Working hard and getting sick...

I can't believe one month has already pass by.  I got really busy as mentioned last post and I got a lot done.  In the first week, I composed and produced 3 songs and arranged one song for Trail Blazer.  That one week was nuts.  When I took a short break after the first day, my friend knew I was drained since I barely spoke at all while playing Diablo 3.  I was essentially a zombie in working mode.  With that said, Trail Blazer is available for download.
  You can download it here: http://biasedvideogamerblog.com/blog:trail-blazer-pc

I'm really not used to Western-themed music, so it was quite a challenge composing the songs with that sort of flavor.  I tried out the game and it's pretty challenging.  It's a pretty good desktop game to pass the time.  So right after finishing up Trail Blazer, I immediately put all my energy into working on one last song for Camera Obscura.  It's for a chase scene and is the final level of the game, so I was asked to make it as epic as possible.  So threw on layers upon layers of octaves, lots of uplifting strings, horns, and vocals, and the most dramatic and dissonant chord strikes at the end of the song should the player get the bad ending.  The third week was actually pretty relaxing as I tweaked and worked with the volume and balance of the song.  The team really liked it and would like me to work on an extended version of it which I suppose I'll do in the near future.  I can't really share it right now as I want it to be kept under wraps until we can get it more polished before showing it to the public.  This fourth week though, has been miserable.

I'm guessing that I got whatever bug my father had last week and Sunday morning, I started coughing and getting symptoms of illness.  So the first night, I just took some cough medicine and went to sleep with little to no problem.  The next day, I had a sore throat, I started coughing more often, and my body started to hurt everywhere.  It felt like my coughing wasn't as serious the 2nd day, so I decided to skip on the cough medicine as I suspected it was the thing that made my body hurt all over and just took a painkiller for my headache from all the coughing I had.  I could barely sleep that night.  I was up all night coughing and tossing about.  The 3rd day is when everything started crashing down on me.  My illness started to fade and I felt pretty good the next morning, but something hit me hard by the afternoon.  Whenever I get sick, there's a chance that my hay fever will react and give me some bad allergic reactions.  And so it happened: I started sneezing, coughing and having watery eyes, stuffy nose, runny nose, body aches and a really bad headache.  It was so painful and unbearable that I couldn't even relax.  I couldn't play games, I couldn't watch videos, and I could barely stand to listen to music.  I decided to go to sleep at 10PM that third night.  I took a stronger cough medicine and had the craziest mind trip ever.  It's not the first time I hallucinated through my sleep while being sick, but it's always an odd experience each time I have it.  Right from the beginning of sleep, I was shaking violently of coldness and I knew my whole body would be in severe pain if I let it continue.  So I had 4 layers of blankets cover me that night just so I wouldn't move around as much and keep the heat within my body.  In just the first 2.5 hours of sleep, I had one crazy out of body experience where my body didn't feel like my body but a whole galaxy with space fighters attacking each other.  It was freaking Super Robot Taisen and each attack was a spark of pain.  I could actually see the Gundam like fighters destroying ships as pain coursed through my body.  I woke up in cold sweat thinking it was 6AM thinking I was half way through the night only to look at the clock and realize it was 12:30AM and nowhere near over my hallucinations.  I went back to sleep going through other odd out of body experience hallucinations that I can't remember, but I knew I had fell asleep when I started dreaming.  How did I know?  Well, I thought I was in school and thought I missed my first day's of class and got really worried.  For some strange reason, I was in a room that was about to hold an Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 tournament and I saw one of my friends from high school there.  I asked him about my classes and he looked straight at me and said "don't worry, you're most likely in a dream".  I thought about it and realize "OH YEAH, I GRADUATED A LONG TIME AGO!"  I said thanks to him, finding comfort that I wasn't in school and did the first thing that came to mind whenever I know I'm dreaming: I ran out the door and started flying.  Usually when I take control over my dreams and start flying, I start losing control and lose the ability to fly; however, I was able to maintain the ability to fly and flew higher than I have ever tried.  It felt very relaxing and comforting.  By a certain point, I landed and tried to see if I could do other stuff in my dreams.  I tried running fast but I was running slow.  I tried teleporting and I ended up a few feet from the door I ran out of and was standing on top of a lake.  I walk back into that room and everyone was packing up from the MvC3 tournament.  Everything past that was kind of a blur.  I kind of remember being in a super market at one point in my dream.  I get really vivid dreams, and so I'll be able to retell a lot that happened in my sleep.  Fourth day was just painful and full of suffering.  My allergies had hit its peak and I was having all the allergic reactions all over again.  I couldn't really do anything the whole day, though I tried to play some games and listen to music.  I had a huge headache that just didn't allow me to think or stay awake any longer.  I took some painkillers again and allergy spray and went to sleep at 10PM only to spend the next hour going to the bathroom 8 times because of the amount of water I had been drinking that day (around 5-7 bottles).  I finally fell asleep and woke up at 1:20AM feeling disorientated with a slight headache rather than a huge one.  I couldn't fall back asleep.  I was tossing and turning as water kept flowing out of my left eye, I continued to cough, and my headache was a nagging pain.  I didn't fall back asleep until around 5AM.  Today is day 5 and I think I'm finally recovering with minor problems still lingering.  I still have a bit of water welling up around my eyes with my nose and head feeling congested.  I'm still coughing and sneezing, but it's not as bad as the past 4 days.  Breathing is a bit difficult as a lot of mucus is blocking my esophagus, but I've been coughing it up all day.  I think the problem that bothers me the most is the headache.  It's really hard to stay conscious and think when a headache starts to pulsate and grow bigger and bigger.  I don't know if I'll be able to stay up tonight as I'm starting to get another headache.  I think I need more rest and will probably end up going to sleep at 10PM again tonight.  This is quite the change from my usual 3-4AM sleep schedule.

