OK, so let me explain to you what the fuck has happened to me in the last 38 hours.

So basically I’m travelling to England for Uni via coach, usual shit. Two things happened there; I saw a dude get kicked off the coach for straight up being wasted as fuck coming of the boat, and I finally got my first StreetPass.

Then I got to the city where my Uni is and I do the usual of getting my key and such, drop some stuff off and then go and get the rest of my stuff from the storage locker. Now here’s the bullshit. I get back and start setting up my PC. Once that’s all good to go, I press the button.

Nothing.
Press again. Nothing.

Power is connected, everything is fine. It just won’t start.

So I open up the case and notice two things; one, it has a bunch of cobwebs in it (No spiders, just webs), and two; the motherboard is not lighting up the way it should when the power cable is put in. So I’m guessing a few things at this point. The motherboard is broke, the PSU is broke, or static got in a fucked everything. Either way, I’m too fucking tired to do a full series of check ups right now, so I’ll get to my next point.

I live in a Uni owned house, which means they’d provided the Internet. NOW, they are charging extra just to get the speeds I had earlier in the year, or pay nothing and get the same shitty connection I had when living in London. They gave into the fucking Internet monopoly that everyone who lives in this dump has complained about. Scumbags!

So my badass PC is busted, I’m getting over-charged for something that used to be standard, and I’ve been awake for over 38 hours and I can barely think or see straight. So I have to use my fucking laptop to tell you all that I ate a Steak while arguing with my sister in English and Japanese.

So how are you assholes doing?

The joke about the title here is that the blogs I used to write at the beginning of September were always called “Back To School Edition” when I used to post on GameTrailers back in the day.

So Uni is coming back up and I suddenly realise how much I haven’t done, at the same time impressed that I did anything at all. At the very least, MGC got a new coat of paint so I don’t have to worry about that for a while. And I recently jumped back into programming by starting to get into C++. With practice I should be able to get up to a competent level with it before I start classes again.

In regards to the Summer Report… Well lets not discuss that. It’s fairly obvious. Maybe next year things may work out better.

This does bring me to my next point of interest, I might rename the “Gaming Den” to the “Media Extravaganza” so I can cover more than just games. I’ve been watching almost too much anime, movies, and TV shows recently I it might be worth jotting down my thoughts on some things. Then again, I do talk a fair amount about that stuff in the MGCast. So you can hear me blabber on about it there should I decide against my idea.

Now with the laundry list taken care of, I feel like I should write something meaningful.

..Ha! Meaningful.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, the last academic year reminded me just how much I hate the education system in England. This ridiculous structure of “Rush through your coursework and then ‘cram, cram, cram!’ for the exams”, ultimately tiring-out anybody who goes through that Hell and making them turn away from their subject entirely.

I’m a huge fan of the BTEC system, which is to take a subject, break the modules down, then break the key learning objectives into specific assignments. No exams. And strictly speaking, no milestone deadlines. Just make sure everything is complete by the end of the year/course. It lessens the stress significantly, and also opens up self-learning opportunities. BTEC assignments are usually handed out at the beginning of the year, so you can work through them as you learn. OK, it is probably a tab more spoon-fed in terms of getting the work, but you still have to practice and teach yourselves core skills, and it is keeping you occupied throughout the year. Currently, it’s taken several weeks before receiving the coursework, often from many subjects at once. At least getting them at the start could give me more time to plan ahead several months and take care of the less pressuring tasks first.

Maybe I’m just complaining here. Although exam are a whole barrel of issues themselves. But I won’t bother over-explaining that. Simply put; how could anyone possibly think that being sat in an uncomfortable chair for two hours, trying to remember a whole years worth of information to fill out a sheet of paper in complete silence; is even remotely accurate to how an actual work environment is? School/University are the only places where you would be put into a situation like that, and it’s fucking torture. It is unnecessary stress being brought onto a person for almost no good reason. Why do we still use this archaic fucking standard of judging a person’s skill when it’s plainly obvious that it is inaccurate?

