It's near the end of June and Summer has begun. The difference now is that I don't get a summer break and I continue to work. I also don't get vacation time either. My birthday came and went faster than any weekend I've had in the past half year since I started working. I didn't do anything that special, but at least I had fun.
The day before my birthday, I just called over 6 friends over (4 of them made it), connected an extra PS3 one of my friends brought over and played Call of Duty: Black Ops the whole day. We had some pretty exciting matches online, and it was so different being able to yell out and coordinate with each other rather than trying to guess what other players are doing online. We played some Zombie mode too, and it was the first time I played with 4 players. It was still difficult and we didn't really get that far (I think round 16 was as far as we went). My parents cooked an incredible dinner and I had my aunt's family come over to join us. At night, we got our computers together to have a LAN night. Before we started, two of my friends presented me with a pair of Sennheiser headphones as my birthday present which I was surprised with and very happy with since I recently had two headphones break. We played Global Agenda (GA), which became free-to-play now, and I really enjoyed it. I've had GA since last July, but didn't play that much since it always took so long to load and it was graphically laggy for me. But I really wanted to play it with some friends and it was really fun. Unfortunately, one of my friend's laptop kept crashing and he didn't get to play that much. He was so tired that he himself crashed at around 1AM. We tried playing with random players for mission mode, but I realized that players are a lot more inexperienced than before because of the transition to free-to-play. I couldn't believe how bad some of the people were playing and kind of miss the quality of players the game once had. The good thing is that it's much more populated now. I think I'll be playing GA more, and I should after spending $35 to buy it last year. We switched over to good old Counter-Strike Source and played for a while, but my other friend got tired too (considering it was already 3AM). I continued to play GA with my friend who wasn't tired yet, as I was, and got him to level 10 so that we could play Player vs. Player. The first match was pretty bad and our team mates were rather uncooperative. The 2nd match we had was really fun though. Everyone was at the capture point, a lot of fighting was going on, and it was much more involving than the first match. By the time we finished, it was 4:43AM and we were both tired. I was thoroughly satisfied being able to play Global Agenda, it was a lot of fun. I kind of wish we had more time to play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, but we ended up playing some more Counter-Strike Source the next morning. I played some Crysis 2 with my friend who knocked out first the night before and switched off on multiplayer while preparing to go play Tennis. Crysis 2 is a lot of fun, and I think I'm going to get it the next time it drops below $30. When we went to play Tennis, it was rather hot. Okay, it was VERY hot! I wore dark clothing and I forgot to bring water with me. There wasn't that much shade at all on the court and I haven't exercised for 3 weeks ever since I got sick. So after barely 30 minutes, I stood under the patch of shade I could get under and watched my two friends play. Unfortunately, my father wasn't feeling well, sooo we didn't go out for dinner that night. I barely remember what I did after dinner; I think I watched Dragon Ball Z Abridged videos and then went to sleep. Yeah, my birthday wasn't very special this time, but at least I had a bit of fun.
In news of games, I'm not even sure where to start. I guess I can talk a little about the stuff from E3 last month. E3 wasn't spectacular, and there wasn't that many games that were announced that no one didn't already know about. I guess one of the coolest news was the announcement of Nintendo's new system, the Wii U. It has a touch screen controller with a camera and microphone as well as a motion sensor device, and a traditional key layout with two joysticks, 4 face buttons and 4 shoulder buttons. The system will also support graphics synonymous to the Playstation 3. For games, most of the ones I'm excited about has already been announced before. I'm really excited for Dark Souls, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (kinda sorta), Blacklight Retribution, Elder Scroll V: Skyrim, and the one game I haven't heard until E3: Dragon's Dogma.
Most of these games won't be out until the end of this year or later next year. There also many other games that's worth mentioning that was shown at E3 such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect 3, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, 3DS games and such, but I'm still working on the predecessor's of those games so I'm in no rush to look at those games yet.
A lot of exciting new things have been happening on Valve's Steam program recently. Daily Deals have been introduced, and so a selected game will been on sale each and everyday now alongside with the usual mid-week madness sales and weekend deals. Steam has also started supported Free-to-play MMOs from publishers like ijji and Perfect World on their platform. It's nothing too new to me since Champions online has been on Steam for a while and recently became free-to-play as well as Global Agenda. Aside from those two, there were 3 other games that were announced as being hosted on the program when they launched the support. There was Alliance of Valiant Arms from ijji (which I have played already with an ijji account) and the other two are Spiral Knights from Sega and Forsaken World by Perfect World (which I've been wanting to play but have had trouble getting the client). The biggest plus for me on this new structure is being able to download the clients of free MMOs with less trouble. Aside from support 3rd-party MMOs, Valve also announced transitioning to a free-to-play model as well. Everyone's speculation was that DotA 2 was going to be free when it released (and it's still possible). Just last week, Valve revealed that their incredibly successful First-Person Shooter game Team Fortress 2 was free-to-play. Looking at it now, I'm not surprised. Their micro-transaction store has been surprisingly successful and Team Fortress 2 is generally $10 anyways. With items costing $15-$200, they might as well turn it into a free-to-play game to attract more customers. I would say that Valve is being greedy with it, but they have provided the players with so much service and free content with some of the best quality gameplay in online gaming that I hardly care. They also FINALLY released the "Meet the Medic" video that fans have been waiting for years for. The only one missing at the moment is the Pyro.
I'd really like to get back into MMORPGs, but I also want to finish more of the retail games I have collected in the past few years. I tried out Eden Eternal during beta and it was pretty interesting. Once you reach a certain level, you can change into any class you want whenever you want. There still seems to be a lot of grinding though. Besides Global Agenda, I think the one MMO that will release that I'll want to get into is Guild Wars 2.
