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2007-12-13 07:29:29
I have been up for almost 24 hours straight now, at the moment I'm finishing a lab report and then I'm going to bed. Unfortunately I gotta get up in about five and a half hours to go turn said lab report in...then I'll probably come back here and sleep. Or ride the train for a while.
Ugh...In the past...um...48 hours, Ive gotten about 8 hours of sleep.
._. -
Kill me now
2007-12-12 16:38:00
Well, I lived through my physics exam, which took me all of five hours to complete (would have taken longer if she hadn't made us turn in our work at 3:00, but oh well). Now I have to go to work for three hours in 20 minutes, and I wasn't even able to fit in a nap. On top of all this, I won't have time for a nap after work either, because I have to dedicate several hours to writing up a lab report for physics that's due tomorrow x_X
It's been a very long day, and it's only half over...thankfully I have NO tests tomorrow, so I get to sleep in a little.
Ugh, I don't like this week. -
Finals x_X
2007-12-12 10:14:46
Well, here I am sitting in a computer lab waiting to take my second final of the day. My first one, for computing science, was spectacularly easy (it was open book, multiple choice), but that's not a test I was worried about in the first place.
In about an hour I have my physics exam. Luckily, it's not cumulative, and instead is a test on the last four chapters we learned. It's basically a normal test, and I don't think it's weighted any heavier than our other ones, but physics exams are always intimidtaing. I haven't done well (by my standards) on any of the exams so far, and this one promises to be the toughest of them all. I got a little studying in last night, but I doubt it'll be good enough to help very much. Also, I'm running on a grand total of about three and a half hours of sleep (damn roommate was up studying until 4:00, and the light kept me awake), so I'm going to run over to the gas station before the final starts and get myself an energy drink. I usually avoid them like the plague, but for the three hours I'm taking the exam I could use a bit of a boost. Then nap-time before work, then I have to finish up a lab that's due for my physics class and turn it in tomorrow.
Ugh, I will be very happy when this week is over. -
Bitching about new video games again
2007-12-10 16:04:24
Copied from LiveJournal. I've basically already said this before in an earlier journal entry, but I wrote some new stuff this time around so in case you care about video games:
I'd like to start this rant by referencing what is today considered a "dead genre" of video games: space flight sims (for the record, all space flight sims I refer to, as well as the genre itself, are for the PC). Despite the fact that there hasn't been a decent entry in the genre since Independence War 2 back in 2001, this is probably my all-time favorite genre of video games. Games like the original Independence War (and its sequel), X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Freespace/Freespace 2, and Tachyon: The Fringe continue to take me away and waste hours of my life. In fact, just yesterday I reinstalled I-War 2 and started up a new campaign. This is a game that is so massive, so open, so unbelievably beautiful that it could be considered a potential alternative to real spaceflight. Maybe I'm being melodramatic, but honestly, no other genre of video game is able to immerse me the way this one is.
And, like I said, it's a dead genre.
This isn't an exaggeration by any means. There have maybe, MAYBE been 10 space flight sims released since 2001, and none of them have been any good. Some had potential, but ultimately, the genre's Golden Age, back in the mid-'90s, has long past and it shows. The sad thing is that the majority of SFSs released back in the day received critical praise and are even today lauded as some of the greatest PC games of all time (Wing Commander III and Freespace 2 come to mind). So what happened?
It's staggeringly simple. Around the turn of the century, the PC's power increased quite a bit, and rather quickly. It was available to more people than ever, and more people than ever began buying PCs solely for the gaming, and little else. The market began to boom, and, as is the case with most entertainment media in its breakout phase, the game corporations began trying to cater to more and more people.
And what do people want?
Simplicity. Pick-up-and-go. Mindless action, stuff you don't have to think about. Visual prettiness.
