On May 16, 2015, I did the one thing I thought I would never do: attend Anime Central, also known as ACen.  Anime Central is the biggest anime convention that’s held in the Midwest area of the United States (specifically Rosemont, Illinois) and it takes place at both the Donald Stephens Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel right across from it.  I’ve always taken a pass at the convention because anime’s not my thing besides Dragon Ball (DBZ Abridged is my favorite now), but there’s one question you might be asking: what caused me to change my mind?

When I attended C2E2 back in 2012, comic books weren’t my thing either.  Of course, I was a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and the DC movies were up and down, but when it came to comics, I was left blank.  Ever since C2E2 2012, I have picked up some comic books and read them.  I’m not fully back into comic book reading and I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point, but with my experience with C2E2, could the same thing happen with Anime Central?  The answer to that is probably not.

Once again, the question remains: what caused me to change my mind?  You also might think that the reason why I changed my mind was because this was a once in a lifetime opportunity every year to meet foxrevolution, but he’s been going to ACen for years and I’ve never attended ACen until this year.  Also, no, he was not the reason why I went to ACen this year.  The reason why I went to ACen this year is because of this pic from last year…

Right there is a thing called the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot.  Every year, cosplayers of the Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series get together to do photoshoots for people in attendance.  When I saw the pic above, one thing came to mind: there are no Fighting Spirit Green Ranger cosplayers there!  I wanted to remedy that situation, so I made going to ACen one of my goals for this year; as you can see, I accomplished that goal!

I ran into some problems with ACen.  The first problem I ran into was that I could not buy a single day pass online; I had to do it at the con floor.  That would’ve been no big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that on Saturday (the day the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot was taking place), the lines can take up to FIVE HOURS to go through.  I didn’t want to bother with that, so I had to bite the bullet and buy a 3-day pass from ACen online, even though I was planning on going for one day only, which I ultimately did.

The second problem I had with ACen was programming.  As big of a con as ACen is, programming has to be its biggest flaw as even Wizard World gets that part right and it’s the worst con I’ve ever attended!  Trying to look for the schedule of the event on its website is practically impossible because there’s no programming there.  In order to see the programming for the event, you’d have to download the Guidebook app on your smartphone or tablet and look for ACen there.

The Guidebook app for ACen’s a lot like the C2E2 app, which is pretty convenient.  There’s still one other problem though: the guests schedule.  foxrevolution had to ask me about where the scheduling was for guests and we both couldn’t find anything as the guest list only had the list of guests that were attending, but had no schedule for the guests.  He was looking for Christina Vee and it turned out that she was going to be there the day after I was to be there.  I didn’t check my Guidebook to see if ACen updated that portion of the app.

My last problem with ACen was its location: the same place where Wizard World Chicago takes place.  From where I live and where ACen takes place, it meant that I would have to deal with traffic.  The good news was that traffic wasn’t that bad; there was a little mishap, but it was more from the usual construction work that gets done in this city on a yearly basis than from whatever other reason there was.  So, thanks to going to ACen, I can safely say that Wizard World Chicago causes traffic stops come Wizard World time!

I didn’t let my friend know that I was going to ACen and it didn’t matter anyway as he never asked me when it was.  So, that meant that I was going to the convention all by myself and if I couldn’t find foxrevolution, I’d have to ask strangers to use my camera to take a picture of me and a cosplayer.  There was only one total blurry pic taken by a stranger and that was pretty much because he took my bag when I was going to pose with other Rangers beside me; I had my camera off too and most people don’t know how to turn my camera on.  Plus, he took the pic with my camera and his phone at the same time.  Other than that, pictures came out fine.

For a while when I was at ACen, I thought I was the only Power Ranger cosplayer there because I didn’t see any other Ranger.  I did get pic requests, but they weren’t as often as C2E2 (that will never be topped in my opinion) nor Wizard World Chicago if you exclude the photoshoot of course.  I eventually saw another Green Ranger cosplayer who looked a little too basic and then I later on saw another Green Ranger cosplayer who had not only a Dragon Dagger, but also the Sword of Darkness.  I never held the thing because despite the fact that my character only made one appearance total (unless you count the Power Rangers Super Megaforce intro which also breaks continuity, thus Power Rangers tradition), he never held the Sword of Darkness.  Maybe next year or next con I’ll hold one!

The environment was rather strange to me.  I’m used to Hall A being one of the halls being used for Wizard World Chicago, but for this event, Hall A was a little bit more colorful, although there were more blue than anything.  As you would expect, most of the environment was like anime heaven: anything you wanted from anime was right there.  It was a little odd to see Artist Alley in the front while the other aisles were behind it.  I’m used to the other way around with Wizard World Chicago, but other than walking around Artist Alley, I didn’t care much about it.

Wait a minute, I forgot something: the location of the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot gathering!  It was hard to forget where it was because it was quite simple where it was: to the very right of the entrance.  When I saw the spot, I knew there would be trouble.  Here’s what the stage looked like…

If there were going to be as much Super Sentai and Kamen Rider cosplayers as last year’s event on that stage, it could cause a catastrophe.  Would it be one?  I’d find out later, but for the meantime, it was time to find a black guy with some long dreads and possibly wearing a Punisher sleeveless shirt.  Why was I looking for that guy?  Because that’s what I assumed foxrevolution was going to look like that day, at least with the Punisher shirt thing.

I did see some black guys with dreads, but none of them were foxrevolution.  I didn’t approach them and asked them if they were foxrevolution because they didn’t have his face.  I looked around searching for him, but I could never find him.  We weren’t Facebook friends at the time and I didn’t want to install Facebook Messenger again because of its pain-in-the-ass setup after installing (plus I didn’t want to drain my battery on my phone by going on Firefox.  On top of that, I forgot to check to see if free Wi-Fi was available), plus trying to make my appearance a surprise meant that I was screwed.  Well, he did know that I was coming anyway, but it would’ve been a better experience if we had met before the Tokusatsu/Power Rangers photoshoot.

Being alone at ACen felt a little bit weird.  All this time, I wanted to go to a con by myself and see how it was like to not be responsible for anybody but myself and at the beginning, I was really starting to miss my friend being there.  He would’ve been unable to attend anyway, but still: it would’ve been nice if he had been there with me.  After getting used to being by myself there, I was able to roam around the place (or places in this matter) and not have to search for my friend.

There was one person whom I met there that I didn’t think I’d meet again: TheRealTDragon.  I hadn’t seen that guy since Wizard World Chicago 2014 and I had no idea he was going to be at ACen either (it turned out it was a last minute thing), so it was cool to chat with the guy and do a little bit of video.  We were outside too, so that made it even better.  Thankfully, unlike my Blue Ranger cosplay, you can see me at the following video on the 58 second mark...

On my way back to the Exhibit Hall, I saw another person I didn’t think I’d see there: Orlando Belisle, Jr.  We just gave each other a nod and went about our business, never to see each other again.  Wait, I forgot something: a room at the very bottom of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel!

I went all the way down and walked around the place just to see what’s up.  I was pretty much in the gaming section of the hotel and when I had reached the end, to my right was something I hadn’t seen since I was a kid: AN ARCADE ROOM!!  I fangirled on the inside, but I acted casual on the outside.  Once I went inside the dark room, I whipped out my phone, turned on the camera app and made this video…

There was one other type of memory it brought out: the memory of not having the money to play those games!  Well, I did have some ones in my wallet, but I didn’t bother to look for a currency converter, so next year, I’m going to bring nostalgia back full circle!

There’s one thing I didn’t mention about the photoshoot: it was originally scheduled to happen at 5PM, but it was changed to 3PM and the Google doc didn’t accommodate that change.  I didn’t notice anything while I was at the shoot, but there was some confusion as to what was supposed to happen on that stage.  That’s one thing ACen has to work on come next year!

When it was around 2:30PM, I decided to hang out at the main hall of the Donald Stephens Convention Center and I saw a Red Ranger cosplayer with a Dragon Dagger and a Green Ranger shield.  I was like how is this possible?  I have the shield and Dragon Dagger with me! Of course, I was acting like I was in character, so I approached the cosplayer and got a pic with him.  He was with a friend who was cosplaying as ShinkenRed and I had to get a pic of him.  After that, I noticed that the Red Ranger cosplayer’s belt looked familiar: it looked like the belt of the Red Ranger cosplayer from C2E2.  Since he didn’t take his helmet off, it was confirmed: that was the same guy.

All three of us had our pics taken together and the amount of pics that were taken was massive; we almost missed the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot because of that.  The pic requests weren’t only at the main hall; they were also near the main entrance as well.  While we were getting our pictures taken, a Rita cosplayer (whom I had met earlier, so sorry for leaving that part out) photobombed us.  There were no versus pics as that was being saved for the Tokusatsu/Super Sentai photoshoot, but it was nice.  We were able to make it to the stage with a few minutes to spare, so luck was on our side…or so we thought.

Remember how I said earlier that the space for the stage would cause some problems?  Yeah, as predicted, it did, especially when the first set of photos was for everybody to be on the stage.  There wasn’t enough space to have everybody on the stage, so that made some people be out of other people’s shots, so that sucked.  Plus, the Rita cosplayer was nowhere to be found; the same with the other Green Ranger cosplayers.

It was while I was off the stage waiting for another opportunity when someone tapped me on the shoulder.  I turned to my right and that’s when I saw foxrevolution.  Finally, the two MyIGNers who had been on MyIGN since the ClubIGN days of 2006 have met in person!  We talked for a bit about the experiences of the event or whatnot (and also me having to be on stage again for another photo session) and he took a few pics of me, which reminds me that I’ll have to practice my dagger placement when I do the flute-playing pose because I totally lost it.  He took some photos of the gathering and you can see them here if you want, but after staying around for a bit, he left; we never saw each other again.

I can’t remember when this next thing happened, but I did notice a while ago that Funimations had their own booth.  Granted, they were there at C2E2, but I never visited their booth, even though I was interested then in getting Dragon Ball Z Battle of Gods.  Since I missed my opportunity to get DBZ Battle of Gods at C2E2, I went ahead and bought it at ACen.  I may do a review on the movie sometime later and if I do, I’ll get on a little rant about a plot hole in the movie that pretty much contradicts the DBZ universe.  You probably know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen the movie (don’t spoil it here please).

I decided to go to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare again to chill out and read my Facebook newsfeed since I was 15 hours behind.  On one of the posts, I had seen that a person I was following was at ACen too: Miss Sinister Cosplay.  Somebody made an Instagram video of her and she reposted it and I was like she’s here too?  I must’ve missed her.  Oh well!  I’ll try again if she comes back to the Chicagoland area.  Here’s where I made a mistake with that logic: I should’ve gone to her Facebook page to see what she had posted earlier.  I actually did do that though…..after I got home that is.

On an earlier post, she said that she was going to be at the Yaya Han table.  W! T! F!  You know what that means?  It means that I came across that table a total of three times and on all three times, like a senpai doing the opposite, I DID NOT NOTICE HER!!  I was too caught up with the fact that Yaya Han table? Eww! that I probably didn’t notice she was there.  Fortunately Yaya Han wasn’t there at all (and I hated the fact that I had to check her Facebook page to find out), but I didn’t know that, thus why I avoided her table.  Hopefully Wizard World Chicago will fix that and I turned on notifications for Miss Sinister’s fanpage since then.  Damn you Facebook for not providing me updates to everything!

When the PA announcer said that the Exhibit Hall was closing in 20 minutes, it was 5:35PM; it was scheduled to close at 6PM.  On that note, I decided to make like a tree and leave.  I did take some more pics on my way out, but once I went up the escalator, that was it with pictures and that was it with me being at Anime Central.  I paid my $13 parking fee and went home to watch SmackDown! since there were no NBA games to watch that day as there were none to be played.

I honestly didn’t see what made Anime Central the C2E2 of anime conventions, but it was definitely better than Wizard World Chicago.  I didn’t have to worry about wrist passes (I dread that part come August) and I didn’t deal with any stupid crap that I normally would expect from Wizard World Chicago.  Maybe I would’ve seen what the big fuss was about had I gone to ACen with my friend (or any friend for that matter) and if I had gone all three days instead of just one.

There’s one thing I didn’t mention about ACen: it’s not really a 3-day event, but rather a 72-hour event.  Why use 72 hours instead of 3-days?  They’re basically the same thing is what you’re probably saying right now, but hear me out.  I used 72-hours instead of 3 days for ACen because unlike other conventions I’ve attended, there’s stuff going on with ACen even when the Exhibit Hall closes.  There are things that are done that takes over the whole night and foxrevolution can give you better details about that since he attends those events and has been there way more than I have.

Am I going to go back to ACen next year?  To get a better experience of the event and to play some arcades like a little kid, you bet your ass I will!  Will I come with my friend this time?  Of course!  Will I go all three days this time?  Raul Julia as Vega (I refuse to use his American name), can you answer that one for me please?

Will I attend the festivities on all three days of the event?  In order for that to happen, my friend and I would have to rent a hotel room for the Hyatt Regency O’Hare and since we live like 45 minutes from the Donald Stephens Convention Center (without traffic), I don’t think we’d need to have a hotel room.  So, it’s more than likely it will not happen.  Plus, if there’s an NBA playoff game happening, I’m going to go home and watch that instead.

Here’s one more question that you might ask me: with Anime Midwest happening in the same building on Independence Day weekend, will I attend that convention?  I was considering going to that convention only if I couldn’t get a Wizard World Chicago 4-day pass.  Since I did obtain a Wizard World Chicago 4-day pass 2 days after ACen, the answer is no I will not attend Anime Midwest.

Since I only went for one day, it would make no sense for me to do a separate pics blog about the event, so I’ll have the link to the pics at the bottom of this blog.  I didn’t take many pics on Day 2 of C2E2 and this convention made up for it totally.  Not only will you see pics of the event there, but you’ll also see the video I posted above on there too.  I hope you enjoy the pics and also be sure to read foxrevolution’s blog to see how his experience was like at the event, which I’ll link to once he does do a blog about the event.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

Back on June 23, 2015, a well-anticipated game was released: Batman Arkham Knight.  It was to be the final chapter of the Batman Arkham series and the world was so great, it couldn’t be included on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U.  After having to download a Day 1 patch (something I think is a major problem with today’s gaming, but that’ll be saved for another blog), PS4 and Xbox One gamers have been able to play the game with no problems, well probably except for how much time they’re wasting playing the game, which is a game’s job anyway.  For PC gamers however, it was the complete opposite: they were wasting time getting crashes, frame skips, freezes and the 30 frame-per-second limit that shouldn’t have existed on a PC game.  The game was so badly done that Warner Bros. Games pulled the game from Steam a day after the game’s release.

What seemed to be the problem here?  How could this problem have happened?  Well, it was a little case of Warner Bros. Games not learning their lesson from Batman Arkham Origins.  What lesson should they have learned?  It’s two lessons actually that they should’ve learned: don’t trust Iron Galaxy Studios for being the outsource for the PC version of a game and to NEVER POORLY PORT THE PC VERSION OF A GAME!!  ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S COMING OUT THE SAME DAY AS THE CONSOLES!!

Before I get more into Batman Arkham Knight, I’ll have to start things off with the first game Batman: Arkham Asylum.  The Batman Arkham games have had a bad history with the PC version of them and even though Arkham Asylum had the least amount of problems, it was the start of problems.  With the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum, if you so happen to have an AMD GPU and wanted to play it with anti-aliasing, well, you was screwed!  If you had an NVIDIA GPU, you could use anti-aliasing and the PhysX features with absolutely no problem.

Since PhysX is an NVIDIA-exclusive feature (AMD users can use it, but it requires quite a lot of power for stable framerates), I won’t knock Rocksteady there, but anti-aliasing has been in existence since practically the birth of GPUs.  Why would NVIDIA users have the capability for anti-aliasing, but AMD users didn’t?  Well, you’re probably not going to believe the real answer, but there is a reason: a miscommunication between AMD and Rocksteady!  Despite a one-month delay from the console version, AMD users did not get the opportunity to play their game with anti-aliasing, but NVIDIA users did.  Fortunately, that problem was averted with the next game, but it introduced a new problem, this time for everybody: DirectX 11.

Just like its predecessor, Batman: Arkham City was delayed a month after the console releases.  After the game was released, it became quite clear that the PC version was delayed just so that Warner Bros. Games would have as many B:AC console releases as possible and didn’t use the extra time to make sure the game was working for PC users.  On DirectX 9, the game ran beautifully with absolutely no problems.  When using DirectX 11 however, the game ran to a crawl, especially for PC users with beast machines.

I had tried Batman: Arkham City when it came out on my PC and I had slowdown issues as well, and that was without and with the first patch.  When I noticed it, I had one thought in mind: Unreal Engine 3 was never meant for APIs higher than DirectX 9 no matter what, also Unreal Engine 3 sucks on dual-core processors (at least AMD ones) on Windows 7.  I ran into issues with Gears of War on DirectX 10 before and I probably did play one more game that utilized DirectX 10 or 11 and Unreal Engine 3, but I had bad experiences every time I played a UE3 game that utilized either DirectX 10 or 11.

Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady had released two patches and a Game of the Year Edition of B:AC and the DirectX 11 issues still persist (mostly outside), but it should run just fine for today’s PCs, although I haven’t played the game in a while.  With the next game (Batman: Arkham Origins), not only were Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill not going to reprise their roles as Batman and Joker respectively (although Mark Hamill was not going to matter since SPOILERS Joker died at the end of B:AC END SPOILERS), but Rocksteady weren’t going to reprise their roles as developers of a Batman game.  Instead, the developer of Batman: Arkham Origins was Warner Bros. Games Montreal.

