the non-playable characters (NPC’s) act such as monsters and friendly characters. As of now I’m currently playing a Paladin, the only way I think I will be successful at having fun with DnD is if I play something true to my personality in real life. I enjoy helping others and I tend to be extremely altruistic.

Semester Salvaged! Agricola on the way! Civilization: Revolution…

So much like the cowardly student I am, I’ve neglected to check my grades for the past few weeks in fear of what was a looming disaster. Worst and best cases were both avoided; however, I ended up with the middle case! Which were 3 C’s and a C+. Nobody should be proud of such grades even as a Computer Science major, I simply could have done significantly better.

These grades, however, are satisfactory given the classes I was taking and the first half of an emotionally tormented year. I would have to say given all the obstacles blocking my path I’m actually fairly pleased I came out unscathed. I had never taken two math classes in a given semester and basically two programming classes as well; to top it off I had a general education class to tack on.

Agricola is on the way! I have no one play it with at the present time that does not already have it, but I don’t care, it’s ALL MINE. I’ll be able to sift through the cards and study them better so I’m not reading them so much when I actually play the game with my buddy and other events like an idiot.

I plan to pick up the animeeples (little replacement pieces that add fun to the game) next month. The pieces represent the actual items you receive in game such as Wheat, sheep and so on. The game is highly addicting.

I’m really enjoying Civilization in my free time. I attempted to play a few online games but the people I have been matched up against have been fairly slow and it takes almost 20 minutes to get through the first 20 turns. Even against PC opponents I can limit my turns to at most 30 seconds after the first 20.As of now I bounce between that and Call of Duty: World at War. Warcraft 3 has disappeared...

E3 has arrived! New Articles and I don’t know WTF to do with myself !!

I didn’t get a chance to go this year but I’m sure at some point in my career I will make to this event!!

So finally new hotness has arrived in what has been a depressingly stale game market. With only a few games such as Starcraft 2 and Diablo III on my radar, I was feeling pretty down in video games.

New Hotness #1

Star Wars: Old Republic



I think I jizzed my pants after watching this video. To me there is almost nothing that echoes awesomeness than a bitchen light saber fight. This game will hope fully have a decent shelf-life against World of Warcraft; however it needs to be done right! Time will tell but the irony is this game will probably not need to worry about WOW, but Starcraft 2 and Diablo III.

New Hotness #2

Metroid: Other M



Finally we have a Metroid game leaving the first person perspective. It’s not that I had a problem with a Metroid Prime series; it got old after two games. I failed to finish Metroid Prime: Corruption out of boredom.

Just in time to watch my dad, brother and his girlfriend take my Nintendo Wii to Texas. This was ingenious timing on my part. I don’t think I should be too concerned; the game is slated to arrive late 2010. Just in time to reunite with my loved ones, my nun-chuck, Wii-mote and console!

New Hotness #3

Super Mario Galaxy 2



Super Mario Galaxy was an incredibly fun game. I’m very pleased to not only see a sequel return but it has Yoshi as well OMGWTFBBQ… Mario tends to be one of a few games I’ll purchase that has zero multiplayer.



New Hotness #4 (No video)

New Zelda Game!


The great news here is we have a new Zelda game to finally take full advantage of the Wii. Admittedly I never played the Twilight Princess, but I’ll probably pick this up. I just hope they continue to use the same formula for Zelda games without the funny business.

Nintendo also announced a bunch of garbage for the Wii. Some piece of shit that will take my pulse and yet ANOTHER fucking Wii Fat… I hate to admit that these things are widely popular with the ladies, which has been problem demographic to grab in video game sales.

I saw a new Halo game announced but I have to admit that Halo was never something I was able to play. Gaystation is no ware to be found! Sony did however announce a new portable system called the PSP Go!

The CEO’s at Sony must be drinking something pretty outrageous because there fucking idiots. You plan to put out a new portable system against the DS and DSi in a market that Nintendo clearly has by the balls. Not to mention you’re also competing against the iPhone/iTouch. If Sony didn’t have all the financial backing they most certainly would be in tank by now! They need to crawl back into a hole, lick their wounds and find a new way to redefine their gaming products at a cheaper cost. Oh wait, Nintendo did that!

I got a couple new articles posted on www.gotgame.com.

Not to crazy about this one… But it was a warm up.

http://news.gotgame.com/the-evolution-of-the-nintendo-handheld-family…/32666/

This one got better! The game was really fun; I suggest picking it up if you can

http://news.gotgame.com/revenge-served-blood-lust-style/32875/
I’m currently working on two new ones. Hopefully see those in a week or two. With all of our E3 coverage it might be two.

So I don’t know WTF to do with myself!!!

I’m working full time and writing articles for this site and yet I still get bored and hit my head against the wall… I picked up Civilization: Revolution given the price drop but I cant find any games. I started playing Warcraft III again, that’s alright but I’m only good for a couple games a day. Lalalala is school here yet?