Sorry, but I felt I had to say it at least once. Maybe we should take a page out of Finland’s book. Their system is excellent and well-proven.

Anyway, that’ll do for now. Maybe next week I’ll do a gaming write-up and such. I just got Rayman and I have a bunch of other games to talk about. Also, MGCast will be this weekend. Later.

-Adam

Well, it’s at an all-time low for me. On the plus side (If you can call it that), I’ve caught up on a whole bunch of TV shows, watched a few animes to completion, and finished off a few games in my back-catalogue. But these are still mere distractions from my goal. At the same time, what’s the point of a holiday period if you’re not gonna use it to relax, right?

I don’t know any more.

Either way, I have been thinking about what to do with a bunch of these different side projects I’ve gotten myself into. This blog, MGC, video editing, streams, etc. It’s not worth throwing out the work I’ve done in these areas, but they are becoming more of a distraction from what I should be doing. At the same time, I don’t enjoy programming, at all. I’m more of a creative person. If I could, I would jump back on to doing artwork and technical drawings, but then I would constantly be going around in circles; designing things that are never going to get made.

Sorry, I shouldn’t write in such a personal way. But it is helping me go through my thoughts better.

Here’s a thought, I should change the way I do blog posts. Instead of doing these as infrequently as I have, I’ll try to make one post a week, but on different subjects. Lets say every Friday evening. The topics should be as follows; general post (Like this one), gaming/media post, “Progress report”, and the “Rant” post. I’ll rotate around with that for a while.

In the meantime, I’m will try and get back on track. I have about a week or two before my gaming schedule goes nuts again, so I should be able to layout some kind of plan to balance all this shit. Next week I’ll make a games/media post as planned.

See you around.

-Adam

So I’m back home in Enniskillen now, waiting for September to creep back up on me. As the title said, I’ve spent the last two week playing the back catalogue of games that I’ve given myself; mostly Persona 4 Arena, Catherine, and Valkyria Chronicles. However I won’t be going on about those here.

Instead, let me tell you the tale of how my own stupidity bit me in the arse two years after making a serious mistake. So I have two computers at the moment, this one being the first one that was built in 2010 with a Intel i7 930, Radeon HD5970 (Now a GTX 580), 12GB of RAM and the like. Pretty damn good computer for the time I built it. However there was always a slight problem, it kept fucking blue-screening and I couldn’t figure out why. I changed graphics cards, drivers, and more to see if it improved; and no dice. Recently I decided to change the RAM because I previous update to my BIOS showed that I was only using 8GB of the 12GB I had installed. Figured it must have been the wrong RAM for the motherboard.

So I replaced it with what was the correct RAM, and got the same result. After some research I figured out the issue; the i7 930 I have is a Quad-Core, to use Triple-Channel RAM on my motherboard, I would need a Hex-Core. I really wish I had known that before building this thing and wasting my time buying new RAM (Which I returned for a full refund, thank you OverClockersUK). Now I’m tempted to either gut it for the HDDs and GPU and build a Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge machine, or just wait it out for a few more years and dump it once I get my other PC back as my main rig.

I also bought a 3DSXL. It’s kinda cool, but extremely social in the way I’m not. Lots of local connection stuff like StreetPass, which doesn’t benefit me at all because I live in the middle of freaking nowhere at moment.

As for other stuff I’m doing, I’m currently re-building MGC with more features and a serious graphical overhaul. Which leads me onto the next thing; because I have a lot of projects to do for the next couple of months, I figured I’d start doing some Progress Report stuff here so you guys can see how things are coming along and watch me hit my head against a wall repeatedly. I’ll post the first one of those in the next couple of days or so. And there will be another MGCast soon, or some kind of podcast at least.

-Adam

It’s that time again. So the day actually started out with an exam, with the Thing Auction not happening till about 1pm. And the only members of the team were myself and Hal.

For the Tarantino fans out there, you’ll probably guess what our team name is referring to. 

