I don't think I like this new layout at all. It's far too dark and boring. There's no life to it and I think it brings down the mood of my blog which is depressing enough as is. I will likely find a new background in the coming days to something a bit brighter, a bit cheerier.
Let's talk about goals.
What are your goals for the next year?
It's not too early to start talking about what needs to be accomplished in 2011 is it? I fully understand that trying to frame achievement and goals in an arbitrary one year time frame isn't a perfect method of thinking. It's hard to avoid putting thing in terms of years because it is such a neat little organized unit. A lot can be done in a year. A lot can be undone in a year. As a whole it would be easier to remember than specific days or months. I had an alright 2009, I had a bad 2010, I had a good 2008. How will 2011 be summarized? That is to be seen.
Goals for 2011? Numerous.
Blog more, obviously.
Write more, obviously.
Trek up the Zambezi River and locate Dr. Livingstone, of course.
Reinvent time travel, naturally.
Travel to 1985 and watch Back to the Future in theaters.
Get a career, possibly in time travel.
And so on in this fashion. I mean it's a long time and you never know...
So what goals or plans do my reader(s?) have for 2011? I'm interested in what others hope to accomplish in this whimsical coming numbered time unit. Is anyone shooting for the moon? Is anyone trying to keep it on the level? Any plans to start from scratch, like me?
All I know for sure is that I'm going to go out of my way to try and make this year a damn sight better than 2010. That shouldn't be hard. I'm going to be getting a headstart on 2011 by greeting it in Sydney, Australia. What a way to get things going, eh?
See you in Sydney!
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Retro Game Reviews: Starflight
Welcome to the newest future-failed feature on YGGOY, Retro Game Wednesday. Every week I will be reviewing a video game from the past. I don't think this will interest everyone, but for me it's a chance to talk about old games. I love to talk about old games. I'll tell a bit about the game, my memories of the game, what it would've been rated when it came out, and my current rating.
You can ignore them if you don't like them. That's fine. I'll still post my (ir)regular posts too.
STARFLIGHT
Sega Genesis 1991
I first rented this game back in the early or mid 90s. At the time there were two systems competing for supremacy, the Genesis and Super Nintendo. There were other systems, the lesser background systems, but for me it was just the Gensis and the SNES. I personally owned a Genesis and my brother had a SNES. So I actually ended up spending a lot of my time playing the more obscure Sega titles. Fortunately there were enough unique games to keep me occupied for hours and hours on end. One such title that I happened upon was Starflight.
StarFlight is a game any fan of either Star Wars or Star Trek would dream of playing. It was a massively open world space simulator. It gives the command of a single ship tasked with figuring out a mystery that is threatening your homeworld of Arth. Hiring crew, buying ship upgrades and getting news and orders are all done from the home planet and then it basically opens up the universe and says "go play". Several other species populate the vast universe and will react differently to the player based on several factors. The game features hundreds of star systems to explore with every planet fully navigable. That's right, you can take your ship down to any planet and disembark your land rover to mine for resources or gather up local wildlife. The planets have different weather and temperature effects that force you to change your approach on each unique planet. It's amazing.
The combat is pretty basic, but surprisingly fun. Combat can basically be avoided against other local species through negotiation. When it does come to fisticuffs the battles are fought on a 2d field in which you fly around and shoot at each other. It's like Asteroids but you have a few different weapons. Not too advanced but it is fast paced and easy to get a handle on.
Starflight also has a basic economic model that allows you to mine for minerals on planets and sell them at bases. This allows you to purchase more fuel and upgrade your ship. It's a basic model but it does encourage exploration as you look for resource rich planets. When playing there are few greater feelings than finding a planet that has a huge resource haul.
I spent hours on this game way back in... well sometime in the 90s. This is one of maybe two or three Genesis cartridges that I actually own to this day. I was drawn in by the vastness of this game, an open world sandbox style game far before that become so popular. In certain ways Starflight was like Uncharted Waters in space which is probably part of the reason I loved this game. Hidden gems were left throughout the universe for the players to discover and trying to locate these were part of what kept me playing so long. There is the hidden Eden planet with huge resources, a planet suspiciously like our own 3rd rock, and various alien homeworlds. Something I personally liked to do was take the "planet bomb" black eggs and destroy an alien homeworld. I made some enemies for life on that one!
Rating - Then
Even though I spent a lot of time on this game I don't think I would have rated it particularly highly. I imagine I'd have been drawn by the lure of the more popular SNES games. Though I put a lot of time in on the Genesis, I wasn't exactly a standard bearer for Sega. I loved this game, but certain factors brought it down a bit. The sound was sparse and what was there was in that terrible Sega tone. The graphics were lacking and I remember not liking them. The gameplay and fun were Starflight's redemption for my younger self.
