There’s a chance that tomorrow the ongoing war between Comcast and I will finally be resolved. Well, it’s more of a war against the modem, but they get involved since they’re the ones who gave it to me. I’m going to get a completely new type of modem, so hopefully this one won’t suffer from these lockups, and I can surf in peace for the next 3- months.
My first baseball game out here is a week from today, and it’s a really random schedule (for me) though the end of school. There’s one two week span where I have 8 games (Tuesday, Friday, and a Saturday DH each week), some weeks where I don’t have any (all away games), and then most with probably 2-3 games. So far I’m still not in love with it, but everyone seems nice enough to at least make it enjoyable. My current prediction is that I won’t be doing it next year though.
Four years ago, I pretty much couldn’t have cared less about HP sports, but now I can’t seem to stay out of somehow being involved. A week from today begins my spring break, and apparently plans are still on track for one of the head trainers (probably Coach Clark) and me to head over to the middle school one day that week in order to make a pitch to current 8th graders to become trainers. This ironically would seem to be counterintuitive to my interests (seeing as how a lack in trainers again would result in me working Freshman/JV games next year), but having only one true returning trainer (Preston) I bet I’ll work Varsity games anyway. I wish I was involved with baseball again right now (their first scrimmage is tomorrow), but I’ll settle for just randomly showing up at a few games.
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From when I spokr with the head trainer here two weeks ago, I thought the first day of baseball practice was the 24th (i.e. tomorrow). When I went today to give him my schedule though, I asked when practice started just to make sure, and he told me it was today (i.e. not tomorrow). So, I head back over there around 5:00, and big surprise, the gate is locked. I go back over to the training room, get the keys, go unlock the golf cart area, drive over to the training room, go in and give the head trainer his keys back, and then head on out to the baseball field. Only one problem (and you should have been able to see where this was going all along): no one was out there practicing, and the ice/water I’m supposed to bring in hasn’t been touched. Maybe it’s just me, but I interpret that as there not being practice today.
Charter guy is coming to our house tomorrow to fix a ghosting problem we’ve had for well over a month now, but hopefully he won;t be early like the Comcast guy was last week out here or else no one will be home. When someone says “2-5″, showing up at 12:30 is extremely nice for a change, but only if you’re there.
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2 weeks of school down, baseball starts next week….sound good? Ok, done.
Just kidding :). There’s been some big issue with the internet side of Comcast out at UTD, resulting in a technician visit yesterday that apparently didn’t fix the problem. Now troubleshooting has shifted over to the router since Comcast claimed they couldn’t detect any problems between them and the modem.
More and more I’m leaning towards a Toshiba Gigabyte S along with a Tivo Series 3 (in contrast to an iPod with Video and/or a Viiv HTPC) for device purchases this year. Well, in the case of the Tivo it would be my parents buying it, but I still get the benefit of using it (since I’ll be the only one who knows how). I’ll wait for reviews to come out for each to make sure there aren’t any glaring flaws that would annoy me instead of buying them immediately the first day they’re available, but what I’ve read so far looks favorable.
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Calc 2 and Computer Game Development were fine, and I should enjoy those classes. It looks like this semester will be all about writing instead of reading though. I used to have Humanities and History which were very heavy on the reading, but now I have Physics and Intro to Digital Systems which both require lab reports and then Comp Game Devel which has a few papers (with the last one being ~40 pages). I’m pretty good at writing so I don’t expect it to be overly difficult, but there’s just something about reading that allows you to do at the last minute that you don’t have with writing.
CES is now completely over and there’s a ton of stuff coming out that looks awesome. The Toshiba Gigabeat S Series could just be my iPod replacement (instead of going for an iPod with video), and with the Tivo Series 3 and Viiv Media Centers finally being launched, it would be pretty easy to get video on there. The only thing I wish they had was support for Xvid since that’s what all my DVD rips are in, and I’d prefer not to have to transcode them to get them on there.
