Bad AIM

So as of today I am starting a little experiment. For the rest of this week I will not be logging on to AOL Instant Messenger. At all. I am going to see how such a change affets my work and study habits.

There are a lot of reasons as to why I'm doing this. I feel that I often spend too much time just checking to see whether people are online or not. If I get into a conversation with someone, it lead into conversations with many, and then I often find myself losing huge amounts of time that I should have spent working on something else.

Also, I am getting sick of how serious people take AIM. Instant Messaging, by its very nature, is stream of consciousness (and if you actually take time to carefully think out your messages, I think you're using the wrong form of communication). People will mess up on AIM, it just happens, yet the person on the other end always takes it so darn personally no matter what it is (and by saying this, I'm in no way excluding myself from being guilty of it). I'm tired of being chastised because I forgot an away message... if I dont' respond, I'm not there. I don't see how that is hard to deduce. I'm tired of being told to update my profile. Something that only excepts a few hundred letters is not something I'm going to utilize to describe myself.

Despite all that I've said, I'm not going to be leaving instant messaging completely for the week, just AIM. If you want to get in touch with me, you're going to have to use Google Talk(contact taidan19), a program which I prefer to AIM due to being far simpler, cleaner and lighter. and if you need a Gmail address to use Gtalk, I can take care of that too.

Random House

It's a boring night at work, so I decided to kill time by whipping up a post containing various random tidbits I've been wanting to write about, but couldn't think of a common thread to tie them all together.

-I believe I have found irrefutable proof that IGN cannot be trusted for reviews. Remember Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood? The IGN review says a lot of things I agree with (I've linked to the last page since all you need to see is the Closing Comments section). For instance, the reviewer felt that the game hasn't improved enough over the original to warrant a full fledged sequel less than a year later, and even declared that he got bored with the it. Yes bored.

So he gives it an 8.2. How can any game that makes you bored warrant a score of "Great"? I won't accuse their writers of being payed off, but somebody there needs to grow some balls and have the guts to give hyped-up/popular games a score below 7 if they deserve it. Otherwise I simply can't trust them.

Won't even go into the horrible quality of the review's writing. Let's just say that it looks like something I would write, meaning incredibly amateur.

- I finally got to see Dead or Alive Volleyball in action this weekend. The game is nothing more than a virtual pet simulator where the pets are replaced with women. You buy them gifts and try not to hurt their feelings, then you take pictures of them sitting on the beach and falling into a pool. Oh, and there's volleyball there too, though it seems to require all of two braincells to operate.

A sad, degrading "game" for both genders. Why do people continue to defend it? Just admit that you're a horny male who wanted some interactive soft core porn? Its not that hard to say.

- I lost disc 2 to Final Fantasy 8. I don't know how I lost just one disc, or where it could be, but there you have it. My brother says its god telling me to stop trying to beat a game that I don't even enjoy.

-Red Sox are out of the playoffs, but this time I don't really care. The White Sox got a lot of crap for their somewhat poor performance at the end of the season, but by sweeping Boston they have reminded me of why they were the best team in baseball for most of the season.

Interestingly enough, and old friend of mine who attends school at Brown told me that compared to last fall, the excitement level of Boston fans was at an all time low even before the first game of the playoffs. Apparently all the bandwagoners didn't come back, and the diehards were just a little too cocky about their team. Take it from a Mets fan guys: always stick with your team, and never underestimate anyone or any situation. Otherwise fate will come and kick you in the face

-They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but what happens when a webcomic artist rips himself off? Is he flattering himself? Or is he simply an architect by trade who really doesn't know how to write? Though if we are to listen to the MT fans the answer is neither: the truth is the comic is equivalent to Shakespeare...

-Now that I have you laughing, here's another dinger: J Allard of Microsoft thinks that no one loses by not having a harddrive as a standard component of the Xbox 360. I guess two of your most popular games, Halo and Knights of the Old Republic, didn't use the Xbox harddrive for caching textures and other things. Oh wait, they did. I guess that's a bad thing to have eh J?

-Over at Battle.net they had some sort of teaser during the weekend. It turns out it was for nothing but a site redesign. Sorry fans, but no Starcraft 2 announcement for you. Don't forget: Blizzard hates you unless you play Warcraft.


And that's it. Thanks for getting to the end. And if you cheated to get here, good job on being clever.

P.S.- Blogger just enabled a new feature that requires commenters to enter a string of words for verification. I just enabled the feature in order to eliminate those stupid spam bots. Guess they were reading my mind.

Fresh links

I have some nice links that I thought you might like. Enjoy:

Lindsay Lohan crashes her car not becasue of chasing photographers, but because she just can't drive. And I almost felt sorry for the stupid spoiled whore (thanks South Park).

A burmese python in the Florida Everglades tries to eat an alligator. I don't know what to say about this. Its kinda cool, kinda scary (imagine what this could do to the swamp's ecosystem), but very interesting.

EA is playing fair and paying their artists big bucks for their lost overtime wages. Looks like that lawsuit finally scared them enough to go ahead do what they should have done in the first place. My only question now is are they going to do the same for the programmers?


It seems Google really does want to kick Microsoft's ass. They're devoloping a toolbar that will let users access OpenOffice (the open source word processor that can read MS Word .doc files among other things) right from the web. I like it. While I don't use OpenOffice too much due to it sometimes running very slow, I do believe that it is as good a program as MS Office for the things I do. Let's see if Google will actually get it out of beta however.

