Spooky's House of Jump Scares

While browsing Steam for new games this Saturday my sister and I found a game called "Spooky's House of Jump Scares" in the free to play section. We thought it was interesting, so we decided to try it out. When the game begins, you are greeted by Spooky the ghost who challenges you to make it through 1000 rooms of her mansion. At first the atmosphere is rather cute, but as it goes on it becomes more and more cryptic. Then you start running for your life to avoid the real threats.

A very fun game, but it is still in early access and is therefore incomplete. There are some bugs in the game and it has crashed on me and my sister's laptops multiple times. However my sister's laptop seems to have more bugs as the audio cackles a lot and it often crashes on startup, both problems my laptop never had running this game. These instability problems kind of ruin the game for my sis, but we both still like it. The crash that has happened to me the most often is when I am playing the stabbing minigame, where it will randomly crash if I play it for too long. Hopefully these errors will be fixed.

More CS:GO, and F Zero GX

Well it took me a while but I think I'm finally starting to get better at CS:GO. I've been playing more with my friend who introduced me to the game and he has helped me to improve. He taught me the importance of shooting from cover and not peeking. While defending catwalk I got two spectacular kills in a row, both headshots, with the MP9. Then a third guy with an AWP came out and ended my rampage, but me and my friend were so amazed by those kills, bur now I feel like I'm bragging about it.

That same day My friend brought over his copy of F Zero GX. We are both big fans of F Zero, so we were excited to try it. It is probably the most unforgiving racing game of all time, and not just because of hard the game is, but also because of the ridiculously broken physics. Especially in the fourth course of the Ruby cup, where you can fly off the course and die if you go too fast, and when my friend tried it he fell through the floor and died. It was the most sudden, confusing death ever. F Zero GX is still a really fun game regardless, just for the speed. Maybe next time we try we'll be able to  actually finish the first Grand Prix on easy difficulty.

Oh Boy

Remember when I said I'd do a post about the Super Smash Brothers balance patch? That's going to have to wait, cause something unfortunate happened at school today. During period 4 at around 1:05 today there was a secure and hold at school, which means we couldn't leave class. Well turns out one student stabbed another and the police got involved. The student who got stabbed was stabbed was taken to the hospital and is OK, thank goodness. The student that did it was found by the cops and got arrested. After 40 minutes the secure and hold ended and the resource hallway where it happened was blocked off. Just my luck it happened in the hall that had my locker in it. So that hall was blocked and I couldn't go in to get my things. As usual I went to the library to do my computers course, and since everyone who had a class period 5 in the resource hall had to go to the library and it was all super crowded. When it came time to go home, the police were still in the hall cleaning things up but the teachers let me in because I needed to get my keys from my locker. I arrived at home and realized I forgot my mom's camera at school in all the confusion, but she's just happy I'm home safe. 

I really don't know any more about the incident other than what was already mentioned. I don't know any of the people who were involved or how it happened. I hope everything turns out OK.

Today

Today I had a test in my online programming course. I was told in the online information about this video that this would be the first test where we couldn't use our notes, so I spent my entire lunch period and most of my time last night studying for it. So I went to class to write the test, and my teacher tells me I could use my notes. The information said I couldn't because it was old and outdated. I thought that was kind of funny really.

Can't wait to get my hands on Mewtwo.

Also today was the day the update for Super Smash Bros was released. This update gave us Mewtwo, new cosmetics for the Mii fighters. The big new thing though was this update focused on balancing the characters in the game. While I can't confirm any changes myself, a lot of characters were affected. When I get more accurate info on what's different in this update maybe I'll make a post about it.

The Weather

It's starting to get warm outside, which means winter is over. It's so good to have a nice, warm temperature after all that cold. The sun is out, and I can finally enjoy the fresh air of a warm breeze. Only thing that is weird is how it seemed to go straight from winter to summer, with no spring in between the two. I love the summer, but it just seems to have started so suddenly. It seems a little weird to me.

It was also very windy yesterday, and I do mean it was windy. It was so windy that when I saw two hats that were blown off of heads. It rained a bit yesterday, and that cooled things down a bit at least. If the weather is like this in April, just imagine what it will be like when July comes around. Things sure are heating up this summer.

Paying for Youtube

Recently, YouTube has announced that they will be starting a monthly subscription service that will give consumers exclusive, ad-free content. The premium service may cost $10 a month according to many sources. Creators won't be able to continue showing content unless they sign up for this subscription offering. If they don't sign up, all there videos will be set to private. One other feature that will be added is the ability to store videos offline on their mobile devices any time they want to.

