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| Friday, April 23rd, 2010 | | 7:19 am |
| | Saturday, March 6th, 2010 | | 4:18 pm |
For anybody who would like to see what I've been working on, the trailer for my upcoming game just went up: In other news, we celebrated our anniversary by going to see Avatar. Yes, we're probably the last people to go see it. We both liked it - the 3D technology was amazing as were the graphics. Plot was cliche & characters mediocre. I think the theme was handled much better in Princess Mononoke. Still, it's worth seeing just for the visuals & the action scenes. | | Monday, February 15th, 2010 | | 11:22 am |
Wow, over half a year since I posted last. Still working part time subbing, part time teaching at Asian exchange students at the college. I've added another part time job - my own game development for XBox Live Indie Games. My first two games (Epiphany in Spaaace! & Molly the Were-Zompire) were basically eletronic Choose Your Own Adventures and they made me about $600 in the first quarter since they were out. Not bad for text games, but hardly enough to live on. On the other hand, the game I'm working on right now (Breath of Death VII: The Beginning) is very promising - I'm working with a very talented artist and he's really nailing the old-school RPG aesthetic. We're aiming for a late March release at $1. You can find out more here (including our awesome box art image) - http://zeboyd.com/2010/02/01/breath-of-death-vii-the-beginning/In family news, Willow is talking and out of diapers. Madeline is walking. Jade is being home schooled since my wife has a master's degree in curriculum design & Jade is too good at several subjects to get much out of the public schools. My wife is on the verge of starting a part time photography business. All is good. My computer stopped working about a week ago, but luckily, our tax refund came in to save the day. My new computer is much nicer than the old one (which was about 4 years old when it died) so I'm very pleased about that. I finally got just about all of my major programs installed on it so I'm looking forward to doing more programming on Breath of Death VII and playing games with it this week. We were also able to replace our old TV setup (360 hooked up to a 19" monitor & everything else on an old SDTV) with a new 32" HDTV and we're all digging how much better everything looks. Oh and we renewed our XBox Live Gold membership (for Netflix primarily), now that I don't actually have any online multiplayer games. I should fix that some time. ;) In other news, we went to Universal Studios last week and had fun there (it was really cheap since we had a couple of free tickets), although the drive back was a pain (over twice as long as it took to go there). Oh and my new group of students come in at the end of the week so there's that to look forward to. I think that's about it for now. Hopefully, I won't take another 6 months to write the next update. :) | | Monday, July 20th, 2009 | | 3:04 pm |
Woohoo! NIS America called! I have an interview for Thursday next week! If this goes well, I could be a script editor working for one of the best video game RPG companies around! I'm so excited! :) | | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | | 6:00 pm |
| | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | | 10:09 pm |
Coraline is the best movie I've seen in years. It's drop dead gorgeous (much better looking than Nightmare Before Christmas and I love that film), the music is fantastic at setting mood, and the story is expertly crafted. Not only that, but it's by far the scariest PG movie I've ever seen; calling it a dark fantasy children's horror movie is not that far off. I saw it in a regular theater, but I look forward to seeing it again in 3D, hopefully next weekend. | | Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | | 4:00 pm |
This is just a quick note to say that if the demo and last night is any indication, Left 4 Dead + friend(s) is an awesome combination. I may have to buy this game soon. | | Friday, November 7th, 2008 | | 11:10 am |
Just played the demos for Mirror's Edge, Banjo-Kazooie, and Tomb Raider Underworld. All great games. I must have spent 4-5 hours last night on Banjo-Kazooie mostly messing around with the vehicle creator. Pogo stick plane? You betcha! Car with a giant pincer in the front that you drive into enemies and then proceed to use a giant sprint to hurl them into a giant fist? Yeah, I did that too. Mirror's Edge was incredible: a very immersive sci-fi first person perspective platformer. I might have to get it instead of Gears 2. Tomb Raider Underworld was also very good - incredible graphics, better (and more difficult) level design, plus the demo level just felt a lot more real and organic than previous Tomb Raider title levels. It's a testament to just how rich of an abundance of quality new games are coming out now that Tomb Raider Underworld is as good as it is and yet I probably will end up picking it up in a bargain bin mid-to-late 2009. Oh and Sega just announced that they're releasing a new Genesis Collection. This time, it's for the 360/PS3, it comes with achievements, and they added a bunch of noticeable games that were missing from the PS2 collection like the Shining Force games and Streets of Rage. | | Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | | 11:47 am |
