While summer vacation doesn’t really have any meaning for me, living life after school, seeing all those new graduates entering society this past week has inspired me to do more stuff in the coming months.

Work Harder, Play Harder

That pretty much sums up the plan. The idea is to simply keep better track of where my time is going so that I can do more of the things that I want to do.

Like what, you ask?

As a few of you know, I’ve been building an XNA Community Game for a while now. I’m thinking that I’ll need to start spreading the word on it soon, but as it currently has no graphics (just placeholder “art”) or sound, I’m not really sure how to go about it. I don’t even have a name for it yet. I call it SWD, at the moment.

In game teaser fashion, I can tell you that it’s a shooter ala Gradius, sprinkled with modern gaming spices, so look for that when it gets closer to release.

I have more plans for myself too, but I don’t want to overpromise. If things work out though, you should be seeing “Trioptical” a lot more. The name at least. The person is, hopefully, going to be really busy.

An aside:

The graduation ceremony format needs an upgrade.

I’m sure that in some time in the past, classes were a lot smaller than they are today, so when the school paraded its graduating seniors across the stage, handing out diplomas and shaking hands, there was a true sense of ceremony, as it were.

Of course, what works for a dozen students, doesn’t necessarily work for a thousand. When a thousand students need to walk up and get their degrees, it seems to me that it diminishes the occasion, turns it into an assembly line type deal.

I’m not really sure what the solution is. On the one hand, you don’t want it all to be a matter of getting everyone out on time. On the other hand, they paid thousands of dollars to get through school, at least they should get to shake your hand on stage in front of their family and friends. I dunno.

It was grueling and took a long two hours, but after killing approximately 2000 undead Nazi, our team finally made it to Round 24 in Nazi Zombies on the new Verruckt map that came with Map Pack 1 for Call of Duty: World at War. It’s quite an achievement for us. It means we’ve matched our record on the original Nazi Zombie’s map, a feat that also matched the development team’s, that made Nazi Zombies, record before the game was released to the public.

Sadly, there’s a lot of glitching going on in Nazi Zombies. So much so that the leaderboards are pretty much a joke. Hitting Round 24 got us into the top 8000 spots, but I can’t help but wonder where we’d be at if the top thousand players, at least, hadn’t cheated to get their 1000 Rounds Survived placements. I’m also curious to see what the actual highest number of rounds survived is. I’m sure it would give countless numbers of players something to shoot for, seeing what’s actually doable and trying to top it.

What I don’t understand is where’s the fun in cheating your way to Round 2100? The rounds get really long and you have to kill hundred upon thousands of undead, which should take the better part of a day or more. If you could do it for real, sure, it’d be extremely exciting, but glitching takes all the risk out of it. You just stand there and shoot. What’s the point of that?  At least in Dead Rising, you got an awesome weapon after killing 50,000 some odd zombies. I was bored as hell doing that, but at least there was a reward at the end. You don’t even get EXP in Nazi Zombies.

I understand the appeal of getting to the top of a leaderboard, but imagining what the number one must have gone through to get there, the lonely, extremely dull experience, was it worth it?

Maybe we should start our own leaderboard. What’s the highest you’ve gotten?

What sucks is that often it’s difficult to tell whether the news is a prank or not, and that’s not how the news should be.

Guess I’ll just catch up on old news today then.