Verizon, Board Games, Gamex, and Gotgame.com!!!

It’s been a fairly busy past few weeks. Let’s start with Verizon! A job offer literally fell into my lap. Little did I know my resume is still floating idle on some database and Verizon happen to pick it up! The job entails customer support optics analyst. This job pays fairly handsomely compared to my current job…

The problem: The Job is in Oxnard and school would most certainly suffer as a result. This places me at a crossroads in life.

Take the job and possibly pigeon-hole myself into it forever and never really finish school, my goals, but get paid, move out, buy neat things and watch my family move! Or stay on track, taking 2 more years to get a real job, possibly move with the family, and get the job I want, build the resume and get a better career? Dilemma indeed…

 

I knew this would happen at some point in my college career, however I would be foolish not to explore the offer and I will certainly do so. We will see!

 

I’ve recently become addicted to two board/card games. Agricola and Dominion! Agricola features you as a farmer fighting for resources and building a farm of all things! The player who’s able to create a better farm wins.

Dominion is a card game featuring players with a similar 10 card starting deck.  Each turn you draw 5 cards and with those cards you buy more cards that increase your deck! Once you run out of cards to draw you shuffle everything together with all the cards you purchased and continue playing. Ultimately you buy points and those get shuffled into your deck. The games ends under certain conditions and the player with the most points in his/her deck wins!

So we went to Gamex! I have to admit I wish I had only gone Saturday. But I still had fun. I must give my friend Avery props for helping me out because with all the bills and obligations I had I could not have made a weekend out of it, so I'll get him back soon. We played some Agricola there, a new game called Amun-Ra (I think). That game was particularly not very interesting. I moped around some, but it was nice to be away from work, school and house.

Lastly I have begun writing again for Gotgame.com. I feel very rusty and I’m attempting to get my groove back. Opinion articles are the directions so hopefully I feel less restricted to say something controversial. The first article, which is indeed one I posted here, I dressed up and submitted it. It’s raising some eyebrows. =).

 

http://news.gotgame.com/battlenet-theory-why-you-will-pay-to-play-starcraft-2-and-diablo-iii/32741/#comments

I know, this was a quick and dirty entry, I’ll make up for it when I can…

Turing Machine’s up the ass, camping and Texas phase 1.

So I completed my last final at 10:00pm last night. I took the full two hours to work on it; however I managed to finish all 10 problems within 90 minutes. So I did cleanup and fixed some of my errors and actually ended up rewriting another problem. Thanks to this man right here, half of our test was on Turing Machines. I was fairly comfortable with them, however they get extremely detailed so a couple mistakes and I could have royally screwed things up. Needless to say, I definitely saved par on that test.

I was glancing around the room trying to get a feel for were everyone was at on the test. I noticed a lot of puzzled faces and saw the 3 people around me stuck on what was one of the more difficult problems on the test.

Find a regular expression for the language a^i b^j where (i ˑ j) % 2 = 1.

Basically what this is saying is find a statement that gives me ANY number of a’s followed any number of b’s given the rules.

Where if I multiply the number of a’s I have by the number of b’s I have then I divide it by 2, I get a remainder of 1. By definition this is an odd number.

This is sort of a trick question as long as you know the definition of an odd number. Note if we multiply an even number times an even we have an even number, which is wrong. Same goes for multipling an even number by an odd number. The only way to get a correct solution is to multiply an odd number of a’s by an odd number of b’s.

So this language produces words (strings for you computer science people) such as…

aaab , aaabbb , aaaaab, abbbbb….. Notice if I multiply the number of a’s and b’s together its always odd. The solution I came up with was (a(aa)*(bb)*b). The * means I can have an infinite amount of those or zero. So I can have infinite amounts of aa’s and bb’s and I attach a single a and b to it to each end. Guaranteeing an odd multiplying another odd. (I guess that math shit is kind of helpful).

I built me 3 of these last night, on paper......

So we decided to scale down our camping trip. Instead of Kern River we are going to a small campground called Atwood Meadows out here some place. Kevo seems to know where it is at and apparently it’s “Tight”. I purchased a tent and cool chair that match the color of my Jeep. I’ll have to get a picture this weekend to post.

My plans for this summer are somewhat up in the air. I’m still debating on taking the last Calculus class I have been putting off for years know and I have an insanely good job offer from Verizon however I risk slowing down my academic progression by taking it. The things I do know for sure are that I need to brush up on my C skills. I need an operating systems class next semester and it is very C heavy programming. Having weak C skills killed me in my Architecture Class.

I also plan to work got http://www.gotgame.com/ once again. Simply having a place to publish more of my written work and add another years worth of skills is only going to help. I also brought home a bunch of game theory programming books from the library I plan to read, but we will see how far that goes.

