Maybe its just because I'm getting older, but I haven't been very interested in a lot of the holiday titles this year. I'm either not excited or I just end up not caring. However, there are always a couple games that pique my interest. Here's the games I want this year. Here they are, in no particular order.
1) New Super Maro Bros. Wii
This is the only game I know for sure I'm going to buy. Simultaneous multiplayer means that Lacey can play too, and I can help her. Plus, some of the friends I have around here enjoy playing games like Mario, so I think I could drum up some interest there. Mario games are always fun, and think from the amount of people that bought NSMB for DS have shown Nintendo people still want that kind of game.
2) Phantasy Star 0 (Zero)
I've bought every console release of Phantasy Star since it released on Gamecube. Phantasy Star Universe was fun, but too simple to carry a console experience. Phantasy Star Portable was pretty fun, but there was no network support, so you were just grinding by yourself. PS0 promises to be a direct sequel to Phantasy Star Online for the DS. It has free online play over Nintendo-Wifi, all the classic classes, zero load times (unike the two disc versions I had for PS2 and PSP), and the return of MAGs. Remember MAGs? I used to have a timer that beeped on my computer whenever it was time to feed my MAG again, so that it would be maxed out as quickly as possible. I may hate the game after buying it purely for nostalgia, but man MAGs! They were so great!
3) Dragon Age Origins
You don't see a lot of heavily promoted, big budget RPGs these days. Usually its some huge muscly guy killing aliens, or living out superman fantasies. This game looks like it is no apologies fantasy all the way with some really cool player choices that affect the game world. Plus I'm a big fan of Bioware's stories. I didn't really get KOTOR, but Jade Empire and Mass Effect are some of my favorite RPG's I've played in recent memory. The fact that Mass Effect 2 will be coming out in about another 4 months is all the better. The only reason I haven't bought this one yet is because I'm trying to finish up some of the games I have already.
That's pretty much the short list. Modern Warfare 2 is kind of hard to ignore, but in general I don't like to play games that take place in the "real world." Besides, the main draw there would be multiplayer, and I have enough multiplayer games for 360. With Street Fighter, Halo, and Gears 2, I have all the multiplayer games I really want. Left 4 dead 2 looks really cool, but that could be the amount their spending on advertising. I may ask for that one for Christmas or something. The only other thing that comes to mind is Demon's Souls, which I pine for with a passion, but would require the purchase of a Playstation 3. That seems to be a barrier I just can't get over for some reason.
I like to play games. With every game comes some sort of competition. The original release of Halo 3 is a game where once the plot is complete, the odds are most of your time will be spent competing with other folks to achieve ever higher rankings online. Halo 3 is really good at that. It has one of the most intuitive online modes you can find on a console.
I enjoy competing in games like this, but ultimately I use games for the fun factor, not to be "the best." Usually when I try to get into multiplayer in a game like Halo, I play a lot at first and rise to the point that my innate ability to play games allows me to comfortably achieve. The problem is because the game is "for fun" I usually don't put in the work to learn the skills needed to progress further up the ranks to compete with the "big dogs."
I also tend to view multiplayer games as a means to an end: hanging out with friends, whether in person or online. That is why firefight mode in ODST appeals to me. If you suck, it doesn't hurt your rating at team doubles, or whatever ranked play list you frequent. There are truly shining moments of the "had to be there" variety when wave after wave of covenant keep dropping in on phantoms or running through garage doors (as we called them). I was delighted to find out what a hero medal was when I was the sole survivor of a wave, long enough for a wave to end and respawn all my teammates. It's times like that that really make me see how much I enjoy cooperative multiplayer over competitive. If you suck, no one has bested you. If you improve, you improve together and can rise to the next challenge.
So if you were on the fence about ODST, there really isn't a need unless you don't have any friends to play with. It is definitely worth the money to me, and the laughs due to online shenanigans of friends I rarely get to see in person anymore. My only regret is that I didn't save the replay of Friday night's game!
So about the time of my last blog entry on this site, I started running. Four months later, it is something I still do.
I started doing it according to a plan in the book The Power of Less. It's written by an author whose blog I subscribe to. I started "running" 10 minutes at a time for 3 days a week. I tried to run the whole ten minutes the first day, and found that I could not. I think I ran for 80 seconds and had to walk the rest of the time.
