Consecutive content!

I'm a very goal driven person. It's not that I dislike freeform, but I always do better when I have a clear, measurable way of monitoring my success. Even in games, I don't often go exploring unless I have a specific goal in mind (i.e. discover all the new places in this section of the map, find the super laser that makes this ten times easier, find the generic hidden items, etc.). For a non-video game example, I decided that having 20 pictures of myself on Facebook after 3 years of college was unacceptable. So I've been on a quest to get to 100 photos before the start of MTSU's school year. And it's gone very well. For those who don't facebook stalk me, you'll see I have a respectable 81 photos tagged of me now (of course, it helps that I have a new, awesome digital camera). However, the point is that I'm disappointed with the English Muffin Power Hour.

Don't get me wrong, I've made some good content updates and it's been much better visited and updated than my first foray into the blogosphere. But I've made less than a dozen posts this year and it's August (Tempus Fugit). So I'm going to write a post every day until I reach last year's total of 42. I can't gaurantee that every update will be a 500 word opus of hilarious insights that you're used to. But done is better than perfect. What's more, I promise that none of the updates will be "Today's update is that I promise to update the blog tomorrow." With that in mind, let's jump into today's update: Tropico.

Holy crap! I'm actually including pictures of what I'm talking about!

I've already talked a little bit about Tropico. It's a game I saw a friend play in 6th grade and then promptly never thought of it until a few weeks ago. I read a headline that said there was a Tropico 3 coming out this fall (it was a very slow news day) and nostalgic memories of the game I saw for maybe 10 minutes came rushing back (did I ever mention I have a very weird memory? I can remember ten minutes of a game from ten years ago but not where I left my allergy medicine.). And then I stumbled on "Tropico Reloaded" on Steam the other day. Before I go on, Steam is a digital distribution store for PC games. Instead of buying a hard copy of a game at a store, you pay for the download off Steam and can usually save a lot of money (because unlike game stores, Steam actually has sales). But I digress. The point is I saw that Tropico, its bland expansion pack, and forgettable sequel were available for a paltry $15. So I decided to try my hand at being a Carribean overlord.

Behold! Hunteria in all its randomly generated glory!

Let's start with what I like about the game. For starters, it has a great character creator. For starters, the game is a civilization/management type game, so any sort of character customization is great. But the real gem is that you get to pick your dictator's background, such as Left-Wing Author (I always knew Al Franken wanted to rule Cuba), General (I am a modern major general), Fortunate Son (It ain't me! It ain't me! I ain't no senator's son!) and several others. And then you pick your rise to power, which ranges from lame democratic process to awesome violent rebellion/military coup. And after that you pick two virtues and two vices for your character. So it takes what's normally a faceless, soulless role and makes it into a very personal one.

Unfortunately, that also leads me to the first major flaw. Every trait you pick influences the stats your dictator has. This game is nothing if not stat crazy. Unfortunately, the stats aren't particularly well-balanced. So rather than design a character that sounds interesting, it's better to design one that can win the game easily.

Back to the positives, Tropico's motto is "You Rule" because of the absurd levels of control the game gives you over your island. You can make it a tourists' paradise, a Marxist wonderland, or a soulless industrial powerhouse. Unfortunately, this absurd level of power is the game's big weakness. It's full tag should read "You Rule... Because The People Will Starve If You Don't Tell Them Exactly What To Do".

The game seems to make place in a bizzarre world of micromanagement where you can only control the least interesting parts of the world. All buildings on the island are government owned and operated, even if you're a capitalist. That means it's up to you to set wages and rent and build houses and businesses. But here's the kicker: you don't control where people work or what they do when they work. This wouldn't be a problem if the AI wasn't made of Liquid Stupid. I suffered far too many economic collapses because dockworkers wouldn't take goods from one end of the pier to another. I later found out that this was because my workers were exhausting themselves moving from their homes to their work. But there's nothing I can do about that. If I build more homes, I can't control who moves in there and I can't do much to make the commute easier (I can build dirt roads for the workers to ignore). And of course, an absurdly huge part of the game is moving goods from where they're grown to where they're manufactured to where they're sold. But of course that requires legions of teamsters whose primary goal is to tick me off by exhausting themselves walking and only carrying one thing in a month of work.

In fairness, the game is good with its realism in regard to fatigue and the average price for workers going up over time. Unfortunately, the goods you sell don't go up at nearly the same rate, so it inevitably leads to a recession. Also, it's impossible to tax the population so you can't get the extra income back.

In summary, Tropico was a cool idea with simply terrible execution.

I'm actually going to write something!