Aside from my usual League of Legends and Diablo 3 with my friends, I managed to complete Devil May Cry 4 on PS3 which I really enjoyed despite the amount of yelling and anger I put out from playing it (just like Ninja Gaiden Sigma).  After finishing the game, I wasn't sure what I wanted to tackle next.  I started working on Sonic the Hedgehog again and understand more and more why everyone hated the game so much.  I now dub Sonic the Hedgehog on PS3 the worst PS3 game I have ever played replacing Golden Axe: Beast Rider.  Such irony and such shame that both games are published by Sega.  I've tried out the 2 Wii games I got: Masamune and Sin & Punishment and both are pretty fun.  I haven't touched any of the new PS3 games I got as I'm working on finishing up more of the ones I've started.  I've tried out all the 3DS games and completed Shinobi out of them.  It's not as memorable as the originals, but it was certainly fun (and very difficult).  The game I'm spending the most time on is Heroes of Ruin.  It's really fun having a dungeon crawler on the go and killing stuff to find better loot.  They should expand the max gold amount though, because I maxed out at 99,999 which isn't that much.  I'm trying my best to ignore all new games and work on my current ones.  I'm actually one game away from beating last year's record of completed games of 67.  I was kind of hoping to reach 100 by this year, but it really depends on what games I play and most of them are RPGs.

That's it for now, I should probably get some more rest and try to recover from this illness.

Update (10-19-12):
Last night was pretty bad too.  I had a slight headache and so I ended up staying up till 12AM.  After eating some vitamins and cough medicine, brushing my teeth and drying my hair, it was already 1AM.  Unfortunately, I couldn't fall asleep.  Besides just lying there and feeling restless, I kept coughing up mucus when I couldn't breathe which made it even harder to fall asleep.  I eventually fell asleep around 6AM and woke up at 12PM with only 6 hours of sleep.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to fall asleep tonight, even with the shortage on sleep from last night.  I've been coughing all day today, so I imagine it might bother me tonight.  My allergies are mostly in check, though I feel a bit of it between my nose and eyes being somewhat itchy.

I also forgot to mention that I'm one episode away from finishing Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) season 2.  I now understand why so many people don't like it.  Besides the shenanigans of 8 episodes retelling the same day, the entire season is a lot more darker and makes the viewer angry.  The first season was so different.  It was so other worldly and spontaneous with Haruhi causing mischief making the viewer laugh, get excited, and love the characters.  The opening of season 1 was so fun and catchy, and it was called "Bouken Desho Desho" (Adventure, right? Right?).  Season 1 really was quite an adventure with fighting, crazy scenarios, and a lot of humor.  But Season 2 feels almost plain, or more like a sad drama.  Even the opening made it feel like a typical opening for a plain animé.  It's a real shame, but I'll still go through with finishing the last episode sometime soon.

