The Fall of Summer

I can feel Fall approaching as I'm sneezing more often these few days.  I hate Spring and Fall because of the unbearable allergic reactions I get from the pollen floating around when Winter's blistering cold melts or when Summer's searing heat dissipates.  And again, an entire Summer has gone by where I'd say I'll go swimming and didn't even go once.  I also haven't been keeping up with going to the gym as regularly the past two months.  I think this week might be the first week I'll have gone all three days of the week since the first week of July.

I'm not sure what to report this month since it feels like a lot has happened, yet it also feels like it flew by like it was nothing.  The perception of time is an odd thing where it can feel long and short at the same time.  Between my last post and today's, we had family friends from China visit us for two weeks.  In those two weeks, we pretty much had a large dinner of some sort every night at my house, or my grandmother's house, or my aunt's house, or at a restaurant.  Long story short: I pigged out.  So I gained a bit more weight again and have to work towards losing them again.  It was good seeing my family friends again since it's been 7 years since I last seen them.

In between working on some music work, I got the chance to try out Payday 2 with a friend when we saw it on our Steam game list the day before it launched.  It must've been some sort of Open Beta or special for those who owned the first game.  I kept commenting on how great the music was and looked it up and realized it was Simon Viklund who led the remake of Bionic Commando Rearmed and remixed all the original songs.  I then found out that there was a little remix contest he was holding that involved one of the tracks he made for Payday 2.  Unfortunately, I found out the day of submission and knew I couldn't finish it in time.  So I just did it for fun and practice.  Here it is:


I only spent two days working on this, but I was super focused.  I wish I were that focused on all the projects I worked on.  Sadly, I've been working on a small arrangement project for one of the games I was working on and it's still not done.  I really want to finish up and move onto new things so I can build up that portfolio.  I'm really not sure if I'm doing what's best for my career right now as most people would say that I'm not and that I should be working, no matter what it is.  I just don't want to end up working at a place long enough that I can't get to where ever I had originally planned.  It'd be nice to work on an awesome game at a studio and be proud of the project I was working on, but I don't know how to go about doing that.  So for now, I want to work on the game and music projects I have in mind until I feel satisfied and have the opportunity to show developers what I'm capable of.

Which tournament did I watch this month again?  I'm pretty sure it was DotA 2's International 3.  There were a lot of tournaments going on this month including League of Legends, Starcraft 2, Pokémon, and a bunch of others.  I had a lot of fun watching DotA 2, but I was so burnt out from it that I didn't feel like watching any other.  I skipped watching LoL entirely this year.  I'd really like to watch some more fighting game tournaments though.  EVO was just so exciting this year that it still lingers on my mind right now.

Speaking of fighting games, I pre-ordered Skullgirls for Steam and got a special Color DLC Palette.  I usually don't care for color changes for characters in fighting games, but when I saw how many references it made to other videogames, animé, and pop culture, I jumped at the opportunity to nab it.  The game's a lot of fun and has great mechanics for an indie developed game.  I only wish that it had some sort of endless mode for single-player.

My friends have been asking me to stream the games I play for a while and I keep refusing.  But I eventually made the effort to gather the applications and accounts to start streaming and have been doing so.  I found out that Twitch records your entire broadcast and I was happy about that.  I was going to download the videos and make highlight videos of my own since I didn't really want to make them on Twitch or Youtube.  But then, one day out of nowhere, 7 of those videos were gone.  I looked it up on the forums and realized that Twitch periodically deletes videos every 4-7 days.  I was furious and sad at the same time.  Actually, I think that happened earlier this week.  This week was quite the roller coaster ride for me.  On Sunday night, I found out that my Kendo Sensei Moon Kang had passed away the day before due to terminal illness of lung cancer.  I can't say that I was surprised since he smoked a lot, but it was still very saddening to hear.  I was hoping to still see him in the future if I had ever gone back to Irvine for work.  He taught me a lot those 2 short years I was at UC Irvine about Kendo and how they can be carried over to our daily lives.  In Kendo, he tells the students often not to hesitate.  If you strike an enemy, make it decisive and quick.  "Don't think too much and just do it."  I guess that could be said about anything we do in life.  If we hesitate too much, we start building up doubt and can't perform our best.  Sadly, that didn't carry over very well for me in my career.  Still, I remember how empowering it felt in Kendo whenever I made a strike and was able to perform well.  Kang Sensei would tells us the story of how one of the masters would show their student that hesitation makes their swing sloppy.  They would leave a small crack on a sliding door, close their eyes, and cut in-between the crack several times with a katana and not hit the door or wall.  As long as you practice, don't hesitate, and have confidence with every swing, you will never miss your mark.  There are many more stories and lessons he gave, but then I'll just be rambling on and on.  He really was an inspirational teacher, and I'm going to miss him.

Right after seeing the post about Kang Sensei's passing, I saw an incredible deal for Lost Planet 2 for $6 on Green Man Gaming.  I purchased it and was given no steam key.  After some frustrating research and submitting a ticket for support, I was told that they ran out of keys to give but would give me one as soon as they got more.  Luckily, they gave me one the day after.  Now that's quick and responsive customer support!  After purchasing Lost Planet 2, I was streaming some Retro City Rampage for my friends and then looked into the recordings section and that's when I found out 7 of my other videos were gone.  So yeah, Sunday night was a pretty bad night for me.  The next morning, I found out that Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F had a retail version being sold.  I was happy about it, but was also indecisive about getting it since it was $49.99.  By this point, I had the mixture of emotions from the night before with the ones right then and there.  Sadness, frustration, anger, happiness, and indecisiveness overwhelmed me that day.