Score -7
Rating - Now
So it's been a while since the last time I played Starflight. I recognize now that this game was ahead of its time in some ways. I'm sure that console fans would've derided the lack of linearity at the time. I see that it was really a step towards the sandbox style of gaming that is so strong in modern Western gaming. The replay value of the game is something I appreciate. Few games at the time kept me playing like Starflight. I won't jump the score much, but I will admit it's better than I would have believed at the time.
Score - 7.5
So there is my inaugural Retro Game Reviews post. I didn't start it with a big name game or even one that many people knew. I'll hit the big classics at some point, sure. Covering the more unknown games I put a lot of time into is important for me though. So look forward to more of these at some point and I promise to post some more soon.
You can ignore them if you don't like them. That's fine. I'll still post my (ir)regular posts too.
STARFLIGHT
Sega Genesis 1991
I first rented this game back in the early or mid 90s. At the time there were two systems competing for supremacy, the Genesis and Super Nintendo. There were other systems, the lesser background systems, but for me it was just the Gensis and the SNES. I personally owned a Genesis and my brother had a SNES. So I actually ended up spending a lot of my time playing the more obscure Sega titles. Fortunately there were enough unique games to keep me occupied for hours and hours on end. One such title that I happened upon was Starflight.StarFlight is a game any fan of either Star Wars or Star Trek would dream of playing. It was a massively open world space simulator. It gives the command of a single ship tasked with figuring out a mystery that is threatening your homeworld of Arth. Hiring crew, buying ship upgrades and getting news and orders are all done from the home planet and then it basically opens up the universe and says "go play". Several other species populate the vast universe and will react differently to the player based on several factors. The game features hundreds of star systems to explore with every planet fully navigable. That's right, you can take your ship down to any planet and disembark your land rover to mine for resources or gather up local wildlife. The planets have different weather and temperature effects that force you to change your approach on each unique planet. It's amazing.
The combat is pretty basic, but surprisingly fun. Combat can basically be avoided against other local species through negotiation. When it does come to fisticuffs the battles are fought on a 2d field in which you fly around and shoot at each other. It's like Asteroids but you have a few different weapons. Not too advanced but it is fast paced and easy to get a handle on.
Starflight also has a basic economic model that allows you to mine for minerals on planets and sell them at bases. This allows you to purchase more fuel and upgrade your ship. It's a basic model but it does encourage exploration as you look for resource rich planets. When playing there are few greater feelings than finding a planet that has a huge resource haul.
I spent hours on this game way back in... well sometime in the 90s. This is one of maybe two or three Genesis cartridges that I actually own to this day. I was drawn in by the vastness of this game, an open world sandbox style game far before that become so popular. In certain ways Starflight was like Uncharted Waters in space which is probably part of the reason I loved this game. Hidden gems were left throughout the universe for the players to discover and trying to locate these were part of what kept me playing so long. There is the hidden Eden planet with huge resources, a planet suspiciously like our own 3rd rock, and various alien homeworlds. Something I personally liked to do was take the "planet bomb" black eggs and destroy an alien homeworld. I made some enemies for life on that one!
Rating - Then
Even though I spent a lot of time on this game I don't think I would have rated it particularly highly. I imagine I'd have been drawn by the lure of the more popular SNES games. Though I put a lot of time in on the Genesis, I wasn't exactly a standard bearer for Sega. I loved this game, but certain factors brought it down a bit. The sound was sparse and what was there was in that terrible Sega tone. The graphics were lacking and I remember not liking them. The gameplay and fun were Starflight's redemption for my younger self.
Score -7
Rating - Now
So it's been a while since the last time I played Starflight. I recognize now that this game was ahead of its time in some ways. I'm sure that console fans would've derided the lack of linearity at the time. I see that it was really a step towards the sandbox style of gaming that is so strong in modern Western gaming. The replay value of the game is something I appreciate. Few games at the time kept me playing like Starflight. I won't jump the score much, but I will admit it's better than I would have believed at the time.
Score - 7.5
So there is my inaugural Retro Game Reviews post. I didn't start it with a big name game or even one that many people knew. I'll hit the big classics at some point, sure. Covering the more unknown games I put a lot of time into is important for me though. So look forward to more of these at some point and I promise to post some more soon.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Ashes Goes Viral aka My Girlfriend the Aussie Hit!
