The Daily Goob

So yesterday I beat March of the Minis and felt all proud about doing so. Today I went to go play WoW, and a patch had to download, so I thought about what else I could do. “You know,” I thought to myself, “I really should play Ratchet on my PSP.” WoW had almost finished patching by this time though, so I logged in, did a little crafting, then logged back out. I did a similar thing with Guild Wars (minus the patch), and then decided that I really should play Ratchet. So I did. I beat it.

Whaaaaaat? Yep, another game down, and this one prompted a game list update. I don’t know where I’ll go next as far as console or specific game, but I’ve made more progress in the past two days than I have since January when I beat Twilight Princess. Depressing (but also exciting at the same time), isn’t it?

Also, on a side note, this makes post 60 in my current streak. Never say I can’t commit to something. :)

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Andrew and I went to Fry’s today in order for him to look at a CD changer they had, and while we were there we decided to wander around and look at other things. We went to go look at keyboards, monitors, hard drives, and then (at my choice) we wandered over to the video game area. Bad idea, Jeff. Very, very bad idea.

We get over there, and the first thing I’m drawn to are the console games, not the PC ones. Ok, that’s fine. Wait, though, this game looks cool. So does this one. Hold up, do I have this one?? I’m not really sure… Ooohh!! That’s another game I want. And that one, and that one… Well, the whole reason I hadn’t bought any of those was because I knew I wouldn’t get around to playing them for a while, so why not let them drop in price first. Don’t worry, I didn’t buy any of them, but the story continues.

I get home, eat dinner, and decide I really should go get gas in my car tonight. So, I go to the gas station, and while I’m there, I start to think about a hard drive deal that they had at Fry’s. 500 GB SATA drive for $110. Not bad at all, and the sale was only through tomorrow. I do have this personal project coming up relatively soon, and I do need a blank hard drive for it… Fine, I’ll go buy it tomorrow. Life was grand. Almost.

I come back home and begin to reason with myself that if I’m going back to Fry’s for the hard drive tomorrow, I might as well pick up a couple of those games while I’m there. *Cue ominous music* I really don’t want to buy a game I already have though (both for the hassle and slight embarrassment purposes), so I start looking through my shelves. Hold up, I still have all these games I haven’t played. And these here… and these in the closet. I proceeded to have/act out to myself a slight mental breakdown over the number of unplayed games I already own, how I don’t even have time to play these, how I just recently claimed I wasn’t “into” console gaming at this time, etc. Basically, I ended up guilting myself into playing my DS and March of the Minis which I ended up beating tonight.* Does this mean that I’ll be buying some of these games tomorrow? I really don’t know, but I am effectively going to do a active game reboot on all my consoles to hopefully jump start me into playing some games again. Sure, FFXII is fun, but it’s just not the type of game I want to play through right now. Eventually, yes, but I have plenty of other choices for the immediate future. Back to balancing PC and console time it appears.

*Although I ended up beating March of the Minis, it wasn’t on my game list for whatever reason, so I don’t have an update to make to it.

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with the not too distant future of adding additional hardware to our HDTV setup upstairs, I need to figure out exactly how everything is going to connect and talk with each other. Easier said than done considering all the hardware, inputs, and connections that have to be taken into account. The end result is that I’ll be able to jump from recording 1 thing upstairs on a VCR to hopefully 4 things spread across a DVD recorder (still SD, but better quality) and a HTPC (both SD and HD). Money isn’t my big concern right now because if the connections can’t happen, no point in getting the hardware.

My days are pretty boring now for blog post information. I go to my internship, I don’t like being there, our project gets redefined, I still don’t like being there, and then I come home. You’d think it would get interesting then, but all I did today for example was watch TV, go deposit money into my bank account, eat dinner, and play Guild Wars. Wow, that was exciting. And now I’m about to go to sleep. Even more so.

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So I have this great idea for what needs to be done with my internship project, but…. I didn’t actually start coding any of it today. Ok, not a giant surprise to anyone (at least it shouldn’t be), and I don’t foresee it being a big loss or issue either. It shouldn’t (key word) be all that difficult to do, and I can probably spend both tomorrow and Tuesday working on it if necessary without being out of sync of where I need to be. Only 7 full weeks of actually working on it left; then there’s the trip week which I think might be the only thing I could possibly do this summer which I’d like less than the daily work. I’m not sure if my parents will ever get let completely off the hook for this.

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Yeah, so no productive work done today. Instead, I decided to play a little WoW, play a little Guild Wars, get the streaming TV setup working on my dad’s laptop, go get an oil change in my car, and connect my dad’s new MP3 player to his computer. Ok, so maybe some of that was productive, but definitely not all and definitely not what I was planning/hoping I would get done. Oh well, always tomorrow. *smile* Yeah…. right.