Unlike the previous two Batman Arkham games, this game came out on the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U and PC at the same time.  Unfortunately, PC gamers weren’t the only people who suffered: everybody suffered gameplay issues to the point where it prevented players from progressing in the game.  With the PC version, they had one special bug which prevented them from completing one of the Riddler’s missions.  It was quite clear that Warner Bros. Games Montreal was not Rocksteady (especially since one company is in Montreal while the other’s in London), and it turned out that B:AO was a placeholder for Rocksteady’s new and final game Batman: Arkham Knight.  Before we get to the latest game, let’s stick with Arkham Origins for a bit.

After numerous patches, the game still had bugs in them.  It got so bad, Warner Bros. Games made themselves look even more ridiculous by announcing that they were no longer going to patch Arkham Origins to focus on making another DLC.  With worldwide issues, it masked the fact that Warner Bros. Games outsourced the PC version of B:AO to Iron Galaxy Studios, a studio that’s notorious for making bad ports of games.  So, with one more game, nothing could go wrong with using Iron Galaxy Studios again, right?  How else was this blog born!

I’ve already mentioned the issues that accompanied with the game and how it was taken off Steam shelves a day after being released to the public (Steam’s new refund policy came at a really bad time for Warner Bros. Games too) and it has shown that despite the advancement of technology, games are still being ported to PC and can still be ported nightmarishly!  You would think that the PS4 and Xbox One having a PC architecture would mean the total elimination of PC ports, but thanks to Dead or Alive 5 Final Round and Mortal Kombat X (why have a studio be responsible for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC version Warner Bros. Games?), that is sadly not the case.  Not only that, they’re either not being tested properly or are not being tested at all (more likely the former for B:AK thanks to reports like this).  To make matters worse, as long as people keep preordering games and buy into hype or until Sony, Microsoft and Steam start penalizing companies for pulling practices like this, it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

I could go on and explain about why we’re allowing these problems to happen, but that would be too long, so instead, I’ll break it down into a series where I tackle the problems individually.  The crazy thing is I did those blogs a while ago, but never found the time to post them.  Thanks to Warner Bros. Games and their total screwup with the release of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, I now got an excuse to post those blogs.  You may agree with me or disagree with me on the subjects, but there’s one thing I think we can all agree with: in the words of Angry Joe (and I’m sorry for swearing for this one), Warner Bros. Games, YOU DONE FUCKED IT UP!!

As I’m typing this, I’m not expecting this blog to be as long as my previous convention blogs, but don’t be surprised if I end up making this a long split-series blog.  With that being said, I’ll have to say that this year’s Wizard World Chicago was the best Wizard World Chicago I’ve ever attended.  This con pissed me off a little bit (which was really a minor inconvenience which I’ll get to in a bit) and it felt just as good as this year’s C2E2, making it a little bit hard for me to decide which con was the better con.  As much as foxrevolution would hate for me to say this, Anime Central was the worst con I’ve attended this year, but that’s only because the environment was so different and anime’s not my thing; we’ll see if next year changes things.

What I’m going to do with this blog is try to be brief about each day as I can and at the end of each day’s testimony, I’ll have a picture from that day that’ll link you to the pics that were taken that day.  I didn’t run into any battery problems like with C2E2, so expect fewer pics from my phone there.  With that being said, let’s talk about Day 1 of the event.

Before I start off talking about this day, I’ll have to talk about a scenario that happened earlier that week, more specifically the Sunday before the event.  On Sunday evening while I was checking my Facebook newsfeed, my mother came to my room and told me that my Uncle Dayton had passed away.  That was a shock to me because 18 months prior, his mother (my grandmother) passed away and then six months after she passed, his brother passed.  With one of my other uncles dying from a heart attack back in 1994, that was a little bit of a cycle with my grandmother and her first three children (whom were sent to Mississippi to be raised by a Reed family) to have passed away.

When I had seen my Uncle Dayton last alive, it was a day after my other uncle’s funeral while we were in Mississippi.  He had his leg amputated (which I didn’t notice even though I already knew that had happened) and he was in some sort of hospital being unable to speak (but was able to express emotion by crying).  I had no idea his condition was that bad, but him passing 11 months after last seeing him was so surreal.  This also caused a little bit of a travelling conundrum.

His funeral was on the following Saturday and on that day, I was going to attend Day 3 of Wizard World Chicago, which meant that somebody was going to have to use a rental car for the weekend since his funeral was in Mississippi.  What ended up happening was that I kept the Kia Forte while my mother rented a vehicle to be used for the trip.  My mother and brother went to the funeral, but my sister (since she started teaching) and I (Wizard World Chicago) didn’t.  The travelling situation was the only thing that concerned me with Wizard World Chicago and since the travelling situation was taken care of, all I’d have to worry about was getting to Wizard World Chicago and try to have some fun there.

When Day 1 arrived, I was woken up to two surprises: the weather and a message from my friend on the Facebook Messenger app.  With the weather, after being in the 80s since probably late June, it decided that it was October weather instead of August weather.  What I mean by that is the weather dropped from the 80s in the previous day to either the low-to-mid 60s.  Couldn’t the weather have waited at least four more days before the major drop?  I guess that’s Chicago weather for you!

With my friend, he sent me a message saying that he needed to take care of things with his job, so he wouldn’t be able to go to Wizard World Chicago that day, so don’t go and pick him up.  Wow!  I really wanted Wizard World Chicago to be the con where I’d go by myself this year, but I ended up taking Anime Central instead.  I guess this was God’s way of making that up for me, but it totally caught me off-guard.  Since I had an extra hour to spare before I’d depart from my house to Wizard World Chicago, I decided to spend that extra time by watching Daredevil on Netflix (which is a really awesome show by the way) and when 1:30PM hit, I hit the road.

Before I could get on the expressway, I decided to go to my bank first to withdraw $300 from my checking account.  There was a little bit of a problem there: the whole block where my bank is had some major construction work, so I had to go around it to get to the parking lot of my bank.  The deposit went through with no problem, so after that, I was back on the road and went to the expressway.

There was a little bit of traffic going there (as expected), but it wasn’t so bad.  There were some construction signs up, but I didn’t see any reroutes or anything, so the travel was good.  Since I was driving the Forte, that meant no need for CDs, so I listened to my Saints Row The Third customized KRhyme 95.4 playlist.  It didn’t feel weird at all, but I was so happy to no longer be limited to 77 minutes worth of music anymore; I could listen to as much music as the memory on my phone would allow!

When I got to the Donald Stephens Convention Center, the setup was pretty much the same as last year’s, which made it easy for me, well, except for where to get the passes.  Last year, I had to get a VIP pass because the 4-day passes were sold out, but I was able to easily see where to get the VIP passes from.  This year, I had gotten a regular 4-day pass a day after ACen ended, so I had to go get my pass from somewhere else in the building.  After last year’s situation, I printed out my pass instead of having it scanned through my smartphone and I didn’t know which booth area I should put my pass in.  It turned out I was supposed to go to Will Call.

Why was it called Will Call?  Can somebody explain to me why it was called Will Call instead of Pre-Purchased or something?  That wasn’t what pissed me off, but it was baffling.  After getting my pass (not scanned surprisingly), I went to a line and killed some time by checking my Facebook newsfeed (sending status updates suck since the reception there sucks and you have to pay for Wi-Fi, which is something I REEEALLY didn’t and don't want to do) and listening to the Saints Row The Third theme through my phone and headphones.  As soon as I sent a status update that I had arrived, the lines were let in.

Oh snap, I forgot to mention something: who I cosplayed as that day!  I’ll have to look back at my previous blogs and see if I’ve mentioned this before, but I had my mind made up since Wizard World Chicago 2014 Day 1 who I was going to cosplay on Day 1 of Wizard World Chicago 2015: nobody!  I was going to attend Wizard World Chicago Day 1 for the first time out of cosplay and I finally did so!  I wanted to do that because the first day of Wizard World Chicago’s always a throwaway day as guests and panels are usually non-existent there.  Until Wizard World Chicago release 3-day passes, I’ll always attend Wizard World Chicago Day 1 out of cosplay.

How did it feel to not cosplay at Wizard World Chicago Day 1?  It felt normal to be honest.  It also felt like I should retire cosplaying as I felt free.  It also didn’t feel weird to be by myself at the event, but I knew it would be short-lived as the day was 5-hours long anyway.

Since I was out of cosplay and I was by myself, that meant that I could take as many pics as I wanted and I wouldn’t be getting picture requests.  If I did, I’d be surprised (spoiler alert: I was never asked for one!), but other than that, I took the most number of pics that day and you won’t see me in any of them!  I did meet a new cosplay friend to replace Rosanna Rocha at Wizard World Chicago probably (UndeadDu) and I saw plenty of vehicles on display at the autograph area of the show.

Speaking of that, do you guys remember last year when I did a rant on Wizard World Chicago for Dandera Entertainment denying me the right to take a picture of the Bat Tumbler without paying for it?  The good news was that Dandera Entertainment wasn’t at Wizard World Chicago this year.  The bad news: I still couldn’t take a pic of the Batmobile, even though it was the 1960s Batmobile, a vehicle I already took a pic of with my camera back in 2013.  Also, there were No Pictures signs surrounding it, so at least I was warned about it beforehand.  I forgot to tell the people working that area that I thank them for the sign as it was missing from Dandera Entertainment’s booth last year.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see the DeLorean at all even though it was advertised at being there.

Before I left, I saw another female cosplayer who looked fine from the front, but couldn’t tell from the back.  I took a pic of her and immediately after that, she sent me a business card.  Well, I can say that I’m no longer a fan of Ivy Doomkitty because this cosplayer got a better looking body and I’m now following her on Facebook.  The name’s Sofia Sivan; those who love booty will not be disappointed!

When 7:30PM hit, I decided to call it a day and left and went home.  Being by myself was great and everything, but Day 1 was a pretty boring day as usual.  Day 2 was when things would change for the better (which is also why I wish 3-day passes for the event would happen), so I was getting ready for that and for my new Blue Ranger cosplay.  Damn this day’s testimony is long as is!  Oh well!  Remove the article subheader and turn these blogs into individual blogs as usual!

A little known fact about my blogs: when I want to do a short one, I end up doing a long one.  When I want to do a long one, I have to force it to be long because the blog ends up being way shorter than I thought it’d be.  It’s funny how that works out!

As promised, a pic from the day will be posted on here and with that, you can check the pics out.  Since Livefyre’s still having its issues, I won’t be notified of when comments come to my page (this problem is slow even by IGN’s standards in the past), so I’ll have to check on the page frequently.  I’ll be back tomorrow for the Day 2 blog.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

There was a little bit of a worry for Wizard World Chicago 2015 Day 2, or rather two concerns I had: my new Blue Ranger suit and my Green Ranger shield.  First, let’s start off with the shield: on Day 3 of Wizard World Chicago last year, my shield came apart when I had to go to the bathroom.  Ever since then, I’ve been concerned with having to take my shield off outside of home because I brought nothing to help me fix the shield.  C2E2 had the Cospitality Lounge which specialized with fixing cosplay problems, but I never needed them; Wizard World Chicago had no such thing.  Since I was planning on wearing the shield for two days, I was hoping it’d hold up.

With the Blue Ranger suit, I finally retired the Color Suits suit from conventions and with my new suit, it is a two-way stretch suit.  The problem with two-way stretch suits is that they limit your movements and could possibly easily tear too.  I had gotten my suit from Raven Prior on Facebook and his suits by default are two-way.  Unlike 007Halu’s two-way stretch suits, Raven’s two-way stretch doesn’t limit movement, but it kind of feels like a chore doing it.  They also don’t feel like they’re going to rip and my fear was that it could.  I was going to see how the suit held up the entire time I was there, so off I went to pick up my friend and go to Wizard World Chicago!

I left my house at around 10AM and went to pick my friend up.  Unfortunately, I forgot to mention that when I went home the previous day, 76th street was closed up, so I had to take an alternate route home.  I had to take 71st street to my friends’ house and I got there around 10:40AM.  My friend came to the car and off we went!

There was another part of Day 1 I forgot to mention and it’s relevant for this day: while I was on my way home, my friend sent me a message about his camera that was worse than when he lost it at C2E2 2015 Day 3.  His mother was going to a party or what have you and she wanted to borrow his camera.  While she was at the party taking pictures and stuff, one of her coworkers wanted some of the pictures that were taken removed.  Rather than deleting the pictures from the camera, his mother gave her coworker the memory card that was in the camera, meaning that my friend would go to Wizard World Chicago pretty much cameraless!

Hearing that story, I was like that’s even worse than me going to ACen without telling him about it.  Fortunately for him, I had an 8GB microSD card that wasn’t being used at all, so I told him he could use that card for his camera.  It turned out that was the best thing I could do because when he had gotten his camera, the lady selling him the camera told him that he’d need a memory card for it as the camera will take pics without a memory card, but the camera would have to remain on for the pics to hold.  By default, Auto Power Down’s on and since the average person doesn’t change the settings on their camera, my friend would’ve been screwed ridiculously quick.  Enough with the backstory, let’s talk about the event at hand!

Not much happened at the con other than getting pics taken, taking pics and getting the Photo Ops passes scanned to avoid a repeat the following day.  Speaking of that, let’s talk about the Photo Ops situation right quick!

When it was 2:30PM, I went upstairs to get my Nathan Fillion Photo Op pass scanned and the guy behind the table asked if I had another Photo Op pass and I told him I had a Photo Op with Brett Dalton the next day.  I had both passes scanned (through my smartphone) and I received a ticket for the both of them.  When the guy told me to come back at least 30 minutes before the start of the Photo Ops, I told him that’s what I did for Nathan Fillion.  He looked at his sheet and told me that Nathan Fillion’s Photo Op was moved to 5PM, so I should come back then.  The crazy thing is the ticket on my TicketLeap app still said 3PM instead of 5PM, so I left my friend a little too early.

When I came back to my friend, we walked around for a bit and then I was stopped by a couple of people and they wanted to take a pic with me.  Of course I granted their pic request and they wanted me to take a pic in front of their background.  The group is called Chicago Reader and you can see two of my photos from them here and here.  Now let’s backtrack to something earlier that day.

While my friend and I were at a booth, we saw a Michael Jackson cosplayer dancing to Billie Jean.  His dancing was spot on and we both tried to take a pic of his dancing, but unfortunately, we ran into a thing called Motion Blur, so no shot was right.  We ended up recording the dancing sequence and you can see it on my Flickr page, which I’ll link to in a little bit.  Now back to after Chicago Reader!

My friend and I killed some time before it was 4:25PM and when that time came, my friend gave me permission to leave for the Nathan Fillion Photo Op.  I didn’t ask for permission, but he told me I could go, so I took the chance.  While I was waiting in line for the Nathan Fillion Photo Op, one of the Photo Op guys was selling photo covers for $5 and I picked up two, one for each Photo Op I was attending that year.  I gave him $20 since I didn’t have $10 on me and he wasn’t paying attention to what I gave him, so I asked him for the change.  Once he realized that I gave him $20 instead of $10, he gave me my $10 change and went about his business.

There’s one thing you gotta understand about Wizard World Chicago: even though they don’t have any black people working the con (as far as I’ve seen, which isn’t a problem to me), they apparently go by Black People Time.  When I did this blog three years ago, it baffled me that some people living in this country had never heard of the negative stereotype of black people always being late.  Trust me, it sucks.  When you’re black and you’re seeing your own kind living that stereotype, it embarrasses you and Wizard World Chicago’s the only time I see non-blacks be late.

Why did I bring up Black People Time?  Because the Nathan Fillion Photo Op didn’t get started until around 5:20PM!  It took a little bit before it was my turn and when it was time for me to get a photo with Nathan Fillion, he loved my outfit and wanted to do a karate pose or something.  Since I decided to go helmetless, I couldn’t do an actual Ranger pose, so I did the best I could, not realizing what Nathan Fillion was doing.  After the photo was taken, we shook hands and I left, never to see him again until Sunday.

There was something new that happened with the Photo Ops this year and it was the same way with C2E2: the photo prints are ready immediately!  I didn’t have to wait 45 minutes or so before I could get my pictures, so that saved me a lot of time!  When I looked at my photo, I couldn’t help but laugh because it turned out Nathan Fillion’s a bigger goofball than his Richard Castle character.  I did get a digital print of it of course and you’ll get to see it in a little bit.

There was one more additional thing that was done differently with the photos: how to download them.  In the past, if you purchased a digital print, you’d get a yellow card that’d give you the codes to put in to get the digital version of your photo.  This time, there was no yellow card; instead, there’s a code on the side of your print that you input to get the digital version of your picture.  That also saves time and was a very convenient thing for Celeb Photo Ops to do.  It makes me can’t wait for next year’s event!

After that was over, I reunited with my friend and we killed some time by going around taking pics and me getting my picture taken.  When it was around 6:20PM, my friend decided that he was done for the day, so we went about and left.  When we were about to exit, my friend noticed the gaming room (delivered by DeVry University) and he wanted to check it out.  We walked around the gaming room seeing people playing Super Smash Bros. Wii-U and some other arcades (the room wasn’t dark however, so no full-on nostalgia there) and after being there for a couple minutes, we left.