The last couple of days have been absolutely insane, probably moreso for The Ashes than myself, after a small mixup on Twitter led to a degree of stardom for my girlfriend. It began as a bit of a misunderstanding and sort of blew up in a two day period. Allow me to summarize this story that has left me with my mouth agape and both of us in shock and giddiness.
As you may know from reading this blog I call my girlfriend Ashes or The Ashes. I started this at the beginning of our relationship nearly 4 years ago. She embraced this name and started using it as an online handle in various places, including her now defunct blog Just The Ashes. Most notably, however, she used it as her Twitter handle. Specifically she was TheAshes which meant that you could communicate with her by using @theashes. Any good member of the Commonwealth should now know why this could be an issue. Being Americans we of course were utterly clueless what she had done. So years passed on Twitter with her using that name until just last week.
This previous week was the first "test" of the 2010 Ashes cricket series, also known as The Ashes. Apparently this is a very, very big deal in England and Australia. These days Twitter has become very popular and rivals only Facebook in social media networking, and is more often used by professionals and celebrities. Livetweeting has also become a common part of any major event. Cricket fans would want to Tweet about this big event they love so much. Oh now this is where it gets very fun.
People started tweeting about the first test in Adelaide and while they should have been using #theashes to talk about the test many people used @theashes instead. On top of that there were plenty of folks thinking @theashes was the official account of The Ashes (cricket) this led to dozens to hundreds of people pestering my GF for the score. On top of that was Jonathon Agnew (famous?) incorrectly saying to tweet @theashes in order to talk about the game. And oh my god what a shitstorm started!
I don't even remember the alerts but I wouldn't because it wasn't my phone, but my GF was being woken up in the middle of the night to folks tweeting at her about The Ashes (cricket). She begged them to stop and eventually shouted at them "I am not a freaking cricket match!" which absolutely lit up Twitter users following The Ashes (cricket). People suddenly became very interested in The Ashes (person) and her ordeal in having to deal with hundreds of cricket fans. Within two hours of posting her quote from above she went absolutely viral, Australian and English fans eating the story up. Over night her followers jumped 3500, and over the next day she was up to 8600. At this point she's at 11000 and likely to go higher as the second test is about to start up.
When this first broke out she was getting mentions at over 100 every 20 minutes. Ashes, her aunt and I were sitting upstairs in the living room following this whole event in absolute hysterics. We couldn't believe how quickly her story was spreading over Twitter. Amazingly it started moving on from there thanks to word of mouth. She was a trending topic in Australia that night, both theashes and her quote. It didn't just stop at that as people started to contact her more and more. Offers for interviews with news stations, cricket shows and papers started pouring in! The first day after this all happened was so overwhelming we were mostly unable to do anything, but she kept tweeting and handled all this sudden attention like a pro. Her story started appearing all over the internet, from the NYT website to BBC to the India Times. It even featured in the news feed that comes with my browser.
She quickly embraced her new found fan and started playing along with the whole thing. She and I found a sudden and genuine interest in cricket. We both like learning and as complete neophytes at cricket we start at ground level. We have been studying our asses off trying to figure the game out. We had nothing to gauge this new info against and it was all so foreign! We'll have plenty of time to figure it out and a pretty damn good opportunity as we're actually getting flown out to The Ashes (cricket)! More on that in a bit.
So the second day she actually had some interviews scheduled. Channel Nine Australia sent a news crew out to our house! They set up a news studio in the living room and she did an interview for their Today Show. At the same time a local station from Boston showed up and did a story. She also managed a Skype interview with the BBC and a phone interview with CNN International. There were a few other radio shows that she did interviews for as well. It was all very, very overwhelming. Yet the people were drawn to her and her genuineness (duh, that's why I love her a-holes) and her good humor so she continues to be in the good graces of the fans following her story. She had more interviews the next day, with a camera crew from Springfield stopping by and a few more phone interviews. She has an interview scheduled with Jonathon Agnew (Aggers?) which is apparently a very big deal. As Americans we wouldn't know, but the Aussies and English seem to be going nuts over this and feel she is getting a huge opportunity.
It's all pretty amazing for one week, isn't it?
I've been staying in the background for most of this since it really isn't about me, but I've been helping her as much as I can. I'm trying to pick up cricket right alongside her. Plus when she flies over I get to go with her which is awesome. This is a once in a lifetime story and we are both just going along with it. She's so into this but realizes that it is a huge bit of fun with the opportunity to maybe do a bit of good too. She's really handling it like a champ and has got into the spirit of the whole thing. The Twitter users are mostly very nice and have really eaten up this story. We're both managing to get a lot of laughs.
Expect this story to take over my blog for a while as I keep updating what is happening and go into deeper details about other aspects. There is some stuff I can't talk about yet but let me just say the excitement is just starting for my Ashes, the viral cricket star.