As you would expect many YouTube users don't want to pay for something that used to be free. Not only that, but we already have YouTube to mp4 converters and adblock, so many think that this whole movement will just cause people to not use the paid YouTube service at all. The main reason this change is being made is because of Netflix's success proving that users would be willing to pay, yet the main appeal that YouTube had was the fact that it's free. This change will have a huge affect on YouTube, and it's just something I thought more people should be aware of. What do you think about these changes?

Nintendo Direct Today

Today starting at 6 PM EST Nintendo streamed a direct on twitch that revealed a lot of news on upcoming Nintendo releases and other news. The first and probably most exciting news is that Lucas was announced as a DLC character in Super Smash Brothers for 3DS and Wii U. In the fourth installment, Lucas was cut from the roster which disappointed many fans. So as you can imagine, fans were very pleased by this news. Along with Lucas, who is planned to be released this June, an already announced DLC character Mewtwo will be available to download on April 28th. That's not all though, there will be an online fighter ballot held for fans to request even more DLC characters into a game that already has a gigantic roster of 53 fighters. I don't think my inner geek can survive any more of this excitement.

More information the direct covered was in regards to different upcoming Nintendo games such as Yoshi's Woolly World, Splatoon, a new Fire Emblem game and a lot of other things that I don't remember too well. The most important part of the direct for me was at the very beginning, so the rest I wasn't paying as much attention to. It was a great direct overall.

Easter Weekend

With Easter coming up, I'll have Friday and the weekend off. I've got some plans on how I'll spend my three day weekend. On Friday, my family and I will travel to Mississauga to visit uncle Mike and my cousins, Christopher and Christina. We'll be staying to eat dinner with them as a family. They have a new puppy that we will see in person for the first time too, which will be fun. I look forward to seeing my cousins weekend.

On Easter Sunday we will have an Easter egg hunt at my nona's house and have a big dinner with the whole family. That's what we usually do on Easter Sunday every year. My cousins will be there too, so it won't be too boring being at my nona's house all afternoon long. We'll probably play computer games together or just hang out. It'll be a nice weekend to take a break from school.

Jelly Jump

This is the Jelly Jump I'm referring
to. I'm aware there's at least one other
game out there with the same name

While I'm not usually that into mobile games, I've taken great interest in a game called  "Jelly Jump" made by ketchapp. Jelly Jump is an endless jumper about helping jellies to avoid drowning in a rising liquid by tapping the screen to jump up to closing platforms. Along the way you can collect little blobs of jelly which can be used to create new jellies once you acquire 20 of these blobs. Each jelly has varying shapes which range from a basic cube to more complex shapes such as a little jelly turtle. The platforms above you close at different speeds, so you need to adjust your timing and jump at just the right moment so that you'll land on it just as it closes. You can't be too early or late or else you will drown in the black liquid.

The game is a lot more fun than I thought it would be when i saw it in the app store.This is because it's simple yet challenging gameplay makes Jelly Jump fun and addicting to play.  You unlock new jellies at just the right pace that it keeps the game interesting. The changing colours of the background and jelly whith each replay helps the game not get boring to look at over time as well. And on top of all that, it's free! What more could you want? I might even go far enough to say that Jelly Jump is one of my favourite mobile games.

CS:GO

Recently I've been playing Counter Strike : Global Offensive with my time, a game my friend introduced to me. CS:GO is a team-based game about the terrorists fighting the counter-terrorists. While it doesn't require the same technical skill as some of the earliest counter strike games it is still very fun to play, even though I'm not that good at it. The two kinds of servers available to play on are casual and competitive. Casual mode is simpler and is merely two teams duking it out for a few rounds. Competitive mode is different because each team can only have five players and almost all of the competitive servers run on the bomb defusal map Dust 2. In bomb defusal the terrorist's goal is to either place and guard a bomb untill it detonates or eliminating all the CTs, while the CTs have to either defuse the bomb or kill every terrorist. The teammates communicate using in-game chat to work together and win the game.

March Break

After today, there will only be two days left until March Break begins! I can't wait for March Break because after the tough last two weeks I had a break will be very good for me. Unfortunately, I have homework over the break for my photography class, but it's a project that I could probably complete over the course of a single day so it isn't too bad. Besides that, I have the whole break to relax and enjoy myself as mush as I want. Best of all, I can finally sleep in! Hooray!

When the break begins I plan to get together with my friend Daniel to celebrate his birthday on Friday. It won't be anything too different from a typical get together. We plan on playing video games together, like Goldeneye and Super Smash Brothers. We will also play the Disney Infinity game in which we can continue to create our large, hazard-filled obstacle course that leads to an island high up in the sky. Another thing we might do is have a Nerf war, but that probably depends on how mush room there is. March Break is going to be a blast!

Laser Tag

A picture from the website of the St. George location.