I took a glance at the other side of the room and saw some people as usual, but there was one person I wasn’t expecting to see nor was he advertised in being there: Doug Walker, also known as The Nostalgia Critic.  Without realizing that the previous photo was a little messed up from C2E2, I went up to him and asked him for a pic.  He granted me that pic and that was the last pic I took for the day.  Speaking of YouTube celebs, besides him, there was also Black Nerd Comedy (hosting for ConTV) and Chris Stuckmann.  I knew about Black Nerd Comedy, but I never saw him, but I had just started watching Chris Stuckmann and I had no idea he was at Wizard World Chicago until he did his reviews from last week.  I guess I’ll have to check every YouTube celeb’s Facebook and Twitter a day before Wizard World Chicago next year so that I wouldn’t be surprised by their unadvertised appearance.

As I was taking my friend home, we were talking about the Supergirl pilot that was going to be shown at Wizard World Chicago the next day.  He told me that he had seen the show and that it sucked to him.  He said it was like Gossip Girl (a show I’ve never seen), but with superheroes.  In case you guys didn’t know, a few months ago, the Supergirl pilot was leaked on the internet and a lot of people had seen it; I wasn’t one of them as I wanted to see the show the day it aired.  Well, you can forget about that because I saw the pilot the next day and I’ll talk about it once I go into Day 3 of the blog.  In case any of you didn’t see the pilot yet, I won’t spoil it for you.

I did think about watching the leaked pilot before, but I decided not to do that.  Oh, and in case you didn’t see my Day 1 pics, somebody at one of the booths was actually selling the pilot episode on DVD!  At the end of the day, I watched Daredevil on Netflix (the 12th episode), prepared my Day 3 cosplay and called it a night.

Usually when I go to cons, my legs would kill me.  My legs were killing me at Wizard World Chicago, but it was more of my thighs than my shins.  After Anime Central, I picked up some compression socks to see if that’d solve my leg pain problems and they did for my shins, but it brought the pain to my thighs.  It wasn’t that bad and I felt like I could go on for another day, but my arms started to really become a problem.

To try to solve the problem of the armbands sliding off of my arms, I installed another layer of 2mm foam sheets onto the armbands (two layers on my left arm and three layers on my right arm) and it worked, but at the expense of being too tight on my arms.  Raven Prior’s suit is a little bit thicker than I thought and it caused the armbands to squeeze my arms a little bit, so my arms were in pain the rest of the event.  Not severely, but it was at its worst when I was the Blue Ranger.  Well, I guess I can retire wearing the Green Ranger shield and armbands while wearing the Blue Ranger cosplay!

The pic with me and Nathan Fillion will be at the bottom of this blog and clicking on it will take you to a new tab and to the pics that were taken that day.  Until the Day 3 blog comes, I’m out!

With this day happening, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news: it’s the last time I’ll wear the Cosplay Tree Green Ranger suit as after this event.  I’ll upgrade to the 007Halu suit, if he doesn’t go AWOL on me again like he did last year, which forced me to go to Raven Prior for my Blue Ranger suit, which I don’t regret.  It was also going to be a busy day, so I was prepared for traffic to be heavy.  Also, I was expecting the number of Deadpool cosplayers to increase.

I wanted to leave my house at 7:50AM to go to my friends’ house to pick him up, but I predicted that I was going to leave at 7:55AM and I guessed correctly.  I was able to guess correctly because I usually end up leaving 5 minutes after when I was supposed to leave, no matter how much I try to circumvent that situation.  When I got to my friends’ house, it was 8:24AM, 6 minutes earlier than I was expected to arrive.  When I called my friend to let him know that I was outside, he told me that he needed me to wait an extra 10 minutes for him to get ready.  It took him like 7 minutes to be ready and out the door and away we went for Wizard World Chicago Day 3!

To prepare for the heavy traffic that was to ensue that day, days earlier, I had created a Saints Row The Third playlist that contained all the menu music from the game and that was a grand total of an hour and thirty-nine minutes; that was something I could never do with CDs.  To our surprise, we didn’t run into traffic issues at all and we got there with minutes to spare.

If you’ve read my previous blog, I mentioned that Wizard World Chicago goes by Black People Time and they didn’t disappoint here.  I wasn’t paying much attention to the time, but we didn’t get in until it was a little well past 10AM.  As expected, the event was packed with very little room to go from one part of the con to another part of the con.  As usual, I had my pics taken and my friend and I took pics of other cosplayers, sometimes with me being in them.  There was one set of cosplay that caught my attention, or rather, two.

Before I talk about this one cosplayer, I’ll have to backtrack to the previous day.  I had seen this one female cosplayer who was dressed as Bulma, but it was the type of Bulma I’ve never seen anybody cosplay as: the Bulma from the Frieza saga.  I took a pic with her and told her that I had never seen anybody cosplay as that Bulma.  Back to this day, I saw a female cosplayer dressed as a Ninja Blue Ranger (which made me wish I was the Blue Ranger that day) and I took a pic with her.  She asked me afterwards if I was the Blue Ranger the previous day (of course I was) and she told me that she was the Bulma cosplayer from the previous day.  Wow!  The crazy thing is she wasn’t even the only Blue Ninja Ranger at the event that day!

There was another Blue Ninja Ranger cosplayer and he was with his friend who was cosplaying as a White Ranger, but with something around his waist.  I didn’t make out what it was initially, but I left it alone and requested a pic with them.  As I was putting on my helmet, I noticed something odd about his shield: it was designed like Vegeta’s first Saiyan armor.  As soon as I saw that, I was laughing on the inside and I also figured out what was around his waist: a tail.  This White Ranger cosplayer was cosplaying as a White Ranger with a mix of DragonBall Z in it!

After I took the pic with those guys, I told the cosplayer that he was the Great White Saiyan Ranger and one of the people who was with him had told me that I was the first person who got what he was doing with that cosplay; everybody else were left baffled as they didn’t remember the White Ranger’s shield looking like that.

Another highlight for me was when I entered the Donald Stephens Convention Center, I saw a little girl dressed up as a DinoCharge Pink Ranger and I didn’t get a pic with her right away.  The next time I saw her, I asked her mother if I could get a pic with her and sure enough, I did.  Now let’s talk about the Supergirl pilot!

When I got to the area where the Supergirl premiere was happening, there was a long line.  I didn’t know if the line was for Supergirl or not, so I went in line.  It turned out that I was in the right line and when I got in Room 24, there were enough seats to sit in, so I sat on a chair in a corner of the middle section (remember, I’m wearing a shield).  While I was waiting for the show to start, I saw a Ryu cosplayer and a Cammy cosplayer walking by and I pointed at the Ryu cosplayer like YOU!!  Bat In The Sun has ruined my potential friendly photo with a Ryu cosplayer while being the Green Ranger forever!

When the show was about to start, one of the people who works for CBS had said that she was a little nervous about doing the show because Wizard World Chicago was the first con she’s ever attended and since getting on the stage, she’s excited to see everybody there.  She also said that everybody in the room were going to see the show before the rest of the nation would.  I said under my breath if you didn’t watch the leaked episode that is.  By the way, the word leaked or any mention of the leak weren’t addressed at all.  Without further ado, everybody was able to see Supergirl’s premiere episode!

If you’ve read my Wizard World Chicago 2014 Day 3 blog, you would know that I saw the premiere episode of Gotham there and the last 30 seconds ended up having some audio problems.  Supergirl didn’t have that problem, but it did have some audio balancing issues; issues that didn’t really hinder the quality of the show.  Like I said in the previous blog, I won’t spoil Supergirl’s pilot episode (please don’t spoil it if you saw the leaked episode), but I will tell you that it’s had some ups and downs as you would expect out of pilots.  My overall impression: it’s good enough to watch multiple episodes of for me.  Then again, therein lies a huge problem: its timeslot.

Supergirl’s set to air on October 26, 2015 at 7:30PM Central Time.  You know what’s on during that time?  Gotham!  So you have two DC TV shows airing at the same time, which could hurt one show’s ratings?  That’s like AMD having the FX-8370 and 8370e cost $200 or AMD having the Radeon R9 Fury X and Fury Nano costing $650.  In other words, IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!!  Then again, this is Warner Bros. we’re talking about, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

Before I get back on subject, I have to ask the inevitable question: which show will I DVR?  The answer to that is going to be whichever one is the easiest to record.  I can pick up CBS with both my digital antennas with no problem on my HDTV, but with my HDTV tuner, it’s a different story.  I guess it’s not that strong thanks to it being a USB 2.0 tuner instead of a USB 3.0 tuner, but I don’t know.  If CBS ends up being too hard to pick up, I’ll DVR Gotham and watch Supergirl instead.  But what if I want to watch Monday Night Football and I’d have to DVR both episodes?  Well, I solved that one at the end of this past TV season: have my two PCs DVR one of the shows.  If anything was to go wrong with Supergirl, Netflix and torrents are my answer.  Either way, me watching Monday Night Raw is going to be messed up.  Now, back onto the testimony of the event!

After the Supergirl premiere ended, I went to Hall A and went to the chairs and table section as that’s where my friend said he’d be at once the premiere was over.  To my non-surprise, he wasn’t there.  So, with less than an hour to go before I’d have to attend the Photo Op of Brett Dalton, I decided to go around the event and take pics and stuff.  When it was getting near 2:30PM, I went upstairs and got in line for the Brett Dalton Photo Op.

Do you know whose Photo Op was also happening at around 3PM?  Jason David Frank.  When I saw that his costume Photo Op was $95, I figured the reason why was because he was going to be in his Bat In The Sun costume and I was right.  Jason David Frank’s Photo Op was scheduled at 2:30PM, but since Wizard World Chicago goes by BPT, I don’t know when it actually started.

While I was waiting in line for Brett Dalton, one of the Celeb Photo Ops guys guessed that I was there for Jason David Frank because I was dressed as the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger; I told him that was not the case.  I guess my Legacy Dragon Dagger holster didn’t like that because minutes later, it came apart.  The sleeve being off because hot glue gun sucks sometimes was something I could live with, but one of the buttons coming off as well was something that was devastating.  Last year it was my shield; this year it’s my sheath.  If I encounter one more cosplay problem as the Green Ranger on next year’s Wizard World Chicago, that’ll mean my Green Ranger cosplay’s officially cursed at the event!

With the holster problem, I decided that it was not going to affect my Photo Op with Brett Dalton as I didn’t need it for the photo anyway.  I was going to need my Legacy Dragon Dagger though as I wanted to use it for my photo with Brett Dalton.  Like I said before, Wizard World Chicago goes by BPT, so the pictures didn’t start until around 3:15PM or 3:20PM.  Unlike the Nathan Fillion Photo Op, I wanted to take my photo with Brett Dalton with my helmet on.  Brett Dalton was a cool person and he didn’t do anything silly with my photo (even though he’s a silly guy as well) and after our photo was taken, I shook his hand and left, never to see him again for at least an hour.

I got stopped for a pic request before I could obtain my photo print and after getting that and my digital photo, I was heading back to the main hallway to kill some time before going to Room 4 for Brett Dalton’s Q&A.

When I got back to the hallway, I noticed Ranger Six hanging out with his buddies, so I went and had a little chat with them.  They were cool to chat with as always and I told Ranger Six that I had finally started watching Daredevil and that the show was amazing.  He told me that after a couple of episodes of Daredevil, he started going on Amazon to piece together that Daredevil cosplay and had it ready by the time C2E2 got started.  By the way, I did not watch the season finale of Daredevil on this day; it was reserved for the following day as I didn’t want to be behind on SmackDown! before SummerSlam.

I did let my Facebook Ranger friends see my messed up Legacy Dragon Dagger sheath problem and they said that it could be fixed without having to buy a replacement.  I’d like to save some money and I’d like to fix my Legacy Dragon Dagger holster, so if anybody can offer me tips on putting the button back on and keeping it there, that’d be nice.  When it was near time for the Brett Dalton Q&A, I went to the programming area where Room 4 was and went in there for the Brett Dalton Q&A.

Highlights from the Q&A: Brett Dalton thought he was going to be fired when he was about to learn that Grant Ward was going to be Hydra, four or five cosplayers were dressed as the original Hydra members (with the Green and Yellow), Brett Dalton would want his Hydra to be the good Hydra with a smiling face instead of a skull and have cookies, Ming-Na Wen being the complete opposite of Agent Melinda May and like us, can’t wait for Season 3 of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  I could’ve sworn that ConTV was there to record the Q&A section, but I can’t find it anywhere.  Oh well, I guess YouTube’s our friend here when it comes to that!

After that was over, I went back to Hall A (Hall F is where the Autograph section is) to go to where my friend was supposed to be hours ago, but before I could get there, I saw the same Ryu and Cammy cosplayers that I saw at the Supergirl premiere.  Of course, I had to have a Vs. pic with the Ryu cosplayer and since my friend wasn’t around to take the pic, the Cammy cosplayer had to take the pic.  She ended up taking two pics (one landscape and the other portrait) and my Green Ranger vs. Ryu pic streak continues!

When I went back to the area where my friend was supposed to be, of course, he wasn’t there.  I decided to check my Facebook newsfeed so that I wouldn’t be that behind once I got back home.  After I was done getting all caught up with my Facebook newsfeed, I texted my friend that I was in the spot where he was supposed to be.  He replied by saying that he was in the main hall.  I texted back OMW and proceeded to go his way.

Once I got to the main hall, I found my friend taking a photo of some cosplayer whom I can’t remember what she was.  We ended up spending the remainder of our time there in the main hall taking pictures of cosplayers and with me taking pics with cosplayers.  We hung around the area until it was around 6:20PM and when that time came, we left the con, preparing for the final day of the event.

On my way to dropping my friend off, he told me that he’s been having too much fun playing the Call of Duty Black Ops III beta and that he might not come to Wizard World Chicago on Day 4.  He also told me that he’d let me know by 11PM if he was going to go.  In my mind, I was hoping I would go by myself because it would make getting my autograph from Brett Dalton and Nathan Fillion easy.  I did have a strong feeling that he was going to tell me that he was not going to go, but things don’t usually go my way, so I expected him to tell me that he was going to go.

When 10PM came, he sent me a message on Facebook letting me know that he wasn’t going to go on Day 4, so I should have fun there for the both of us.  With that news, it meant that I could leave for Wizard World Chicago on the final day an hour later than expected.  Also, no shield and armbands this time!

As usual, a pic will be at the end of the blog and the pic will redirect you to my Flickr page where you’ll see all of this day’s photos taken.  With the next day being the final day, you can expect some stories there.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

With the final day happening, it was time to go back in Blue, but this time, with no shield, armbands, friend and patience.  I’ll get to the patience part in a little bit, but for right now, let’s talk about the funeral that happened the previous day.

In case you didn’t read the first blog, my mother and brother went down to Mississippi to attend one of my uncle’s funeral and my sister and I had to miss it for various reasons.  My mother and brother came back from the funeral while my sister and I were sleeping and I didn’t notice it until I went downstairs and saw my uncle’s obituary on the couch.  I read the obituary and…..it was a pathetic obituary.  If you had read the obituary, you’d be disappointed too because it didn’t mention how he impacted anybody’s life.  It was like he lived, he died, the end.  It was worse than my grandfather’s obituary and that was back in 1992 or 1993.  It kind of made me glad that I missed the funeral, but not glad at what I was about to expect.

I left the house at around 9:30 AM (the same time I leave to attend 10AM church) and went on the expressway.  I didn’t encounter any problems until a little after I passed Comiskey Park (I know it’s US Cellular Field, but I grew up on it being Comiskey Park, so eat it!) and it was bad.  I mean reeeeally bad.  Remember the construction thing I talked about on Day 1?  Well, for some apparent reason, Sunday became the day that the actual construction work would happen and ruin everybody’s day who were trying to go from point A to point B heading north.

Anytime it looked like there was free movement, I was stopped in my tracks again by yet another traffic stop.  I didn’t see how long it took for me to get to Exit 78 for O’Hare, but I was in traffic for a while.  Traffic’s not supposed to be this bad on a Sunday, but I guess some people forgot that Saturday had passed.  You would think that by the time I went to Exit 78 and then took Exit 1 on River Road, it would be the end of the traffic problems, but oh no!  It was like living in a movie or something where everything that can go wrong does.  If you couldn’t tell by now, I was getting furious and impatient.

I started thinking that my friend was lucky he decided not to go because we would’ve been stuck in traffic for a while.  I don’t know how much longer I would’ve been in traffic had my friend decided to go with me, but being in traffic for two hours was no fun.  I expected this on a Saturday, but not a Sunday.  I even started thinking that I should’ve left an hour earlier like I was going to pick my friend up so that I could at least be at the event on time.

I was fortunate enough to be listening to my Saints Row The Third Menu playlist since I needed all the tracks there being played to be played.  When that playlist was over (which is 99 minutes long), I was on the River Road exit just waiting to get on River Road.  My alarm even went off when I had set it to 11:15AM so that I could get in the Brett Dalton Autograph line.  Well we all know that wasn’t happening since I was still STUCK IN TRAFFIC!!  And why in the bloody hell are there no police officers directing traffic at the River Road exit?!  This should’ve been addressed a long time ago!  What in the bloody hell is wrong with the Rosemont Police Department!?

It took me two hours to get to the parking lot and park my car.  Since I arrived late, that meant that I didn’t have to wait in line to be let in and be forced to go to Hall A first.  So, with that being said, I went inside the Donald Stephens Convention Center, walked to Hall F, got stopped by a police officer so that he could tag my Blade Blaster (even though it already had a green zip line on it meaning it was already tagged, so I ended up with green and red zip lines on my Blade Blaster), then went into Hall F to go to the autograph line for Brett Dalton.

