Knew you'd be back before too long. Super happy to see you, and I look forward to more blogs. Bring a picture of Kaylee doing shenanigans when you do your next photo update!
Alien Isolation, Dragon Age 3 and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
Majora's Mask was my favorite of that year, and favorite 3D Zelda game. I liked the Bomber's Journal and the long list of side quests that game had. The most emotional moments and dark moments of that game were in the side quests, which were all related to personal stories of the NPCs.
I was a preteen I think, only a few years older than you at that time, and I really needed something more layered and dark, and Majora's Mask blew my mind.
Do you remember the sad epic music that plays during the last five minutes or so on the 3rd day, right before the moon falls? That music is still haunting to hear, I don't remember but may have actually cried when I failed the first time and let the moon fall.
The whole clocktown gameworld changes so much from the 1st day till the 3rd and for me they really made it feel like a lived-in place, and all those NPCs in the Bomber's Notebook felt like people that mattered. By the 3rd day so many of the people are running for the hills and you get this really dark sense that most of them are huddling together with loved ones, preparing to die. When you roam around Termina during the 3rd day you can see that in action when you find out where people have run to and see the sadness in their dialogue when you interact with them. I had never seen such a foreboding theme presented in my games before at that age. I was presented with death and loss on a massive scale and the NPCs that were going to be lost because of it felt like they mattered, so it gave me a lot of incentive to find out how to save everybody and complete the Bomber's Notebook. I haven't given even half-as-much-a-shit about characters and a gameworld in any other Zelda game before that or ever since. Majora's Mask was a really special and weird thing.
Happy Spooky month. I played through FEAR 3 last week already so my celebration of Haloween season is off to a quick start.
I ended up liking Portal 2 even more than the original. It would be too reductive for me to call the first game a proof of concept since it's quite a complete and amazing experience, but Portal 2 is like that indie concept getting fleshed out into a AAA game. Portal 2 is the best Portal sequel I could've ever hoped for, it knocked the design and production out of the park on all fronts. Great single player campaign, fanstastic and unique two-player cooperative campaign. I was super satisfied with how everything in Portal 2 turned out.
Fisher takes rounds 1 and 3, Agent 47 takes round 2. Fisher wins in those two scenarios, and wins the competition overall, because he can sneak in the shadows out of sight, studying all the characters around the world until he deduces which one is Agent 47 in a disguise. Then breaks his neck.
Glad you liked the songs, Alex!
Is Dark Descent the first of the Amnesia games? I can't remember which one is which, I think Machine for Pigs is the newest one but I don't remember.
You're no henchman, the amount of Jedi you've killed should easily earn you a kingdom of your own. I fear the only reason the peasants don't revolt on me is that I bring puppy pictures from far and wide to keep them at bay.
Thanks Travis!
Our astronomy instructor has been using a lot of math and physics work, and labs as well as physical experiments to show us some of Kepler's laws, Newtons laws, and help us understand orbits and everything. It's been really great so far. I took an astronomy class in highschool but we never did any interesting labs, never went stargazing, and didn't much math. I can't really remember much of value that came from the high school astronomy lol.
This class we are in now is pretty great though so I'm happy.
There's a lot of different jobs in game development but the point you make is totally true, and all the admissions representatives and teachers I've talked to (mostly the ones at Westwood back when I was thinking about going there) told me that in order to break into game development most people come at it from one of those two extremes. Either the art side, in which you need to be a pretty great artist and your chances of actually getting onto a team are still super slim at best, or a great programmer with a strong computer science background, which includes tons of math. I'm not an artist so I decided to try out the other extreme and luckily it's going okay so far.
Based on all the things I hear about the game industry I'm not sure if I'll ever actually settle down in any one place with a big team and have a career. The job security is terrible, even for highly talented people. You could get like twice the pay and much more job security being a non-gaming programmer at like Boeing or something I've heard. Basically, making games is a fools errand, I'll never pay off the student loans, and I'll probably get laid off all the time at the end of projects lol.
I'm not sure what will happen, in a few years once I've actually completed a B.S. in the field I might end up taking the non-gaming route and just develop games as a hobby on the side, or open an independent studio, or just get "lucky" and be a programmer getting tossed around between all the AAA studios making Assassin's Creed 17 and Uncharted 12.
Thanks Joe.
As far as the math classes go I've barely started, which feels incredibly daunting since math has never been my strongest set of skills, but it's going okay so far so I'm keeping my spirits up. Once this one's done it's on to trig and then the calc sequence, just as prep. If I can get into Digipen for game design and computer science we will have to do even more calc, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics.
