It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an review! It's an article!
Well...not quite. It's a review from my school's student paper of Empire: Total War. Give it a read here.
All in all, Empire is an amazing game. The theaters of war are huge, the battles are epic... if you're a strategy gamer, this is your Holy Grail.
Still, a few bugs have popped up since I reviewed the game a week ago. Nothing major, just some strange lag towards the end-game. Also, gamers on Nvidia drivers have been reporting problems, although I've been fine. Supposedly they'll be fixed in the next patch. They're also going to up the AI (which is already stellar) and balance a bit of the gameplay.
Still, no matter, the game is amazing. The best I've played this year for sure. If the bugs worry you, wait until the patch goes live.
If I'm planning on running a company, a web site is a near necessity. Especially if I'm trying to run a small business, having a website would make it much easier to compete with larger companies trying to make the perfect pillow. And where do you get a web site? By registering a domain name through a company like the infamous GoDaddy.
So I did some research. I wanted to see if "www.catchsomezees.com" was available, but alas, it had already been taken by some enterprising entrepreneur. However, "catchzees.com" was available. And for the low low price of $6.45 a month!
This week's lecture explained that a domain name is just an alias for an IP address, and that there's no difference between a .com and a .net or .org. However, for name recognition, everyone seems to prefer a .com over another option.
So when i went looking for a domain name to start my comany's web site, a .com was exactly what I was looking for. CatchZees.com will be the go-to destination for all your cooling pillow needs!
...
(on a somewhat related note, you'd think that GoDaddy would do a better job of Photoshopping their spokesmodel...seriously, I could do a better job)
Ah yes. This week was databases. And I learned that there is one more application I need to learn. This time? Access.
To be perfectly honest, this past week's lab was the first time I had ever used Access, or even heard of it. I was aware of different OS's like Unix which could be used to access an e-mail server or online server, but never Access.
I was surprised by how fluid it was. As a small business owner, having both Access and Excel would make it incredibly easy to retrieve data from a database and then present it in a usable form. This means I could easily store credit card information, mailing addresses, phones numbers, etc. and be able to pull any of that information up whenever I needed it.
I never understood Excel. Word, I got. Powerpoint, I had down pat. Even Outlook I had pretty well. But never, once, had I ever been able to understand Excel.
I know what a detriment this would be to any kind of career I would choose. I know I need to learn just how to use this program, especially if I want to be able to excel (no pun intended) in my place of work.
For my pillow company, the uses are easy to see: planning and using figures and numbers to make useful data tables and flowcharts and graphs.
But even beyond this fictional *GASP* company, I need to know how to operate Excel. What this week's lecture and lab taught me is that Excel can be an incredibly useful tool...far more useful than I had originally thought. I always saw my father using Excel to fill up spreadsheets with financial data and cold immovable facts. Now I see that Excel can be much more fluid. Perhaps used to display a budget, or organize facts in a way that makes it easy to read and understand.
Whatever the application of Excel, I know now more than ever that I need to have Excel under my belt...and the sooner the better.
Unix might be able to help me make queries in a larger database that Windows or Mac OS wouldn't be able to handle. This would be helpful if my pillow selling business expands beyond just a small business.
As my company might grow, the database from which I would need to operate from would only grow larger. Eventually, it would be beneficial to learn a programming language for something like Unix or SQL, so that I might be able to run database queries in another OS should the need arise.
It's funny. At the beginning of the year it seemed like everyone was predicting the New York Rangers to be Cup contenders, and at the very worst, a lock for a playoff spot. Then the Rangers jumped to the top of the standing with a brilliant run of games and it looked like they may be making a run at the Cup. Could another 1994 be in store for Rangers fans?
Then, the team started to even out. Their domination slowly, painfully, slipped away. Over the course of the season, the holes in the Rangers lineup became clearer and clearer. The Ranger's fall from grace had begun.
Now, with about 20 games left, the Rangers sit only 2 point ahead of 9th place and barely holding onto a playoff spot. They have 10 losses in their last 12 games. Gomez, Drury, and Redden, the players the Rangers signed to monster contracts, have all but disappeared and it's the third liners that are holding the team afloat. The "King" has lost his throne.
Some might say that Renney should have gotten more out of his players. After all, their contracts had the Rangers up against the cap. Aren't your most expensive players supposed to be your best. That Drury and Gomez and the rest had all but vanished was blamed on Renney.
And to be fair, Renney's easy-going approach did not help the Rangers as they slowly crashed back to Earth. But the true enemy of the Rangers is the man at the top:
General manager, Glen Sather.
Sather put this team together. Like Ranger's GMs of old, Sather took full advantage of the cash cow that is New York Rangers hockey. When the free agency rolled around last year, Sather threw everything at the best available, and hit the jackpot.