So the video game season of joy is upon us. So many good games and not enough time or money for them all. I think I'm going to go with Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts (the vehicle creation utility with 1600 different parts sounds awesome plus the $40 price tag and free inclusion of one of my favorite N64 games sealed the deal), Persona 4 (no brainer, loved P3), and Gears of War 2 (sounds like the story mode is substantially better & horde mode sounds like a blast with a few friends). Maybe Civilization: Colonization as well since that's a cheap one and I love the Civ games. Oh and I've got an XBox Live Gold membership coming in the mail so I'll be able to play multiplayer and use Netflix on my 360. Yay! Anyway, that leaves the following games for purchase sometime next year when I get the time & money for them: Fallout 3 (looks like an awesome game, but I'm wary since I didn't like Morrowind) Fable 2 (looks like it's a little light on the Action/RPG front, but it still looks fun) Prince of Persia (incredible graphics, but I don't know how well it'll play) Dragon Quest 4 remake (loved the NES original) Chrono Trigger DS (loved the original, but I'm not paying $40 for a port of such an old game. I'll get it when it's cheap) Castlevania: Order of Eclessia (looks like a lot of fun and apparently it's a lot harder than recent Castlevanias). Left 4 Dead (multiplayer zombie survival game with Valve's polish? Sold! Probably pick it up in January or February) Dead Space (looks like a fun RE4-esque game, but I'll pick it up later in the bargain bins) Tales of Vesperia (though Symphonia was lacking, but I'm willing to give it another try) The Last Remnant (Square-Enix is really hit or miss of late, but this RPG looks promising) The latest Tomb Raider (looks fun, but not amazing) The new Naruto 360 game (really enjoyed the demo, but I'll pick it up later for cheap) The Sonic DS RPG (looks fun, I'll get around to it) and I'm sure there are a lot of games missing on this list. | | Monday, October 20th, 2008 | | 11:48 am |
The car is busted. Transmission problems. I took it to Pep Boys on AAA's recommendation and it turns out that they don't do transmission work so I need to go back there after work today, get it towed to another place and then try to get back home to say nothing of trying to pay for it all. I am not pleased. | | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | | 7:01 am |
I got a surprise day off work today (the campus is closed due to high winds and power failures) so I thought I'd write a new blog entry. As a part of my job, I have to help supervise field trips. This is a good thing: I get paid around $150 plus free admission to wherever the field trip is going and the work is practically non-existent: I make sure that all the students are on the bus before we leave and I might have to sign a form or two from the bus driver, but once we actually arrive, the students tend to scatter and I'm left alone to enjoy whatever location we're at (the students extremely responsible and we never have major problems with people arriving back on time). So far, I've been to Huntington Library & Knott's Berry Farm with Disneyland, Sea World, and South Coast Plaza coming up later this semester. Reports follow: Huntington Library is a bit of a misnomer. Sure there's a library there, but there's a lot more. The place consists of a couple hundred acres of well tended gardens along with several large buildings filled with artwork and historical artifacts worth a ton of money. I mean, they have an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible on display (first printed work) and that's just one of their very expensive items. All in all, it felt like I was on some rich guy's private estate. I spent most of my time in the gardens which weren't just flower gardens, but more like well kept forests. They had several different theme gardens: Japanese, Chinese, Rose, Desert, and Jungle to name a few. Very pretty. Knott's Berry Farm was a lot of fun. I haven't been to a roller coaster park in ages and I was pleased to see that I still enjoy them. The only real problem was after lunch: I made the mistake of eating a big lunch at a nearby TGI Friday's (Jack Daniel Burger, the burger wasn't anything special, but the