Arivall’s and Departures

While casually browsing what I like to refer to as the ‘internets’, I was reminded of two things that I prefer to not be reminded of.

The first of which was GTA4. Dear god, April 29 is so close, yet so far away. I’ve been avoiding coverage as best as I can, I know that Rockstar is gonna pull it through and set another bar for open-world games.

The other was Starcraft II, which will be released god-knows-when (fingers crossed by year’s end!). And it reminded me of how much I suck at RTS; I think I’ve figured out why, I truly have no idea how to micromanage nor multitask the multitude of different things that are can be happening at any given part of the battlefield at any given time.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying either. This past weekend I started up Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer 3. And wow, these are two completely different animals; Company of Heroes is very tactical and strategy based rather than a strict rock, paper, scissors balance. Which is pretty much the opposite of what Command and Conquer 3 is — don’t get me wrong, it still requires strategy for high-level play, but in comparison to CoH, it’s much more attrition based.

So yeah, I started the campaign’s for both games in hopes of getting a bearing on things. And I’m not gonna laugh at the FMV sequences in C&C3, not because I like them, but because they’ve gotten enough of that.

The whole bearing-grabbing thing didn’t work out so well. I got stuck about 4-5 missions in for both games. I’m gonna try really hard to not get discouraged and hope that something in my head will ‘click’ and I’ll magically become a decent RTS player. Mostly since it’s really easy to get discouraged, since a 45 minute to multi-hour long games will be rendered useless in a matter of seconds. Naturally you’ll think “Well, what the fuck? What was I doing all that time?” I’ll try and tough it out, though.

Following up from last week, I think I’m nearing the climax and it’s still consistently scaring the hell out of me. This game absolutely gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, I’m considering playing through F.E.A.R., or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl because although these acronym’s of game titles may not be as visceral as the hand-to-hand combat in Condemned 2: Bloodshot, I hear they’re pretty damn scary.

And since I’m still a total wuss, I’m sure I can be the judge of that. But I think like Nick Suttner something to the effect of, “I just don’t generally like the feeling of tension while playing games.” on the 3/21 1UP Yours — I can’t say disagree.

For my English midterm we had to write two potential colleges, two potential careers, or one of each. I went with the latter, this is just a copy/paste of the work that I  did on it, I should have a blog proper incoming by the end of the week, if not by the next; it’s midterm week.

With senior year fast approaching it would be beneficial to make myself aware of what my future may possibly hold, this includes looking into potential schools to further extend my education in hopes of attaining something that is worthy of being called a career.

Being the realist that I am, I know I’m not going to be eligible for some big university that would be my first choice like UF, USC, or UC Berkeley. To be honest, chances are that I’m going to end up at Miami-Dade College – most likely the Kendall campus since, according to MapQuest, it’s only 22 miles away from home. The main reason I’m being realistic with this is the cost; if I were to choose UF, it’d cost around $15,740 as opposed to Miami-Dade’s $725. Not to mention my grades, they’re not the worst ever, but I don’t believe that they’re up to par with an average big-name university’s standards, it probably doesn’t help that I’m the complete opposite of an athlete either.

While attending whatever school I end up at, I’m fairly certain I’m going to major in either literature or journalism. I have reasons for wanting to do both, and wanting to pick neither — I know I’m going into a specific form of journalism, which I’ll bring up later, and it would benefit me to have a strong base of literature, that way while writing I have a variety of words and phrases I can pick and choose from with relative ease – but knowing myself, I’d hate the class because I don’t enjoy reading novels unless I vest enough interest in them, to make myself do it. As for majoring in journalism, it would definitely help as I’d already know how to obtain information, act when necessary, and behave as expected – but they may not be necessary because of the specificity of the field that I’ve chosen.

As far as anything extra-curricular, I don’t really see it happening as I’ll be busy dealing with the rest of life. The main reason I’d want something in California is almost exclusively because of the possibility of an internship at a specific place, but for the mere reason of cost, I don’t believe it’ll end up happening.

The specific form of journalism that I spoke of before is covering video games. It’s something that I’m passionate toward for a multitude of reasons that vary from sentimental to just to the pure love that I have for the medium. I’ve been seriously pursuing it for the past two years or so and it’s recently come to fruition. I am now a regular contributor to Ripten.com, a website that covers video games in a variety of forms – lately, I’ve been the news guy, but because of this whole midterm deal, I had to put that and the review I was writing up, on hold. Depending on how it all works out, by the end of this month I may begin to receive pay for the work that I’m doing. By and large, the significance of my career won’t have an effect on many people’s daily lives, unless they are gamers.