When I went to his line, I noticed something about Brett Dalton: he’s going by Black People Time too.  The line for him wasn’t that long, but he wasn’t there and his autographing was supposed to start at 11:30AM and it’s a little past noon and he wasn’t there.  One of the volunteers had asked me if I had an autograph ticket for him and that’s where Wizard World Chicago finally pissed me off: for this year’s event, you have to buy an autograph ticket either from online or from the booth area before you get in line for said person.  I probably would’ve been furious if my friend came along with me because I probably would’ve had to pick and choose which actor I wanted to autograph my Photo Op photo, but since he wasn’t there, it was just a minor inconvenience.

Wizard World failed to mention that you’re supposed to purchase autograph tickets beforehand and even if they did, it wasn’t clearly stated anywhere.  I guess that change was made to prevent people from not knowing what to do when it came time to make up their mind on what they want from the guest or to prevent congoers from saying that they’re there just to say what’s up to the guest.  I don’t know the reason, but whatever the case, that part sucked and it would’ve been nice if they had let us know beforehand.  Then again, maybe they did on their Facebook page and I don’t follow their Facebook page as I don’t care about any Wizard Worlds that are not Chicago.  Whatever the case may be, the point is I hit a roadblock, but it was a roadblock that could easily be resolved.

I got my tickets for both Brett Dalton and Nathan Fillion and I went back to the Brett Dalton line.  Guess what?  Brett Dalton still hadn’t shown up yet!  While I was waiting in line, I saw a Ninja Blue Ranger cosplayer talking with a Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Goku cosplayer and I asked the woman behind me to watch my stuff for me as I wanted to get a pic with the Ninja Blue Ranger cosplayer.  I had a few pictures taken and got back in line and that’s when Brett Dalton showed up.  The line didn’t take long before it was my turn and, well, there’s a little bit of a funny story before it was my turn to turn my ticket in.

The woman in front of me had made a customized Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2 Episode 1 poster and it looked amazing.  I should’ve taken a picture of it, but I was afraid that I was going to be warned of No Pictures, so I didn’t take the pic.  The thing was so amazing that the woman on the other side of the desk accidentally knocked her cup of water over.  Fortunately, not at the direction of the poster, but unfortunately, the cup of water got knocked over.  I was thinking to myself that poster was so amazing, it can cause somebody to spill their drink.  I should’ve used that zinger when I had the chance!

When Brett Dalton saw it, he was obviously amazed by the quality of work that went into the poster.  He and the woman got into a little chat and I was just sitting there thinking how Brett Dalton would feel if he had seen my photo op with him from the previous day.

If you’ve read my C2E2 2015 Day 3 blog, you would know that I had CM Punk sign the Photo Op photo that I had with him and he was surprised to see that the Blue Ranger cosplayer with his helmet on was me.  I neglected to mention that I did the same thing with his wife (then not-wife) back in 2013.  I was wondering if Brett Dalton would do the same thing.

When people would show the woman behind the table what they wanted autographed, she would ask for a name, write the name down on a Post-It-Note (how else do you spell Percy?) and stick that note on the thing that needs to be autographed.  When it came my turn, Brett Dalton was intrigued by my name and thought that it was an awesome name.  I’ve never had anybody compliment me on my name before, so that totally threw me off-guard for a bit.  But what also caught me off-guard was how he put my name and my Green Ranger cosplay together.

He first asked me if I had seen Thomas The Engine (which I’ve said I was aware of, but had never seen) and he told me that there was a train on that show named Percy and the color of Percy’s train was Green, so he thought me being the Green Ranger was pretty neat.  He also knew about Percy the Green Train because he has a little girl.  I didn’t know about that and of course, after I went home I Wiki’d the Percy train and he was right.  I guess I was meant to be the Green Ranger after all!

Anyway, he signed my Photo Op print with Go Go Hydra Rangers! on it (I was laughing on the inside when he did that and yes, I can read upside down), we shook hands, I told him I couldn’t wait for Season 3 of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (he couldn’t either) and I never saw him again.  Since Brett Dalton was out of the way, let’s try to have some fun at the con!

In case you didn't believe me.

After the photo was autographed and put back in its sleeve, I went to the SSJGSSJ Goku cosplayer and got a couple of pics with him.  Then I walked around the con killing time until it was 2PM.  At 2PM, it was supposed to be the Gotham Q&A panel with Ben McKenzie and Sean Pertwee in Room 24, but I had decided that I wasn’t going to be at the panel the previous night thanks to it being in Room 24.  Also at 2PM was the Jason David Frank Karate Hour thing.  I think I failed to establish that I had no plans on meeting with Jason David Frank, especially when he committed defamation of character on Austin St. John on a now-deleted Facebook post last year.

One of my Facebook friends was going to cosplay as the Yellow Tiger Ranger and she was going to surprise a 5 or 6 year-old little girl with some Mighty Morphin Power Ranger cosplayers at the karate class.  I said that I wasn’t going to be there, but since I decided to cancel going to the Gotham Q&A and Wizard World had the tendency to run on BPT, I figured I could get a few quick pics at the entrance maybe.

When I made it to the front entrance, I saw my Facebook friends with the Yellow Ranger one (she was wearing a skirt) along with a Pink Ranger cosplayer (who looked to be thick in all the right places).  There was also my RyuuRanger cosplaying friend being the RyuuRanger as usual and of course, I had to get a pic done with the four of us.  It was too bad there were no Red, Black and Green cosplayers that day, but three was enough.  When the ladies went in the room, I stayed out and went back to the show floor to check out the autographing area.

I forgot to mention that before I went to Brett Dalton’s line, I saw Nathan Fillion’s line and it was ridiculously short.  I figured it might’ve been because the autograph line was getting cut so that Nathan Fillion could go do his VIP Photo Ops and I was told that was exactly the case and that I should come back at 2:45PM.  When I got back down to the autographing area, I was just going to walk around and kill time until 2:45PM came, but when I got to Nathan Fillion’s line, to my surprise, he was just getting back to his table and it was only 2:25PM.  Of course, I wasted no time and got in line.

While I was waiting in line, I thought Nathan Fillion was going to ask me what happened with my shield since I wasn’t wearing a shield that day.  I guess that question’s best reserved for the Green Ranger as he didn’t ask me that at all.  Our conversation was brief as I don’t recall what the hell we talked about (it wasn’t Castle nor Firefly), but it was interesting where he signed his autograph: at his crotch area.  After we shook hands, I told him I couldn’t wait for Season 8 of Castle and I left, never to see him again.  Boom!  I got both Photo Ops autographed!  Now I was hungry!

Before I could get myself something to eat, I decided to check up Jason David Frank’s line to see if my Yellow Ranger cosplaying friend was there and she was along with her Pink Ranger cosplaying friend and the little girl wearing the Yellow Ranger dress.  It was a cute scene to see, so I decided to take a couple of pics and went to look for something to eat.

I did neglect to mention that in between the end of the Brett Dalton autograph and me meeting up with my cosplay Ranger friends, I went to the Dial Up Games booth (follow The d’Arda Sisters on Facebook as that’s their booth) and bought Diddy Kong Racing.  The game was being sold for $30, but I didn’t have one $10 bill nor two $5 bills on me, so I gave the guy 2 $20 bills.  He didn’t have any change on him, but a guy nearby gave me two $5 bills on his behalf.  I do believe the guy was JustJayce as I don’t remember any other black guy who has hair like that.  I also remember him because a couple days prior, he wanted to do a video of me and I did the Blue Ranger poses and the Green Ranger poses.  As of this blog, I haven’t seen a video of me nor the con on any of his sites.  He gave me a business card soon afterwards which is why I remember his name.

Since I was hungry (or rather wanted to get enough energy to withstand the remainder of the con), I decided I wanted some pizza.  So, I grabbed a slice of pizza, a bag of Skittles and a Sierra Mist bottle, paid for them and consumed them whole.  I was expecting to consume all of the pizza, but I normally don’t consume a whole bottle of pop/soda in one sitting, but that day was different.  While I was eating, I had noticed two Alice cosplayers at the same spot: one was the Disney Alice and the other was the American McGee Alice.  Since both Alices weren’t together, I quickly took a photo of the both of them before the Disney Alice walked completely away.  Maybe I’ll have some better luck getting a picture of both Alices come C2E2 2016!

After I was done eating, I decided to go to the Jason David Frank line to see if my Yellow Ranger friend and her Pink Ranger friend was there with the little girl.  It turned out they were there and they were getting their pictures taken.  Of course, I decided to put my helmet on and join the party.  We were getting so much attention that Jason David Frank decided to take a small break from his table and photobomb us for a bit.  It was an exhilarating moment for me and it made me can’t wait for C2E2 2016 when the pic requests will become massive as always.  Once the pic requests died down, I left those friends, never to see them again.  Oh, by the way, the Yellow Ranger is Procrastiranger Cosplay and the Pink Ranger is Bright Eyes Cosplay, so go follow them on Facebook!

I wondered if the other friends were still in the same spot they were in hours ago and they weren’t, but they were nearby at a window.  I decided to sit on by and have a little chat with them.  I had asked where Bright Eyes Cosplay got her suit from and the RyuuRanger friend said that both Procrastiranger Cosplay and Bright Eyes Cosplay got their suits from Raven Prior.  You know that had to have made his day; if you checked out his Facebook page, you’d know it did.

When I got ready to leave them, I said my good-bye and the RyuuRanger friend told me to tell my cousin that he said peace.  I was left baffled because I never took any cousin to any con, so I didn’t know who he was talking about.  Once I realized he was talking about my friend, I told him that that’s my friend from high school, but I was going to tell him (I neglected to tell my friend that he said peace, but at the same time I forgot to tell him that my friend wasn’t there).  Once I got back to the main hallway, I decided to stay there and take pictures and get my picture taken until it was 4:45PM.  I didn’t really leave until it was 4:46PM and I really didn’t want to leave, but there was nothing left to do with the remaining 15 minutes, so I left the building for the year and went to my car.

When I left, I decided that the music I would listen to was the music I had been meaning to listen to in a car for a long time, but could never do in the 2007 Kia Rio: my Pure soundtrack; Pure as in the racing that was made by the now-defunct Blackrock Studios.  The whole playlist is 108 minutes long and it turned out I needed those 108 minutes because it took almost that long to go back home.  There was traffic on the way to the Donald Stephens Convention Center and there was traffic on my way back home from the Donald Stephens Convention Center.  When traffic became free-flowing, it was near the St. Louis and Lake Shore Drive exit, which is the exit I normally take to take my friend home; that exit was exponentially backed up.  It looked like it was going to take hours before anybody could go through with the exit; my friend totally dodged a bullet there!

Other than traffic problems, I made it back with no problems.  I uploaded the pics on both my Flickr and Facebook accounts, changed clothes and went back out to put gas in the car (I had enough attention with my cosplay in traffic to the con, I didn’t want any extra attention) and came back.  I ended the night by watching the season finale of Daredevil and can’t wait for Season 2 of the show.  I also can’t wait for C2E2, Anime Central and Wizard World Chicago next year!

My interest in blogging had gone down the past few months or so and Livefyre’s problems didn’t make matters easier.  It’s quite baffling that after Livefyre made its debut, it’s caused nothing but trouble with MyIGN and notifications are still a problem.  The least IGN could’ve done is bring the blogs back to Disqus until the situation’s been fixed.  The articles still use Disqus, but MyIGN doesn’t?  That’s unlike IGN of the past and they had some mess ups in the past too.

When I had interest in doing this blog, I expected it to be a brief description of each day, but it ended up being split into four parts like it’s always been.  This year’s Wizard World Chicago was by far the best Wizard World Chicago I’ve ever attended and it was on par with this year’s C2E2, which was the best C2E2 I’ve attended so far.  The fact that the event didn’t piss me off that much showed how much improvement the con has made from previous years; I guess they read my blogs after all!

I will be back at C2E2 next year, but there’s one problem with it: it’s taking place in March!  If you know Chicago weather, it’s pretty unreliable in March.  Hell, it’s pretty unreliable as of this blog!  If it’s not warm enough by the time the event starts, I may have to go in there with a little bit of chill in my body; I better look for some Under Armour Cold Gear compression wear just in case!

With Anime Central, I will be back next year, but this time my friend’s coming along unless there’s a situation that causes him to miss the event.  If I’m on Instagram, I can finally upload pics there without being forced to crop them or find a way to make the whole picture fit in a 1:1 aspect ratio!  Also, if I’m at the event, I hope to hang out with foxrevolution a lot longer than last time!

For Wizard World Chicago, I don’t know who’s going to be there or what’s going to happen, but my only concern so far is the Spider-Man cosplay as the wrist passes aren’t going to fly with putting the costume on or off.  I’ll see though if I can find a way to take the passes off without cutting them or find a suit that’ll make it easy for me to put it on and still keep the passes visisble.  I know I wanted to be Spider-Man this year, but it’ll have to settle for next year.  Thank upgrading my PC for that!

As usual, a pic from this year’s event will be at the bottom of the screen and clicking on it will redirect you to my Flickr page which will show you all of the pics that were taken that day.  I know I was supposed to post some gaming blogs about things that pisses me off with this generation of gaming, but that got put off because of my lack of caring to post it.  These Wizard World Chicago blogs might get me to post the blogs and if they get released, I’ll let you know.  Until then, I’m out!

I had the videos done back in early June of 2015, but because I was too lazy and forgetful about them (also include editing them), I had them uploaded earlier this week.  I've already reviewed the Color Suits Blue Ranger suit and the Tech_Styles Green Ranger suit in written form (which you can read here and here), but I never reviewed the CosplayTree/Hunny_Lee Green Ranger suit nor the RavSeams Blue Ranger suit.  Well, I've reviewed them and you can check the embedded videos for them!

The total runtime is around 45 minutes and if you'd rather watch the videos in playlist form, you can go here and binge-watch.  Until the next blog, I'm out!

Earlier this year, I was on a big mission for myself: upgrade my PC so that I could play either the latest games or the games I’ve been meaning to play, but couldn’t because my hardware wasn’t up to date.  Also, I wanted to play some games that I had played before, but had framerate problems.  I first started with upgrading my PC from the AMD Athlon II X3 455 to the AMD FX-6300.  Then, in early July, I upgraded my GPU from the Radeon HD 6850 to the Sapphire Tri-X R9 290.  With that combination, I was going to see how much better games ran on my computer than in my previous PC.

I had played the following games this past summer and I’ll try my best to give a brief summary on all of them in the order that I played them: Tomb Raider (2013), BioShock Infinite, Sleeping Dogs, Spec Ops The Line, Saints Row The Third, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2 and Batman Arkham City.  Without further ado, here are my takes on all the games I’ve played this past summer!

I held out on this game for a while because of two reasons: TressFX and Rhianna Pratchett.  With TressFX, it was an exclusive AMD feature, but I didn’t have the GPU for it (a Radeon 7000 series card or above) and with the CPU I had at the time, I didn’t think I’d be able to run the game at 60 frames-per-second or higher.  I wasn’t going to try the game out until I had upgraded my GPU and CPU and I accomplished that this past July.  But even with the upgrade, I was a little bit hesitant on playing the game because of another problem: Rhianna Pratchett.

What do I have against Rhianna Pratchett?  What did she do to piss me off?  Well first, when IGN reported that she was writing the story of Tomb Raider, I was excited because a female writing a female leading character would do a female character right in games for once.  But then IGN mentioned that she did the story of both Mirror’s Edge and Heavenly Sword, which are both games I own for the PS3, and my interest for the game immediately dropped.  What do both games have in common?  Weak storylines despite having female protagonists!  After reading about that, I feared that the story for Tomb Raider was not going to be as good as the trailers made it out to be.  The verdict: the story pissed me off.

The framerate on the benchmark was fine (around 70-75 frames-per-second) without V-Sync on and the game ran very well for the most part (Shantytown was when I experienced a little bit of framerate issues the most, plus I had TressFX on the whole time), but when it came to the story, it was so infuriating to see how dumb the story was.  Seeing the story of Tomb Raider made me believe that Rhianna Pratchett’s storytelling ability had gone downhill as it was worse than Heavenly Sword and Mirror’s Edge combined.  Since we’re on the topic of Mirror’s Edge, I believe that the story on Mirror’s Edge was so bad, they had to retell it on the next game; THAT’S how bad Rhianna Pratchett’s storytelling is!

I could tell you everything that I saw wrong with the story, but GCN and Dartigan can probably explain it better.  Also, the game has the worst QTE I’ve ever experienced, which probably proves that I haven’t played Resident Evil 6.  It’s bad enough when you suddenly see QTE, but a QTE that tells you when to press a button and if you press it too early, you die?  I’m sorry to say this, but that’s BULLSHIT!!  Overall, after beating the game (which felt like took forever for me), I was like Xbox can keep Rise of Tomb Raider.  PlayStation and PC fans should be relieved they’re not getting a sequel to a crappy game!  A couple days later, it was announced that Rise of Tomb Raider will come to PC in early 2016 while the PS4 will get it in Holiday 2016.  DAMMIT!!

Before I move on, I’ll have to say this: Rhianna Pratchett, YOU SUCK AS A STORYTELLER!!

Unlike Tomb Raider, I have no idea what took me so long to play this game.  PhillyD had posted a BioShock Infinite Spoilers video on YouTube and I had it on my Watch Later list for a while and I made sure I didn’t see any spoilers for the game in case I decided I wanted to play the game.  After experiencing Tomb Raider, I wanted to try out anything else.  What appeared to be anything else to me was BioShock Infinite.

Using the benchmark test, I was getting over 100 frames-per-second.  Playing the game, at the beginning, movements were going so fast that I thought that I had V-Sync off by accident (I didn’t).  Also, I was disappointed to see that there were only two options for anti-aliasing: on and off.  Even when playing at 900p, the aliasing was still around (not the worst anti-aliasing, but I’ll get to that in a bit).  Despite that, the game was pretty good.