sauce was awesome) and then riding some fast paced rides soon thereafter. Felt very sick and had to walk it off for a couple hours before riding my next ride (at which point I was fine). Some of the rides were awesome: I loved La Revolution (kind of like the Dragon Swing rides, but spinning around at the same time and much faster), Sidewinder (regular rollercoaster where the cars were circular and spun in-synch to the rollercoaster's forward motion) and the Silver Bullet (just a really fast upside down sort of rollercoaster). I hated Ghost Rider, an old fashioned wooden rollercoaster, since it just felt so jerky compared to more modern rollercoasters and ended up hurting my neck. Other rides I rode included the Boomerang (fast paced rollercoaster with upside down parts that goes backwards halfway through) and this ride that just went straight up to an insane height and than dropped (my students dared me to go on that one, otherwise I would have skipped it). | | Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 | | 10:33 am |
I'm teaching a new group of students. This group is bigger (40+ students as opposed to the previous 20), Japanese (the previous group was Chinese), and all female (the previous group was half and half). It's really taking some getting used to: the previous group was more talkative and the classes were in nicely manageable 70 minute blocks as opposed to now where I have five 50 minute classes on Mondays & Wednesday and two 90 minute classes on Tuesdays & Thursdays. It's also weird to be teaching different subjects: previously I taught the 5 different classes every single day, but now I teach a lot of repeat classes to different students. The increased student body size combined with 5 different configurations of students (Group 1 & 2 as well as Group A, B, and C) along with the fact that the students just plain look a lot more similar to each other since they're all female is really making it difficult for me to remember names. Hopefully, I'll come up with some sort of strategy to use. On the negative side, I have fewer hours now which means less money. I still am making more money than I would be making with full time substitute teaching (and for fewer hours too), but chances are I'm going to need to supplement my income with some substitute teaching on days I have free since Shannon is planning on quitting her job at the end of the year and becoming a full time mom. We'll probably also have to cut expenses some as well, but we'll see. Oh and our car broke down multiple times recently with the result that we had to spend about $500 to fix it and I ended up spending many hours dealing with mechanics. Oh well, at least it beats a car payment. On the plus side, I just got Professor Layton for the DS in the mail from a Goozex trade and I'm looking forward to trying it out today. On the baby front, Willow has starting to walk and stand unassisted in the past few days. On the Jade front, she started 2nd grade at a brand new charter school where they do bilingual immersion education so she's learning a bunch of Spanish. It's good for her; she was doing too well in her previous school so it's nice that she finally has a challenge. | | Friday, August 15th, 2008 | | 1:13 pm |
My computer started acting really poorly a few days ago. And by that, I mean, it would start to load up Windows & then crash to a blue screen. I was able to start it in Safe Mode & reload an earlier configuration and then would solve the problem for a brief time, but before long, it would start to act up again and I'd have to reload an earlier configuration. In the end, I had to wipe the computer clean, reload Windows XP and all my programs, and find all the drivers for my hardware and re-install them. The process has taken several hours yesterday and today, but it looks like I'm almost done (I'm just in the process of re-installing various programs now). Yay for not having to buy a replacement computer! | | Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | | 5:54 pm |
1 - I'm working up at the college again teaching foreign exchange students. This time, it's 20 Chinese college students and it's 4 days/week, 8am-4pm, 5 weeks. The pay is good and it's pretty fun as far as work goes, although it can be stressful trying to come up with lessons, especially since the first day or two, we didn't have any textbooks. 2 - Ever since Microsoft's announcement that any member of their XNA Creator's Club will be able to sell their XBox 360 games on the system's download service ( http://creators.xna.com/en-us/XboxLIVECommunityGames), I've been working on a game of my own. It's a text-based RPG: kind of a combination between a game book (like the Choose Your Own Adventure series) and a traditional console RPG. It's called Molly the Were-Zompire RPG and progress is going well. I have most of the basic code done: thanks to today, not only do I have a lot of much cleaner written code and a lot of the underlying logic structure done, but I also have a working menu system. It's just about time to start actually coding scenario material; I can hardly wait! I'm planning on selling it for 200 Microsoft Points (so $2.50), but in the meantime, I'm planning on entering the Dream-Build-Play contest. The deadline to submit is September 23rd so I have to hurry. | | Saturday, July 26th, 2008 | | 7:22 pm |
