PixlBit

Happy new year everyone! First blog of 2015 HYPE! Sit down, get naked if you have to, and let's discuss everything that actually matters in the world today.

I played games, bought games, and settled into the new semester at school. Let's talk about it!

Games I bought

Diablo III - Never played this before. Bought with a Walmart giftcard I got around Christmas. Found a used copy on Walmart.com for cheap and in great condition.

Mass Effect 3 - Used the same Walmart giftcard, used and cheap. May finally get around to playing it, after all this time.

Resident Evil 4 HD - XBL had this on sale before new years. I already beat this game six times on gamecube and still like playing it, there's no reason I shouldn't own as many versions of it as possible.

Fallout 3 GOTY - An all time favorite. $10 for a new copy at Target. I'll play through this game again anytime.

Games I've been playing

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

I'm around level 40 in the multiplayer. The majority of the level designs in the vanilla game are really fun to play. There's one I really hate, but that's always the case with any online game. To say there's only one map you hate is actually quite rare, usually even the best of online games have more stinkers than that.

The big changes to movement mechanics are exactly what CoD needed to make this one not a waste of my time. Moving around the level is super fast so you're never out of the action for long, and once you find action the firefights give you a little more agency than you had in past games. You still die quickly, so you don't have a ton of time to dance around like you can in Halo, but the dashes, boost jumps, and wrist-shot grenade launchers among other things all help to make gunfights more entertaining.

It feels great to not be tied to the ground. If there's a big wall in your way, just jump over it. If you want to get into a building you can double-jump into the air and forward-dash through a window. You can come at people from just about any direction now, and do it quickly, instead of having to plod around and slowly work your way into buildings and up staircases.

Fallout: New Vegas GOTY

This was the game I played the most last year by far, but I didn't finish it. I took a break for a while, but now I'm back. I'm almost finished with the whole thing as well. I completed the Dead Money DLC and now I'm about to start the Lonesome Road DLC. I'm done with all the other download packs, and I only have one main quest left to do in the vanilla game. I'm so close to total victory I can taste it. The Mojave will be all mine soon, and all its factions will either stand beside me or die!

If you've never played New Vegas all you need to know is that it has robots that wear ten gallon hats and cowboy boots.

Dragon Age: Origins

I beat the game finally. I was pretty satisfied with how everything turned out. There was an interesting and unexpected curveball that a party-member threw at me right before the final battle that made me completely rethink what kind of person my character was. In the end I made a decision that I never thought my character would go along with.

Origins has disappointingly boring combat that makes it almost criminal to call it a tactical game as some people refer to it. I could go on about how much better Dragon Age 2's system is, but I think Dragon Age fans all smoke crack and continue to think that Origins was some kind of gold standard for combat and DA2 screwed it up. Origins is exceedingly boring, all you do is watch cooldown timers and look at lackluster animations. Dragon Age 2 changed a lot of small things to make the system better, like emphasizing status effects that allow party members to team up on enemies better, adding the ability to leap at an enemy once you come close enough so that you can close the gap quickly, and plain writing better skill trees with more useful abilities focused on teamwork.

The roleplaying is incredibly satisfying though, and the writing is genuinely great. The game is set in a high fantasy world full of tropes, but the writing does a great deal to turn most of those tropes on their heads. It was a real treat to read the dialogue that was written, and listen to the VO performances.

School

I'm taking trigonometry, computer science 1 in C++, and chemistry this semester.

C++ is really fun. DarkBASIC was quite simple and stripped down, or at least that's how we used it. C++ by comparison has been a bit more sophisticated and intriguing. At this point our projects have been about taking concepts we learned in DarkBASIC and learning how to do them in C++ in order to see the differences as well as learn some basic rules and terminology.

This week we did an assignment where we built a tip calculator, like one you'd use after dinner at a restraunt. I'm going to leave a few screenshots of some of my projects.

A hang-man game I built last semester in DarkBASIC. I wanted to show this to you a long time ago but I forgot. There's an array of words, the program chooses one, draws the appropriate number of blank lines below the gallows, and the user gets six guesses before the bastard hangs, which he's about to in my screenshot. Most of my words were dumb and hard to remember, so I lose at my own game a lot. Many were moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Code taken from my latest assignment in C++. This section is where I have all my variables defined in the tip calculator program. If your server is terrible they get a hot 1% tip.

This is hard to read but it shows a section where the calculations happen and a block of IF statements begins, related to the questionnaire.

This is the end of the program where a simple table is built to show the results to the user.

The program is running on the right side. The user enters the name of their server, the amount of the check, and answers a short questionnaire to determine the tip percentage that you should consider giving to the server. 

The final screen where the results are presented. Jenn was pretty damn good, she should at least get $8.15.

I don't have the same enthusiasm for my other classes at this point, but we are only two weeks in, so they have plenty of time to grow on me. Programming is fun, that's the most important part. Computer science is why I went back to school in the first place, so the fact I'm having a blast bodes well.

Music

British thrash band Sylosis came out with their new album and I like it so I'll leave a song from that. On a completely different note there's this kid on Youtube by the name of Peter Crowley that makes symphonic music of various persuasions, but mostly of the epic film score type. He's been steadily progressing over the years, acquiring better software, and arranging more cohesive pieces. He's always had a knack for melody that I appreciate, and if I ever started a gaming company and needed music I might just ask him. I'll leave one of his songs from a couple years ago.

What's on the horizon?

A February update of course! I have a lot of games I can play, when I find time to play them. I'll have plenty to talk about next month I'm sure.