It was kind of a wake up call for me. The problem with Southeast Texas is that it tricks you. There are many people around here that are large. I don't know if I just pulled my head out of my butt and noticed, but there are a ton of big folks around here. It's probably that way in Oklahoma, and now that I think about it, a lot of people in Bartlesville were big too. It was easy to think of myself as in "better" shape than most people. People would tell me I was skinny, and I was skinnier than them.
But I know that I am not in the shape I could be. I realize, I'm not large. I'm at the top of a healthy BMI for my height. But I know I have a small spare tire around my midsection that doesn't have to be there. While I never was an athlete, I used to be able to walk up stairs without getting tired. So I decided to start running.
4 months later, I'm doing a lot better. I definitely have a log way to go still, but I've made a lot of progress. I can run for about 10 minutes without walking. My routine now consists of running for about 10 minutes, walking for about 3, then alternating between running as long as I can stand and walking for at most 1 minute. I don't know exactly how far it is that I run, but I've been running the same distance for about a month now, trying focus on getting up to running the whole distance.
The first time I set this distance, it took me about 45 minutes walking and running round trip. Today I finished it in 27 min and 47 seconds. Once I get to where I am running the whole distance ( I think that running the whole time it will take me about 20 minutes) I plan to up the distance over time until I'm running for 30 minutes. Then 45.
My ultimate goal is to be able to run for an hour, every other day. I do my best never to take more than one day off. Every time I do, I back track bad. I don't know why other than your body just gets used to running the more you dot it.
I haven't lost a whole lot of weight, but it seems like my weight is more stable. When I was eating vegetarian, my weight dropped to about 175 lbs. When I quit and went back to eating meat, it seemed to fluctuate from 175-185 lbs. Now, I usually hit 180 dead on and rarely go over. So that's proof enough for me that if your goal is to lose weight, diet is the way to go.
I will say that even though I am about the same weight, I feel a whole lot better exercising than when I was dieting. I'm not saying making changes to my diet didn't affect how I felt, because it did. I find since going vegetarian and coming back, I feel much better in general the higher percentage of vegetables are in my diet. The best result of exercising I've experienced, which I suspected would happen but didn't realize how dramatic it would be, is the improvement of my sleep. This time about 12 months ago, I would need to sleep 9 hours a night to feel rested. Now, I get 6-7 hours of sleep and feel pretty good during the week with no ill effects. I still tend to sleep more on the weekends (usually because I stay up later), but groginess is definitely less every morning, and I usually wake up about 5 minutes before my alarm goes off. Whether or not I choose to get up then is a different story :).
I would strongly recommend to any of you that don't exercise in any way to consider doing so. In half an hour 4 days a week I feel like I have dramatically improved my mental clarity and focus. I don't feel like I'm going to pass out at my desk anymore after a big lunch, I sleep a lot better, and I find I deal with upsets in my sleeping routine a lot better than I did when I wasn't doing any form of exercise. It really, really sucks at first, but now that it's a habit I really enjoy the private time to listen to music and push myself to do better than the last time.
Abe and I are working on a video game. We are going to have it operational by the time he goes back to school in August. It's going to be crappy, but I think (judging from the chat below) we will be having a ton of fun making it. Here is a very, very, very, VERY basic plot outline. It takes place in an office and is going to be a really simple RPG game. The goal is that it lasts anywhere from 1-3 hours, depending on how long it takes us to get flash working and how much dialogue we write. The hero is New Guy, with his companions IT Guy and Admin Assistant. Abe has been posting his flash work. Hopefully our respective blogs will be able to document the creation progress as it goes.
me: So act 1.
Normal day at the office. new guy has been there a few months
word comes out that a performance analyst is coming to town to promote "synergies"
11:20 PM and he's interviewing employess
our heroes encounter Performance analyst and successfully pass the "interview"
11:21 PM geostatue: That sounds like the boss fight at the end of the level though
me: right
that's what i'm saying
11:22 PM they beat the PA and he leaks them a little bit of info that sends them searching somewhere else, like.....?
and that's where the blank is drawn
Maybe it could be like a server room
like, you beat the PA and says something about a secret email going around
11:23 PM that we don't need to worry about it because we're strong, but it could affect the rest of the employees badly
geostatue: YES, Holy crap what are you? Some kind of alien or something
me: so they decide to go hack the server in the basement
lol what do you mean?
