20101019

Observations

A few things that have caught my attention lately:

1. I'm not really all that excited about new game releases. There's been a new Mario Galaxy, a new Dead Rising, and more in recent months, but the only games that have excited me are expansions on games I'm already playing. I suspect this is because I have a large back catalog of single player games I haven't finished, and it's tough for me to justify buying anything new when I have all these excellent games yet to play.

2. On that same note, I need to bring my Wii with me the next time I am out of town on business. I have yet to find a hotel that doesn't have chronic internet problems. Bonus points for only having wireless connections available, for said wireless connections to crap out every five minutes for forty seconds. For the love of Zelda just either provide internet that is reliable or just don't bother, you'd save me the heartbreak of constantly trying to get it to work and I could just go to sleep or drive in circles or something more productive than wrangling with a network as stable as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

3. I really don't mind losing games to mistakes I make, or even to mistakes other make. Yeah, it's not ideal and some would say it sucks, but that's how competitive games go, and how challenging single player/cooperative games should be. I really, utterly, and completely despise losing games to lag or other technical failures. It feels analogous to someone flipping a board game in your face, only you don't have an actual person to lecture on sportsmanship or blame for it. There's just this powerless feeling of futility to comfort you as you inwardly rage and boil.

20101013

Communication Fail

How hard is X > Y > Z to understand? Someone tell me, because I used that exact format to try to communicate a concept on a forum, almost exactly as you see it there. Somehow I keep getting responses akin to:

"So basically X is the largest, then Y, then Z? What about if we're doing subtraction instead of addition?"

"Okay, so if I want to subtract one of these numbers from another of these numbers and get a negative number, which numbers do I subtract from each other?"

"Which is bigger, X or Z?"


Those are just the posts which seem to have bothered to read my maxim. I am going to cry myself to sleep tonight if I see one more person post who doesn't understand the concept of the "greater than" symbol.

20101008

Better than Christmas Presents

Blizzcon in two weeks. My head shall asplode.