GHOST TRAIN STAMPEDE! Better words than before, that’s for sure.

Here are some basic designs that I drew to make sense of the idea I had.

Game Screen. The player has to dig underground to run from the Ghost Train. But the Ghost Train don’t need no stinkin’ rails, so it follows them under.

A list of game objects, I go into some detail on them later.

What the dangers are in the game, and what are the on screen elements.

What is the Ghost Train capable of. However, you cannot truly predict the Ghost Train’s actions. 

Stuff the player can do.

General game rules.

This was a basic class hierarchy that I designed later to fix some of the issues, however, we never implemented it.

Around 6pm, time for pizza!

So about an hour later I had to go home because I was mentally fatigued. A lack of sleep the previous night, plus an exam in the morning, and then this; I could not think straight. I feel terrible about leaving Hal on his own though. I came back at around 4.30am to help out.

Hal holding down the fort at 5am.

At around 6am, even with my nap from 7pm to 4am; both myself and Hal were beyond knackered and barely had any enthusiasm to want to continue. And between a choice of staying till 1pm and desperately try and add everything we originally wanted, or just going home; we picked the latter.

On the way home, took this picture from just just outside the Staff House at 6am.

What I learned from this TTG:

1. Doing a game jam on the same day as an exam is probably a bad idea, especially when you’ve had barely any sleep.

2. The camera on my phone is probably better than my actual camera.

3. I’m still a novice when it comes to programming.

4. Hal and I have significantly different programming styles.

5. Define class hierarchies before building the game.

6. Bring actual food, not a couple of packets of crisps.

7. Keep it simple, then add stuff later.

It kinda sucks we left early, but it probably would have sucked more if we stayed there the entire event and had a mostly busted idea to show for it. That being said, both myself and Hal have cool ideas in mind for what we could do with stampeding ghost trains, so I wouldn’t call the idea dead. And at the very least, we both have something to work off.

I’ll write some more posts as soon as I get back home in Ulster. Later.

-Adam

So a whole lot of nothing has happened since my last post. The podcast I used to do started back up and promptly died not long after; I actually got something “Playable” working in XNA (Sort of); and I spent two weeks doing nothing but playing Persona 4 Golden. Which I have NO REGRETS ABOUT WHAT SO EVER.

Other than that, a friend of mine is building a website using ASP.NET, and seeing as I’m interested in getting the fuck off WordPress, I’m started looking into it as well. Albeit, he’s doing in pure code, I’m more likely to go down the Web Forms route which has more of a GUI when it come to customization. If you’ve used WPF in Visual Studio, basically that. Just to minimize the amount of programming work and to build something usable quickly.

Not that I have anything against WordPress, but the lack of customization for things like fonts or backgrounds really drives me nuts. Unless I wanted to change it in the CSS file for the template I’m using, but I would rather just build something from scratch and add whatever I needed when I need it, and have a much deeper level of customizability. Not to mention I have to go around WordPress to host my own files because they have a upload limit, despite the fact that I’m the one hosting them on a server that I am paying for.

And guess what, remember that game I was supposed to be working on with a few people I know? Well it got cancelled, but you can see the work I did for it here. I really hope this doesn’t become a habit, because I really want something to my name other than failed ideas and broken down projects.

Later.

-Adam

So about 2 years ago I helped do a few episodes of a podcast known as “Union Report”, and then everything went to Hell and we never did another one. Now the podcast is reborn under the name MGCast.

MGCast – 03/03/2013: Fridge ain’t here, man!

Feel free to subscribe to it and such. I’ve added an RSS feed to it on the right side of every page anyway, so I won’t be posting about it again.

It does feel great to do a podcast after this long though, hopefully we can keep to the schedule this time.

-Adam

I bought one. I said I was going to and I did. All things aside, this is a really slick device. It feels much better in my hands than the PSP ever did. The inclusion of dual-analogue sticks is a serious improvement also. Persona 4 Golden feels fantastic on the system because of it (Although it being an awesome game in it’s own right helps).

