I haven't been online playing wow much lately, I've just been playing too many other games. There have been a lot coming out lately, and they keep pulling me away from my wow obligations... I've got Ultimate Spider-Man, Serious Sam 2, Black and White 2, Age of Empires 3, X-Men Legends 2 (won't install for me but I have yet to play around with it), and the new doom 3 expansion called "Quake 4".
Ultimate Spider-Man is the game I've been playing the most, surprisingly. If I couldn't play it with my PS2 controller, I probably would have written it off pretty fast. But the game is just so fun when I use my PS2 controller, it's like playing a very nice looking console game. I mean, it IS a console game, but PC games usually don't feel like a console game, although lately it seems like they've been trying... Now when I am driving around and looking at trees and stuff, I wish I was spider man and could swing off of them and stuff. I want to web zip over buildings irl... it would be so much better than walking or driving. The game really only takes like two hours to beat, the story mode is really short. But that doesn't really matter to me, because the races are what makes the game fun. All though the city there are random race courses, where you have to swing around and hit certain targets in a certain amount of time. There's targets up against buildings that you have to climb on to get, there's targets that are just random floating platforms that you have to jump on, there's some that just float in the middle of the sky and you have to swing off of a building and get enough height from jumping out of the swing to hit the target. It seems like the races were the real intention of the game, the story mode was something just thrown in there because.. well... every game needs a story mode. I've gotten gold medals on all of the easy, medium, and hard races so far (there are still "insane" races that are indeed insane). Let me tell you, that is no easy task, lots (if not most) of those "hard races" required me spending at least an hour on them, learning and memorizing where all of the targets are, the order of where to go, what moves are best to use at the best time. The races are what has kept me playing the game so long. It kind of makes playing spider-man like playing a tony hawk game, which isn't very weird because it's made by some of the developers that worked on tony hawk.
I haven't played too much of any of the other games I've downloaded, but I've put at least an hour into all of them (except maybe AoE3, RTS games don't fascinate me as much as they used to). Serious Sam 2 is insane, not just in how they throw a thousand things at you, but just the theme of the game. Protecting these little blue african midgets, lots of crazy hidden secrets and easter eggs. Serious Sam 2 is awesome though, kind of how FPS games should be. It doesn't try to be an interactive movie like lots of FPS's do nowadays, but that's not bad.
Black and White 2 looks beautiful, and seems to be a little more complicated than the last one, but from what I've seen, seems like a lot more of the same thing. I'm sure I'll enjoy it a lot more when I find the time to play it more, but the first impression I got was "this is just like black and white", and it made me go sample another game. It's not exactly the same though, you can control military units now, and that could lead to some awesome huge battles between countries/religions... Which would be another way of spreading your belief to other parts of the world probably.
Quake 4 didn't disappoint me as much as I thought it would, actually. The game looks a lot like Doom 3, but the graphics are better. I think the main difference I've noticed is that Quake 4 isn't NEARLY as dark as Doom3. One of the first things I said when I was playing it was "this game is way more colorful than Doom3", which is true, but only because Doom 3 consisted only of black most of the time. You notice the colors a lot more when you can see everything and not have to focus on a certain part with a flashlight. The monsters are less demonic than Doom3 and more cyborg-ish. The human models look exactly like the human models from Doom3. The opening sequence of the game was a little too cliche for me, they were inside of a marine dropship, the dropship gets shot down, the screen goes black and you hear nothing but a heartbeat... It was a lot cooler when HALF-LIFE did it, and also every HALF-LIFE EXPANSION, and also probably lots of other FPS's, and let's not forget that Anarchy Online does it when you start a new character, just in much crappier graphics. But yeah, the game is fun and I'll probably play through it once I get around to it.
I should probably play some WoW some more and take advantage of that rested time I've built up before I binge on some more single-player games, but it's hard to pull myself away from all these new games to play.
Well, I guess I underestimate people a little bit... I talked to justin and he's cool with it, encouraging even. So I was really afraid of nothing, just reasons I made up. I'm gonna drive to norman today, I've never driven that far before and it's kind of intimidating, but it shouldn't be too bad. It's not really the distance that bothers me, it's just getting lost, I'm afraid of getting lost or missing the right exit or whatever. I'm used to being a passenger so I never really paid attention to directions or road signs or whatever on my way there or back, so I'm gonna have to google map it up and hope the directions are right. I don't know how much money I'm gonna need for turnpikes so I think I'll just bring like, five dollars in quarters or something. Now I'm going to bitch about that. I think it's totally awesome how we have to pay taxes and stuff, but still have to pay separately to drive on the roads. I think that's a really awesome thing. I guess I could get a pikepass, but then they win. Well who am I kidding, I lose either way.
Does anybody ever feel like they're helpless, like they have no control of anything that happens to them? That's kind of how I feel. It's my own fault, for being so passive, being afraid of confrontation and being afraid of failure. It's kind of ironic, being afraid of failure has actually kind of caused me to fail.
