i hit a nice little achievement of 365 day streak with DuoLingo 🎉

it’s a really fun language learning app. they have it “gamified” nicely with achievements, leaderboards, experience points, unlockable bonuses, and streaks. it has been a nice replacement for me from playing C&C Rivals, hearthstone, or summoners war.

i started with learning Chinese and got through two tiers before things got really hard with dates and so i started mixing in Spanish lessons which are waaaay easier (both from being more similar to English and also having had lots of Spanish in grade and high school).

i’ve been playing a lot of C&C Rivals on the iPad. it’s the best RTS for iPad yet! they did an amazing job adapting RTS to small screens and touch input.

the unit cap is only six so you don’t have to worry about selecting and managing a lot of units at once and the whole map fits on the screen so there’s no fiddling around with scrolling. this all keeps things very focused on strategies with which units you bring into the match and which six units you have built at any given time. it’s great! there’s a lot of depth to the micro and unit counters so you’re always busy rotating units around to give them the best match ups. also instead of just taking out an enemy base you can take control over launch pads to charge them up and send a missile at the enemy base. this does a nice job spreading the focus around the map between bases, harvesters, and missile pads.

making progress on an important life goal! :)

last thanksgiving i got my nephews addicted to Bitcoin Billionaire but it seems they've gotten me back now by getting me hooked on Summoners War. these free to play mobile games are dangerous!

it takes hundreds of hours of hard to work to achieve something special and get that nice shot of dopamine from your nervous system rewarding you for a job well done... or you could play one of these games for like 30 minutes. why spend ten years leveling up your coding or drawing or composing skills when you could get to be a wicked cool level 35 5-star awakened fire monster in just a few weeks (or like right away if you throw down some cash)??

lots of people have asked me "hey blackpawn, why did you get xbox one instead of PS4, are you stupid?" so, i though it'd explain my reasons here. :)

it's good to support local businesses in your community and i live near Redmond, WA which is home to Microsoft. they employ lots of my friends and neighbors and sponsor some of the radio shows i listen to and other stuff so i want to see them do well. they've made a lot of blunders but i'm voting with my dollars for them to continue supporting games.

recently i've been playing a lot of halo wars on the 360. it's easily my favorite console rts to date - oh and before you explode screaming about how rts games should only be played with keyboards and mice let me just say console rts games have their place in this world too okay?! :)

so anyhow unlike with most rts games i actually played all the way through the single player campaign of the game. it was pretty short having just 15 levels taking something like 15-30 minutes a piece and joined together with some really nice pre-rendered cinematics. the story might have been a bit forgetable because i've forgotten it but i don't have much of a memory for that stuff anyway. :) the campaign did do a decent job of preparing me for the competitive multiplayer which is the party i care most about in rts games.

well the supreme commander beta ended this weekend and now i have to wait until the end of the month to play again.  i don't know if i can make it.... yeah i got pretty addicted.  :) 

there are so many great new things supcom introduces to rts games.  i really like seeing the rate of change of resources.  it definitely changes the way you think about your economy.  i love how good the action queuing is.  it's great to queue up 10 minutes of work for some engineers and go off and micro some battles letting your base build itself up without so much attention.  having units assist each other and even buildings assist each other is great.  being able to zoom so far out works really well for coordinating large armies and ordering around fast moving planes.  the sci-fi setting is awesome and the tech 3 buildings and experimental units are a blast. 

i finally got a 360 to play dead rising and it was totally worth it. i haven't enjoyed a console game this much since resident evil code veronica on the dreamcast.

here are some tips: always grab the katana and submachine gun on your way through the paradise plaza, mix orange juice and pie for untouchable drinks, mix milk and milk for a drink that makes you run really fast, get the criminology book in the store with the japanese tourists so the katana will last three times as long, and keep the people you're rescuing alive by giving them orange juice and weapons.  i beat the game but only got ending c which is weird because i did in fact talk to isabella at 10.  oh well, i'll try beating it again because it's so fun.

ok e3 this year was awesome.  the biggest thing at the show was nintendo's wii, but the lines to see it every day were crazy so i didn't bother.  i did wait in line to see spore
though and that was totally worth it.  will wright didn't show too much
more than he had previously at gdc, but it was really cool to watch him
go through the latest version of the creature editor and the different
game modes.  man, i can't wait for that game!  i had also been really looking forward to seeing c&c 3, but all ea showed was like a 10 second video clip.  oh well.  as for other stuff, aion was sweet, tabula rasa is looking very nice, crysis is amazing, quake wars looks purchase-worthy, flight sim x is solid, hellgate london is quite fun and the ps3 does in fact look like a george foreman grill.

my copy of shadow of the colossus finally arrived!  this is such a great game.  my only gripe is that it's for the playstation.  it would look so much better on xbox or pc.  oh well, maybe there will be a sequel on ps3

a couple weeks ago i got a pro-gaming mouse pad. i needed a decent mouse pad so i figured i'd get something elite. this thing is no joke. it has seriously boosted my micro in warcraft 3. good luck trying to take me out when my fiends are burrowing and unburrowing like mad and my heroes are using skills and potions with perfect timing.

after months of letting my world of warcraft box gather dust, i finally installed it. it's a very pretty game, but i'm having a hard time getting into it. i got into lineage 2 for awhile, but that was mostly because i got an adena boost from ige which helped me skip a lot of grind. at one point while playing world of warcraft i was so excited to get an "aspect of monkey" skill that killing the same spiders over and over didn't seem so bad. then i was totally betrayed when i got it and instead of turning me into a monkey like i'd hoped it just increased my chances of evading attack. **yawn**

looks like world or warcraft uses the same mpq format as warcraft 3. this is cool because it means my war3 explorer works with wow! to use it you still need war3 installed but then open war3 explorer and click file|open and point it at an mpq from wow.

the best game of all time until six months ago or so was starcraft. it was finally replaced by warcraft 3 with the help of many, many patches. the only thing that warcraft 3 needs some improvement in is the ladder. the level for players is either completely meaningless or the matchmaking system in completely worthless. for example, 90% of the games i play the teams are something like this: levels 19, 5, 4, vs levels 30, 27, 21. i'm the 19 and i either have total newbs playing with me and we get owned, or the level 4 and 5 dudes are actually really high level on another account and we slaughter. mostly they're newbs.