Last weekend me, my sister, and two of our friends went to laser mania to play two games of laser-tag. Laser-tag is about 3 teams (or 2 depending on how many people there are) who aim to shoot the enemies in the glowing parts of their vests, while avoiding being shot yourself. Each team has a "base" on the lower level that can be destroyed for major points. My friend Daniel acted as a squad leader of sorts, we moved as a group and worked together. It was overall a very enjoyable experience, although I do have some complaints.

The first issue is every team starts from the same place, so there's nothing stopping players from shooting each other before the round really begins. In the second game the red team won, and I'm almost positive it was because lots of people on that team were doing it. The biggest problem though is how hot it is in the battleground, and considering how much you're moving around you can easily tire yourself out. To make matters worse, you also have that bulky vest which adds to the problem. When it was over and arrived at home, I was so exhausted that I took a long nap. Though I'm not really complaining about that, because I really needed a rest that day.

Dirty Harry

Recently I've been watching old Dirty Harry movies, and they are very entertaining. Dirty Harry is a tough cop who always ends up doing all the dirty jobs. He plays by his own rules when dealing with criminals, and kicks butt. The villain in the first movie is Scorpio, a murderer who kidnaps a 14-year-old girl and holds her hostage and demands his ransom be paid immediately.  Harry has to deliver the money to him, but the madman gets away and the girl dies. Harry has the guy caught, but the courts won't send him to jail because the evidence was obtained illegally, because Harry didn't have time to get a search warrant. When this madman goes free, he goes right back to being evil by taking kids on a bus hostage. Harry takes matters into his own hands to take this guy down.

"Do you feel lucky? Well? Do ya punk?"

I enjoy these movies because they are so action-packed and fun to watch. The bad guy is so evil you just can't wait for him to get whats coming to him. It has all the enjoyable qualities of 70's cop shows, which I happen to be a fan of. Yes it certainly is a good series to watch, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys 70's cop movies. Dirty Harry is a film that does not disappoint.

FNaF 3 released!

Not too long ago the full game for Five Nights at Freddy's 3 was released on Steam. I was very hyped for this game and now that it's here I must say that it did not disappoint. Even though there's only one actual animatronic in the game, the game is still as challenging as ever. To keep the animatronic from reaching your office and killing you, play audio sounds in other rooms to lure it away from you. You also need to keep him from entering through the vents, so you'll have to seal them in order to prevent him from entering.

The teaser image for the game.

The challenge this time around is once the animatronic is near you there is nothing you can do to stop him, unlike the first two games where you could close the door and hide behind a Freddy mask. To add to the challenge, the system can have errors that keep you from succeeding. The first type of error being audio errors which prevent you from hearing, and then there's video errors which prevent the cameras from working properly. The third and the most annoying error is the ventilation errors, which cause you to have hallucinations of Foxy and Balloon Boy, who were both animatronics from the previous titles. To fix the errors, you must take some time to do a system restart. The most interesting thing about this franchise is the story, which is very interesting yet because of how little detail the games put towards that story there is a lot of room for speculation, trying to find out the secrets to the mysteries of the murders that happened many years before in Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. FNaF is really about solving the mystery.

Saints Row 4

Well I've mentioned this game in my previous two posts, but now I'm going to focus on this game as I have finally been able to play it properly. Saints Row 4 is an open world action-adventure game. You play as the President of the United States (former gang leader) and you fight against aliens who invade the planet. The aliens capture you, and put you in a simulated world that is intended to be a prison for you. However, with hacks and bugs in the program you can have superpowers and attempt to escape.

The game play is rather fun, as I find it very easy to aim and shoot in this game. The driving mechanics are also nice, driving and handling feels so smooth. Another cool thing is how in-depth the character customization is.There are lots of options that allow you to create pretty much anyone. You can also customize most vehicles, but getting a lot of changes done to a car can cost a lot of money. Something that's more fun than the main story is just simply causing mayhem and fighting off the aliens. After all what can be more satisfying?

Laptop's Better!

My reaction when it worked.

Good news! I got some aerosol last night and cleaned up my laptop, and I fixed it! I'm so glad my laptop is back to normal, and I don't have to deal with those thermal shutdowns anymore. What's great is I didn't even have to open the bottom, I just blew the compressed air into the fan on the bottom and I got out enough of the dust to get my laptop working like normal. My laptop's performance is much better now, and I can finally play Saints Row 4 without any problems.

However, now that I got the laptop clean I need to make sure it doesn't get dirty again. I'll have to do monthly cleanings to keep this problem from happening again. There's more I have to do to keep it clean, for instance, I need to keep the environment around my laptop clean so dust can't enter the laptop. The fact that I didn't do this before seems to be the main reason the problem got so bad to begin with. Therefore, cleaning my desk is something I've got to take care of as well. A general cleanup of my room will probably be the first order of business over the upcoming March break.

