July 2005

7/30/05 I'm taking a break. I work on the site every day and only when it begins to build up on me do I realize that it's harmful. Making a website can suck some of the fun out of the games you play when you're trying to write walkthroughts/reviews etc. It just gets tiring. I'm not even going to play any PC games for the next few days for this reason. Most people work 5 days and get 2 off each weak. I usually work 7 days doing this stuff. It's time for a little vacation. The self-imposed deadline of september 22nd is easily reached at this point and I'm ready to relax a bit. I've been enjoying watching Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network Monday-Thursday at 10:30pm EST and it's reminded me that there are some great new dragonball muds out there. The original one I played, dragonball saga had its codebase released to the public and many inspired coders have taken it upon themselves to improve it. I'm playing one of those muds and I'm going to write a short essay on why I enjoy mudding soon. It's nothing like the homework I usually impose on myself. I chose to create a namek an I've had a lot of fun my first night. I got him to nearly 300k powerlevel. I want to make a newbie guide for the mud but unless I get some veteran player support it will take me a long time as I'll have to learn everything myself.

7/29/05 I wrote a warcraft 3 review finally. It took a while to get around to it with all the walkthroughs I've been writing. I need to work on several others as well. This puts the site at 93 pages. Seven to go! Oh boy

7/28/05 I uploaded a Starcraft Terran walkthrough. I'm working on the next campaign/walkthrough which is the zerg. Starcraft is very challenging compared to other RTS games I've played. These two pages put the site at 92 pages. Eight more to go for my goal to be met. Nothing special is going to happen when I reach it except maybe a six pack and another game to start work on.

7/23/05 Finally I beat Warcraft 3 and I enjoyed it a lot. The Night Elf Walkthrough is completed! The final mission is really tough and is probably the most enjoyable mission of the game. I only wish you could play it as all the different races. I wonder if someone has made such a custom mission? If it exists let me know. I'd love to play it. I'll write a review soon. I have about 30 good screenshots but I'm going to choose only four for the review. I'll pick the best one from each race's campaign.

7/22/05 I want to take a moment to tell about something other than pc games. If you get a lot of cardio exercise and are trying to gain muscle/lose fat like me you may have trouble with your normal scales. They can be so inaccurate. I had to go a week without playing tennis and gained 3 pounds. It was worrisome but I'm pretty sure it was water weight because I hadn't been sweating so hard. Also, I'm positive I've made some nice muscle gains. I'm going to recommend buying body fat scales for those of you who have this similar problem. They can fairly accurately tell you your body fat percentage so you can be confident that you're having success on your quest for better health.

7/20/05 The Warcraft 3 Orc Walkthrough is now complete. I'm loving the story to this game and highly recommend it if you like strategy games. For now you can buy the warcraft 3 battle chest from my shop section if you're interested in the game. I'll add links to buy only reign of chaos and the frozen throne when I do my review.

7/16/05 I started the Orc walkthrough and got the first 2 missions done. I guess i want the walkthrough to get indexed as soon as possible. At any rate the preliminary Warcraft 3 Orc Walkthrough has been published. I'll continue work for the next few days. I have a strong desire to get this completed because screenshots from each campaign are going to adorn my future review. Which is going to be a favorable one. Warcraft 3 doesn't have any of the annoying naval battles I dislike in other RTS games. Still, Red Alert 2 will reign as my favorite. I guess that just says how good it is. I must also say that before my computer couldn't handle Warcraft 3 too well. Even now I keep the graphics turned down just a little to ensure super smooth gameplay but the graphics aren't bad at all at that level. Another thing I want to mention is directed at other webmasters. If you're looking for a free way to count your visitors and the methods they used to get to your site I must highly recommend statcounter. They offer an invisible tracker that is completely ad-free. Join them and put the code on all your pages and you won't regret it! The level of detail is awesome and no, I don't profit a bit from this. They just rock that much. An additional tidbit - I removed the news from may and june and placed them in the site archive. Now the site has 87 pages (with the orc walkthrough incomplete). But yes, this counts. As archive pages should. They are original content. Otherwise blogs shouldn't count for crap either.

7/15/05 I finished up the Undead Walkthrough for Warcraft 3. I'm glad to see this campaign was harder than the human one. At that, I'm looking forward to the Orc campaign but I'm a little tired of writing so this one may take a couple more days.

