Not reading reviews anymore, Change in my beliefs...

If you read my previous blogs, it's just about reading reviews... review this, review that, and so on...
It seemed like a good idea in the beginning (read reviews instead of playing them, conserve time), but as the time went by it became more & more stupid. Why? It was really time consuming, and no matter how I changed my plans it would take a lot of time to read a hell lot of game reviews. It was so time-consuming that it got in the way of actually playing games, let alone learning to design them...

Well, NO MORE! I just realized that it's been six months since I last played a game, and told myself: "hey! how much is this actually going to take???" and decided to overhaul my schedule.

That overhaul means that I will read at most 14 reviews per week. one in the morning, one in the afternoon. It doesn't matter that I won't be able to read all the reviews this way: they're not all that important. I've written a program fo myself, and I'll follow this program for the time being...

Changes in my beliefs:
(Red text represents further information, and you can skip it)

So what do you do when you want to reach a destinations?

Basic Belief: You move towards it, and you'll eventually get there.

My Belief: That's just too simplistic. Just when exactly is "eventually"? and what guarantees that you'll get there in the end?
I'm a logical guy (and a programmer), so when I want to get somewhere, I carefully plan my approach to it, I make a plan, and then follow it. I'll use facts (ie: the place you want to reach is 4 meters away), and logic (to make it there in 4 seconds, you have to move at a speed of 4 m/s) to create my plan.
I used to put a lot of thought into my plans, and then carefully follow them, I thought it's the best way to reach your destination, since it's based on facts & logic. (both of them are absolute, so you'll get an a plan that's "absolutely" the best)

However, I have to correct myself. Having a plan is absolutely better than not having one, But this approach is not efficient enough for me. So I have to modify it, in two ways.

01-Prioritize: This comes in handy when your plan is made up of different elements. In order to make the plan efficient, instead of following the plan instructions one by one, you'll have to choose which part of the plan plays a more major role in getting to your destination, and spend more time & attention on it.

Example: You want to go to a mall in a snowy day, the best logical plan is to wear something warm, get a car, use geometry to find the fastest route, and then move in the said route. This plan is made of three different elements. 1-warm clothing, 2-a car, 3-moving towards the mall. If you start following this plan, you need to put on some warm clothing. Now if somehow you couldn't find something warm enough, you wouldn't be able to follow your plan, and it will be useless. That's the same if you find out that your car doesn't start. That's when prioritizing comes into the picture: Your goal is reaching the mall, so moving towards it has the highest priority. Now while moving towards it, you'll want to stay healthy, so warm clothing comes next, and after that you'll want to save time so the car comes last. "Priority: reaching your goal> staying healthy > saving time". So if you really want to go to the mall, the most important thing you have to do is moving towards it so it has the highest priority. The next is keeping warm, so you'll look for warm clothing, and wear it "if you found it". If you didn't, you have to go outside without wearing something warm, since moving has a higher priority. The same goes to the car: you use it if you can, and if you can't you just walk there. Because this example plan was so simple (made of 3 elements), you can unconsciously plan something without putting much thought to it. However if your plans get more & more complex (a plan that's made of 50 elements), prioritizing plays a major role in it...

02-Feedback: By "Feedback" I mean "use a streaming input to continuously correct your output."
You use feed back in your everyday life: use this experiment to understand what I mean: put an object on a table, stay 1 meters away, and look where the object is. Now close your eyes and try to grab it. You'll most likely fail, and hit somewhere near the object, instead of grabbing it the way you intended.
So what does this mean? You know where the object is, so you create a plan for grabbing it. (stretch you arm about 1 meter, then put it down) You then execute your plan, but because your arms and brain have some faults, you are not able to execute your plan the way you intended to.
However when you normally want to grab something, you stretch your arm, your eyes see your hand, and give the input to the brain. your brain analyzes the picture and if you're moving your arm in the wrong direction, it will reconsider your arm's approach and send the new signals to your arm. This happens continuously, so you reform your plan continuously before you reach the object.
(You see the placement of your hands and the object, you create a route, move your hand in the direction you want for a very little bit, then you use the new picture captured by your eyes to create another route and move your hand in the new route for another little bit, when these actions are strung together, it seems like your hands are moving straight towards the object.