I knew I had heard Booker DeWitt’s voice from somewhere before and after looking at the credits, I saw why he sounded familiar: his voice actor’s Troy Baker, the same guy who voiced Joel in The Last of Us!  I was disappointed that you could only carry two weapons at a time and I was more disappointed that, like the first BioShock (I’ve never played BioShock 2 for DRM reasons), there was no New Game+.  Yes, the PS3 version of BioShock has New Game+ (which is BS by the way to anybody who owns BioShock outside the PS3), but I’m not counting that.  The fact that BioShock Infinite doesn’t have New Game+ and you still can’t upgrade everything in one playthrough meant that replayability of the game sucked.

The enemies were a pain-in-the-ass to kill and that was probably because I played the game on Normal instead of Easy like I usually do.  Other than those problems, I had some fun with the game and the ending was something I never saw coming.  If you had no idea why the game was called BioShock Infinite, you’ll see why, in the end, Infinite is in the name.

Was the game worth $60?  In my opinion, no it wasn’t.  I felt like the game wasn’t worth $60 to play through only one time and never play again because of the lack of New Game+ when you can’t upgrade everything in one playthrough.  But is the game worth having?  Yes it is, especially when it doesn’t have the DRM BS that was present with the first two BioShock games on PC!  If you haven’t played BioShock Infinite yet, go ahead and buy the game!

This game I was hesitant on playing because I didn’t know if the game was going to be as fun as the demo claimed it would be.  I’m really skeptical on open-world games because I had bad experiences with them in the past (GTA San Andreas got too boring and Scarface: The World Is Yours, inFamous and Just Cause 2 pissed me off), but I had a good experience with Saints Row The Third.  Was the same thing going to happen with Sleeping Dogs?  That’s what I was interested in finding out!

I decided to use the regular version instead of the Definitive Edition one as the regular one had the demo and I wanted to see how the regular version fared on my PC.  I’m disappointed that the full game has a benchmark mode and not the demo, so I used the benchmark tool to see where I was at.  I was at around 85-95 frames-per-second and that’s with the options turned on at the max (except Motion Blur as I had that option disabled because fuck Motion Blur!).  When I say “at the max”, I’m including anti-aliasing as well.

Normally, I would turn AA on at 2X and that’d be all I need for 900p, but for Sleeping Dogs, that’s not the case.  It’s bad enough that AA’s on automatically and there’s no option to turn it off, but it’s even worse when the highest AA setting is still not enough to eliminate aliasing.  Out of all the games I’ve played, the regular Sleeping Dogs has the worst AA feature I’ve ever seen.  You mean to tell me that with the highest AA settings, Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) and Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) are on High and I’m still seeing aliasing at 900p?  Sounds like poor optimization to me!

The demo ran fine on my old PC and it ran even better on my new PC.  Playing the whole game, I had trouble getting out of it as it was that fun.  I loved doing the regular missions, the side missions, dressing up Wei Shen in different outfits, street races and a bunch of other stuff.  Sleeping Dogs was by far the best non-parody open-world game I’ve ever played thus far and I can’t wait until next year or the Steam Holiday Sale arrives so that I can get the Definitive Edition of the game for a cheap price!

There was a problem for me with the demo of this game and playing the full game confirmed it for me: the game was a great rental, but a complete waste of $60.  The gameplay wasn’t spectacular or anything and I hated the wave of enemies I had to kill, not to mention regenerating health was about as bad as Uncharted Drake’s Fortune.

Unlike a lot of people who played the game, I wasn’t left breathless like what have I been doing playing shooting games in the past?  It didn’t get me to rethink how I play shooting games and the big reveal at the end made me realize that there were some giant plot holes with the game that many people probably overlooked because of the shock they saw of themselves playing the game.

I was glad I didn’t buy the game and I didn’t bother to try to get every intel in the game nor check out the different endings of the game.  I’m glad that I played the game, but I have no interest in playing the game again.  Now let’s go to a game I had played before, but was playing again.

I had played this game before (more specifically, last summer) and I had a hell of a time playing it.  I was interested in the game because I heard that you could transfer your Saints Row The Third character into Saints Row IV and I wanted to see how the game was like.  I enjoyed it, I laughed a lot and I was looking forward to playing the game for real the next time (I had played it via torrents) after Wizard World Chicago 2014.

I played through the first part of the game and when it came time to download my character from My Steelport, I ran into a roadblock: my character wasn’t available.  What the hell!  So I went onto Saints Row’s website only to find out that My Steelport was grayed out.  To make matters worse, the main website was doing a major overhaul because of THQ’s unfortunate closure (which didn’t matter as members of the site said that problems were happening with My Steelport well before THQ’s closing) and as of September 24 of this year, My Steelport was back online after at least 13 months of being greyed out.  That’s over one year people!  I couldn’t wait any longer, so I decided to recreate my character from scratch this summer and go from there.

Going from Easy to Medium was not a smart move on my end.  I died more times than usual and to make matters worse, a change in hardware meant nothing because the frame-per-second average was the same on my new PC as it was on the old PC.  To make matters even more worse, according to Raptr, I was better with V-Sync off than with V-Sync on.  When I have V-Sync on, SRTT was averaging 50-55 frames-per-second.  With V-Sync off, I was averaging 66-70 frames-per-second.  If that’s not proof of poor optimization, then I don’t know what is.

I got two trophies left to go before I’m done (which requires me to play the game all over again) and no, I’m not doing the multiplayer ones and the DLC ones!  The soundtrack is amazing and I’m on a mission to create some playlists involving the music in the game!

Anytime there’s news of new hardware, there was that one question that always came to mind: can it run Crysis?  Every time I had gotten some upgrades to my PC, that was the one question I would always ask myself.  I’ve played Crysis in the past, but I’ve never played it at the highest graphical settings because my PCs in the past couldn’t handle it.  My new PC could handle the demo just fine, but the question was could it handle the two final boss fights?  In short, no.

For the most part, Crysis ran fine without any framerate issues.  There was one point where I had to deal with a bunch of North Koreans and a few enemies with miniguns and when I ran to an area that had nobody around, the framerate stuttered.  I thought it was weird, but it didn’t hinder the gameplay.  Framerates really suffered with the final two boss fights as they got bad.  The final boss fights were pain-in-the-asses as is (I needed a strategy guide to find out how to beat them as the game failed to tell me how to do so), but poor framerates didn’t do me any favors.  To make matters worse, lowering the graphic settings seemed to make the framerates worse instead of better.

I was mad at Crysis 2 because it never told us what happened to Nomad, but after playing Crysis and seeing how Nomad’s character development sucked (plus the disappointing framerate issues to go along with it), I thought it was best that Nomad became an afterthought and I vowed never to play Crysis ever again.  Can it play Crysis?  How about Can Crysis Kiss My Ass?

After my bad experience with Crysis, I didn’t know how Crysis Warhead would perform.  Oh well!  Time to play Crysis Warhead and see if it’ll piss me off!

I had read that Crysis Warhead ran better than Crysis, but I couldn’t tell because Crysis Warhead ran just as bad as Crysis on my old PC.  With the new PC, it was a matter of if it’s true or not.  I can tell you for certain that the game does indeed run better than Crysis.  From now on, if I want to ask myself can it run Crysis?, I’ll ask instead can it run Crysis Warhead?  I know Crysis 3 should replace Crysis Warhead for the question thing, but I haven’t played Crysis 3 yet and I don’t know if I will play Crysis 3.  I’ll get to Crysis 2 later.

With Crysis Warhead, it was basically EVERYTHING Crysis should’ve been.  It had character development on the protagonist (you’re playing as Psycho instead of Nomad), you can see the protagonist’s face in cutscenes, more weapons, no need to pick up weapons to pick up ammo for a weapon in your inventory, boss fights weren’t complicated and no framerate issues that would hinder the gameplay.  The only framerate issue I did encounter was when I had to shoot a bunch of aliens with my comrades for a period of time, which was to be expected since there were a lot of characters on one screen.  It wasn’t too bad, so I didn’t die from it.

Speaking of aliens, I loved the fact that in this game, the alien encounters didn’t mean you’d stop seeing North Korean enemies, so I thought it was a nice change of pace.  Also unlike Crysis, the special weapon at the end can be used against any enemy instead of only being used when the plot demands it to be used.  If you can’t tell already, this is my favorite Crysis game and it’s the Crysis game that should’ve been Crysis!

Because of the disappointment of Crysis, I decided to give Crysis 2 another shot, despite the fact that I hate voiceless protagonists…

Crysis 2, like the previous Crysis games, didn’t run well for me in the beginning even though when it first came out, it had no DirectX 10 nor 11 support like the first two Crysis games did.  It was later on they patched the game to include DirectX 11 support, but even then I couldn’t run the game at the highest graphical settings.  It turned out there’s a reason why: with Crysis and (I assume) Crysis Warhead, they use up 1.5GBs of GPU memory in just 900p (that’s insane for a 2007 game!).  With Crysis 2, at its highest graphical settings (minus Motion Blur) in DirectX11 with the High Resolution Texture pack, it uses 1.7GBs of GPU memory.  That’s insane for a 2011 game!  Fortunately for me, I got a 4GB GPU, so I got memory to spare!  With my upgraded memory, it was time to see if I viewed Crysis 2 differently from the last time I played it!

This game so far makes my computer the hottest and run the loudest.  Without the A/C running, my CPU was at 58 degrees, but with the A/C on, it was at 53 degrees; all other games would have my CPU run around 48 degrees to 51 degrees.  But how was the game?  I spoiled it a little bit by saying that Crysis Warhead was my favorite Crysis game, but what does that make Crysis 2?  Overall, it’s better than Crysis (in terms of it didn’t make me throw a copy of the game in the garbage like I did Crysis because I hate the game that much), but it’s taken some backsteps from Crysis.

For example, the stealth is much better, although I hate that enemies can find you if they’re aware that you’re around, but the weapon choices (or rather, how you carry your weapons) was questionable.  In Crysis, you can have a handgun on one slot, two big guns on another slot and the special weapons on another slot.  In Crysis 2, you’re limited to two weapons and you can’t throw a grenade while holding a weapon like you could in Call of Duty games or even the previous Crysis games.

The game rarely did something that other games with voiceless protagonists don’t do: explain why your character’s mute.  The aliens are harder to kill than in Crysis and the fact that there are no quicksaves in the game’s pretty damn insulting (while the previous Crysis games do have quicksaves).  I also hate how often the checkpoints show up (maybe once every five or so minutes and never when you need them the most) and it’s because of those why I felt like Crysis 2 was a disappointment.  I don’t know how Crysis 3 is like, but if it’s anything like the good things of the first three Crysis games, I’ll probably consider it the best Crysis game to date, if you exclude Origin of course.

Now onto the last game, a game that had the biggest DirectX 11 issues to date and it still persist…

When I last played Batman Arkham City, I was getting upset that I had to quit the game after a few hours because it would run that poorly.  In DirectX 11, it was pretty much unplayable, but in DirectX 9, it was playable until the poor framerates came out of nowhere.  Also, SecuROM was the worst with this game because every time I played it after uninstalling SecuROM, the SecuROM files would return.  I don’t know if SecuROM was the cause of the slowdowns or if my CPU at the time (Athlon II X2 250) was the cause, but either way, Batman Arkham City was poorly optimized.  Hell, it looked like 2011 was the year of terribly optimized games for the PC!

Fast-forward to right now and my PC was finally able to handle DirectX 11 in the game.  What did I think about Arkham City this time?  It was better than I thought, but still no better than Batman Arkham Asylum.  I probably thought it was better than I thought because I had played Batman Arkham Origins last year and that game clearly told us that Rocksteady had nothing to do with that game.  It’s also a shame that Rocksteady didn’t know how to handle this game on the PC.

There are still framerate issues with the game and they mostly happen around the church.  With the challenge modes, they seem to happen when a fight’s about to start and it can sometimes happen when you’re trying to dodge knife attacks.  The framerate issues weren’t bad enough to cause me to go to DirectX 9 and I was able to play the game for as long as I wanted to too.  Oh, and I was playing the game without Games For Windows Live and SecuROM, so that might’ve helped as well!

I’ll have to look back at the reveal trailer later, but if memory serves me right, when Batman Arkham City was revealed, it was shown that Hugo Strange blackmailed Batman into coming to Arkham City as if he didn’t, then Gotham City would know that he’s Bruce Wayne.  If the story stuck with that, it would’ve been a better explanation as to why Batman was in Arkham City.  Instead, what we got was Bruce Wayne was forced into Arkham City and when he escaped capture, he let his curiosity get the better of him and he dressed as Batman to find out what Protocol 10 was.  Throughout the entire game, Batman had no reason whatsoever to be in Arkham City (and you’ll hear some criminals say the same thing) other than it was a lame excuse to get you the player to explore a world larger than Arkham Asylum.

After 4 years, I still think the story’s dumb and I still think that Arkham City was a disappointment.  I even think that it’s stupid that there’s a thing called Respawned Enemies in the game, especially the two missions with Catwoman dealing with Two-Face and Robin dealing with Harley Quinn in the Harley Quinn DLC.  I’m on the mix between whether this game is worth buying or renting, but overall, it’s not as good as Batman Arkham Asylum.  Plus, I can’t imagine playing Batman Arkham Knight in the state that it’s in as of this blog.

Those were all the games I played this past summer and as you can see, none of them were games from this generation, unless you count some of them being remade on this generation.  I will try out some current generation games on my new PC come next year and until that time comes, I’m out!

As a disclaimer, this blog was created in the early part of this year, back when Mortal Kombat X was a couple or so weeks away from being released and IGN was hyping the game to a ridiculous degree.  I do also realize that the most anticipated game of the year (Fallout 4) is coming out tomorrow and since this blog hasn't been changed in any way (with the exception of proofreading obviously and an upcoming game being switched to it being here), you won't see Fallout 4 in this blog in any way.  With that being said, enjoy the blog!

It was June of 2012.  I had nothing better to do, so I decided to watch some E3 coverage and see what was going on as it was happening.  What I ended up seeing was Ubisoft’s stage show and one of the games that they showed was a game called Watch_Dogs, a game that took place in my hometown Chicago and involved a lot of hacking from the protagonist’s cellphone.  The game was expected to come out the following year and I had the following feeling after the conclusion of the video: just like McKayla Maroney, I was not impressed.  But with the average gamer on the other hand, their level of excitement for it could not be contained.

I didn’t understand the hype for the game and I’ll never understand the hype for it.  November 19, 2013 was supposed to be the day gamers would finally get their hands on one of the most anticipated games of 2013, but the game ended up being delayed for early 2014.  Then the game was delayed again to the summer of 2014 and once the game came out, fans were so excited, they picked the game up and loved it.  They loved it so much, it was the 2014 Game of the Year and a sequel is in the…wait, fans were pissed at the game?  The game didn’t live up to expectations?  The game had ridiculous system requirements for the PC version?  And the game didn’t look even close to the vertical slice that was shown at E3 2012?  Wow!  Who would’ve guessed that the most hyped up game of 2014 ended up being a major disappointment?  I certainly didn’t, and-

Wait just a minute!  I was wrong yet again.  Watch_Dogs wasn’t the most anticipated game of 2014: that honor belongs to Destiny!  That game was so anticipated that one of the Collector’s Edition of the game got cancelled because of demand overtaking supply!  It was the first game being developed by Bungie that wasn’t exclusive to one system since Oni and gamers couldn’t wait to play the game because of Bungie’s name alone.  I think we know what happened in the end: it was a major disappointment.  What’s the lesson to be learned here?  Not only is the lesson being don’t believe the hype, but it’s also to stop getting hyped for games!

Lately games have not been giving us a reason to get hyped.  Not only that, it seems like gaming’s gotten worse and worse when it comes to marketing and the way the publishers have been treating gamers.  There’s been such a lack of trust lately that we can’t even trust people who write about games for a living.  When the whole GamerGate (god I hate using terms that has gate at the end) situation happened, there were articles that talked about gamers being dead.  When gamers got word about Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson, they felt like journalistic integrity in gaming was thrown out the window and that’s only with indie games!  If we’re in that kind of level of distrust, why are we still getting hyped for games?

The thing about gamers getting hyped about the three most anticipated games of 2014 was that they ignored their hate for the publishers in favor of giving those games a chance.  Titanfall was the first game to have come out and that game was published by Electronic Arts, also known as EA.  EA’s had a long history of getting distrust from gamers and Spore, Mass Effect 3, Origin and the infamous (now dead thankfully) Online Pass are examples of reasons why gamers typically hate EA.  But, for Titanfall, they were able to look past the fact that EA published Titanfall and got excited for the game.

Why were gamers hyped for Titanfall?  It was for a few reasons: first, it was labeled as the Call of Duty killer.  It was supposed to be the game that would challenge Call of Duty and be the game that would finally put an end to yearly releases of Call of Duty games.  EA tried it in the past with Battlefields 3 and 4 (and two Medal of Honor games), but the Call of Duty games not only still get yearly releases, but each release seemingly did better than the previous one sales wise.

What would make Titanfall different?  Well, Titanfall was being developed by Respawn Entertainment.  Despite the fact that Titanfall was Respawn Entertainment’s first game, its founders were some recognizable names: Jason West and Vincent Zapella.  What makes those guys so important?  Well, there would’ve been no Infinity Ward (one of the Call of Duty developers) without them since they were the originators of Infinity Ward!  They were unceremoniously fired from Activision after getting caught being in cahoots with EA.  Fans didn’t like their firing and they wanted to play whatever game West and Zapella made as they hated Activision that much.