I just won the High School Musical Interactive DVD game. Bleh. | | Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | | 11:27 am |
The whole family's been really sick the past few days. Bleh. It sounds like people are planning on going to Six Flags on Friday in between going to Anime Expo and that sounds good to me. Looking at getting my dates for AX changed to Thursday & Saturday now. My family is going to be out of town from Wednesday morning to Saturday night so if people want to hang out sometime on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, that'd be great. | | Monday, May 26th, 2008 | | 8:49 am |
I heard that a lot of people I know are planning on going to Anime Expo this year so I decided to go as well. I just finished pre-registering. I'll be there on Friday and Saturday. The family is going to be out of town most of that time so it'll just be me. If people are interested, we could get together at my place Friday night (not Saturday night since they'll be back by then) after the con for some gaming and then people could spend the night and we could drive back over to the con the next day. I've got a Wii w/Brawl & enough controllers for 3 players (2 Wii remotes + Gamecube controller), Wii Fit, and a 360 with 2 controllers and some good multiplayer games like Bomberman Live & Heavy Weapon. The 360 & Wii are hooked up in different places (360 up to a nice 19" widescreen monitor, the Wii to an somewhat small TV) so we can get quite a few people playing at one time, even more if people bring extra controllers. | | Monday, April 14th, 2008 | | 4:59 pm |
Let's talk about Shinkai Makoto, shall we? He started out with a cute 5 minute short black & white short called She & Her Cat. It was well received so he made the much more ambitious 30-minute or so long Voices of a Distant Star. It looked good and was very emotional, but what really stood out about Voices was that the animation and script were entirely done by one man and his computer. With the money made from Voices, he was able to fund more elaborate full length anime features: first Place Promised in our Early Days and more recently, Five Centimeters per Second which I just finished watching. All of Shinkai Makoto's films so far have dealt with love separated by distance. Voices did this through a sci-fi angle (one character was traveling through space and not aging, the other was waiting planetside) and did it well. Place Promised in our Early Days also used a sci-fi angle, however I thought the sci-fi aspect was overly complicated and detracted from the movie; the movie looked amazing, but the plot was weak and hard to follow and at 90 minutes, it felt incredibly slow. So how did Five Centimeters per Second do? Very well. Makoto ditched the sci-fi aspect completely this time around and I think the film benefits from it. The film is 60 minutes long and is split up into 3 episodes of varying length that focus on one individual's boyhood (a childhood love), adolescence (a girl who has a crush on him), and adulthood (living in the past). The film is slow-paced, but it doesn't feel slow. The artwork in the movie is simply incredible with the background animation quite possibly being the best background animation in any anime ever. The music is great (aside from the music video segment in part 3) and the dub is solid. In short, Five Centimeters per Second is a more realistic Voices of a Distant Star with a much higher budget. It's not perfect (the first two episodes were fantastic, but the last episode felt rushed), but if you liked Voices, it's highly recommended. It also makes me wish I had a Blu-Ray player; given how good this movie looks on our cheap SDTV, I can only imagine how it must look in high definition. Oh and a word to the wise, don't watch Shinkai Makoto's films if your loved one is a long distance away from you. From one who knows (Shannon, Jade, and Willow are off in Utah this week visiting family while I'm still here in California working & going to classes). | | Saturday, April 28th, 2007 | | 4:13 pm |