Eventually, if everything goes as planned, I’ll be an editor in some form or fashion of a print magazine or a website. Although a degree isn’t necessary, it’s absolutely beneficial. If it comes down to a person that can write well without a degree, and a person that can’t write well with a degree; they’ll go with the former, rather than the latter. Experience is valued moreso than a degree, but it’s not useless by any means.

Obviously, this isn’t a 9-to-5 job, hours aren’t ever set in stone; you write what you need to and have it in by deadline. Print magazines have very firm deadlines that vary from weekly to monthly, while online venues have very small daily deadlines, for example getting a news story up as quickly as possible to beat out the competition.

Although, most offices are in California considering the state of the internet as it is now, it’s perfectly normal and efficient to have different writers and editors in different parts of the world — my editor-in-chief lives in Pennsylvania, while my managing editor lives in California, along with a total of four regular contributors that write out of the UK and send it in.

At first many writers freelance for a multitude of companies, and if they are looking for a more permanent position at a given company they’d talk to the editor-in-chief (or whoever may be in charge) about becoming a more critical part to the effort. At which point, they’d achieve the position of an editor; it’s really situational most times. But common titles are managing editor, executive editor, previews editor, and reviews editor.

Obviously, income differs from position to position – and although I couldn’t find any solid figures for that an average editor would make, it’s nothing amazing, but it’s enough to make a decent living on. Those that choose to freelance exclusively, it makes their future fairly uncertain as the pay relies on the basis of how often you’re needed and the pay usually varies from every article that you write.

Although I am as unsure as a person can be about what life may hold college-wise, I’m very sure as to what I’m going to make a living off of, as I’m determined and will do anything to achieve the aforementioned position of an editor. Even now, as I work with Ripten, if nothing else, I’m building a portfolio that exemplifies what I am capable of as a writer, and I believe it’s enough to carry me to where I need to go.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot. I’m really liking this game, so far. But, there’s one problem — it’s scary, and I’m a total wuss.

Since beginning C2:B, I’ve been scared shitless on a pretty regular basis, and through the use of the transitive property I’ve been spouting out more unnecessarily profane sayings that may make small children and the elderly cry, pretty regularly as well.

The sound design is absolutely amazing. There were moments that I had to stop moving and look around to make sure everything is safe because I thought I heard something. Now, that’s not too special, but when it’s accomplished without visual hints or anything and exclusively by sound, now that’s special.

And although the sound plays a big part in the atmosphere of the game. Visuals are as dark and gritty as you’d expect. The atmosphere mostl get its job done by pure design — for example, at some point you’ll see a crazed bum run across a hall in front of you, and what it does is make you aware of his prescence, and if you’re like me at all, it’ll make you think twice about going down that certain hall. And to me, that’s the very essence of a horror game.

Although, arguably the biggest addition to the atmosphere is the sound from the voice acting to just a tv sitting in a room emmitting white noise, and everything in between — it all comes together to form one cohesive piece of entertainment that has managed to continuously scare me for the three hours that I’ve spent with it.

There was one specific moment that I won’t spoil, but after it ocurred I just had to get up and walk away from my TV.

It wasn’t a cheap “BOO!” scare either, the game succeded in making me feel paranoid by making me genuinely believe that there was something in that room that was making a concerted effort to fuck with me right before killing me and making me aware of it, throughout.

And thus far, I’ve liked the little CSI sequences that break-up all of the killing, which may I mention is the absolute best impleminatation of first-person melee I’ve ever seen.

The real longevity of the game will be determined with how well they can break up the scares as well as introduce new ones, because the scariest part of that which is unknown, s the fact that it is unknown. Once you know what it actually is and when you get to the point in which scares are easily predictable, once you see/experience something in full it ceases to be quite so scary.

And to tie-up some loose ends: Lost is still awesome (surprise!), DMC4 lost me halfway through — fucking backtracking, and Cindy and I are feeling much better.

Back to procrastinatin’.

Just as soon as I hop out of my figurative week-long sickbed (i.e. bedroom bed) like a dog returning to its vomit, here I am to unapologetically rant and rave about anything that my thoughts stumble upon as I type.

Throughout the week of freedom from the stress and responsibilities, you’d think that I’d totally go on some unforgivable gaming marathon, right? Not so much, there wasn’t really much to play. I’m more or less all World of Warcrafted out for the time being, and Condemned 2: Bloodshot wouldn’t be out for another week. It also didn’t help that I was far too drained (damn antibiotics) to do anything by mid-week.