On Tuesday, I went out and bought Project DIVA F, found out that I got my Lost Planet 2 key on Monday in my e-mail, and got over my anger over losing my video recordings on Twitch.  So my week was starting to turn around.  On Thursday (yesterday), Valve had put up 50+ greenlit games on sale between 10%-75% off in celebration of one year since Steam Greenlight had launched.  It hit a weak spot for me and I bought 4 games.  And here I am today, happy for the most part, but frustrated with myself that an entire month has gone by and have accomplished very little.  The most productive thing I did in August was the Payday 2 remix, and that was only 2 days out of the 31 days of this month. The only other "productive" thing worth mentioning I've done is the completion of 88 games from last months checkpoint of 70.  This does make me happy and feel a bit proud that I got through so many games, but there are still plenty to go through.

All the HYPE!

Man, what a crazy month it's been!  It's funny that I say that since I haven't really gone anywhere.  I decided to take a break from work in July and had planned that for June but kept busy in order to keep up with work.  I'm so sad July is coming to an end since it's been so much fun for me.  In the beginning of the month, a friend from LA drove all the way up to visit me and hang out for a few days.  I played a bunch of games on Wii, PS3, and PC with him and showed him around Old Sacramento.  It was a short visit, but it was definitely worth seeing him again since the last time I got to hang out with him was 3 years ago before I graduated from UCI.  Project X Zone for the 3DS finally came in the mail, but I didn't get the chance to play it until 2 nights ago since I've been so busy the past 3 weeks.  On July 11th, Summer Steam Sales and EVO began.  On that weekend, I watched all the matches on Twitch Stream while playing the Open Beta for Firefall.  There were a lot of exciting matches and this was the first year I watched all of EVO.
Source: Youtube Channel IGN

The match between Justin Wong vs. ChrisG on Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was the one I really wanted to see happen and it did when Justin was knocked into the loser's bracket.  When it was 0-2 and Justin was down to his last character, I just expected him to lose and thought it was a one-sided match with ChrisG doing some excellent plays.  But then Justin surprised everyone with a crazy comeback with Storm (which he has done before) and won 3 rounds in a row and climbed his way all the way out of loser's bracket and into the finals with 2-2 but lost in the end.  Still, it was such an exciting experience watching him beat all odds and get so far.  I enjoyed watching most of the finals, but for specific games, I was looking forward to watching Persona 4 Arena, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Street Fighter x Tekken since those are games I generally don't get to see tournament plays for.  I played Firefall and Path of Exile with a friend while watching the streams that weekend.

Then the week continued with more sales from Steam.  I had ordered a discounted Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate 3 for 3DS and went out to buy Dynasty Warriors 8 on the first day it came out (July 16th) for the PS3 in between the sales.  And right when the sale started, there was a Humble Weekly Bundle of Spiderweb Software's 15 games.  I also forgot to mention that during my friend's visit from LA, we went to GameStop and I finally got a copy of Baroque for the Wii for $5 and Odin Sphere went on sale for $5 on PSN this week so I picked that up last night.  Needless to say, I acquired a plethora of new games and have been excitedly playing through a good number of them in the past 2 weeks.

To go through some of the games I got on steam, I finally purchased Defiance for $13.59 and thought it was a good price for a game I can hop onto once in a while to mess around in and kill stuff.  I didn't feel very good about a $30 on it during the free weekend I tried it a few weeks ago, but $13.59 isn't too bad of a price.  I had a lot of trouble getting God Mode to work and then found a way to play it without it crashing by turning all the graphic settings to low.  It's definitely a multiplayer intensive game, but I can't connect to anyone's game which means no one plays it or match making sucks.  Still, it's a fun third-person shooter that cuts to the chase and let's me jump into the action.  The one game I'm really happy with is Rogue Legacy.  It's an Action-Platform Adventure game with RPG and Rogue-like elements such as level progression, equipment acquisition, randomly generated levels, and extreme difficulty.  It reminds me a lot of Castlevania post Symphony of the Night type games and I think that's where it really pulls me in.  I'm also really happy with The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, a sort of diablo-ish game with a unique skill tree and ability mechanic.  Along with me buying a bunch of games during the sale, a lot of my friends have been buying games too and I've been able to play a bunch of games with them because of it.

And the month isn't over just yet.  One of my friends is treating me to Videogames Live tomorrow and it will be the first time I'm seeing it in concert.  There's still so many games I want to play and get through.  My plan for "relaxation" originally was to beat as many games as possible with one of them being Starcraft 2.  Well, that didn't happen as I haven't even touched it yet.  I just ended up buying a bunch of games and playing whatever I felt like.  Surprisingly, I jumped up from 53 completed games to 70 since the last time I posted last month.  What makes me sad about July ending soon is what I have to get back into for the next month: back to arranging my portfolio, searching for job openings and submitting resumés and cover letters, possibly going to court for jury duty (most likely, ugh), and getting work done.  Hopefully I was able to relax enough this past month to actually help me keep focused for the next month.