In the past 24 hours, I have updated two different blogs, neither of which are my own. So while I'm on a blogging hot streak, I figure I'll actually stop neglecting good old English Muffin Power Hour.

What I Am Doing Now

Today, I began my internship at WKRN, channel 2 news in Nashville. In fact, I'm at the internship right now. In retrospect, it is perhaps a poor decision to update my blog at work, but I'll let history be the judge of that. So far, it's been very exciting even though I haven't left the newsroom. I already flipped through Murfreesboro police reports trying to find hi-larious hijinks, which included Grand Theft Go-Cart. So far, I've knocked out 4 hours. That means only 225 left to go!

I've also been working on calculus in an effort to make up for avoiding math like the plague. Again, it is perhaps a poor decision to major in Economics when I haven't taken a math class seriously since 10th grade. Funny story, I actually got through Algebra-Trig without any Trig. It was the year I switched from Charlottesville Schools to Murfreesboro Schools. In Charlottesville, they do Algebra first semester and, in Murfreesboro, they do Algebra second semester. And while I was definitely enrolled in AP Stats, I can't honestly say I took it. I was definitely in the classroom but I was in AP Playing-Hearts-with-Doug-and-Sam.

But I digress. The Calculus CLEP is this Friday and I've been hitting the review extra hard. The problem with the AP Calc book is that the review problems are fairly inconsistent in their difficulties as you work through a chapter. For instance, Problem 1 may ask you to integrate the sine of the cosine of X divided by the cosine of the sine of X. Problem 2 would then ask for you to determine the velocity of a laden swallow. Problem 3 would be written in an ancient language so indecipherable that if I were to utter a single word of it, it would cause me to go utterly mad. Then problem 4 asks you to integrate 2X. Well thanks, AP Calc Book, I really needed to review something that unambiguously easy after you just forced me through a gauntlet of mind-rending numbers, the horrors of which I may never recover.

What I've Been Doing
I've been spending a lot of time with 3 PC games I picked up cheap- Company of Heroes, Tropico, and Plants vs. Zombies. Company of Heroes is a World War 2 real-time strategy game that caters to my love of history and blowing the ever-loving crud out of my enemies. I really like the tanks in Company of Heroes. Usually in RTS, tanks are just another unit for your gigantic legion of terror. In Company of Heroes, the tanks are like a T-Rex (like in Saving Private Ryan). They barrel through barbed wire and brick walls like a hot knife through butter and generally make me feel mad with power.

The fact I like Plants vs Zombies should surprise no one. First, I have a well-documented obsession with the zombie apocalypse. Second, the game is made by PopCap, who made the digital cocaine known as Peggle. The only bad thing about Plants vs Zombies is it was supposed to be called Lawn of the Dead, but there were copyright issues with the name. It has simple, but clever gameplay. You set up a garden of plants to shoot zombies as the zombies try to take over your yard. Some plants shoot, some chomp, some stab, some explode. Plus the zombies are hilarious. You fight Thriller zombies, for crying out loud! I don't need to say anything else.

Tropico is a different story. I was first introduced to Tropico in 1999, by my Jewish friend, Tally McBagel Cohen. Tropico lets you be a circa 1950 dictator of a Carribean Island. But that's another blog post.

Now that I'm back in the bloggy groove, hopefully I can keep building momentum and actually get a respectable post count going.

Week's Schedule

Hello, my rapidly dwindling and oft-neglected fan base. You're probably wondering why I went three months without updating my blog. The short answer is I was busy. The long answer is I spent three months kickboxing bears in the brutal Australian outback. The clever reader will note that there are no bears in the Australian outback. However, so intense was my training that they had to import bears to a safe location, far away from other bears, so the entire bear family might be safe. That's how brutal my training was. However, I've decided to outline my next week of topics. That's right, I'm going to be updating my blog daily for the next week! It's my reward to you, my invisible fan base, for not murdering me in my sleep for not updating.

Sunday: Kickboxing Bears in Australia (check!)
Monday: NBA Draft Shenanigans
Tuesday: My Romance and Horrible Break-up with Spore
Wednesday: My Romance and Horrible Break-up with XKCD
Thursday: Greatest Day of the Year
Friday: My Reconciliation with the iPod
Saturday: Manliest Show/Website EVER

Unintended Consequences

Well, if you are like the majority of America, you are afflicted with March Madness right now. Unfortunately, the madness this March has been rather tame. Indeed, it's more like March Eccentricity or possibly March Unusual Behavior. Perhaps a psychologist would more accurately be able to describe the precise nature of March's mental lucidity. But I digress. My point is it's not March Madness without upsets. Otherwise, the tournament becomes incredibly predictable and loses a lot of its charm.