So I've been selling a bunch of gaming stuff lately. So far, I've run into two ridiculous situations. One, I take some games to Gamestop to see what they'll offer me. They offer $26 for the 6 games (5 GBA games many of which are respectable RPGs that would be easy to resell plus a full copy of Gitaroo Man for the PS2 which is a moderately hard to find old game). I turn around and put them up on eBay. Even after the shipping & eBay fees are taken care of, I end up making over $70 on the games. I even ended up making a tiny bit of profit on Gitaroo Man (I bought it for $19.xx and sold it for $20.xx whereas Gamestop wanted to offer me $8 for it). Why on earth would anyone sell their games to Gamestop? Second, I try to sell a lot of import games for the Gamecube (Mario DDR, Naruto 4, memory card, and Freeloader). An hour or two later, I get a message from eBay telling me that my lot has been pulled because it's against eBay policy to sell boot disks for bypassing region locking on game consoles. Now this is eBay - the #1 place in the world to order bootleg DVDs, anime, and merchandise. Hypocracy much, anyone? Now, in the end, neither will end up hurting me much (I just put up the Gamecube import lot again minus the Freeloader disk), but I found them amusing in their ridiculousness. | | Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | | 12:37 pm |
It's been 2 weeks since my last post so I figured I ought to update again. The bad: we still haven't gotten notice from the First Presidency. With that being the case, it looks like getting married in February is out. Here's hoping for early March. The good: I was able to take the CBEST test last week. It wasn't quite as easy as the practice test, but it was still pretty easy (think an easier version of the SAT with an essay section added on). Also, I met with the head of the TESOL Master's program at Cal-State & that went very well. She all but told me "Welcome to the Program" and she even gave me a little Chinese ornament on my way out (she minored in Chinese as an undergraduate). Now I just have to actually finish the application process. I received a $20 gift certificate to Best Buy for Christmas. I went there last week and surprisingly enough, I didn't really see anything new that I wanted to get that fell in the $20 category. Their videogame section looked like it had been ransacked; maybe they were renovating it? In any case, I went ahead and picked up the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4. Yeah, I already own the Gamecube version but the PS2 version has some extra stuff like several new chapters. I played through the main game rather quickly doing a "Don't pick up items from regular enemies" run & then had a chance to play the new Ada chapters. My verdict? Not as good as the main game chapters, but still a lot of fun. Took me about 4 hours to finish them all, during which time I was able to try out a new weapon (a crossbow that shoots grenade-calibur explosives), fight a new boss (pre-transformation Sadler) and try out some new areas (most of Chapter 4 & a couple parts of Chapter 5). Yeah, the vast majority of Ada's chapters were just areas from the main game with different enemy configurations, but it was still lots of fun. Oh and the PS2 version also has a Movie Player that lets you check out all of the cutscenes you've seen (unlocked after beating the game). Very spiffy. I've been going through and playing games that my brother owns that I don't. I just finished Disgaea (used to own it, but sold it). Before I never managed to get into the game; I would play for an hour or two and then get bored and frustrated. This time, however, I tried some different tactics - use a small party to make leveling up and buying equipment easier & mostly ignore mage type characters (they have horrendous defense making leveling them up a major pain). With those two changes, I ended up enjoying the game quite a bit - the game's plot is very funny if you enjoy spoofing anime. I haven't decided what game I should steal from my brother next. There's Shadow Hearts 3 which I've played a few hours of - it's decent, but nothing special. I could play another NIS Strategy/RPG since he owns several (including Disgaea 2), but after Disgaea, I think I'm done with NIS Strategy/RPGs for the time being (they're fairly similar from game to game). There's the Gamecube Fire Emblem which I could try. There's also the new DS Castlevania which I believe my brother is finished with. Also Okami (which I played a couple hours into and then switched over to Zelda: Twilight Princess). Alternatively, I could just play one of my own games that I haven't finished - Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 3 is a lot of fun and I'm only on the 3rd chapter. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't enjoying my extended vacation (lots of free time for videogames, internet, and anime plus great food), but I really wish the first presidency notice would come so I could get married, move out, get a job as a substitute, and get on with my life. |
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