In this case, output is your plan, and input is your surrounding's events. so you constantly reform your plan based on current conditions. (Example: you're going to mall, you see that there's heavy traffic on your desired route, you change your plan and decide to go there from another route)

My Current Belief: So what do I do if my "destination" is "game designer"? I create a plan. I prioritize the important elements (it's designing mods for now), and I use the info I get from internet using reviews, news, game sales and popularity, and other info, as a feedback to continuously correct my plan's faults.

This approach certainly has it's faults, as I'm just a normal human and humans make a lot of mistakes. However I'll use this approach until I find a better one...

Picture of the day:
E74 has infected my X360, again

My problem with game reviews!

Okay, I skipped a week not blogging. It was because I was testing my anime watching program and it works awsome... It's just a program which tells you how many episodes of a particular anime you should watch based on date, but it has 3 major pros:
1- It makes sure that I won't run out of anime (for at least 4 years)
2- It makes sure that I have something new to do every 5 hours, so I will never get bored!
3- It makes sure that I won't spend a whole week just watching anime and not doing anything else (which happenned for Naruto & One Piece)

My plan to read "Game Reviews"

I wanted to become a game developer, so I figured playing lots of games might help me to have plenty of ideas, but I didn't have time to play all the games! So I decided to read game reviews instead of playing them to save time. However that proved to be impossible: The amount of games released each week is far more than I can handle!

I originally thought each review would take me 10 to 15 minutes to read (which it should) but instead, It usually takes me about an hour to read each review! This was because when I'm reading a review I also do three more things:
1- I Imagine the game in my mind.
2- I Think about the good aspects of each game and try to grasp the way they were created (what was the designer thinking when putting this particular feature into this game?)
3- I Try to find ways to improve the bad aspects of each game (what would I do to avoid the game's problems?)
Doing these were essential, because if I were not to do these, the whole "Read other game's reviews to improve yourself" idea would become nonsense.

After I relized that I can't read all the reviews of the games that are released,I decided to only read the reviews of the games that had an score more than 85% (gamerankings & gamespot).
I followed that plan for some time, but that plan had a major downside: I've originally planned to force myself to read the reviews of games with a score over 85, and then read other reviews however I liked. That turned into a "read more than 85s and let the rest pile up over each other" program, and It would stop me from reading reviews with scores below 85. I couldn't do that, because after all those reviews that I read, I relized that many awsome games get scores between 65 to 85 because of stuff I don't count as a game's downside, like "They're difficult for newcomers", "They're difficult to control", or "they have graphical glitches" (which will be fixed when you install the game's patches). On the other hand there were game that would get scores more than 90 that didn't deserve anything more than 75 or 80 (they get scores because they were "popular")

This made me take another approach: I would read all the game's reviews with scores more than 80, and I would read the rest compared to the amount of reviews I've read for the games with scores more than 80 (Example: for every 5 reviews with scores more than 80, I would force myself to read 3 reviews for games with scores over 75).
I followed that program for some weeks, but that program is also taking too much time.

Now, that anime program i wrote in c++ for myself, gave me an idea: I would write a program that would make sure i would read all kinds of reviews in a week, but would also make sure that I have time to do other stuff:
I know that it takes 1 hour for me to read each review, so I plan to read about 10 reviews a week. The program will ask how many new reviews I've downloaded this week, the total amount of reviews that I have stored on my computer, and today's date. Then the program will calculate how many new reviews I have to read, it would also devide these 10 reviews in different intervasl (how many revs more than 80? how many between 75 and 80 and so on...).
This program has 3 pros:
1- It makes sure that I efficiently choose what reviews to read
2- It would stay the same whether the week was crowded with games or it had 3 to 4 new games (like this week)
3- It makes sure that I have time to do other stuff while reading game reviews.

The program would probably be done in two weeks (I can't spend time on it this week, since I have other stuff ta do). I hope it helps me to make time for other things i want to do.

Reading reviews is important, but playing them is even more important, and designing them is way, way more important, for becoming a game developer.

That's all I have to say for now...
HAVE FUN!

Picture of the day:
Just read Psyren chapter 1

Dreamcast!!! YEAH!!!

Well, I didn't blog for two weeks (or more?).
It was probably because I had no time or that I didn't have access to internet.
Anyway I want to make this short so here it goes:
I got sick, I got better and went to a trip, then I found a good deal on a dreamcast and bought it (YEAH, finally. Wanted one for more than ... 10 years!). Then I found a hell lot of anime and bought them all. found a site to download manga from. Created a very dense anime watching, manga reading weekly program, then wrote a c++ program to tell me what anime and manga I am able to see\read. Then went to internet, got new games (fortunetely they were few due to holidays) and now I'm back on my stupid program. (Which becomes more stupid each time I fail to finally complete it. I haven't played video games for 5 months! That does it, I'm gonna finish this thing no matter what in approx 1 month.)
Needless to say, I also did a hell lot of other stuff in this time, but I don't feel like blogging about it right now.
Stay Safe &
HAVE FUN!

