Monthly Archives: February 2007

So I’m finally ABD. Now all I have to do is write up the prospectus, get it approved, write the dis, graduate, get a job, and then get tenure! Easy street here I come!!! …or not…

In other news, I’m following through on my promise to switch over to wordpress. I got it installed, but I want to customize the theme first and then figure out how to redirect the front page to the wordpress blog.

Then people won’t get error messages when they try to leave comments and I won’t have to approve them by hand! Easy street here I come!!! …or not…

According to Red Herring, Google has agreed to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million. Adscape is an in game advertising company (according to their website they do “Real advertising in the virtual world”). Combine this with Microsoft buying their own gaming ad firm and it seems like there’s a good chance that we are going to be seeing a whole lot of ads in videogames for the near future.

Of course the fact that I said the “near future” is no accident. While there may not be much consol gamers can do to block ads in games, PC gamers certainly will figure out how to do it. You can already block ads on your browser so why would ads in your games be any different? While the near future may suck for gaming, I see this as little more than the popup and banner ad boom of 90s. If they can crack the copy protection on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I’m sure they can figure out how to block ads in my games.

Today was a horrible sleety windy cold day. As I was walking out of the horrible weather into the library I noticed that there was some computer and activities type thing day and I noticed that the IU Gaming Club was set up in a room. I went into the side of the library with the computers, found an empty one, sat my stuff down and went back out to check it out. It turns out they had a Wii set up. So I got to play Wii Sports including tennis, bowling and golf. Over all, ti was pretty cool.

Funny enough, the sports thing brought up an issue I hadn’t thought about before. I’m left handed and while I play some sports left handed, I also play some, like golf and bowling, right handed. Switching back and forth from sports is kind of a pain. So I had to think about whether I really wanted to play with the hand I would play the real sport with or would I just play them them all left handed? I’ve never had to stop and think about which hand to use when I played the Atari 2600! Damn kids these days! I tell you what!

Been busy lately. No posts lately. Submitted proposal to Association of Internet Researchers conference. It is in Vancouver so I hope to get in and make my triumphant return to Vancouver.

I’m trying to get my paper edited for DiGRA 2007 in Japan. I’m not sure if I can afford to go, but if I get in I’m sure going to try. It is right after the Tokyo Game Show too, so I really really want to go. SO click on some ads and click on my Amazon ads before you buy anything from Amazon (I think I’ll still get some money even if you don’t buy the product that is being advertized, just as long as you click through the link.

I just got done playing Project: Snowblind. It started off as a more action-based Deus Ex spin-off, but when Deus Ex 2 didn’t do so well they changed the name. There’s still the augments and stuff, but honestly, they are pretty pointless. I got through the entire game and barely used them. The best part about the game is that all the cut scenes are skipable and skip them I did. I got it cheap, and that’s about what it was worth.

Since I modded my xbox I’ve also been doing some retro gaming. Either I stink, or Super Mario Bros. 3 is incredibly hard. Thank goodness for cheats. Without cheats and the emulator allowing me to save wherever I want I would never have been able to beat that stupid game.

While I often hit up gamefaqs.com for help, this is the first time I’ve really ever used cheats extensively. I never really saw the point of it before, but now I do. Without cheating I would have been so much more frustrated and probably would have quit the game a long time before I got anywhere near the end of the game. mmmmm cheeeaatttssssss.