This face fuels the hate in gamers everywhere!

So with that much history, it might explain why gamers were so hyped for the game.  It’s too bad though that it didn’t live up to the hype.  It was still a good game and it sold enough copies to make a sequel, but it was not the Call of Duty killer it was supposed to be.

Going back to Watch_Dogs, like I said before, I have no idea what got gamers so hyped up for the game.  Oh, you can hack any electrical devices around your premise!  So what?  Is there anything else Aiden Pearce can do that’s so mesmerizing that makes the hype worth it?  I wasn’t impressed with the gameplay on the vertical slice, but there was one thing I did noticed: gamers ignoring their hate towards Ubisoft.

Ubisoft has a bad history with the way they treat their customers, PC gamers being the biggest victims of them.  Actually, most of their bad history goes against the PC gamers.  They’ve had to deal with an always online draconian DRM, they’ve had games that constantly crashed on them and had sub-par graphics to top that off, and Ubisoft even got “caught” saying how much they don’t care about the PC gaming community.  Despite that, PC gamers ignored the bad blood they had with Ubisoft and gave them another chance.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen that every gamer (both PC and console) got the short end of the stick with Watch_Dogs.

Being the fact that Watch_Dogs is an open-world game, it’s susceptible to dealing with glitches.  Unfortunately, the amount of glitches that were present in the game was too much to bear; it looked like the game was rushed to release despite two delays.  TWO!!  And the excuse was that they had to fine polish the game?  Where have I heard that one before?

I’ve explained about why people were excited for Destiny, but I didn’t explain who published the game.  With Bungie separating themselves from Microsoft, they became a third party developer for the first time in years.  With them being a third-party developer instead of a second-party developer, it meant that they could make any game they want on any system they pleased.  Well, a third-party publisher decided to pick them up and have them be a part of the team.  That company’s name?

No! NO!! NNNNOOOOOOOOO!!

That’s right: Activision!  The company responsible for World of Warcraft, Diablo III and its always-online DRM, the death (and resurrection) of the Tony Hawk games, the overuse of Guitar Hero (a new one’s here y’all!) and the yearly releases of Call of Duty.  It was quite baffling to see that Bungie was able to do the one thing that Sony couldn’t do with its PS3: sell by name alone.  At least, that’s what it looked like it did in my eyes.  The love of Bungie caused the hate of Activision to go ignored and it resulted in gamers getting burned.

With those three games, it showed the problem that I have with hype: you’re bound to be disappointed.  If the level of excitement was low, then the game wouldn’t feel like a complete waste of $60.  $60 alone leaves me skeptical of every game that comes out and I’d wait for reviews to come out before deciding if a game’s worth my money.  I’m not saying that I’m better than some gamers who let hype get the best of them, but what I am saying is that I’m always cautious of games since I’ve been burned before by getting hyped for some games.

Earlier this year, Dan Stapleton had done an article on IGN saying that it’s still okay to get hyped for a game.  Despite that, even he shared the same thought that I had: you have to take every information that publishers deliver to you with a grain of salt.  We’d be better off if we lower our hype levels down and be weary of what information publishers give us, especially since Aliens: Colonial Marines, Watch_Dogs and more recently The Witcher III have burned us with vertical slices, something that should’ve been reserved to publishers and away from public eyes.

Earlier this year, I was getting upset with IGN because of their constant coverage of Mortal Kombat X because I saw what they were trying to do: get us hyped for the game.  To my surprise, the average gamer didn’t fall for it; microtransactions probably had something to do with it and the average gamer HATES microtransactions.  Well, maybe their DLC practice had been done well-oh crap, now I gotta blog about DLC because of Mortal Kombat X’s DLC practice!  Thanks a lot Warner Bros. Games!

I’ll end this blog with a video clip about hype, courtesy of Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z Abridged.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

This blog was done months ago as well and I wanted it to become outdated, but recent examples like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided proved that this blog remains relevant.  So without further ado, the blog!

I don’t know how many articles and blogs have been done about this, but I’m pretty sure it’s been done to death: Downloadable Content, also known as DLC.  There are people who are for it and there are people who are against it and it totally sucks that there are two sides of this predicament.  Even though there’s been more talk about the downside of DLC than the positive, I’m going to be talking about the downside part unfortunately.

In my last blog, I said that I was going to talk about Mortal Kombat X and how its DLC content has pissed me off and I’ll get to that in a bit, but right now, I’m going to talk about how DLC ended up being hated in general instead of some DLC content being hated understandably.

DLC has existed for a while now, even before DLC came into consoles thanks to a thing called Personal Computers, also known as PCs.  PCs can also stand for Public Computers, but how often do libraries and universities or other public venues allow gamers to play their games on there?  Also, do you know how much time you’ll need to install today’s games on PCs with a wireless internet connection?  On public Wi-Fi on top of that?  That’s why it’s best to have PC stand for Personal Computer instead of Public Computer.

As far as I can remember, DLC wasn’t created by developers and publishers; it was created by fans and it was all for free.  DLC as I knew it in the past still exists to this day and PC gamers can’t live without it; it’s called Mods.  We never called Mods DLC because DLC wasn’t a term that was being used until the Xbox 360 came out 10 years ago.  Also, DLC added content to games while Mods altered parts of or the entire game.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of another form of DLC that existed before DLC became DLC and it was something developers created, but it wasn’t in downloadable form: Expansion Packs.  Expansion Packs were additional content created for some games and, with some dignity, actually came out months or even years after the original game came out.  Yes, you had to buy the Expansion Pack, but it was understandable since they came in separate discs and, as I said before, they came out months or years after the original game came out instead of alongside the game.

DLC seemed fair at the beginning: buy some additional content at a proper cost and it’s yours; it doesn’t hinder the game and was never a part of the game in the very beginning.  If you didn’t like the offer or if you didn’t want the DLC, you can take a pass at it.  There had been some times when paying for DLC seemed ludicrous (horse armor for $2.50 in one Elder’s Scroll game comes to mind), but DLC was alright.  But then, at some point, DLC got out of hand and continues to to this day.

The first type of DLC that comes to mind is Day 1 DLC.  What Day 1 DLC is is content that could’ve and possibly should’ve been in the game already (Javik, I’m looking at you!), but because of some unforeseen circumstances, was left off the game and was available to be had once the game officially came out.  The main reason I’ve heard about why Day 1 DLC exists is because the game’s at a period where it’s under certification and once it’s under certification, there’s nothing to do with that game.  So, what’s left to do is to create some additional content that’s ready to be available the same day the game’s been made public.  There are some things I find wrong with that statement.

First, why isn’t DLC under certification?  If you Google DLC Under Certification, you’re going to get nothing but DesignLights Consortium certification instead of Downloadable Content certification.  If you look up that specifically, the closest you’ll get is Braid having its development hindered thanks to the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) certification process.  If DLC can get past the certification stage, then why can’t digital games?  The fact that I’m having a hard time trying to find info on the certification process of games must mean that the Under Certification excuse is nothing but an excuse for game developers or publishers to cover their own ass.

While we’re still on the subject of certifications, if a game was being certified, why is the release date the release date that it is?  If a game was taking longer to get certified and it didn’t get certified in time to meet the release date, then why didn’t the game get delayed or rather, why wasn’t the certification process used as the reason for the game’s delay?  Not one time have I heard the word certify when talking about games until the DLC fiasco happened, more particularly with Mass Effect 3.  Thanks Casey Hudson!

Sorry for getting offtrack for a bit, but that’s pretty much what Day 1 DLC feels like: going off-track to playing a game.  If Day 1 DLC is free, it’s a minor inconvenience as you’ll have to waste some time downloading that free content before you play your game (if you decide to go in that order), but when you’ve already paid $60 and then you’re being asked to pay some more for Day 1 DLC, it sounds like greed to me.  THAT’S where gamers have a problem with Day 1 DLC: you have to pay for it on top of the $60 you’ve already spent for that particular game in the first place!

I could go on to explain why Day 1 DLC exists (because of development time), but that’s probably nothing compared to another form of DLC that exists today and is, in my opinion, worse than Day 1 DLC: preorder DLC.  Never in my life have I seen preorders become important to the gaming industry like today when truth of the matter is, preorders aren’t even necessary.

I’ve preordered stuff before and I’ve sworn not to do them ever again.  The reason why is because I’ve had bad luck with preorders; everything I preordered ended up being a disappointment save for NBA Live 2004 and that was only because EBGames (before they became GameStop) didn’t have the GameCube version in stock the day the game was released and I refused to get the PS2 version.  I’m not saying that gamers are idiots (although there might be some companies who think so), but what I’m trying to understand is why preorders have risen over the years.  Wait, I think I know one of the reasons why: preorder DLC.

If you buy this game early, you’ll get this DLC absolutely free.  If you don’t preorder this DLC, you’ll either never get that DLC (as it was a preorder exclusive), or you’ll have to pay some extra money for it once it becomes available to everybody else days or months after the game’s been released.  Or, in the case of Mortal Kombat X, you’ll have to pay for that preorder bonus on the same day as the game’s release!  It’s been happening a lot and it seems to never stop either.

As bad as Day 1 DLC looks and as bad as Preorder DLC looks, there’s one more form of DLC that exists and it’s nearly impossible to defend: On-Disc DLC.  On-Disc DLC is DLC content that was in the game, but was locked out from gamers; the only way they could unlock that content is if they bought that content.  Paying for something that’s already in the game?  That’s preposterous!

When there’s On-Disc DLC in a game, gamers feel like they’re being lied to; it makes game publishers look more greedy than they already are!  They think we wouldn’t notice, but there are some of us who would like to hack our games (consoles or not) and when those of us who hack discover locked content that can’t be unlocked without paying for it, then that’s trouble for the content makers.

I know what some of you might be thinking: those guys were doing something illegal anyway.  Their consoles should’ve been banned because they were cheating.  That’s the thing though: they weren’t gaming online and their consoles were probably already banned in the first place and that’s just on the console side.  If there’s code on the PC version of the game, then that person’s not doing anything illegal; hell, the console users aren’t doing anything illegal, just as long as they’re not gaming online and using those hacks to try to win.

There’s pretty much no excuse for On-Disc DLC, but the content creators can try.  The excuse I’ve heard so far?  It’s the same one that was used for Day 1 DLC: the dreaded certification process.  If the certification process thing is true, then that would confirm one thing: deadlines are the bane of our existence!

Why aren’t developers being given more time to make our games so that On-Disc DLC doesn’t exist?  Well, it’s because of three things: development costs, publishers wanting games to be out in the allotted time they gave their fans and, most importantly, greed.  If On-Disc DLC was free, like I said, it’d be a minor inconvenience and gamers probably wouldn’t care if the content was already in the game, but the fact that you have to pay for it on top of $60 for the game in the first place, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that gamers were up in arms about it.

I wish I was done with the examples of DLC here, but there’s one more thing about DLC that upsets me and it’s thanks to Mortal Kombat X why I have a problem with it: the announcement of DLC before the game comes out!  Seeing that makes me think that the fighting game industry is going downhill as we no longer have secret characters or stages, but rather DLC characters and costumes.  That would be fine and everything, but when you announce that there are DLC characters before a game comes out, that lets me know that you’re holding something back.

When Mortal Kombat X had some news, they announced the following characters as DLC: Goro, Jason Voorhees, Predator, Tanya and Tremor.  10, 15 or even 20 years ago, those characters would’ve been hidden characters (and this announcement would’ve also been a spoiler alert), but now they’re DLC and they were announced as DLC, again, BEFORE the game came out.  My question to that is why?  Why are those characters DLC?  Why did they need to be DLC?  The only thing I can think of as to why those characters are DLC characters instead of hidden characters (the 7th generation had a funeral on that concept), it’s one thing and one thing only: $$$$$.  Out of all of those characters, Goro’s the only one who’s free and that’s only if you had preordered the game.  If you’re reading this right now, you’re too late: you’ll have to pay (as of today) $5 to get him.

The way Mortal Kombat X was handled made me want to not pick up Mortal Kombat X and do the same thing with it that I did with its older brother: wait for a Komplete Edition to come out so that I won’t have to deal with the DLC bullshot (Jim Sterling reference FTW)!  As much as I’ve raged against Mortal Kombat X for its DLC announcement, they’re not even the worst to have done it.  The worst example is a game that just so happened to have come out this year as well: Evolve.

I took a pass on Evolve because it’s an online-only game and I don’t do online games.  But, when I saw videos about it, I was shocked to find out that when Evolve was announced, 2KGames had the nerve to talk about DLC on the same announcement.  There were no screenshots nor videos nor any form of visual representation of the game, yet they were already talking about DLC for the game.  That’s waaaay too early to talk about DLC and the DLC content for the game didn’t do them any favors, let alone the many different editions of the game with neither one giving you everything.

When the game and its various DLC content came out, gamers were surprised not at how much DLC there was to the game (which was a lot), but how much all the DLC cost in total: $136.  That’s right ladies and gentlemen: all the DLC content for Evolve cost more than twice the amount for the game!  2KGames got called out for it and to make matters worse, the game was a disappointment.  It’s because of all bad forms of DLC I described (plus additional reasons) why I’ve never picked up nor torrented (and will never do either) Mass Effect 3.  It’s situations like this why gamers hate Ubisoft, Activision, Warner Bros. Games, 2KGames and especially Electronic Arts.

Everything I’ve described is the reason why the word DLC is looked down upon by some gamers.  The practice that’s been used right now is why DLC gets some bad rap, even if it’s free.  It’s gotten so bad that not even indie developers can escape its wrath.  Now I’m not fully against DLC, but what I am against is the poor use of DLC being the excuse for publishers to make more money out of us than they already are.  It’s their out-of-control use of it why gamers see DLC as evil and why they believe it will be the reason why the videogame market crash will happen again.

If the DLC practice continues, then gamers’ fears will come to fruition: content being purposefully held back and we’d have to pay the DLC to unlock the rest of the game.  How long will publishers test us before we decide to stop buying their games as buying their games mean we support the crap they’re dishing to us?  It doesn’t make sense, they need to put a stop to it and they have to realize that sooner or later, there’d be no market to rip off because it’s 1984 all over again and not the George Orwell version either.  WAKE UP PUBLISHERS!!

As much as I would love to put the blame squarely on the publishers and (in some cases) developers, they can’t take the whole blame.  Gamers are as much to blame as the publishers are for allowing this practice to happen because they keep on enabling it to happen.  If gamers want to stop the madness, they’d have to stop buying the madness.  But, there’s one problem to that: they can’t stop it!  Why?  The next blog I’m going to do will answer that question for you.  Until then, I’ll end this blog with another angry face and I’m out!

In the past, I talked about hype and how it can lead to disappointments; hell the year 2014 was the year of disappointments.  Dragon Age Inquisition is pretty much the 2014 Game of the Year and it would’ve gotten a lot more hype had Dragon Age 2 not ruined it for EA and BioWare.  I also whined and complained about the state of DLC today.  In the end, the inevitable has to be realized: my words will fall on deaf ears.

If my blogs are going to fall on deaf ears, then why talk about them?  Well, it’s because blogs are supposed to be things that you, the writer, can use to talk about whatever the hell you want.  It shouldn’t matter if people comment on the blogs or not, but for some people, it does.  But there’s another reason why my words will fall on deaf ears too: gamers are idiots!  Well, at least that’s what the title of this blog was originally going to be.

It’s not me who thinks that gamers are idiots: it’s publishers who think that.  The 7th generation had been about how much crap they would cram into us before we call foul on them.  Gamers whined and complained about SecuROM, Always Online, Online Passes, Preorder DLC, Day 1 DLC, DLC in general because of Preorder and Day 1 DLC, Season Passes, Day 1 Patches and the list could and probably does go on.  With as much whining and complaining that gamers do about those practices, with the exception of Online Passes, none of those things went away.  Why?  It’s because gamers are doing the one thing that enables those things to exist: they buy them.

The reason why I thought publishers believed that gamers were idiots is because they believe that gamers are hypocrites: complain about one thing, yet buy the same thing they’re complaining about.  It doesn’t matter how much they complain, if their actions say differently, then their words mean nothing.  Their actions show that they’ll go through any and all hogwash practices that come their way as long as they get to play their game.  It’s gotten so bad that the website ReclaimYourGame (a website that lets gamers know which kind of Digital Rights Management [DRM] is in every game possible) has shut down because, in their words, most gamers no longer care about the DRM in their games.

Every online-only game that’s ever come out on PC lately have had the same Day 1 problem: servers not living up to demands.  There had been server problems with Diablo III, Starcraft 2, SimCity and even World of Warcraft.  And those are the games that sold hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies within the first week of those games being sold.  That’s also despite the fact that most of the games on that list shouldn’t have had required online connections in the first place.  When gamers get a game even when the developer or publisher lets them know ahead of time that a draconian DRM measure is going to be in the game, it means that something’s seriously wrong with a gamer’s psyche, right?  Maybe, but it’s something other gamers don’t like at all.

Speaking of psyche, that’s the one thing that has to be studied: why are gamers letting publishers get away with nonsense?  They complain and complain, but publishers don’t want to stop because gamers don’t realize that their actions are causing the malarkey to exist.  When thinking about the actions of those gamers and their actions, I’ve thought about those gamers having a different type of personality: they’re not idiots, they’re addicts!