Over the past two years, that is precisely what happened. Last year, in defiance of all conventional wisdom, all four number 1 seeds met in the Final Four. This year, all four number 1 seeds have a good chance of repeating that feat (with all four playing for a spot in the Final Four). And the lowest (or is it highest?) seeded of their opponents this round is a 3 seed. With the exception of a few flukes in the first round, there have been no genuine surprises this year. But what has caused the death of the Cinderella in March?

I believe that it is because of the NBA instituting it's 1 year of college ball policy. According to ESPN Radio, the number one thing college football recruits consider is the recent success of the program. I suspect the thought process for basketball recruits can't be much different. Therefore, with waves of top notch high school players being forced to go into college ball to develop their talents, the beneficiaries would be high profile, successful schools. After all, if your plan is to only stay a short while to hype up your draft status, then you want to play on the best team with the most national recognition. Whereas a few years ago, before the rule, a school like George Mason could make an improbable run to the postseason. Now, it's nothing but the powerhouse university's like UConn and UNC.

The irony is that the 1 year of college ball rule has dramatically improved the quality of draft picks and the entertainment level of college basketball's regular season. But there are always unintended consequences to every decision.

What I've Been Up To

Hello again. It's been a very fast March. Over the past year, I've been incredibly busy filming news stories for my last few Broadcast Journalism courses. Uploading the videos has been a tedious process because I can only upload my videos on a Mac computer, which I only have access to on campus. But today, while working on a project, I decided to upload a few of my stories.

Right now, it's a very incomplete portfolio. I uploaded my first package ever (the technical term for the stories I make), and then two of my favorite packages from this.







Hurray for the internet!

Every time I think I'm out, they drag me back in

Well, it's been a busy and exciting month. Unfortunately, the busyness and excitement continue into this update so I'll have to be brief. As has been previously established by anyone who's spent 15 minutes with me, I am addicted to Rock Band. It provides people who failed 6th grade band (who may or may not be writing this) with the delusion that they actually have musical talent akin to the most successful bands (and Freezepop. Oooooo, I burned them good). And to capitalize on the fact, they've released 3 or more additional songs for the game every week since it came out. This is an ingenious system because, eventually, a song the player likes will come out.

However, there's a crippling problem when it comes to paying for the songs. It's not that the songs are expensive (unless you think $2 is espensive these days), but the fact that they only accept Bizarro Internet Currency or "Microsoft Points". Now, I like to believe I understand how pretend currency works. That's what all those hours bonking alligators on the head at Chuck E. Cheese's was about (convert Dollars into Quarters into Tokens into Tickets into Novelty Glasses with the Giant Nose and Mustache). But "Microsoft Points" is easily the most confusing. To begin with, rather than pick an easy number, the conversion rate of points to dollars 80 to 1. It's inconvenient to realize that 1600 points really costs $20, but you can handle it. But then there's the issue of how's its sold.

Most basic imaginary systems of currency lets you deal in units of 1 and 5, because you can easily reach most numbers that way. But not with Bizarro Internet Currency (BIC). It's sold both at stores and over the internet, for consumer convenience. Logically, one might expect that they'd be sold in similar quanities. After all, it's essentially a gift card. It shouldn't matter where you purchase it and you should be able to control how much you can purchase. But that's not the case. In stores, you can buy either $20 or $50 worth of BIC. It's a little extreme. But you figure there might be some logistics issues with gift cards being sold by a third party vendor that would limit the variety. So, certainly, buying BIC must be a much simpler process online.

Ironically enough, this is the most complex part. See, with $20 and $50 coming in at 1600 and 4000 BIC respectively, you instinctively can tell there's an unusual and inconvenient exchange rate. But online, they intentionally mislead you. They sell BIC in units of 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 points. But that totals to multiples of $6.25. And since the companies who sell their digital goods base their prices off of reality, instead of Microsoft's Insan-o-bux, you almost always have to pay more than what the product sells for. Using the Rock Band example, getting anywhere from one to three songs would require the exact initial cost. And even if you found three songs you wanted, you'd still have a meaningless quarter left on your account that was wasted.

Anyways, the point of those 500 or so words of introduction was I had finally broken free of the system of overpaying and repression. With the latest batch of songs, I had whittled my BIC account down to 10 points. Sure, it's not completely empty, but I'm willing to pay 16 cents extra for all the stuff I got. It finally seemed like I would be free. But then this happened. They actually listened to me! At the worst conceivable time ever, no less.

Oh, the gouging never ends! It goes on, and on, and on and on!