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Any guesses as to which movie I saw today? If you guessed Pirates 3, you would be quite correct. I really didn’t have near the issues with it that a bunch of critics did; it was a little long (and that was because the extra length was non-action scenes), but not LotR “make this movie end” type long. I thought the ending gave a nice closure to the trilogy, but left the possibility of future movies there. Overall, definitely makes the purchase list, and it gets a score of 9/10.

I have some “homework” that I should probably do this weekend related to my internship, so that might be what I end up doing for part of the day tomorrow (no movie planned). Of course, games will also command part of my day (wouldn’t be a weekend if they didn’t), and the remainder will probably be split between TV and just resting. Yep, I like that plan. Good plan.

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At the request/suggestion/prodding of one of my friends, I started playing Guild Wars tonight on a trial key (something like 14 days or 10 hours, whichever comes first). I’d say that I’ve played about 2 hours so far, and overall I have a favorable opinion of it. It suffers a little bit from “SWG Syndrome” at the start, but seeing as how I’m now an MMO veteran, that didn’t pose any issues to me at all. There are still a couple oddities for me that I’m not sure whether they’re intrinsic parts of the game or just options/controls I haven’t learned or customized yet, but nothing giant that turns me off from playing it. I think it’ll definitely end up being a purchase (especially since there is no monthly fee).

Tomorrow is finally going to be a movie day, but as for which movie I’m not sure yet. It’ll be one of Pirates 3, Shrek 3, or Ocean’s Thirteen (I thought Evan Almighty was out already, but it doesn’t premiere until next week). I’m a little last on seeing those first two, but they will get seen. After all, when’s the last time I missed seeing a high profile movie at a movie theater??

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Today something amazing happened. Something so amazing, I’m not sure if I actually want to say what it was for fear of jinxing it out of happening again. Of course, I will say it to reward my loyal readers *snicker*, but it’s a big, big shocker. Ready?

UPS left something at my house today when no one was home.

…I know!!! My dual-core processor arrived today, and it took me probably about an hour to take my computer apart, swap it out with my old processor, and then reassemble my computer. Everything appears to be working fine (which is a very good thing), and tomorrow I’ll see just how much of a performance boost I’m looking at while I transcode a couple DVDs during the day. Even if it’s not that big of a jump, $80 for future proofing this computer just a little bit more isn’t anything I think I’ll regret. As for quad-core though, that’s waiting until my new desktop next summer. I don’t think my body could handle another upgrade like this for probably a decade or so.

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One thing I’ve noticed about my gaming habits is that they all seem to have some cyclical trait to them. MMOs I get addicted at launch, get bored with after a few months, pick back up a little while later, and so on. Well, the same thing happens with my platform of choice. Back in middle school I was very, very into console gaming (my N64 and the 60+ games I had for it, thank you very much). At the start of high school, I fell over to the PC side and wasn’t all that interested with many console games, but by the end of high school I was back into my console gaming ways (as evidenced by all my gaming lists). I realized tonight that I think the balance is starting to go back the other way (and has been for the past 1-2 months). Really the only console game I’ve played in that time has been FFXII, but at the same time I’ve been playing Warcraft 3, WoW, Civ 4, and C&C3. Also, looking through the end of this year, my anticipation level for PC games is much higher than any console. Sure, I’ll pick up and (eventually) play Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros. Brawl, Prime 3, etc. (notice how I just named all Nintendo games there), but I’m looking much more forward to Bioshock, UT3, and HL: Episode 2/Portal. I’m also trying out Guild Wars later this week and probably going to check out Oblivion within the near future. PC gaming is where it’s at for me right now.

I’ve also been holding off on quite a few console games that I normally would have bought but know I won’t (or in a couple cases, can’t) play in the immediate future. Super Paper Mario and SMB: Banana Blitz on the Wii and God of War II and Dawn of Mana on the PS2 are all games I want, but I’m starting to subscribe to the theory of if I’m not going to immediately play it and it’s not a CE, I might as well put off getting it. Saves my backlog, might save me some money, and also lets me read reviews and stuff on the games (which might save me even more money). What a strange world this is where I don’t impulse buy every single game that I think I might like. Very strange indeed.

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One of my favorite shows last summer was Kyle XY, a show on ABC Family (I know, strange channel for me to find original programming), and the second season premiered tonight. The season finale last year left a bunch of open ends, some of which were dealt with tonight. I think this season is going to have 12 episodes, so that’ll put it going into September and possibly conflicting with Prison Break (assuming it returns in the fall on Monday nights). Not saying I use it, but people love BitTorrent for a reason. :)

And if you really want to know who I am, there’s an About Page on this blog that covers the basics pretty well.

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