Me and Neo had a poker night Saturday evening along with his girlfriend, father, sister and her boyfriend. It was an awesome night, especially because I pretty much whooped the floor with everyone twice.
We started out with Texas Hold 'em, after a few rounds of explaining to those we had yet to be explained, we started the first serious match. Lost some, won some, played some people bankrubt and eventually went bankrubt myself when I went all-in against impossible odds.
After the Texas Hold 'em game we did a few matches of real 'old fashion' poker; 5 closed cards and you get to swap cards twice to make good combinations. Whooped everyones asses in that game twice with two flushes, including the final pot which was all or nothing. I got it all and they got nothing. It was a very successfully night, especially because me and Neo visited the Mac at 1 in the morning after we dropped off his girlfriend. Hamburgers just taste that much better when consumed in the middle of the night, also there were a lot of KITTAH's there eating all the left over food. Probably stray cats or something, they didn't like it when I came close but they were cute :P.

Command & Criticize!
EA has established a new record for itself. If you thought having 3 patches in a period of 2 months (BF2) was bad, then you're not going to believe this. The new record is now set on 3 patches in 3(!!!!) days, and all very needed might I add. The online mode was hardly accessible for a lot of people and I still have no clue how the development team working on the online mode managed to fuck up like this. Aren't you supposed to test for exactly this kind of stuff? Make sure the game DOESN'T crash when it can't connect, make sure the server ISN'T overloaded because the game is just released and everyone is hanging out in the same damn room? Isn't that just common sense? Especially for a team that is hired to do specifically these things?
The people who designed the online part for the game deserve to be bitched at, but when I hang around in the C&C 3 lobby and some of the developer team members are online chatting with the users, I see everyone bitch at them. Remember that the people responsible for the game physics (engine, gameplay, units, buildings, blablabla) and the people responsible for the online function and smoothing everything out are probably two different teams all together. Team 1 did an awsome job, I can't say anything less about C&C 3 by itself. It plays, looks and feels like a real C&C game. The story could use a LOT of work but I'll go into that in some other post when I complete the game entirely.
The point is that you're all bitching at the wrong people. The people responsible for the multiplayer enviorment are responsible for all the stupidities and I will bet you money that it's not the same team that made the biggest part of the game. If you want to bitch at someone, bitch at the management, they are the ones who don't care if a game is working properly, who don't care if beta testers have a mile long list of bugs that needs some serious fixing before shipping the game out. Every other developer would not even THINK about sending out a game with more then 3 serious bugs. But not EA, their attitude is to 'patch it later'. And hey, it works, cuz we're all still buying their shit arn't we? Well can't really blame us, since they buy up every major title available we don't really have a choice anymore.

The writing's on the wall
When you think up a good story and you have it all in your mind, the hardest thing to do is convert it to words. I dunno about everyone, but whenever I think up a story I come up with it in my head like it's a movie. I could be a script writer and film director no problem, but I'm not. Problem is that converting an image like story in your mind to something that reads pleasant but also describes exactly what you picture in your head, is EXTREMELY fucking hard. I mean I have the entire first scene of my story all thought out. I could probably fill 20 pages without stopping, if I could actualy come up with the words! Eventually they will come to me, all you really have to do is start on it and the words will start flowing, like me writing this blog entry right now. But starting... you need to be in the mood for it, and I'm not always in the mood.

Tiger