Fighting the Lords of Hell

Diablo 3 was finally released on May 15th, and it was a very painful wait.  Throughout the years, I had placed the thoughts of Diablo 3 in the back of my head and didn't give much care as I didn't want to get overly excited over a game that might not come out in years (or ever with cases like Starcraft Ghost).  When Diablo 3 finally had a release date, I still tried to remain calm and did so until May 1st when I decided to pre-order it online.  Ever since that day I pre-ordered it, all I could think about was Diablo 3.  It's like all that crave and anticipation that was bottled up in the past 4-5 years suddenly started pouring out.  Many players who bought the digital form or picked it up on Monday midnight of the launch couldn't log in the first few hours (I heard it was 5 hours) and many players were upset.  My game left the pickup at 5AM Tuesday morning and I was hoping to get it in the afternoon.  I waited the entire day and didn't receive till around 8-9PM, and even then I had to install and update it which took over an hour.  When I finally started up the game, the graphics were so majorly messed up that I couldn't even play.  May 15th, 2012 was one of the longest Tuesdays I've ever had.  I finally figured out how to fix most of the graphics problems by uninstalling all the drivers off the laptop and re-updating it to the newest one.  A lot of the graphics are actually still messed up, but at least it was playable.

Anyways, Diablo 3 has been eating a lot of energy away from me as I feel lazy and reluctant to work.  I'm still getting my main priorities in check, but extra work has been ignored for the most part these past 2 weeks.  I finally finished through Normal after all my friends maxed out at level 60 on their characters and got to Inferno already (There's 4 levels of difficulty for Diablo 3: Normal, Nightmare, Hell, Inferno) and just started playing Nightmare.  My main is a Demon Hunter and I knew I was going to play one the second I saw the announcement trailer for that class.  I've made a character for each class already and really enjoy the unique gameplay for each of the classes.  I think I've gotten to a point where I feel okay making a review now, so I'll probably write it sometime soon.

Other than my daily posts on Superpad Unplugged, I've been called back to do some sound effects work for our upcoming game "Camera Obscura" set to launch on Steam.  Sound effects is a difficult task to accomplish for the entertainment industry and I feel as if it might be even more challenging than doing music.  It seems easier since sound effects last no longer than a few seconds, but getting it right seems to be much more difficult to achieve.  I'm so close to finishing the Street Fighter Mix, but I've been so lazy about completing it that it still sit there as incomplete.  I revisited an older project I had: Mach Rider Remix, and started thinking of a different way to mix it.  I was going to make it sound more rockish, but I think I might go more electro with it.  I'm working on so many music projects that I'm starting to feel limited in the resources I have.  I really don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy new VSTs and programs if I'm not consistently making money at the moment.  I feel like I could be doing a lot more productive work, but I can never get into the work mood after the main priorities have been completed.

So I finally completed some games, one of them being E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy for PC.  It's a FPS/RPG open-world Action-game, and everything about it sounded really cool in the description and videos.  After getting through the game, I felt like I didn't even experience 10% of what I saw in the videos or what was described on the game page.  It was a painful playthrough of figuring out how the game worked with its terrible menu interface, convoluted game mechanics, and poorly designed combat.  It crashed a lot, had a ton of glitches, and the story wasn't interesting at all.  I have to praise its graphics and environment though.  It was very atmospheric and immersive.  The other game I finished was Samurai Warriors Katana for Wii (about time).  I had this game forever, but I just didn't have the patience to sit down and play through it.  It's an arcade, gun-rail like action game.  There were a lot of parts I liked in the game where I'm just slashing at enemies and shooting them from afar.  The problem is that out of the 8 weapons the player can choose from, only two were really useful: the spear the identified weak points and the musket which didn't require reloading.  There were quite a few "mini-games" between the action that made it less than entertaining but rather more infuriating.  There were 4 main campaign stories and once I finished the last one a 5th one appeared but wasn't playable unless I cleared all the previous mission with a certain score.  It was semi-entertaining, but not enough for me to play through the whole game again and so I declared that I finished the game from there.

Dragon's Dogma finally released:


I'm still holding off on buying the game yet, but I really want it.  I was worried when I saw a lot of negative reviews on it a day before it launched by critics.  The average score has picked up and is in the green once again, so that has restored a bit of faith in the game for me.  I hear there's day one content for it already, and so Capcom's shenanigans seems to still ensue.  In the meantime, Diablo 3 is keeping me pretty well occupied as I try to get through some of my other games on the side when I'm not playing it.  I already seemed very lax enough at the moment, yet I'm hoping to have a peaceful and enjoyable summer this year as I continue to get through some of my work and climb through some of my backlog.

Reflecting the past 2 years

It's been nearly 2 years since I've graduated.  Exactly 2 years ago, I was up at 4am in the morning writing about the first game jam the Videogame Development Club had that I hosted and did music for, my horrible spring break of sickness and allergies, my unhappiness with school and not being able to build a proper portfolio, trying to look for a job, and suffering from sleep deprivation.  It seemed like I was very bitter back then.  2 years later, I still don't have a proper portfolio, worked for 8 months and then got laid off, and up till now I'm still looking for a job.  Here's another update in the industry: Sony is laying off 10,000 employees around the world while Electronic Arts is laying off 500-1000 employees.  Blizzard already did their 600 along with other studios such as Obsidian Entertainment.  At this point, I'm just applying whatever is available and have several back-up plans.  One of my back-up plans, which I hope I don't have to resort to, is going back to school.  At the very least, I'd be going back to Sac City College to study simple programming, game design, 3D modeling or graphics design.  My ideal plan is to continue working on my music and independently developed games be recognized within the industry so that I can either: A) have my game picked up by a publisher or B) have a developer hire me for my skills as a game designer, music composer/producer, or simple concept artist.  I like my ideal plan.  I get to work with something I like and I have much more freedom of what I want to do.

Anyways, just a while ago I ended up buying around 8 games after I promised myself I wouldn't buy any games as of the new year until I completed a handful of games.  But because of spring sales, I was too tempted and ended up buying quite a few.  There's Dead Island, Sonic the Hedgehog, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Dynasty Warriors 7: Xtreme Legends, Red Dead Redemption GOTY edition for PS3 with Dragon Quest VIII, Eternal Poison, and Tales of Legendia for PS2.  I haven't really touched any of them except for Dead Island which I specifically got to play with a friend.  It's a pretty fun game I suppose, but the game has a lot less content than I thought.

I tried out TERA Online over the weekend and really enjoyed it.  I like the whole "action" aspect done right in an MMORPG.  Sadly, the game is going to be monthly subscription based and so I won't be getting it.  I am eagerly awaiting for Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 because of it.  Besides those 2 games, I'm awaiting Dragon's Dogma for PS3.  I have too many games right now, so I'm still trying to resist.  One game I want to look out for is Cherry Tree High Comedy Club coming out on Steam.

It seems like a really laid-back, humor driven game.  I like animé-ish looking games.  I'm off for now.