I tried going back through Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Call of Duty 4, BioShock, and Portal; each time I found myself not really wanting to play anymore, which then led to me questioning why. I then came to the conclusion and revelation that I don’t like going experiencing a game more than once. I absolutely loved Half-Life 2, Call of Duty 4, BioShock, and Portal the first time through, but as hard as I tried I couldn’t bring myself to be entertained by any of them.

Maybe it’s that initial sense of enwonderment that can’t be had the second time through or maybe it’s the feeling of being dropped and engrossed into a place that I couldn’t dream up if I tried and the genuinely unique experiences that are had that don’t feel quite as great the second time through. That’s my games-in-depth thing for the week, I guess.

I’m not sure, but I guess the point is that my week sucked for games and it’s takes the crown when it comes to missed opportunities. However, it then kicked into high gear when it came to passive entertainment; movies and TV. Before last week, I honestly can’t remember the last movie I saw, but I got around to watching a few, Hitman, Juno, Fight Club, and The Mist. Nothing much to speak of besides Juno, which may I mention has the most amazingly unlistenable intro song ever. It grew on me, mostly because of one reason which I’ll get to later.

One of the things in my mind is a 6am wake up call from a little thing called reality so that life as usual may resume.

I say resume for those of you that may not have noticed (see what I did there?), I wasn’t around last week. And it wasn’t for lack of time, there was plenty of that considering I did nothing but veg out and wait to get better all week long. For all one of you (did you catch it this time?) that are wondering I’m not gonna disclose exactly what was wrong as it’s not the most pleasant of thoughts.

ANYWAYS.

Kinda like a live-blog, I’ll attempt to insert the happenings of my day as I live it:

6:56am - Waking up this morning I felt like today was different, the good kind of different. Woke-up-with-total-confidence-regardless-of-anything different, let’s hope for the rest of the day will follow suit.

8:59am - Being stuck in traffic for no real reason besides God unleashing his wrath by making me late on my first day back from ‘vacation’. So yeah, I was late to English, everyone stared in amazement. I guess they all thought I was dead or something. Miss Pez (teacher) went a little insane with some bunny that makes a boing sound when you press a button…you had to be there. Although, she was forgiven, mostly because she was generous when it came to lightening my load on a weeks-worth of make-up work. You rock, Pez!

9:57am - Video productions — didn’t really film, Rini and I kinda just bounced ideas back and forth on what our next project should be about and ended up just grabbing a tapeless camera and going for a morning stroll around the school. Choice quote with no context from me “It’s kinda breezy out here, I kinda wish I was wearing a skirt.”

11:25am - Lunch flew by, mostly because I was off make-up quiz for English, and well, it always kinda flies by.

12:25pm - Exactly an hour later I find myself surrounded by numbers. Math class, conveniently enough we have a substitute. Time for sleep.

1:39pm - Journalism, Ty (my partner in stupidities) and I were graced with the opportunity of editing articles that can only be described as literary masterpieces (sarcasm, much?) another choice quote I managed to mutter throughout the whole editing rigmarole was “How do you kill that what which is already dead?” After today, I think I’m gonna start putting effort in making myself more quotable.

2:32pm - Gah! I’m free! In retrospect, today was a good day, laughter was a constant theme throughout the day, along with a whole lot of not worrying about what others are thinking. I should see about having these more often.

And the reason that I spoke of earlier, the reason that a totally unlistenable song that I’d normally turn off grew on me and the reason I put off watching my now second favorite episode of Lost, The Constant (the first being Tricia Tanaka is Dead, but that’s beside the point) until Monday afternoon is actually a person.

Her name rhymes with Mindy and she may very well be among the most amazing people that I ever had the pleasure of getting to know. I’d fully insert a picture of her right around here, but I don’t know how I’d feel about all you fools ogling my goodies if some random person posted a picture of me on the internets, I follow that ‘do unto others’ thing.

Even though, neither words nor pictures would do her justice, inside or out. Shit, now I sound like some love-sick puppy but that is false, sir!

I’ve just really enjoyed conversations that I’ve had with this person to the point of me being awake at 3am, falling asleep mid-conversation but not wanting to. I found myself stalling both of us from leaving when either of us would have to. As you may or may not know, I have trust issues because of reasons that I’m not gonna go into now. But, I found myself trusting her and confiding in her with things that in most cases I would only divulge to people proving their worth in my eyes.

It bothered me for a little while, as I didn’t understand how I could bring down my perpetual guard to a point of vulnerability to someone who is ostensibly a total stranger.

I don’t know what that means, or if it even has meaning. I just know that every time I speak with this person, a lot of the time I have no clue what to say, so I just say everything, and end up looking like a total loser that talks entirely too much.

Hope you’re feeling better, Cindy.