Picture of the day:
I got a Dreamcast!

YEAH, I bought a wii!!!

K, I didn't do anything that I said I would, and it was due to 2 events, one cheerful, one awful.

Reason #1: I got a Wii!

Even though I've been a gamer for almost all my life, I never had anything Nintendo. I bought NDS at it's launch some years ago only to play GBA games, but I never really used it and later gave it to brother (Well, Actually sold it to my brother). Besides that, Wii is my first Nintendo Console. I had several reasons to buy it:

1: Five Resident Evil Games:
I'm a huge RE fan, so These REs were one of the major reasons for me to buy the console. It has:
1-a high quality, bonus content filled, motion control aiming & stabbing, and reloading Resident Evil 4.
2-a redesigned Resident Evil 1, originally released for GameCube and later ported to Wii.
3-a re-released Resident Evil 0, with the plot line set before the events in RE1.
4-a rail-shooter that chronicles the plots in RE universe: "The Umbrella Chronicles".
5-another rail-shooter that reuses the locals in RE2 and Code Veronica: "The Darkside Chronicles".

2: GameCube Games:
I never had GameCube, So I couldn't play it's exclusive games. Now I can play Wind Waker, Metroid 1&2, GC Mario games and much more thanks to Wii's GC compatibility.

3: Exclusive Wii Games:
Wii games are good too, and among those that I personally like, I should mention Twilight Princess, Metroid 3 and Mario Galaxy.

4: It's relatively Cheap:
PS3 is way better, but also way more expensive. I can't afford a "3" at this time. Maybe later.

5: Motion Control:
Yeah, It's fun. But It's kinda ironic that it's the last reason for me to buy a console which was based on motion control in the first place.

So I went to a store and bought these:
Wii (couldn't you tell?)
Extra Controller and Nun-chuck
Wii motion plus (I don't have any games to play with it yet, but I might get PGA10)
Wii Zapper (to play rail-shooting REs & other games)
Component cables (To get the most graphics outa my wii)
GC Contoller & Memory Card

After I got home I installed the motion-capture sensor on our HDTV and started playing Wii Sports (bundled on wii) with my brother and later with some my relatives who were staying at our house at that time.
Tennis was the most enjoyable mini-game and Golf was also fine. playing Boxing for 5 minutes left me with numb arms for the rest of the day, I couldn't aim the bowling ball no matter what, and Baseball was simply the worst: Instead of waving you Wii remote like an actual bat, it would be better to make simple quick tiny wiggle (impossible to do with actual baseball bat) to score a home run.
To summarize it all: Wii Sports is a fun game, specially if you're with some friends.

Other games I played were Resident Evil (I was shocked when I saw how improved it was over the PS1 RE, a true "Redesign"), RE4 (difficult to grasp, but after you get the controls you'll realize that motion-control aiming is superior to Analog sticks (specially since the PC RE4 (which I played before) didn't use mouse for aiming)), and Wind Waker (to test GC compatibility, I'm not gonna play it for now)

Reason #2: I got sick!

Yeah, and it's the worst kinda sickness. I couldn't walk for a whole day, and I lost another day just watching movies and anime because I couldn't do anything else. But I'll make it up (hopefully) this week. Also I hope I'll be fine by the end of the week, however it might take more...

SEE YA NEXT WEEK!!!!!!!

Picture of the Day:
I got it.

Okay, another week past by (again)

Well, I don't have much to say for this week. For some reason it passed so fast that I couldn't even feel it. I didn't read much reviews and now I also have to read this week's reviews but it'll all be done in a flash.
I've got no real plans for this week, So I guess I'll just read the reviews (again) and then if I had more time, I'll do the naruto thing (I was going to do it on Thursday, but something happened and I couldn't.)
I lost 2 days this week (Thursday and Friday (and also Saturday, which is today)), but I'm not really behind schedule right now.
Anyway see you next week.

Picture of the day
Nintendo has put it's stretching skills into use to release yet another console in a seemingly endless line.