But there was a problem that few noticed. These monster contracts were far above what these players were worth.
It was Sather who paid second line players what first line superstars would be paid. And no matter who the coach was, it's clear that these players may never end up living up to their contracts.
It was Sather who let Jagr, their best player, their leader and point producer, walk away to Russia.
It's Sather who foolishly thinks the key to their success was a "sloppy second" named Sean Avery. Avery is now toiling away in Hartford, just waiting for that opportunity when the Rangers will be desperate enough to let him back into a league that by all means wants him gone.
It was Sather who loaded this team up with huge contracts so that the Rangers now have no space to move.
It was Sather who above all else, threw so called superstars together and hoped it all would fit.
So of course Renney is somewhat to blame. And he was all but crucified by Rangers fans who shouted for his head.
But I sincerely hope that once Torts hits the same roadblock, and these Rangers sink deeper and deeper those harsh eyes of the fans will look farther up the ladder.
Because as long as Sather is GM, the Rangers will never contend.
A much belated review, delayed because of possible publication. Now with that cleared up, here in it's original format, as the director wanted it, un-cut and un-edited: Fallout 3
Many video games promise an open ended experience where you can go anywhere and do anything. But no game has delivered more on that promise than last year’s post-apocalyptic adventure game Fallout 3.
You play as a character born into an underground Vault designed to withstand a nuclear apocalypse that was sealed off 200 years ago when the bombs dropped. Everything is great until your father leaves the Vault when you are 19 and you begin your journey out of the Vault and into the ruins of Washington D.C. to find him.
Fallout 3 is unique in its variety. Most of the characters with the exception of a few are expendable, so ignoring or accidentally maiming a quest-giver won’t make the game impossible to finish. Instead, you’re offered a set of choices, some more outside the box than others, and no matter what you chose, there is a clear consequence for the rest of the game and how the other characters treat you.
For example, upon leaving the Vault you may bump into Megaton, a grungy village built around an undetonated nuclear bomb. Do you disable the explosives and save the town? Do you leave the bomb alone? Do you go the evil route and blow the entire town to smithereens? Choices like this one come and go throughout the game, ensuring that no two people will have the exact same game experience.
The sheer size of the game makes no two play-throughs alike. The Capital Wastes you travel through are huge and there are many side-quests available. Thankfully a method of “fast-traveling” between places you’ve already discovered makes long trips across the nuclear wasteland a breeze.
And what a wasteland it is. No doubt about it, Fallout 3 is one of the best looking games to come out in 2008. When you first step out of the Vault, there’s a brief moment as your “eyes” have to adjust to the sunlight. As everything comes into focus, you’re treated to an apocalyptic world that is both terrible and strangely beautiful. Houses are blown out from the explosions and bits of garbage and debris are scattered around the D.C. wastes for miles; food and ammo are hard to find.
Even rarer are human beings. Much of Fallout 3 is spent wandering and scavenging the burned out homes and buildings for supplies. Medicine and weapons you find among the ruins will help you fight for survival against residual radiation and the world’s mutated creatures.
When you do eventually find another human settlement, you’ll more often than not find a trader who will buy the useless junk you may have collected in your travels, like plungers and old books, bent tin cans and broken lawn gnomes.
For your battles in the wasteland, Fallout 3 uses an interesting new combat system. While the game can be played as a simple shooter, another mode called “V.A.T.S.” pauses the action and lets players choose individual body parts to target. With each body part is a percentage of how likely a successful shot will be. Once the player cues up a list of moves, the game shows a cinematic view of the carnage that ensues.
Watching a zombie’s arm get blown off or seeing your bullet fly across the screen with perfect accuracy is a treat to watch every time, and V.A.T.S. puts Fallout 3’s combat a step above the rest.
Impressive as it may be, Fallout 3 suffers from a bunch of issues that keep it from being truly great. The optional third-person perspective looks a bit tacked-on and the character animations are disappointing.
The game is also littered with bugs. Companions can get stuck or be just plain useless at times. You may be fired on by enemies out of your sight that the game hasn’t rendered yet. And most frustratingly, the game crashed or froze at random intervals during my play through.
However, many of the problems have been fixed by a modding tool released for the PC version of the game. This tool lets aspiring programmers design new content which can be then uploaded into the full game. Even though the tool has only been out for a few months, many mods already exist, from ones that improve and refine game features to ones that add new levels, weapons or even new storylines.
While the main game runs about 30 hours at minimum, Fallout 3 will also receive three additional content packs to be sold exclusively for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game. The first content pack, Operation Anchorage, has already been released, and future packs later in the year will expand the nuclear wastes even more. So check your radiation levels, charge up your laser gun, and get exploring.
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