I’ve never met an addict in my life and I’ve never been one, so I don’t know personally how addicts are like, but I’ve read and seen reports on addictive behavior and some gamers are in that description of addiction.  If I’m not mistaken, an addict will go through as many obstacles as they can just as long as they get their fix.  If they have to jump through hoops, then so be it.  If they have to pay more than what they’ve paid in the past, they’ll pay the price as long as they have the money for it; if they don’t, then they can buy their addiction from somewhere else.  Lately it looks like publishers have seen the addictive behavior of gamers and they’re doing absolutely everything in their power to keep it going and nothing in their power to stop it.

Going through as many obstacles to get their fix?  It looks like some gamers have fit that description perfectly.  How many times have you heard of fans complaining about installing a game, installing its achievement/trophy and installing a patch to the game before they could even see one screen from the game itself?  And for a while, how many times have you heard gamers complaining about entering a code to go through the Online Pass?  It may have been aggravating, but it wasn’t enough to get somebody to quit playing a game (except for this one guy).  Well, at least I haven’t seen reports of gamers giving up on a game because of the obstacles they had to go through to play their game; they didn’t spend $60 on a game that they’ll never play!

Speaking of $60, that might be another reason why they’re addicted to their gaming: they need a reason to justify spending $60 on a game.  Like I said before, 2014 was a year of disappointments and gamers have been burned at least $180 on three anticipated games, but that’s not deterring them from spending another $60 on a game.  Why?  It’s because they need a $60 game to spend to justify their gaming habits and they need a $60 game that’s actually worth $60.  If they end up giving up on $60 games, they’ll get their addiction from indie games.

What about paying for more than you have in the past?  We’ve already been there when we made the transition from the 6th generation to the 7th generation and even before that.  Games did use to cost $60 or more during the cartridge era, but thanks to the PlayStation, $40 was all you needed for your gaming needs.  Then, when the 6th generation happened, $50 was the standard pricing of games.  Once the 7th generation came along, the price went up to $60.  Infamous Activision CEO Bobby Kotick once said that he wanted to have games cost at least $70 and that was before the transition to the 8th generation (as a joke).  With preorders and Collector’s Editions, gamers are already paying more for games even though most preorders cost the same as the original game without the bonuses.

Some addicts have been known to stealing from loved ones in order to keep their fix going and I don’t think gamers have gotten that far, at least not yet.  I haven’t heard a story about a gamer stealing some money from a loved one to buy a game.  Then again, last season I saw a case on Judge Mathis where a defendant used the money he borrowed for something to buy 4 $60 games (something he was not supposed to do with the money) and had the nerve to post them on Facebook.  I wish I could say the same thing about trades, but I read a long time ago about the time a guy broke into a girl’s apartment, stole her PS2, memory cards and games and sold them to EB Games.  Granted, the thief didn’t do that to pay for some games, but EB Game’s mishandling of the situation caused it to be headlines.  To make matters worse, it happened in Florida and that was before Florida had the stigma of being a corrupt state judicial wise.

Another sign of addiction is a dependency on the thing the addict is addicted to.  There’s no way gamers can be dependent on games, right?  Well there’s one case where a guy spent 50 straight hours in an internet café playing StarCraft before his heart decided it couldn’t handle his addiction anymore.  Hold on, that was just one unfortunate incident; it couldn’t have happened to anyone else.  Well, addiction can also make you neglectful of your surroundings just like the couple who let their baby die after taking care of a baby in a videogame.  Dammit, even a single mother let her baby die thanks to playing videogames!  These people aren’t making cases for gamers not being addicts!

Addiction can also get addicts to kill those that either try to prevent their addiction from continuing or they do it because of their addiction.  Gamers don’t kill people because their addiction was taken away from them, right?  Well, there’s that one infamous story where a teenager killed his mother and almost killed his father because they took Halo 3 away from him.  I spent another 5 minutes after that sentence trying to come up with excuses to see if there were any patterns addicts made that gamers don’t and my mind went blank.

Even though the average gamer doesn’t show the signs of addiction and there’s no telling if gamers buying the games that are enabling draconian practices by publishers is a direct result of addiction, gaming addiction is real.  We may deny it all we want, but it’s true.  As a matter of fact, the first thing an addict has to do when they go into recovery is to admit that they have an addiction and it’s something I think we’re seeing gamers doing right now.  There’s no such thing as a gaming addiction and I don’t have an addiction seems to correlate with each other.  There’s been no real diagnosis of a gaming addiction, but the signs have been there.

In a bit of a surprise, there are recovery centers that specialize in video game addiction.  There used to be only a small part of a gaming addiction recovery center and they were located in the least popular gaming countries (I think), but lately, those centers have expanded, which goes to show that this is a serious issue.  Gamers have the same benefit of going to gaming rehab as any other addict (probably except for the cases of every episode of My Strangest Addiction), but for the most part, the most popular rehab facility is in South Korea; doesn't mean there aren't any in America or any other places.

Recovery can happen online too, but in-person’s probably the best way to do it.  Of course though, before a gamer can go to rehab, they’d have to admit that they have a problem and it’s something game publishers don’t want to have happened to their fans.  Then again, just by mentioning the words addicts and rehab, I’m probably going to be ignored again.  So much for that I guess!

If the supposed gamers weren’t and aren't addicts, they would stop buying new AAA games and move on to indie games.  It could and may hurt AAA games in the future, but if gamers want that wake-up call to publishers, it’s something that must be done.  I know it’s a sacrifice and sacrifices hurt, but sacrifices have to be made if change is to be made.  And I’ll end on that note and stop talking about gaming for a while, or at least for the most part.  Until the next blog comes, I’m out!

This blog is an old one too, but given the fact that I've already started this series, I might as well continue it.  Also, I had no idea that Just Cause 3 was coming out today until a few days ago and with the problems that it has on both console and PC, this blog came at the right time.  With the exception of a picture and some obvious proofreading, nothing has changed with the blog.  Enjoy!

I remember back in either 1997 or 1998.  The game that I was playing was NBA Live ’98.  It was the first of two games I had owned that utilized a tool called 3DFX and I remembered not being able to use 3DFX because I didn’t have a 3DFX card, let alone a GPU.  I also remember something that always bugged me: the AI shoving me frequently to get a steal and not get called for a foul.

At the time, I had foul calls all the way up.  Despite that, the AI was never called for a foul most of the time when it shoved me.  If I shoved the AI right back?  100% of the time, I’m called for a defensive foul.  It was definitely a bug that needed to be fixed and if anybody had the console version of the game, they were screwed.  If they had the PC version like I did, then they would receive a patch that fixed the refs being biased, but it didn’t stop the frequency of when the AI shoved the player to get an easy steal.

What am I getting at with the nostalgia of NBA Live ’98?  I was thinking about the time when patches did come out, but weren’t as frequent as they are now.  I also looked back at the times of NBA Live ’98 because that was also at a time when games weren’t so, so glitchy at a time of release that patches had to be rolled out immediately.  This is one of those times where it looks like games have gone downhill.

We’re living in a time right now where it seems to be the norm that games come out and are so glitchy that they’re nearly unplayable.  It was something Microsoft tried to prevent from happening when they implemented their patch rules with the Xbox 360, but it was something fans, publishers and developers didn’t like because it meant that everybody would suffer from non-fixes that would make or break a game.

What was Microsoft’s patch rule?  It was that game developers were allowed to create one patch for a game for free and it’d have to be approved by Microsoft before it could get released.  If a game needed to be patched again, then the game companies would have to pony up some cash to Microsoft.  How much?  Tens of thousands of dollars!  It was supposed to get developers and publishers to make sure their games were ready to launch without much issues and that only one patch would be necessary for a game.  If you’ve been following videogames over the years, you would know that one patch is not enough; hell, sometimes a second patch is needed because the first patch messed things up.

Not looking into the 8th generation, I had a theory that the policy of Release Game Now, Patch Later was a dumb thought process.  It’s something that developers would HATE to have to go through.  Just imagine: you’ve been developing a game for months, with little breaks and spending most of the days working on the game.  The game’s finally done with and within minutes of other people playing your game, you find out that you have to go back to the drawing board and fix numerous issues with the game.

The latest game that has done this strategy, and it's a sad example.

If it’s just a few minor bugs, it’s no big deal.  But when it’s bugs that hinder gameplay and there are numerous amounts of it, it can be a frustrating experience.  Why would a developer purposely leave a game unfinished and think that it’d be best to patch the game after its release?  It doesn’t make any sense!  If that’s their way of thinking, then it’ll be no wonder why companies like Acclaim, LJN, Midway and THQ went under.

Is this the case?  Fortunately and unfortunately, it’s not the case at all.  It’s fortunate because my thought process on this whole matter is absolutely correct: game developers are not purposefully leaving a game unfinished with the sole purpose of patching it up later (I found that out from a Jimquisition video, though which one I can’t remember).  It’s unfortunate because it’s the publishers that are forcing game developers to halt their business so that the games can be released as soon as possible, just to get patched up later.  With the way gaming businesses have been going nowadays, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the publishers are doing these things.

How many times have you heard people say the following: why are these people having us pay $60 to do QA?  We shouldn’t be their game testers!  If you’ve heard that term being used too many times, then you know that’s a problem for today.  Going as late as the 6th generation, you’ve probably never heard people complain about being used as game testers and wasting their money to do so.  If you have, then not as frequently as right now!  If you think it’s frustrating for us to be beta testers after spending $60 on a game, then imagine how frustrating game developers have to be when they have to do all they can to fix a game that prevents them from making other games.

Like I said before, this was my thinking process for just the 7th generation.  With this generation, the situation’s gotten worse.  The Release Now, Patch Later scheme has been happening so frequently, it’s amazing that people will still buy a game on Day 1.  It’s been happening so frequently that even re-releases have to be patched.  Just recently, it was announced that Ultra Street Fighter IV was going to be played on the Xbox 360 at EVO 2015 instead of the PS4 because of the issues with the PS4 version.  This is unacceptable!

What excuse can I come up with for why games are being shipped more broken than ever?  It’s the same excuse as before: publishers forcing developers to stop working on the game so that it would be released at a specified date.  It seems like that’s happening more frequently because of development costs and it looks like it’s cheaper to patch a game than it is to have enough time to make sure that the game’s less glitchy as possible.  I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but when things are looking the way they’re looking right now, it’s not good at all.

This generation actually went off to a bad start when the consoles were released.  Nintendo started it all by implementing Day 1 updates to the Wii U and for some apparent reason, Sony and Microsoft followed suit with the PS4 and Xbox One respectfully.  If I’m not mistaken, to this day the PS4 and the Xbox One still don’t have the features Sony and Microsoft promised were going to be on all of their systems.  I don’t ever remember this incident happening with the Xbox 360 and the PS3, so there should be no excuse as to why features were missing from the systems on launch day.  All of those systems weren’t made by publishers nor developers, so trying to figure out why those systems launched without all of their features has to point to one reason and one reason only: $$$$$.

It’s 2015 and this trend needs to stop.  It’s time that everybody needs to tell these game people that they need to get their act together or else we’ll have to relive 1984 all over again and some of us weren’t even around in 1984!  Game journalists, game “journalists”, YouTubers, bloggers, gamers and everybody else who cares about games should call these people out and let them know that we can’t and we won’t stand for this nonsense anymore.  Everybody who are working on games and game systems, here’s a message to you: GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!!

I knew this was going to be a hard blog for me to do, and it quite was.  I came into this blog wanting to talk about how the thought process of Release Now, Patch Later was a dumb concept, but upon doing the blog, I noticed that not only was it a dumb concept, but it was a dumb concept that’s growing.  It’s become another one of those dumb trends in gaming and it’s another instance where the publisher has to be blamed for the state of our gaming industry.  If I come up with something else that’s wrong with this gaming industry, it’ll show you how bad things are going.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

This is the last gaming blog of the year and it's the last gaming blog of the series.  It's an old blog, so some things are going to look outdated.  With the exception of some parenthesis statements and some obvious proofreading, this blog will remain unchanged.  Enjoy!

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a gamer.  Wait, that’s not right: I started gaming in 1992 when I was seven years old and had received the SNES.  Even when I was playing games on the SNES, there was one genre I’ve always been fond of: fighting games.  Even though Street Fighter II had started the fighting game genre, the first fighting game I’ve ever played was Mortal Kombat and that was back in 1993 if I’m not mistaken.  I’m saying if I’m not mistaken because my father had bought the game from a flea market.  Also, this was obviously before the ESRB came into play.

My favorite fighting videogame franchise has always been Tekken thanks to playing a demo of Tekken 2 at one of my cousins' house.  But, I couldn’t help but notice that with all of the fighting games I’ve received from the 7th generation, there has been one trend that’s happened with them: a lack of secrets.  It’s like Downloadable Content has become so popular that fighting games have disregarded secrets in favor of DLC, especially Day 1 DLC.

For the 7th generation, I’ve only got three fighting games: Mortal Kombat (2011 version), Tekken 6 and Tekken Hybrid (with Tekken Tag Tournament HD and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Prologue).  Out of all of those games, how many total hidden characters are there?  Two!  Well, technically it’s two, but since I bought the Komplete Edition of Mortal Kombat, those two characters were already unlocked; I just needed to complete Story Mode in order to “unlock” those characters for a couple of trophies.  Just one game had two unlockable characters while the rest didn’t have unlockable characters; everybody were available from the start!

Not only did unlockable characters no longer exist, but so too did secret stages.  There was one secret stage in Tekken 6, but there was no way to access it unless you got lucky with the random stage select thing.  Granted, hidden costumes did exist with Mortal Kombat and Tekken 6, but I hated the fact that with Tekken Tag Tournament HD, there was no way to unlock anything as everything was already unlocked from the start.  What’s the point of playing these re-releases on newer systems if there’s no reason for me to play it for unlockability?  It just didn’t make any sense to me.

Sticking with Mortal Kombat, I thought it was odd that the next Mortal Kombat game wasn’t called Mortal Kombat 2 (since this is the sequel to the start-all-over Mortal Kombat), but rather Mortal Kombat X.  We should all know that the Roman Numeral X stands for ten and this is technically the tenth Mortal Kombat game (I still have no idea why Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe counts).  Then, I started looking at the DLC and I couldn’t help but to be pissed.  Goro, Tanya, Tremor, Jason Voorhees and Predator are all DLC characters and they were announced before the game even came out!  What in the bloody hell is this!  Even though I don’t own this one game, even I know that Injustice: Gods Among Us doesn’t contain hidden characters, so this is a NetherRealm Studios thing.  Not only that, but it seems to be a thing that’s done with practically all fighting games.

What has happened to the state of fighting games?  Why are there no hidden characters in these games, but instead, DLC characters?  After thinking for some time about why that’s the case, the horror crept in on me and it’s a horror that I think is reality: the 7th generation has allowed either the developers, publishers or both to cater more to online gamers than to offline gamers.  I think it’s a horror in reality because it’s already been done with local multiplayer games.

When looking back at the 6th generation, there were some online gameplay, but games still had single player gamers in mind; it was practically a generation that catered to both online and offline gamers, with the exception for the GameCube for the most part.  When the 7th generation got started, there were certain racing games (like the first Motorstorm game) that didn’t even allow local multiplayer gaming; if you wanted to game against other players, online gaming was the way to go, nowhere else.  Sports games still allowed local multiplayer and to be honest, fighting games did too, but it looked more like online gamers were the primary focus for multiplayer gaming in that generation than ever before.

Did Sony and Microsoft force game makers into making their multiplayer games online only?  Maybe, but I think the publishers are at fault for it as they’re the ones who think online multiplayer is the now or never.  Hell, Spec Ops The Line was originally never going to have multiplayer, but it got tacked on because the publisher forced them to include it.  I don’t know if that’s what happened with fighting games today, but it’s quite sad that there’s no such thing as unlockable characters in the 7th generation and beyond because online gamers matter more than offline gamers.

Why is it that online gamers matter?  Is it because that’s the closest we’ll ever get to playing in the arcades?  Is it because over 50% of gamers play online more than offline (even though there are no statistics that proves it)?  I think neither one of those is the reason why: I think the reason why online gaming is the focus of the games is because of the very thing I’m complaining about- unlockable characters.

I’ve never played fighting games online, so I can’t comment on if what I’m saying is true or not since this is pure speculation on my part.  I think that the problem with fighting games in terms of online gaming is the fact that there are people who will go online right away and they can’t fight against certain people because both gamers don’t have the unlockable character.  What I mean by that is one person has the unlockable character while the other gamer doesn’t and it causes a conflict of interest.  So, to be safe for both fighters, the developers decided to save themselves the trouble and have all the characters unlocked and squash whatever problem that could be had there.  That’s where the other problem comes in and it’s exactly the topic of this blog: abandoning offline gamers.

I loved the fact that in past Tekken games (including the disappointing Tekken 4), I could play as different characters and unlock new characters every time I beat the game.  With Tekken 6, I was left disappointed that the only reason to play it was to unlock one thing and one thing only: trophies.  I hate the idea of unlocking trophies as the only thing worth playing a game for and it makes me feel like I wasted a lot of money on that one game (in Tekken 6’s case, $20).  Plus, when Scenario Campaign mode’s the main focus for Tekken 6 (with the majority of unlocks for that game being in that one mode), you know Bandai-Namco screwed up Tekken 6.  I was just so disappointed with the three fighting games that I had that I didn’t even bother to try to pick up other fighting games, not even Dead or Alive 5 (more on that in a future blog).