Sloppy music

I like thisarticle, as it gives a better look into just how much modern music can (and often is) electronically modified. I rarely ever enjoy a song on top 40 radio these days, not because of any drive to be 'non-conformist' or rebellious, but becuase it seems to me that nearly every voice out there (especially female artists) sounds too damn similar. Throw in melodies that sound 100% synthesized and you have music that seems to have one robotic soul.

I guess that is where live music comes into play, though live doesn't always equal better (ex: a live Dave Matthews concert seems to always devolve into random jam sessions where they play glorified scales. But that's just me). It's also interesting that now popular kinda-sorta-indie Death Cab for Cutie is against electronic tomfoolery. I guess they're too awesome for that? I can't say for sure (having not listened to them).

I gave blood yesterday, something I've done every college semester. I was glad to see that there seemed to be regular business coming into the drive; giving blood is such a simple thing to do, yet it helps out the community far more than a lot of other things (I really, really want to make a comment on Relay for Life here, but I will abstain.)


I was asked by someone lately if I was at all affected by my break-up. I guess that anyone reading this web log would think that I couldn't care less, so cold have I approached it. The truth is that I do care about it, a lot. But I have always had a policy to not get too personal with this or anything else I write on the 'net, and I will continue to stick with that. Its not an issue of privacy at hand, it is simply my own perspective on journal writing. When I read Megatokyo, I'm there only for the comic and information pertaining to it. I have no interest in what is going on in the daily life of Fred Gallagher, yet I often have to wade through this in order to read any comic related news. On the same token, I don't think most internet denizens want to know about the problems I may have. I'm grateful for every single person who takes some time out of their day to sit down and read something I have to say. Asking them to be my therapist/shoulder to cry on just seems a little much, even if they were willing to do so. So I may mention it in passing, then deal with whatever it is on my own. It's a bit different than the standard blog/livejournal/whatever that is out there, but I have a tendency to do that.

Gamesplode'

What the hell did they do to Gamespot? The massive gaming media site has just gone through another redesign, and once again I dissaprove. For one, it is far too.. narrow. Maybe it is the high resolution my monitor runs on, but everything seems to be crammed into one long and slim vertical column. It takes quite a lot of scrolling just to get to the bottom of the page.

Also, it takes disorganization to the next level. Everything seems cluttered and happenstance, and most of the items on the main page don't seem to have any worth to them. Let's see, we have a section for "latest and greatest", right above the section for "featured previews", which are of course for other latest and greatest games. We have "new releases" and "new tech"... then "most recent updates", and a random string of screenshots. What if you just want to read something? A review or a feature? Good luck.

I rarely ever went to Gamespot for anything other than their news ticker (which I always checked through Gamefaqs anyways), but this doesn't give me any reason to change my habits. In fact, I might not even do that much now that their news section has been messed up (clicking a link doesn't actually take you to the article in question, but instead to the main news hub so you can search for it... fun).

To continue this rant, I am getting a little tired of all the gaming sites trying cram as much useless junk onto each page as possible. Every game released or in development has a vault of screens, videos, repetitive previews and developer diaries that no one reads. You can know everything about a game before you even get your grubby paws on it! But if you're looking for actual writing, maybe a review or an opinion piece, good luck; it is there, but you'll probably have to dig through scores of links for video content featuring shy and awkward editors trying to do TV.
Then you have the constant push to display the opinions of the "community", AKA the slathering fanboys who will give a game a zero score simply because it isn't on their favorite system. I can do an entire post on this tripe, so I'll stop it there.



In other news, everyone who has played Dead or Alive 3 may agree that the game plays nearly identical to its predecessor, which itself had some problems to sort out. Yet the game looked like a dream and was filled with beautiful babes, and as a result became a showpiece for the Xbox system and a million seller. It was at the right place at the right time I guess.

With DOA 4 Team Ninja doesn't have the same luxury. It looks grand, but not enough to really make people's heads spin. What are they going to do to continue the series' arguably undeserved popularity? Put a Halo character into the game. Who it is we don't know, but if putting Link into Soul Calibur 2 is any indication, this alone will make the game a smash hit. Now if only the gameplay is worked on a little bit more.

Back

I can't believe it has been almost a week since my last post. Last week was light in homework, and yet it still went by quickly and very much wore me out. I guess its because I managed to take care of a lot of non-class work that I wanted to do on time rather than leave to the last minute. Perhaps I can continue to stay ahead of myself through the week rather than getting things done by the skin of my teeth.

Family weekend just ended at the college, and it was nice to see the folks. We went down to Annapolis, which is much nicer than I thought it was. This was also y the first weekend this semester that I've just said screw it and had some fun. I may have to do it again sometime soon.

Looks like the Giants won today, and in a big way. We need those kinds of numbers from our offense if we are going to stay in the hunt.

Finally, it seems that I am now officially single, though there's not much to talk about. Its over and I'll certainly survive. As much as we all like to think that it was meant to be, sometimes you have to clear out your head and see if it really is.

Call of Duty 2

The Call of Duty 2 demo, as I said before, is out. It basically seems to be a prettier looking and more intense COD 1. The controls are the same, as is the pacing and strategy, though the improved engine means that the environments are much more complex and there are a lot more enemies on screen. An old preview in PC Gamer boasted that the missions will be a lot more dynamic in how they play out; events that look scripted may not actually be so. Still, if it any of that was going on I couldn't tell. I also saw no really solid examples of the game letting you take different paths through the level; it was pretty much linear all the way through.

It should be pretty good when it hits retail, but unless the game is of decent length or has some new multiplayer quirks I don't know if it will be worth the initial $50 investment. It still seems to be the best Single Player WWII experience out there, and it seems to explore some fronts that aren't often covered in games. But then again, it is another WWII game, and it looks like Day of Defeat Source is going to have the MP crown for a while.