Maybe I'm being cynical, and this was of course not the case for every company, and still isn't today. But I really think that it's impossible to deny that these things became the focus of a lot of game companies around this point. They wanted to reach the lowest common denominator to sell as many copies as they could. This is evident even in how almost all of these games are displayed - does anybody remember the days when games came in big, meaty boxes, with thick, informative manuals? Around this time is about when those boxes became less and less common, and now the only place you'll ever see those is in stores that (miraculously) sell used PC games. These days all we have is small, pussy boxes with bare-bones manuals and CD sleeves. Goddamn game comapnies are so greedy they don't even provide us with jewel cases anymore. But I'm getting off my point, which is that marketing PC games has ultimately killed everything but the games themselves - there's no depth anymore, all we have is shallow, flashy crap.
It's a sad day when a niche genre dies because people have become so jaded that they aren't willing to spend any time learning how to play. That, I think, is the biggest reason for the death of SFSs. The games are admittedly very daunting at first. I don't think anyone who has never played an SFS before could load up Independence War and know where to even begin. An oldie like TIE Fighter might even be a challenge. SFSs tend to use at least half the keyboard to fly the ship, and with games like Independence War/I-War 2, you have Newtonian physics thrown in the mix and just getting from point A to point B becomes a challenge. I can understand being initmidated; I sure as hell was, and didn't play I-War for the first many months I had it because I didn't even know where to begin.
And this is the problem. People look at a game and say, "This is going to take more than ten minutes to learn to play, I don't want to do it", and because they are too fucking stupid and lazy to RTFM, they will just move on to something else. What the hell happened? When did we become so lazy that not only do we not actually go out and do things in real life, but we can't even teach ourselves how to not go out and do things? I don't completely blame people for this, because the market has kind of conditioned us to expect that we don't need to spend time learning how to play, and that the game will explain anything out-of-the-ordinary to us. But come on. There comes a point where the only way to explain yourself is that you're too damn lazy, and I think this is an example of that.
This all melts together, and the decline of other genres indicates this as well. For example, take 4X space strategy games, another of my favorite genres of PC games. None of these are pick-up-and-play. Or, at least, very very few are. For pretty much every game, you're going to have to read some sort of documentation whether you like it or not. And this turns people off. If it takes more than ten minutes to learn, it's not worth learning, right? Pfffft. I promise you this mentality will guarantee you miss out on some excellent gaming moments. I want to experience and immerse myself in my games, I don't just want to play them. There hasn't been a good 4X game released for a while either, and that genre's almost out the door for the same reasons as SFSs.
This crosses over to console gaming, but only to a limited extent. Console gaming, at least from my viewpoint, has always catered more to the "casual gaming" crowd. This is not absolutely true, of course, but if you ask the common person whether they're more a PC gamer or a console gamer, the vast majority would probably say "console". I think that the PC gaming market's problem is that they're trying too hard to make the PC into a console. They don't care so much about making a game that people will have to take time to learn and appreciate, they care about getting as many people as possible to buy their game. The games have become less personal, and that's the one thing I've always despised about console gaming - very few of the games really have a "personal" feel to them.
There's a good chance we will never see another truly good space flight sim for the PC. There are too few fans of the genre, too few people willing to invest their time and effort into learning the games, and it's the market's fault for discouraging immersion. This is why I hate modern video games almost without exception. Part of the experience involved reading the manual and learning the backstory. It wasn't just the game, it went beyond that.
And now, we've lost an entire genre of video games because of industry streamlining.
It makes me sad.
-sKy- -
Best music video ever
2007-12-07 16:57:32
Trythil posted this is the Effects forum a while back, but in case you missed it, here is probably the best "professional" music video I've ever seen, and if you have four minutes on your hands you should really take the time to check it out.
http://www.stage6.com/user/Cryogenics/video/1046230/Star-Guitar
It's the music video for the song "Star Guitar" by the Chemical Brothers. If you have any appreciation for internal sync at all, you must watch this.
I really want to know how Gondry did that o_O
JOURNAL: CrackTheSky (Ben S)
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