Working hard, playing freaking harder!

This past month has been pretty great.  For starters, I bought a new laptop that was even cheaper than my last laptop (around the same price actually) but has the power to turn up the settings to max on every game I have and still run pretty smoothly.  I don't think anyone can really understand what a huge deal this was for me playing PC games other than those who have had a similar experience.  I wanted to get through more of my PC games, but there were too many distractions.  First, there was the release of Guild Wars 2 which turned out to be incredibly fun.


Sadly, my friend that got me into Guild Wars 2 got bored of it really quick.  Because of that, we started playing Diablo 3 again because of the addition of Paragon levels.  And then Borderlands 2 came out this past Tuesday which attracted quite a few of my friends and so we've been playing that the past week.  Then last Tuesday, I bought a Nintendo 3DS XL.  On that same day, I ordered a bunch of items on Amazon as the new law states that it requires the online retailer to start charging customers sales tax which took effect last Saturday.  I had bought 5 PS3 games, 2 Wii Games, 4 3DS games, a new mouse (Razer Deathadder), a new headset that can be used on PC and PS3, and a HDMI cable to connect my previous laptop to my big-screen TV.  Most of my items came in just this morning and I'm using the new mouse right now! (My logitech mouse has sadly started giving out in movement and clicking.  Diablo 2 & 3 probably ruined it).  There's another problem to this case: work.

So two of the projects I'm working on are getting done rather quickly now, and both teams suddenly want things completed now.  This has put me in a strain against time these past two weeks.  I'm going to have to work this weekend as well to ensure I get things done.  I'm happy to be working on music again.  It feels like it's been a while since I've given much attention to music when I've been working on SFX for so long.  I said I would draw more this year, but so far, I've got one piece of work done.  That is freaking sad.

I wanted to get back into watching animé and decided to go back to Crunchyroll to finish up Hokuto no Ken only to find out that it's not there anymore.  Why Crunchyroll?  Why do you keep putting things up I like and then taking them down?  Well, I know the answer to that (licensing and contracts with publishers), but it still makes me sad that I didn't finish the series.  On the bright side, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya season 2 is available on CR.  I was warned by a lot of friends that it was a terrible show for season 2 as 8 of the episodes were repeated.  I took heed to that warning and still watched it anyways.  It was sorta painful watching the same scenario unravel 8 times, but I think it made the last episode for that little arc worth it.  It's not something I'd want to watch again anytime soon.  I still have about 3 more episodes of the season left, so I'm hoping there's still something I'll enjoy about it in the end.

It's really hard to find Videogame music now.  Games sometimes do have soundtracks for sale, but they'll be overseas, sold for an insane amount online, or very limited in special collections.  After a bit of hunting, I was able to find a few soundtracks.  There was one I just couldn't find at all though.  I had bought Centipede: Infestation for the Nintendo 3DS and completed the game with no interest in playing the game again.  The game mostly boring with a few interesting boss battles (it's an arena top-down shooter), but what really got me playing the game till the end was the music.  The composer is Jake Kaufman who I've took notice to after his work on Contra 4.  The music in the game has a strong influence of Electronic, Drum 'n Bass, and Dubstep that made it unique.  What I eventually did was hook up my 3DS to my laptop and recorded all the song from the "Jukebox" selection of the game.  I think the true prize of Videogame music this past month was purchasing the Humble Indie Bundle 6 this week.  I had 3 of the games listed already, but I really wanted a game called "Dustforce" after watching some gameplay of it from launch and from hearing about from my friend.  The bundle included the soundtracks to all the games.  I played Dustforce the night I bought it and really liked the game.  The controls were really tricky in the beginning (well, they still are), but the game flows really well when you know what you're doing.  What I didn't expect was how amazing the music was going to be.  I've been listening to the soundtrack all week.


I just can't stop listening to it.  Not only does it supplement the gameplay, but it's so chill and makes you feel so good.

I'm going to try my very best to hold back on any other game purchases (other than crazy steam deals) until I can go through some of my previously bought games.  I feel like I'm going to be playing some of them for a very long time.  I dread the thought of having to work right now and the rest of the month, but I'll enjoy each night that I find time to play some games. (Literally over 100+ games waiting to be played).