Summer Intermission

Summer isn't quite over yet, but I don't really have anything planned.  June and July were great!  There was Steam Summer Sales, E3, EVO, Summer Games Done Quick, and The 5th International for DotA 2.  This past month has been sort of a blur for me.  I've gotten back to working again and finished two remixes.  I'm still working on the The Guardian Legend Remix Album and hope to finish quickly and work on more.  The quality of my work certainly has gone up, but my work count has lowered.  I'm glad I'm improving, but I expect myself to produce more work than this.  I'm currently at 8 complete audio works, and that's very little for me.  My count of completed games have also been kind of low.  There's only 5 days left of this month and I'm still at 87 completed games.  I was hoping to go beyond 90 games by now since it's the summer, but that just hasn't been happening.  For one, Terraria got an update and I got caught up in playing that every night for about 2-3 weeks.  It's amazing how much content is added with no extra charge for that game.  So near the end of July, I've been burning through some games: Remember Me, Fighties, Sol Divide, Diadra Empty, Divinity: Dragon Commander, Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires, Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved, Lost Planet 2, UBERMOSH, Cosmic DJ, Xeodrifter, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit!, and Dungeon Hearts.  I'm going to try to finish more in the following days.  Looking through my list of completed games this past month, I can't say I've enjoyed a really good game in a while.  The closest game I would say that I really enjoyed was Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires.  The game was unpolished, lower quality than the base game (DW8), didn't have English voice overs (even though they said there would be), etc.  The game was just so low on quality that it was shocking since almost every Dynasty Warriors game I've played was pretty top notch, even my least favorite one (Dynasty Warriors 6) looked pretty and played solid.  But perhaps it's because I've never played an Empires version of any DW that I had so much fun with it.  I got to create my own character (I made Hatsune Miku), use a variety of weapons and customize their specials, look, and speech.  I got to make my own choices to achieve the main goal of unifying Ancient China.  It was the closest thing to a "make your own adventure" Dynasty Warriors RPG-experience game I wanted.  I've only finished one campaign and I do want to play the other ones, but I'm kind of preoccupied with finishing more games for now.  At this point, I want to clear up more games so I can move onto other games I'm interested in playing.

Besides Terraria, what's also been kind of halting my progress of finishing games is the amount of fighting games I started playing again.  Every year after EVO, I get excited about playing fighting games again.  I've also been revisiting a lot of older fighting games and forgot how fast-paced some of the older Capcom fighting games were.  I also revisited the old MAME collection I bought back in 2006 and looked for all the fighting games to look for one in particular: The Last Blade.  That game was really beautiful.  And then I was reminded of a lot of fighting games I've played in the past such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and some games I've never played before like Capcom Fighting Evolution.  I had a particular interest in that one since Ingrid (exclusive to CFE and SFA3 MAX on PSP) was hinted on Capcom Twitter to a possible return in Street Fighter V.  I finally tried CFE out and I have to say that she's kind of difficult to use.  Her moves have a lot of delay starting and ending, her projectile move is about arms reach length, and she feels kind of clunky.  But if she does end up returning in Street Fighter V, I'm fine with that.  I'll definitely play her and see if I'll warm up to her.  Besides that, I've been playing some King of Fighters 13 Steam Edition (which I mainly got to play with a friend, but he ended up not liking it) and Dead or Alive 5 Last Round on PC to try to improve on both games (which I generally don't bother doing since there's no one to really play with) as well as Ultra Street Fighter IV so I could play with another friend that has it.  I bought all 3 games during the Steam Summer Sale.  I already have 3 previous versions of all three games but ended up buying the latest ones on PC.  I kind of warmed up to the idea since I play on the PC more often than I do on consoles now (I mainly play consoles on Saturdays and Sundays).  I do admit that it's kind of fun to actually practice and try to get better at these games, but it is a bit lonely when I don't have friends willing to play it with me.  At the very least I have one friend to play Street Fighter with and I've improved because of how good he is.  But because I've been revisiting a lot of older fighting games, I've also run across a lot of old RPGs as well.  I missed a lot of great games during the PS1 days and there's a bunch of PS2 games I still haven't gotten around to playing yet.  So this has been the majority of my time taken when I'm not working which explains why I haven't been finishing any games.

Despite the plethora of games I already own that I'm trying to get around to playing, there's just so many games I'm looking forward to that's about to release already:

-Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight - Aug 4
-XBLAZE: Lost Memories - Aug 11
-Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & the Monster Seal - Aug 18
-Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - Aug 18 (Steam Version)
-Zombi - Aug 18
-Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Aug 20
-Amnesia: Memories - Aug 25
-Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder - Aug 25
-One Piece: Pirate Warrior 3 - Aug 28
-Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls - Sep 1
-Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX - Sep 8
-Sword Coast Legends - Sep 8
-Super Mario Maker - Sep 11
-Mighty No. 9 - Sep 15 (Delayed till next year)
-Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson - Sep 15  (Already pre-ordered; I can't wait!)
-Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Sep 15
-Persona 4: Dancing All Night - Sep 29
-Samurai Warriors 4-II - Sep 29
-Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax - Oct 6
-Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - Oct 6
-The Legend of Legacy - Oct 13
-Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Oct 13 (Delayed till December 1)
-Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below - Oct 13
-Tales of Zestiria - Oct 20
-SUPERBEAT: XONiC - Oct 20
-Call of Duty: Black Ops III - Nov 6
-Fallout 4 - Nov 10
-Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 - Nov 10
-Norn9: Var Commons - Nov 10
-Rodea the Sky Soldier - Nov 10
-Star Wars Battlefront - Nov 17
-Stella Glow - Nov 17
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Nov 17
-Code:Realize - Guardian of Rebirth - Nov 24
-Just Cause 3 - Dec 1
-Xenoblade Chronicles X - Dec 4

I'm happy that there's games to look forward to, but I'm sad that I'm falling farther behind in clearing up my backlog of games.  It's even worse now that I'm adding older games that I find on Steam and PSN on sale (Grandia 2 Anniversary Edition released on Steam 2 days ago).

As for job searching, I might have mentioned a possible job position available.  I finally got a response stating that it was indeed a Senior level position and wasn't listed as one because they weren't receiving any applicants when they labeled it as such.  There's nothing I can do but keep looking elsewhere.