As you may know from reading this blog I call my girlfriend Ashes or The Ashes. I started this at the beginning of our relationship nearly 4 years ago. She embraced this name and started using it as an online handle in various places, including her now defunct blog Just The Ashes. Most notably, however, she used it as her Twitter handle. Specifically she was TheAshes which meant that you could communicate with her by using @theashes. Any good member of the Commonwealth should now know why this could be an issue. Being Americans we of course were utterly clueless what she had done. So years passed on Twitter with her using that name until just last week.
This previous week was the first "test" of the 2010 Ashes cricket series, also known as The Ashes. Apparently this is a very, very big deal in England and Australia. These days Twitter has become very popular and rivals only Facebook in social media networking, and is more often used by professionals and celebrities. Livetweeting has also become a common part of any major event. Cricket fans would want to Tweet about this big event they love so much. Oh now this is where it gets very fun.
People started tweeting about the first test in Adelaide and while they should have been using #theashes to talk about the test many people used @theashes instead. On top of that there were plenty of folks thinking @theashes was the official account of The Ashes (cricket) this led to dozens to hundreds of people pestering my GF for the score. On top of that was Jonathon Agnew (famous?) incorrectly saying to tweet @theashes in order to talk about the game. And oh my god what a shitstorm started!
I don't even remember the alerts but I wouldn't because it wasn't my phone, but my GF was being woken up in the middle of the night to folks tweeting at her about The Ashes (cricket). She begged them to stop and eventually shouted at them "I am not a freaking cricket match!" which absolutely lit up Twitter users following The Ashes (cricket). People suddenly became very interested in The Ashes (person) and her ordeal in having to deal with hundreds of cricket fans. Within two hours of posting her quote from above she went absolutely viral, Australian and English fans eating the story up. Over night her followers jumped 3500, and over the next day she was up to 8600. At this point she's at 11000 and likely to go higher as the second test is about to start up.
When this first broke out she was getting mentions at over 100 every 20 minutes. Ashes, her aunt and I were sitting upstairs in the living room following this whole event in absolute hysterics. We couldn't believe how quickly her story was spreading over Twitter. Amazingly it started moving on from there thanks to word of mouth. She was a trending topic in Australia that night, both theashes and her quote. It didn't just stop at that as people started to contact her more and more. Offers for interviews with news stations, cricket shows and papers started pouring in! The first day after this all happened was so overwhelming we were mostly unable to do anything, but she kept tweeting and handled all this sudden attention like a pro. Her story started appearing all over the internet, from the NYT website to BBC to the India Times. It even featured in the news feed that comes with my browser.
She quickly embraced her new found fan and started playing along with the whole thing. She and I found a sudden and genuine interest in cricket. We both like learning and as complete neophytes at cricket we start at ground level. We have been studying our asses off trying to figure the game out. We had nothing to gauge this new info against and it was all so foreign! We'll have plenty of time to figure it out and a pretty damn good opportunity as we're actually getting flown out to The Ashes (cricket)! More on that in a bit.
So the second day she actually had some interviews scheduled. Channel Nine Australia sent a news crew out to our house! They set up a news studio in the living room and she did an interview for their Today Show. At the same time a local station from Boston showed up and did a story. She also managed a Skype interview with the BBC and a phone interview with CNN International. There were a few other radio shows that she did interviews for as well. It was all very, very overwhelming. Yet the people were drawn to her and her genuineness (duh, that's why I love her a-holes) and her good humor so she continues to be in the good graces of the fans following her story. She had more interviews the next day, with a camera crew from Springfield stopping by and a few more phone interviews. She has an interview scheduled with Jonathon Agnew (Aggers?) which is apparently a very big deal. As Americans we wouldn't know, but the Aussies and English seem to be going nuts over this and feel she is getting a huge opportunity.
It's all pretty amazing for one week, isn't it?
I've been staying in the background for most of this since it really isn't about me, but I've been helping her as much as I can. I'm trying to pick up cricket right alongside her. Plus when she flies over I get to go with her which is awesome. This is a once in a lifetime story and we are both just going along with it. She's so into this but realizes that it is a huge bit of fun with the opportunity to maybe do a bit of good too. She's really handling it like a champ and has got into the spirit of the whole thing. The Twitter users are mostly very nice and have really eaten up this story. We're both managing to get a lot of laughs.
Expect this story to take over my blog for a while as I keep updating what is happening and go into deeper details about other aspects. There is some stuff I can't talk about yet but let me just say the excitement is just starting for my Ashes, the viral cricket star.
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