Like I said in my last post, I turned in an application to TCC. I think this is a good start, but I've been thinking about it, and I really don't want to go to TCC. I feel that I am capable of going to a better school, and I feel like I am settling for less. One of the main reasons I feel like this, as much as it pains me to say it, is Justin. As most of you know, my friend Justin has been living with me for a while now. What was supposed to be temporary, has become a year. It's partially my fault, because before he moved in, I agreed to get a place with him, and he could live at our house temporarily until we got our own place. But things have changed in that time, and priorities have changed.
To go into further detail, at the time, our band, was still a band. I still thought that we would keep practicing and stay together, but our drummer moved out of state. Instead of getting on the ball and actively looking for new members, we procrastinated. Since then, though, I've done a lot of thinking. As much as I love playing music, I know that I can't dedicate all of my time to it, it's already wasted so much of my time already. I need something real in my life to persue, instead of putting all of my stock into something that has little chance of actually happening. I realized this a long time ago, but I never really had the courage to admit it.
And now, it seems that we rarely practice anymore, and we have different priorities. But if that's the case, why is he still here? A big reason is that he has so much now in Tulsa, that he can't leave. He has gotten too comfortable, and now can't afford to move out and live on his own. He bought a car that he can barely afford, the payments take all of the money he has. Even if we were to get a place, how would he come through on payments, if he doesn't even have any money right now? These are the things that I think about now. He is a really good friend of mine, but he is far too impulsive, and I on the other hand am very contemplative. What if we were to get a lease at an apartment, and he couldn't pay his half? I would be pretty fucked then. Moving into a place with him doesn't seem like a viable option to me.
And that's where the tough part comes in... how am I supposed to tell him that? How am I supposed to say, "Hey, you can't live here anymore. Find a new place, a new job, a new source of income to pay off your bills that you can hardly already afford." How can I say something like that without looking like I'm turning my back on him, or stabbing him in the back? These are the things I think about now.
And during this whole time, I am wondering if I am going to regret the rest of my life for not taking action now. I really want to live in Norman with my friends, you guys don't understand how much I want to do that. I really want to go to OU and not some community college. I think I am smart enough to do that... but now I feel like I'm stuck. I don't know how I'm going to get out of it without losing a friend or regretting what I'm doing.
On top of that, it's affected my life... I don't hang out with friends anymore, because I feel guilty leaving Justin alone. And I don't want to bring him along everywhere I go. I don't bring my computer to the LAN as much, if hardly at all, anymore because he uses it almost as much as me now, and I would feel guilty about that. Generally, I think I care too much, and I need to stop... but then I feel like I would be an asshole.
My hospital bill doesn't mean shit to me compared to this. I feel like I am ruining my own life.
Been a few weeks since I updated. So what's new... I owe the hospital $14k, they were nice enough to cut off $3k from the bill, I don't know why. It still feels like they held a knife to me and said "fourteen thousand dollars or you're dead", but whatever. I might sound like a socialist weasel, but I think there are some things the government should help you pay for regardless of whether or not you're insured, like medical emergencies that could be fatal if not attended to (i.e. exploding appendixes). But I'm not really letting that bother me all that much, I'm realizing that people have been in much worse financial situations than me, and lots of those people brought it upon themselves.
I turned in an application at TCC, but I haven't actually enrolled yet. I still want to live in norman with my friends, and go to OU instead of TCC, but it will be much harder for me to do.
I fixed my bittorrent and now it downloads like it's supposed to. I got Fallout Tactics, Age of Empires 3, Black and White 2, Final Fantasy Advent Children, and the Naruto movie, in the past two days.
Let me say something about Advent Children. A lot of people are going to hate me for this, but Square should stick to making games. Cheesy storylines are much more acceptable in games, because you at least have some control over what's happening. Advent Children seemed like a big gimmick to me, very pretty special effects, lots of cool fights, lots of cameos from Final Fantasy VII characters, and a really lame story. I thought it was really cool how Sephiroth was in the movie for like three minutes, while all of the advertisements show him like he's a main character or something. I also like how Square could have spent this time making an actual sequel or remake of FFVII but instead just made a bunch of cutscenes linked together by weak story. Fuck you square, NM camping sucks. I liked the Naruto movie a lot more, but the series is better than the movie.
I can't really say much about Fallout Tactics, AoE3, or Black and white 2, I've been spending all of my game time playing WoW on my rogue, which is a really fun class to play. Very action oriented, and hordes run away whenever they see me go into stealth.
What else... I've been listening to Darkest Hour a lot, munkie got to go to their show but got kicked out for kicking a security guard in the head. So remember kids, don't kick security guards in the head because they tend to not like it much.
oh... I got a demo of a PS2 game in the mail today, called "Shadow of the Colossus", and I think it's a really badass game. There's a huge world to explore, and in the demo there is a huge giant that you have to kill, basically by climbing up on him and stabbing him a lot. It's a really unique type of game for a PS2 game, it's something more like I would expect on PC, because it has such a huge world to run around in. It's kind of like what the new Zelda games should be like.