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Tomorrow I have to start back to school again after having had slightly more than a month off. On paper I have 8 classes for a total of 16 hours, but 3 of those are lab/problem sections and 1 is baseball, so I really only have 4. I took care of the early evening class that I really didn’t want to have, so my days are all nicely spaced out and over the latest at 5:00 (Calc problem section again). Tomorrow I at least have the game development class, so it won’t end up being a horrible day. :)
Football banquet is Thursday, and I know I said I wasn’t planning on going, but I have nothing better to do with my time (and it also means I get to stay at home that night). I asked Swope to go with me because they gave me two tickets and maybe with someone to talk to it won’t be quite as boring. Nah, it’s still going to be boring…
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Come on, you didn’t really think I would forget to make a post today, did you?
I beat Grabbed by the Ghoulies today (with a total play time of under 4 hours even) and then started Conker: Live and Reloaded. Two words to describe my experience so far: Loading. Screens. When Rare said they were going to do a direct port, they had no problems changing up a few things and then joking about it in the in-game dialogue, but that game has to load so many times it’s like they just left in the loads from the N64 version instead of bothering to optimize it. Aside from that, though, it’s pretty fun.
Nothing left to say except Happy New Year!!!
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In what I guess could be seen as a response to the question I raised yesterday, I beat Jade Empire this afternoon (yeah, I just now finished it…) and then decided to start Grabbed by the Ghoulies as a shorter, less intensive game before I decide which other game to play. It’s not a bad game (it is made by Rare after all), but I will admit that I don’t mind having waited for over 2 years after the game’s release to play it.
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After my comments about Advent Rising yesterday, I went review searching since this was one of the numerous games I preordered and never bothered to read what the big sites had to say about it. GameRankings.com came up with a 67.4% average for the game while GameStats.com came in slightly higher with a 7.0/10 Press Score. What surprised me though is that the Gamer Score on GameStats was an 8.3 (same as the IGN Reader Average) and the Gamespot reader score was 7.3 compared to the 5.7 that they gave it. Now, all of this is just opinion, but maybe if I gave it some more time, the issues wouldn’t seem as bad. So, now the decision is whether to start up Advent Rising again once I finish some of my current games or keep it off to the side like it is now and maybe come back to it later on.
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$1169. Yep, that’s the total amount of money I got from my birthday and Christmas combined. This makes the 4th year in a row that I’ve received over $1000 between my birthday and Christmas. I figure this will either get invested or just be deposited with my mom and be used to fund large purchases I want to make later on in the year (iPod with video, anyone?).
I want to like Advent Rising as a game, especially now that I’ve become so engrossed in the Ender series. I finished Ender’s Shadow on the way up to Hot Springs on Christmas Day, and while I was there I got Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets. So far I’ve loved everything about the books, so since Card (the author) is the one responsible for the story of AR, I think I would enjoy it also if the game just wasn’t so bad.
This leads into a thought I have about the way the game industry works now: who is it within the company that’s responsible for allowing games to be released that obviously aren’t at the highest possible quality? Movie games I can understand (although not tolerate) because of the desire to release the two simultaneously, but wouldn’t companies rather delay the game by one or two months to clean up the most obvious bugs and glitches in order to increase the overall quality of the game (and therefore potentially sales)? Games that didn’t do too well like Psychonauts that were awesome and just suffered at the hands of not being marketed well unfortunately can’t be changed this way, but I think that someone should focus on creating a studio that takes the potentially great games marred by a few bugs (but serious, as in the case of AR) and finishes that last amount of work to release a better product. Yeah, there are probably infinite legal issues with this not to mention that it probably wouldn’t financially be worth it, but when all a game needs is a little more time to clean it up, you can’t help but wonder “what if”.
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Yes, today is my birthday, but do I feel any older? Nope, not really. I do, however, have a picture to go along with this post of something that one of my friends gave me 2 years ago:
Cydney made me that card when we were in Coach Richardson’s class together, and I found it while I was doing the massive cleaning of my room a week or two ago. So, there you go, Now it’s off to a day that won’t be different from any other except for the fact that people will give me more stuff than usual :)
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