I seriously had no interest in the game until just a little while ago when I started to see some of the changes and new classes that they're adding to the game. The gameplay just intrigues me since it's Guild Wars 2 seems to want to aim for the "non-grinding" type of gameplay that its predecessors had. I never did finish Guild Wars Factions, and I would still really like to sometime soon. For other MMOs, I have barely tried out Spiral Knights and Forsaken World, so I'll be playing more of those as well as Vindictus which I have relentlessly have neglected, even after waiting for so many years for it to come out. There were a few other MMOs I wanted to try out, but I think I'm biting off more than I can chew. I know for sure that I'm doing that with retail games.
Last night was a very bad night to play FPS games. After a really long day of work and finishing up my other responsibilities, it was already 10:30PM. So I decided I wanted to play some FPS on PC to test out my new headphones some more, but updates were being downloaded and applied on Steam. So I started the night with Medal of Honor (2010) which I usually have no problem playing at all. Last night was just terrible as every shot I successfully landed didn't count as the server recognized that I was killed first. This continued to happen 5 games in a row. I understand that the game is laggy sometimes, but I've never had so many kills denied before. True, I was 2nd in the team every match, but I always ended up with a negative k/d ratio which is no good in my eyes. By the 6th match, it was already so dumb that I couldn't even move. I forgot about how badly implemented the spawning system was that players could predict exactly where you spawn and kill you before you even move. I gave up and switched over to Team Fortress 2 since I haven't played for so long. I was up to 5 kills and 5 deaths when suddenly the server shut down. I love Team Fortress 2, but one thing I really hate about playing it is how ridiculously long it takes to connect to server. I just gave up tryingn to connect to another server and moved onto playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My team was really bad in trying to attack in "Rush" and we were kept at bay the entire time. When we lost and switched positions to defend, we couldn't do a thing at all. 2 Helicopters hovered above our base, spawn killing my entire team and me. A ship was constantly barraging our cases and a ton of men rushed in to set the charges with no one being able to get near. After dying 10 ridiculous deaths and being backed into our last base, I gave up on that too. I just wanted to play something simple and kill in-game at that point, so I started up Counter-Strike Source and got into a gungame. Counter-Strike can seriously be one of the dumbest games to play sometimes as some people can take 3 straight shots to the head from a shotgun and not die while a single bullet from a pistol can take me out. I couldn't tell whether players were using aim-bot or not since gungames immediately respawn a player after dying, but it was still very frustrating nonetheless. I ended up negative every match and was pissed as hell by then. My last hope was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Guess what? I couldn't connect to a single game. 10,000 players online and I couldn't connect to a single game, that is sad. I think after last night, I need to take a break from multiplayer FPS games as it has betrayed me in every way. I ended the night playing Dynasty Warriors 7 and it did make me feel a lot better. I'm still so amazed on how great Dynasty Warriors 7 turned out and am really glad I bought it. I think I should focus on retail games and MMOs for a while, it's much less rage inducing.
Besides my regular everyday job for work, I have picked up two projects to work on over the summer. One of them got back to me yesterday and explained that the project will possibly slow down a lot more now which makes me think that it may not finish. I think I need a new rule on making music in that the game is at the very least playable or near finished before I agree to make music for it. The other project is one I previously worked with for the Game Jam Spring 2011 competition. The team wants to polish it up and host it on Xbox Live Arcade and needs about 7 more songs or so. Besides these two projects, I think I should consider dropping all other ones I had before to start moving forward and making my own games. I have yet to even touch the Starcraft 2 editor which I purposely bought to practice with. So I'm still practicing my art (barely) and still working with more music to prepare for my own game developments. I've been still trying my best to practice piano when I can, but I simply cannot play as well as I did when I was Jr. College which I practiced everyday back then (at least technically). I think I've gained a better understanding of playing music on the piano, but my dexterity and nimbleness has faded with the lack of practice. For guitar, I think I've actually improved a lot from what I used to be able to do. I'm thinking of doing some more demonstrations and practices that I have been doing on Facebook as an incentive to continue learning more. For violin, I have become more comfortable to use more parts of the strings and bow rather than staying near the top all the time. Can't say that I've improved that much more on violin though. I'll need to buy a new bow and I need to change my bent bridge. I'm hoping to go to guitar center sometime soon and finally get my first Electric Bass, which I've been wanting for a while now. So even now, I'm still staying very active in music. Writing is something I'm staying very active in with my blog: http://superpad.blogspot.com/ And it's also my main role for work to edit texts and create new ones. I'm really not sure what to do anymore since my future is so blurred right now. There's things I want to do in terms of career, and then there's things I want to do for enjoyment like playing games and reading books (yes, reading book. I feel like I can't since I feel like I'm wasting time reading a book when I really want to play a game). And then of course there are the things I need to do: have a steady job, build up experience in working, keep going to the gym to stay somewhat active, etc. I barely have enough time to work on game development, art, music, and reading/writing (not blogging). I guess you can say I feel trapped within my own life, but I suppose everyone does when they're stuck with what they don't want to do.
I think that's enough ranting for one post. June was rather short, and I feel like I've accomplished very little. I'm really glad a few of my friends are back home for the summer, that's for sure. It feels really sucky to be working throughout summer when it's so beautiful outside (well, not today since it's all cloudy and cold) and it reminds so much of my past summers of being free from responsibilities and allowing myself to be carefree. This may be the year of the rabbit (supposedly brings tons of luck to those born in that year, which is my year), but so far it's been pretty sucky which very few occasions where I felt honestly happy. Now that my birthday has passed, I hope things will get better for me.