What I got when I first got the system.

So starting the system up in the first place didn’t take too much time in comparison to something like the PSP or even the PS3, Probably took about 10 minutes at most for the initial setup. General stuff; setting the time, connecting to the Wi-Fi, so on. Then there was an update I had to install that took 20 minutes, but actually installed as it downloaded, so already an improvement over the PS3 in terms of that.

Thereafter, I finally get to the main screen, and it’s your typical “Lets cover the whole thing with shortcut symbols to apps” that every mobile device does these days (Thank you Apple, you’ve ruined UI design forever), albeit there are some shortcuts faster ways of navigating if you want it. Pressing the PS button to bring up the multi-paned interface showing all open windows is an example. Reminded me of the Xbox Blade interface that was on the X360 when it first came out.

After a few weeks with it, I think I have finally perfected the interface for my uses. I essentially have it so that games are at the top along with the PSM Dev, PS Store, Friends, etc. On the second level is all the communication apps, Skype and such; and then on the last level is all the apps that came pre-built on the system or stuff I never use; Near, Maps, E-Mail, etc. This layout system to work fine for me. I only ever use the top layer when I use the thing outside, mostly to launch Persona 3 Portable.

Some time and a bit of tweaking later…

Speaking of features, there’s a significant step-up from what the PSP offered, but that’s expected seeing as the market is considerably different in scope and user demand. But the general idea of it being primarily for games is still there, but the other media options continue their presence and are perfectly welcome. I’m partially fond of the new camera and video capture options, albeit the camera does not have a resolution that’s even remotely on par with most phones, but some condescensions had to be made after all. For £215, it’s a seriously low price when you consider most phones are £400-£600 when all is said and done (Referring to contracts).

Social aspects certainly play a more prominent role here. Every time I boot a game or look at my friends list, I can scroll down and see their current activity throughout their games; trophy lists, whether or not it’s their first time playing, and much more. It reminds me of Steam’s community hub that one might see when clicking on that item in the window, and how it displays a similar (but slightly more in-depth) feed page.

Multi-application support is a significant step up from what the PSP had.

 But back to multi-tasking for a second, because it is one of the more impressive features when compared to the PSP and PS3. I can press the PS Button to practically pause any game, bring up the web browser and start YouTube videos, and then go back to the game and continue from where I left off; AND THAT’S AWESOME!

OK, I realise any smartphone has been able to do that for a few years now. But it does impress me nonetheless. The fact that the multi-tab idea of the PC interface is starting to become more and more a part of nearly every device is certainly an improvement; and in regards to the Vita, this can used for some awesome stuff.

Take for example Persona 4 Golden, you’re going to want to use a wiki for a good chunk of that game. And the ability to pause, check the Internet, and jump right back in; all within minutes, maybe even seconds, is crazy awesome and useful.

Speaking of games, I gotta disagree with some ideas that there is a serious lack of content. After one look in the store, I saw plenty of games. The problem is that a good chunk of them were part of PlayStation Mobile, so very people know where to look. And they don’t look bad at all, some seemed very impress, and I can’t wait to get better at programming in C# so I can get a chance to have a crack at that stuff

The screenshot feature is a nice touch. Here’s some Persona 4 Golden for you.

Also, I have Persona 4 Golden, a 100 hour JRPG, I’m pretty much set for the rest of the year with that alone. But you add on top that most of the PSP games on the store can be played on the Vita, that’s a ton of content! And they are more comfortable on the Vita than the original PSP, partly due to the improved form-factor and shape.

Overall, I’m a lot more impressed with this device that I initially theorised. It’s a solid machine, I really hope Sony support it and market appropriately, so there can be a larger install base, which will lead to even more content. Furthermore, I am really interested in PSM now that XNA has been killed off.

That’s all. Sorry for the month long delay, I kinda forgot about this place… And real-life for that matter. Persona 4 is a a Hell of a game.

-Adam