Dusty Laptop

Yesterday my Windows 8 laptop hasn't been able to run certain games on it properly. Every now and then it would have a thermal shutdown during the game, which as you can probably imagine was quite annoying. No matter how much I would try to adjust my laptop's settings to prevent this from occurring, it still happens regardless. I was getting frustrated and I needed a solution.

Dust in a laptop

I looked into the problem, and found out what was causing the problem. This was being caused by dust that has been building up inside of my laptop. In order to fix it, first I must open up my computer and then I'll have to air it out with a can of compressed air. I'll need to make sure I blow all of the dust out of my laptop as instructed by and online service manual. The sooner I get this dust out the better, because then I can finally play my new Steam game Saints Row IV without any more pesky interruptions. That will be a time of celebration.

Difficulties

Things haven't been going too good for me lately. Namely school is giving me some troubles because I have to worry about selecting my courses for next year. On top of that, I've got some work I need to really get done but it seems like so much. I've got a chemistry quiz tomorrow, an assignment to work on for computers, and now a project for photography. These aren't that big of a deal, but all this cold weather is making things difficult for me.

I can't begin to tell you how much I'm disliking this year's winter, and cold weather in general. I've been really sick for about a week and a half, and on top of that I'm having horrid headaches. To make matters worse, I usually have to walk home since neither my mom or my dad can pick me up at that time. Even though the distance from my high school to my home is only a few blocks, having to step over the tall snowbanks and putting up with all that cold and the sometimes unforgivable wind makes it so much of a pain. I wish winter would just stop right this second, but that's not how nature works. One things for sure, I'm going to have a wonderful dream of a warm sunny beach tonight.

Paradise here I come.

Sonic Robo Blast 2

Gameplay from Greenflower Zone, the first stage.

There are some interesting fan-made Sonic games out there, but Sonic Robo Blast 2 is probably one of my new favorites. SRB2 was created using a modified version of the Doom Legacy port of Doom. It's gameplay gives the feel of the Sega Genisis Sonic titles while having 3D gameplay. You can play as eaither Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles and stop Eggman from being bad.

The controls in this game are a little awkward the to

"Nights Mode" AKA the special stage

get used to using, even after multiple tries, but I don't mind that. I enjoy this game for the feel of the old games that I mentioned before. The thing that really made me like this game a lot was the special stages. What I like about them is how the special stages use the engine from a Sega Saturn game called Nights into Dreams, which is a game I liked very much when I was younger. Upon playing a special stage for the first time, and immediately recognizing the Nights engine, it literally made my day. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is probably one of my favorite fan-made Sonic games, and I've played a lot so that's really saying something.

FNaF 3

I'm sure you've heard of Five Nights at Freddy's, the horror game in which animatronics try to kill you. Well, a while ago a trailer for Five Nights at Freddy's 3 was released, and it caused a lot of speculation. The trailer for the game can be seen here. The trailer has caused a lot of the fans to start making theories.

Some theories are about the new animatronic, some are about game mechanics and some discuss the release date, among other things. All of these theories that make the game mysterious is why I find the FNaF series interesting.

Unturned 3.0

The Map editor in action

I'd like to say more about Unturned and how it is starting to improve. There is a new 3.6.4.0 update that is currently in beta testing that will add new content, features, and bug fixes. The game has lots of new content, with two brand new maps that are both significantly bigger than the old maps, PEI and Arena. There will now be a map editor, which allows you to make custom maps. There are more character customization options, and characters can have specialties, which can make them better at a specific task.

One thing that I am very happy to see added is VAC support to servers to prevent hacking. Hackers were one of the biggest problems Unturned had, because if someone cheats it isn't fun for anyone else now is it? I encountered hackers quite often while playing Unturned. I once led a horde of zombies to other players so the zombies would kill them for me because I was unarmed. When the zombies started attacking them, they must have hacked and blacked out the server for everyone on it. Now that cheaters are no longer an issue, Unturned will be a much better game.

The new character customization screen

Unturned

A game I've gotten into playing recently is called Unturned. Basically, it's a early access zombie survival game that can be played on Steam. I like playing Unturned with my friends and trying to survive together, but there are many things about Unturned that need fixing. In the most current version there is no serverlist, so you have to search for a public server's location on the internet.

A military zombie.

Another thing that needs to be addressed is how buggy the zombies are. Sometimes when they're chasing you they'll go in a different direction and get stuck in place. To make matters worse, when they play their attacking animation they can sometimes hit you when your behind them, you can imagine how this can get frustrating. The last problem I have with them is how they can approach you completely silently, and by the time you know they're on top of you it's already too late. Unturned is still really fun, but there are problems that need to be fixed.