Texas Phase 1 is underway. For those who are not in the know, our family has been attempting to sell the house for some time now with the intention of moving to Texas. My father has a great job offer out there and the family is honestly quite sick of this communistic state. The people here act like there shit don’t stink and the women are some of the most snobby/bratty/spoiled bitches I have every met.
Texas phase 1 include my father, brother and my brothers girlfriend all going to Texas as of June 1st. They plan to live there and begin establishing their life while my mom and I stay here to maintain the house and I continue going to school. My fate is still uncertain as to how soon I will be going to Texas. If CSUN is going to continue throwing money at me to go there I have no good reason to stop and out of state tuition will kill me in Texas.

An old urge of my past is slowing creeping back into me....

http://paladintales.blogspot.com/2008/03/vial-of-sunwell.html

Finals, Starcraft II Beta and Kern River…

I feel very strong about finals week. Once again, to my luck ALL three of my finals were to land on a single day, but I will have none of that this time around. I asked one of my professors if I could move my Comp 310 final to Thursday night at 8:00 pm. The time is late but I would rather avoid a potential disaster. On the flipside I get two whole days to study for a final that I could probably take today and do very well.

Without warning and barely a week after my Battle.net rant the beta signups for Starcraft II fell upon us! This tells us we have nearly a finished game and in the worse case we are only a year away from its release. But that case is highly unlikely. We are probably looking at a late fall or quarter 1 of 2010 release. Beside the release date we also know there are no plans to release another World of Warcraft expansion probably until at least summer of 2010 and Diablo III is way off in the distant haze some ware.

While on the topic of “game politics” if you will, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is projected to release this November, putting it right in my potential time frame for Starcraft II. Activision, the publishers of the Call of Duty franchise, is partnered with Blizzard. So could this be a possible sign that Starcraft II may come sooner or later than late fall? I do not have that answer however I don’t think the companies will compete on top of each other. Call of Duty and anything Blizzard creates is really the only thing selling big in the game market.

Literally right after I get done with finals, I plan to head to bed, hit an 8 hour work day Friday morning then make a Blitz for Kern River. I’m fairly exited however I am not prepared at all! I still need a tent I got to grab food and all my critter containment devices! I also might go get one of those nifty snake grab thingy’s and go snake hunting at night. I also wanted to get a tube to down the river in, but I think the water is going to be extremely frigid.

Battle.net theory… Why you will pay to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo III

So the anticipation of Blizzards upcoming releases probably has most gamers in quirky funk. By now most of us have known Blizzard to announce a title and on average take about 4 years to actually produce it. It’s been almost two years since Starcraft 2 wasannounced, so were looking at no more than and additional two. But I have high hopes we will see it sometime 2010. But all that is really besides my main point, which has to do with monthly subscription services and Blizzard.

In case you have yet to witness the recent move by Blizzard, they have decided to create and merge all of your previous Battle.net games and your World of Warcraft Account in one happy little thing they like to call a “Battle.net Account.” Of course you don’t have to do this but in the end you will likely have to do it to continue playing. Why would Blizzard decide to do such a thing? Everything seemed to be great and happy the way it was?



Because in the end, Blizzard plans to make you “pay to play” your Battle.net account. Don’t believe me? Of course this is my crazy theory but I have a couple arguments to make that will hopefully get you thinking.

I’ll begin with my strongest argument. Blizzard is sitting on top of a mountain of 11 million players paying an average of $10 a month to play World of Warcraft. The only thing that is going to stop this gravy train is Blizzard themselves! Why would they even think to jeopardize this cash flow with another game they plan to release?

Blizzard knows that it is fairly inevitable that they would loose even a million players at the least to Starcraft 2 or Diablo III. That is 10 million in the minus per month for Blizzard at a minimum; that is an unacceptable business move. The way I see it is Blizzard will get the sales rush from the game, that a guarantee they can count on. So why loose monthly revenue?

The Next not so strong argument is that everyone is doing it, so Blizzard knows they can get away with it. Microsoft makes you pay monthly for Xbox live, If Microsoft can get away with it Blizzard can get away with it.

Lastly, if you remember in the late 1990’s (god I’m getting old) there was this tremendous emphasis on Battle.net being free to play all over www.Battle.net. I can’t say that I have looked hard enough to find the word free on the site, but I used to not have to look at all. I’m fairly certain the terminology is absent from the site. Why remove the word free? Players can easily distinguish between Battle.net and World of Warcraft right?

I could be wrong but it makes to much sense to me. My friends and I have always joked that we would pay to play Starcraft, Diablo or even Warcraft RTS. Then World of Warcraft came out, that’s when the laughing stopped.. While subscriptions to Battle.net would not be the end of the world, you know damn well you and everyone else will pay it!