11:24 PM geostatue: This stuff is coming out of you like there's no effort involved
me: lol
just spitting out ideas
geostatue: But they're GENIUS
11:25 PM me: We'll see
about that
11:26 PM Anyway, so they go to the server room, and its all wires and crazy computers
11:27 PM eventually, they get to the mainframe and IT guy discovers a trojan or something
so the second boss could be them fighting a virus
but it turns out the trojan is planted by the COMPANY to log employeee internet browsing
so they can lay people off
11:28 PM and that's when they find out that its an evil lay-off initiative
11:29 PM geostatue: why do you even keep me around? All I'm giving you is crappy graphics and some code. Holy crap. So what's level 3?
Wait, Level 3 is Management Retreat
me: YES
they go seek out the managers in their camping retreat
11:30 PM so its a change of evironment
so awesome
they get there, and find out an EVIL senior VP is manipulating the CEO into laying people off so they can all keep their huge bonuses
so final boss is Evil VP
11:31 PM geostatue: Yeah, leaves it wide open for a sequel with CEO
me: That could be
if we want to leave it open
11:32 PM If we wanted to close it up nice and neat, beating senior VP cause CEO to come to his senses and fire senior VP and promote the heroes for new age of profit and productivity
geostatue: Yeah, let's keep it tidy. I like CEO is manipulated
me: happily ever after
11:33 PM lol you know what we could do
if they beat the game, we could send them back to the beginning to show the cycle never ends
geostatue: That would be cruel man
me: yeah
11:34 PM geostatue: we've got to reward the player
I think the title says the first important thing, since I missed the entire month of March. The reason for this is March was a very busy time. It was my first time tackling end of month duties of my new position at the plant, and I was gone for literally half the month. I don't know if I ever mentioned it here, but I moved positions at the plant I work at in Orange. I could easily put in a lot of overtime, but I'm following the advice of the 4-hr workweek and giving myself a hard deadline to leave each day. Somehow, all the important stuff is still getting done. However this makes for usually very busy days spent mostly in front of a computer screen. Hence, updating (& playing WoW) has lost some appeal. I've stayed away from the computer a lot lately, because I don't want to look at a screen anymore when I get home.
Anyway, March was a good month. I went on a cruise with Lacey and the entire maternal side of my family. When my grandmother died, she left a fair sum of money to my mom and my aunt. They decided, since we had never traveled as a family before, to buy 10 cruise tickets with some of the money and invite Lacey and I to use two of them. We ported at Cozumel (Mexico), Grand Cayman (Cayman Islands), and Jamaica (um...Jamaica). I gotta say though, the places and scenery were not the best part of the trip. The most enjoyable aspect of the whole thing was an entire week of no distractions spent entirely with family we don't see as often anymore. Ever since the wife and I moved to Orange, we have canned conversations with relatives we don't see or speak to on a regular basis. The oppurtunity to get past standard chitchat and have real conversations where we shared with one another really was the best reason in the world to do it. If there are people that you care about, and you feel like you are having trouble connecting with them, may I recommend a royal carribean cruise. If this is impractical, you could just lock yourselves in the house for a week, but that has a creepy vibe the other parties may not be down with. I'm just saying, I haven't spent that much time with my brother in years, and it really felt good, especially since he is about to finish school and be a person too.
I was going to write something really weighty, but just now decided that the above paragraph pretty much covered that one. Instead, here are some songs that really get me pumped when I feel like work is threatening to ruin my day, and it did several times after coming back from a week long vacation.
In no particular order (videos embedded when possible, linked otherwise).....
I haven't been a huge fan of 3DD since their debut album. They ditched the harder rock sound for more popular radio fare. This song, however, still gets me going.
The main song is good, but it's when the chorus of "you can never give up" starts swelling over and over again at about the 2:15 mark that gives me chills every time. I don't know what it is, but every time it makes me feel like I can handle pretty much anything.
Sometimes, work tries to take things from you. More than its fair share during the day, time on the weekend, and time you have every right to take off. This song basically reminds me that I am not my job. I know that sounds really corny, but I have a real problem with seeking approval where it isn't required or even smart sometimes, and some people can do a good job of making you feel guilty for not being loyal to the company at the drop of a hat. Listening to this song is basically my way of getting those people out of my head with a mental "screw you corporate America!" Some day in the future when i have saved (or continually earn) enough go to hell money, this will be the song blasting from my car's speakers.
Sorry, no embed on this one. This song is a reminder to me not to dwell on the things that I think are crappy in my life. Either I can just sit around feeling overwhelmed and out of control, or I can stand up and take ownership of what's happening around me. The wife introduced me to it, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since.
Well, I hope you guys enjoy the songs. I'm sorry if this was really corny.