7/13/05 I'm having a lot of fun with Warcraft 3. I wrote a human walkthrough as I played. I loved it and I'm definitely going to finish up the other three races. Now it's time to begin the undead campaign.

7/8/05 I finished up all the dialog for the Fallout 2: Wasteland Merc Mod 2. I did a pretty good job I think and some of the quests are extremely original. The originality I had to put into it was WHY the NPC (non player character) wanted this item. Haris and Miran gave me a list of items and rewards you get for that item. I had to make reasons the character would want those items. I had a good time and I somehow managed to finish in one day. It was a big project though I just wanted to get it over with and return to site maintenance. Some of the team members sort of ducked out on me and I had to do three times as much as I had originally planned. The mod is going to be available within a couple months I'm sure, and we are going to begin testing it soon as a team. We'll make sure it's finished before it's released. And I think people are going to have some serious fun with this one. I'm going to release some news as we test it so I can give you the best hands on experiences as I can. I can't possibly relay to you at this time how much work Haris and Miran have put into it. Their new experience in scripting will be a very interesting show and, with original art and weapons conceived by other members of the team, we're in for a hell of a treat. The original Wasteland Merc Mod is gonna be blown away.

7/6/05 I was thinking of moving the tips I had in my "review" of Fallout 2 to their own page when I discovered that the review is total crap. I had hehes and lolz and IMHOS and :Ps littering it. I edited it a lot and added the score.. I can't believe I didn't even put the score. It was my first review however so I won't be too hard on myself. I moved the tips and added to them putting the site at 81 pages. So, Fallout 2 Tips and the Revised Fallout 2 Review are now up. The Master of Orion 3 thing is going to take way longer than I thought. It's now moved to a side project. That game is so huge and complex it's hard to make a good tips page. Like I've said before it's a game of a lot of trial and error before you can master it. But it's so fun doing so.

7/4/05 Happy Independence Day America. We're also only four days away from the release of Fantastic Four here in the states. I'm pretty damn excited and I suspect a lot of others out there are. A good place to find trailers for movies is trailerdownload.net. I liked the internet exclusive trailer available there. Go check it out. Enjoy some fireworks and a good barbecue but don't forget what the holiday means folks.

7/3/05 I've really never worked harder I realize. I get criticism for my 'work' being playing games but there really is some pressure. I want to get this article out, this review indexed by the search engines, this tips page viewable by the people who might use it. It takes hours and these hours are spent by me currently for very very little profit. I'll now publish my first financial statement ever. From my sales at Amazon.com this quarter I made a total of $25. This isn't too bad. My first quarter was all family member purchases ($40) which I cannot really count. Noone bought a pity product from me this quarter. But, with my site sandboxed by google and just now getting indexed by MSN Search I'm expecting a very slow quarter this time. It will be good when I manage to make over $100 a quarter for the first time as I will purchase a webhosting package and begin serving game patches and mod downloads! This couldn't be too far off but like many aspects of my site I'm looking forward to standing out above the complete bs sites that dominate the internet right now. Sometimes I have a hell of a time finding a game patch. My goal: provide a patch for every game I have a review for. With my current 250k file size limit at atspace this is impossible but they provide some really kickass hosting for completely free.

7/2/05 I'm working on a Master of Orion 3 tips page. I want it to be useful to anyone who cares but other than ship design and things like that there isn't a whole lot I can do to help you. Master of Orion 3 is very fun to me and I want to be helpful but really it's a 'learning experience' game because there are so many options on how you can govern your empire. When my site was very new I emailed Quicksilver and got a response from their president. That makes me think that at some point in the future (more visitors each day to make it worth their time) I am going to strive to conduct interviews with important people in the gaming world about new products. This will set me above your cookie cutter gaming site. It might take a while to build up such a reputation but it's very high on my list of goals. My current goal is to achieve 100 site pages by the time summer is over here in the United States. I have a couple months remaining and I figure I can pump out a page every three days - if I don't, I'll fall short but I won't be too suprised if this isn't the case.

7/1/05 Finished off the Soviet walkthrough. Finally. Fortunately once I started each mission I remembered how I had written it before and managed to finish them off pretty quickly. Now I'm stuck deciding if I want to play Starcraft or Master of Orion 3 next. Moo3 can't really have a walkthrough but I think some tips would be useful to some people. It's sort of a hard game to learn as the manual's not all that great.