Speaking of Dead or Alive 5, I gotta give kudos to Tecmo on being the only company I know that didn’t throw in Day 1 DLC characters in the original game.  Yes, DLC characters did exist in DOA5 (and its re-releases), but they came after the game’s release instead of the same day as the game.  When looking at the cheats section (the 7th generation got rid of those too didn’t they?) of DOA5 on GameFAQs, I saw that there are 5 characters who can be unlocked.  Even though that’s a low number compared to the previous generation, that’s 5 more than the average fighting game of the 7th generation!  Still, kudos to Tecmo for doing things right with DOA5!

There is a solution to this problem, but it’s not going to be easy because you can’t please everybody.  The one solution I can think of is balance; treat online and offline gamers fairly.  I’ve thought about solutions that could be beneficial, but since I’m not a developer, I can’t say if these ideas would work or not; the only way to find out is if you people will agree that certain things would work.

One solution I’ve thought of was have hidden characters offline, but have them unlocked online.  That sounds like the best solution, but I don’t know if offline gamers will be okay with it.  Maybe it’s not going to matter because they’re not planning on gaming online anyway (like me) or if the online gamers do want to spend their time offline to practice their character, but they can’t because that character’s a hidden character, but again, not an easy solution.

Another solution I’ve thought of was to have the hidden characters remain hidden if both gamers didn’t have that one hidden character, but that would probably piss off the gamer who wants to play as that character, but can’t because the other person hadn’t unlocked that character yet.  Damn, another level of frustration there!

I can’t think of any other solution except for the last one and it’s the common one we’re seeing today: have every character unlocked, offline gamers be damned!  It’s the path that I’ve seen continually going down from these game makers and it’s turning me away from fighting games.  If I was to play those games, I’d be left to torrent them just to see if they’re worth it and that’s after it’s been months or even years since the game’s been out.

I wish there was a solution to solve this problem, but I feel like with the 7th generation and later, fighting games are starting to cater to the online gamers and are offering nothing worth investing to offline gamers except for achievements and trophies.  I’m not saying that they should abandon online gamers, but what I am saying is to get back to the 6th generation where there was a balance for online and offline gamers.  I don’t know how DOA5 is like online, but if Tecmo can get it right, why can’t the others?  Now that I think about it, I should get DOA5 Final Round as my PC hadn’t seen a fighting game since the MS-DOS version of Mortal Kombat 3 (again, more on that in a future blog).

Are there any concerns you have about fighting games today or do you think I’m overreacting to this thing?  Whatever the case may be, put your thoughts in the comments and try to keep it civilized.  Until the next blog, I’m out!

Earlier this year, MyIGN was messing up on me when it wouldn’t allow me to publish my blog called 8 Things I Hope To Accomplish in 2015.  Every time, nothing would happen.  Just as a test, one time I named the blog Testing to see if how I was doing the blog was the problem and lo and behold, it worked!  Of course, this was after I posted my blog on the MyIGN section of the IGN boards, making it the first time ever I posted anything on there.  That actually reminds me: did I get any new comments since the last time I was there?  Nope!  Okay, then let’s move on!

Did I do everything I wanted to accomplish this year from that blog?  I knew at the very beginning that I wasn’t going to accomplish everything on the list, but what I was interested in was which things was I not going to accomplish.  So, going by the list in the order that I put them in on the blog, let’s find out if I did accomplish those things or not!  Starting with…

Going by Star Fox 64 terminology, this one was more Mission Complete than Mission Accomplished.  I was set out to make 4 hardware upgrades to my PC and I only accomplished half of that.  I did get my new CPU (which I picked up when I released that blog) and I did pick up my new GPU this past summer, but I did not pick up a new monitor and I didn’t pick up the AverMedia Live Gamer HD capture device.

I was having a hard time determining which 1080p monitor I wanted to have and felt like this summer was not the best time to get one.  Since I’ve decided to skip getting the monitor this year, I’ve decided to pick one up next year that has a 144hz refresh rate, 1ms response time and has a DisplayPort link on it.  Size wise, I’m thinking somewhere between 21” and 24” as my desk’s width will only allow those sizes.

With the Live Gamer HD, it still cost too much for me to pick up as a capture device and even if that wasn’t a factor, another factor has determined that it’s too early to pick it up.  So, I’ll wait another year at least for it.

This I did do, but it wasn’t that good without any Doritos.  I ended up using too much rotini (the whole box), too much whole kernel corn (a larger portion than was supposed to be in there) and to top it off, I used the wrong flavor.  Why in the hell does a McCormick meal need a Lawry product instead of its own?  That makes no sense to me!

I tried again a couple months ago with the right ingredients this time and it tasted delicious.  I’m planning on making this thing one more time before the year ends.  On this front, Mission Accomplished!

I thought this one was going to be easy.  Only $230 and probably a little bit extra if I bought the boots for it, but in the end, this one is a Mission Failed.  With other stuff I had to buy and not having the finances to get the cosplay before any of the cons I attended this year, it had to be another full Power Ranger Cosplay Year for me.  I will remedy it by buying the Spider-Man cosplay next year and it should be ready before C2E2 2016, which to my surprise is happening March 18-20 of that year.  If you see a C2E2 2016 blog in March or early April next year, that’s why.

Anime Central’s a 3-day event, or rather a 72-hour event as the event lasts like that long.  There are activities at the event that happens overnight, so it’s like a non-stop event.  I would’ve only attended the show floor events as the NBA Playoffs are more important to me (plus I’m not really into anime), but the only day I wanted to attend was Saturday.

I’ve heard that getting tickets on-site was a tedious process and I wanted to avoid that.  Unfortunately, in order to get one-day passes, that’s the only way.  If you bought a pass online, it was the 3-day pass only.  I could’ve attended Anime Central all three days if my new Blue Ranger suit was ready by then, but the suit maker (Raven Prior or RavSeams) didn’t get to my suit by that time, so I only went for one day.  You can read about my experience at Anime Central 2015 here.  I said at least one day, I was there for one day, so on that front, Mission Accomplished!

After going through Wizard World Chicago last year, I had the feeling that I was wasting my time dressing up in cosplay on Day 1.  Why?  Because practically nothing happens on Day 1!  I’ve heard even San Diego’s comic con is a wasteful day on Day 1 and that event sells out of every ticket every year in less than 24 hours!  Since I had never not cosplayed at Wizard World Chicago, I wanted to see how it was like to not cosplay there for just one day.  With this, it’s the easiest Mission Accomplished I’ve ever had this year.

A couple surprises came my way: my friend didn’t attend and the temperature dropped exponentially.  The temperature dropped so low, I had to go from wearing shorts to wearing jeans.  I was still complimented on wearing the #45 Michael Jordan jersey though!  It was tempting of me to skip cosplaying altogether at the con, but I didn’t do that and I will continue to not cosplay Day 1 of Wizard World Chicago until they start selling 3-day passes there.

Okay you guys, this will be the last time I’ll post this on my wishlist.  Does that mean that I finally got a PS4 in my possession?  No!  This was probably the easiest Mission Failed I could’ve ever accomplished!

I didn’t get a PS4 not because I thought that it was too expensive for me.  I didn’t get a PS4 not because PC upgrades and cosplay upgrades got in the way of getting one (although it could contribute to it, I have to admit).  The reason why I didn’t get a PS4 is because of one reason and one reason only: there are no games I want for it!  The same with the Xbox One and Wii U!

I don’t know if it’s because I’m 30 and at that age, it’s going to take a lot to impress me, or the amount of broken games that’s been out recently, but there hasn’t been a game that has my attention.  Even if a game does have my attention, it can be played on PC which has better graphics, shorter loading times (depending on hardware), smoother gameplay with higher frame-per-second averages and can be played on higher resolutions if I wanted to get a higher-resolution monitor.  When it comes to exclusives, I can’t think of one that I want.

I’ve decided to give up on wanting a PS4 and just leave it alone.  If I ever do pick up a PS4 or an Xbox One, I’ll let you guys know.  In the meantime, it’s “PC Master Race” for me.

The last time I bought a game in the year that it came out, it was Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed on Steam.  I had played the demo on my PS3 and loved it.  When it was free one summer weekend, I tried it out on my PC and loved it.  So that I wouldn’t lose my achievements, I bought the game and it’s probably the most expensive game I’ve ever bought on Steam and that’s despite the fact that every game I bought on Steam was through a sale!

Did I buy a 2015 game this year?  Okay, so maybe I was wrong with the PS4 entry: this one is probably the easiest Mission Failed I’ve ever had this year.  I said in the blog that the only games I was interested in were Tekken 7 and Batman Arkham Knight.  Despite the fact that this year is Tekken’s 20 year anniversary, Tekken 7 hasn’t been released on console yet.  It’s been confirmed that it will come out on PS4 and Xbox One (since it utilizes Unreal Engine 4, it won’t come out for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U), but it’s not coming out this year.

With regards to Arkham Knight, if I had a PS4, I might’ve been able to pick this game up.  On PC, that would be extremely tough since Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady have a bad history with PC releases of the Batman games.  I said in the blog that I was interested in seeing how they were going to screw up Batman Arkham Knight for PC and it’s by far their worse release not only this year, but ever.  So much so that I did a blog about it!  It continues to get mixed reviews (more bad than good), so it looks like I’ll have to pirate it to see if it’s worth a purchase or not.  Even if I do get Arkham Knight, not this year for sure!

The only game I’m interested in getting this year is Dragon Ball Xenoverse and I haven’t seen a sale that’s good enough for me to purchase it.  I feel like the game’s not worth $50, even though I’ve seen gameplay footage of it and it reminds me of the Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi games (a series I like, especially the second one), but we’ll see if I pick it up before the end of the year.  If I do pick it up before the end of the year, then the PS4 will be the easiest Mission Failed of the year.

So far this year, I’ve only bought five games: Super Mario 64, Killer Instinct Gold, BioShock Infinite, Diddy Kong Racing and Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition.  Do you know what all 5 of those games have in common?  Neither one of them came out in 2015!  Again, if I pick up a 2015 game by the end of the year, I’ll let you guys know.

Out of all the 2014 blogs I did that didn’t get released, I only posted one of them and that one was When Putting The Blame Goes Wrong.  I had only three blogs I wanted to publish and the other two (two Super Sentai show reviews) never got published because I forgot about them.  Even if I didn’t, I fell out of Super Sentai and I hadn’t watched a new Super Sentai show since the end of my favorite Super Sentai series Jyuuden Sentai Kyoryuger.  If I ever post those blogs next year, I’ll let you guys know.

As usual, once next year arrives, I’ll let you know which blogs I had done this year that didn’t get published and since I have no blogging ideas for next year with the exception of the usual con blogs, I should post them, especially since some of them are a part of a series of blogs that I really want to talk about.  Be ready for them!

That ends this portion of the blog.  Next up will be the bad things that happened this year and that will be all next week’s blogs.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

As I always do in the month of December, it’s Reflections Month!  With Reflections Month, I take a look back at all the things that had happened in the year before we move on to the next one.  Somebody suggested to me to take notes on everything that had happened in the year on a quarter-monthly basis, but I never took advantage of that, so this will still end up being a long series of blogs.  So long in fact that I’ve decided to split the good and the bad into three categories: gaming, yours truly and everything else.  This blog is the start with everything else and as usual, I’ll start off with the bad stuff that happened this year.

In a surprising turn of events, there seems to be more bad than good that happened this year compared to last year.  Sure, there were no major incidents involving police corruptions (although one will have a special blog on its own) and there has been no GamerGate repeat, but there were still a lot more that went wrong for this year.  It’s so much that for this blog, I’m not even going to try to list the things in chronological order: instead, I’ll just roll with the punches.  What’s the first thing bad that happened this year to my recollection?  Let’s start with something that involved somebody who lived in my city…

The first time I had heard the name Sandra Bland, it was due to outrage.  I couldn’t for a time go through my Facebook newsfeed without somebody talking about her death being an injustice.  To what may shock you guys, despite being a black man, I didn’t buy into the hype for a second.  How could I be outraged from something that I knew nothing about?  Was this another overreaction thing like last year’s Michael Brown’s death?  Doing my own set of research, it looked like this was exactly the case.

Here’s what I know so far: Sandra Bland looked older than me, but was actually a couple years younger than I was.  Originally from Chicago, she moved to Prairie View, Texas to start a job there and on one day (July 10, 2015), she was pulled over because she failed to use her turn signal to switch lanes.

Before I can continue, I have to say this: as a citizen of Chicago and being a driver in Chicago, the failure to use turn signals is my biggest pet peeve.  Anytime I’m driving and I see somebody turn right in front of me without a turn signal, I’ll usually say a turn signal would’ve been helpful asshole!  There have been a few instances where I almost rear-ended somebody all because they failed to use their turn signal before they turned.  It would’ve been a lovely day to see a cop pull somebody over here because they didn’t use a turn signal, so kudos to Officer Brian Encinia for that!  Now, back to the story!

Dash cam footage showed Officer Encinia doing his duty as an officer pulling Sandra Bland over, and she was basically being uncooperative with him.  Because of that, she got arrested and was put in a cell by herself.  On July 15, 2015, she was found dead in her cell.  Autopsy results showed that she committed suicide, but other people believed that she was murdered in her cell.

Am I saying that she actually did kill herself?  No!  We don’t know all the facts and the facts that were presented to us thus far show no signs that the police were involved with her death.  Sandra Bland’s death looked like another case of a race war with blacks versus everybody else and I was not looking to pick sides on that.  Then again, this other incident might have caused the outrage with Sandra Bland’s death…

Riots are never a good thing.  Protests are fine, just as long as there are no riots that accompany them.  Riots happened in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown (and the racism in the city that preceded the murder), and riots happened in Baltimore over Freddie Gray’s death.  The difference between the murders (besides the cities) is that what led to Michael Brown’s death is debatable, but what lead to Freddie Gray’s death is not: Freddie Gray was literally murdered by the police.

First, let’s look at Freddie Gray’s arrest.  He was initially arrested for allegedly owning an illegal switchblade.  The arrest was caught on video and it showed the officers arresting him in an unusual and illegal manner.  When they put him in the van, they didn’t seat him properly and made numerous stops, which caused his injury.  He was taken to the hospital late and right there was when he was pronounced dead.

The officers involved were on paid administrative leave (something the public never wants to hear happen to officers who unlawfully kill someone) and residents of Baltimore were so furious that riots happened.  In a sign of good news however, the six officers who were involved with the murder of Freddie Gray got arrested, indicted and I believe are no longer fit for police duties.

With those two murders, we don’t really know if racism was involved or not, but they do seem like racism was involved.  This next story has been confirmed that racism was involved…

On the night of June 17, 2015, a bible study was happening at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  While the congregation was praying, a white 21-year-old kid (I’m not revealing his name because he doesn’t deserve that kind of attention), came into the church and started shooting, killing nine people, including the senior pastor of the church.

The reason why the guy killed the members of the congregation was because he believed that blacks have been raping their (white) women and that they were taking over the country (even though Barack Obama’s no longer going to be president come 2017).  He looked like he would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for the fact that one of “his” women spotted him, made a U-turn and followed him until the police got there.

Since we’re on the topic of –isms, let’s talk about one –ism that’s LGBT related…

Senate Bill 101 is a bill that was signed into law by Indiana governor Mike Pence on March 26, 2015.  When searching for SB 101 on Wikipedia, you’re redirected to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (Indiana) page.  What the bill proposes is that any store can deny service to anybody for religious reasons and not get in trouble by the government for it.  What that essentially means is that if a store doesn’t want to serve a customer because he/she’s an LGBT, then that store has every right to do it and wouldn’t be punished for it.  Anybody would be a fool if they didn’t think that this bill wouldn’t cause an outrage.

The bill was in such poor taste that businesses wanted nothing to do with the state of Indiana.  Angie’s List halted expansion to the state, conferences and things that were to be held in Indiana either got cancelled or moved to another state and even Gen Con, a popular gaming convention, threatened to move to another state if the bill became a law.  The NCAA headquarters are in Indiana and even they weren’t thrilled about the bill.  If I’m not mistaken, every sports team in Indiana didn’t approve of the bill either and showed love and support to all their fans, no matter what they labeled themselves as.

Oh, speaking of NCAA, let’s get back to racism for a bit!

There have been some people who have never understood the concept of the digital age.  We’re living in a time right now where cellphones can be used as video cameras and those same videos can be posted on the internet for everybody to see.  Just because you’re filming a great time doesn’t mean that you won’t get backlash for it, especially when that good time involves a little bit of racism.

On March 7, 2015, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity were riding on a bus heading to an event when they were singing a song about a nigger never coming to their fraternity.  Why would he if he’s being prejudiced by them?  Unfortunately for that fraternity, some idiots recorded the incident and had posted it online.  The next day, SAE suffered the consequences: the fraternity got suspended and the members of that fraternity got expelled.

One last –ism topic and that will be the end of it, I swear!  This next one though may have something to do with racism, but it’s more of a racial identity problem…

There was a black member in the NAACP by the name of Rachel Dolezal.  She had taught about Black America and she advocated for African-Americans.  The average person never heard about her until earlier this year when she became headlines for a different reason: she’s not black at all!

Her parents had to have been furious at the fact that she identified herself as a black person that they presented evidence that showed that she wasn’t black at all.  When I saw a picture of Rachel Dolezal, I didn’t see any black facial features on her; she looked like a white person with a tan, which is what she was.  What made this a bad moment was that she was a constant attention.

The media and social media just couldn’t stop talking about her.  There were debates in social media and any piece of new information was brought up by the media.  It took a while before both sides stopped talking about her.  Oh, and while I’m at it, I will NOT be talking about Bruce Jenner transforming into Caitlyn Jenner as the Jenner-Kardashian family gets talked about a lot as is!

Let’s get one piece of no-news (at least to me) out of the way before we move on to more important stuff…

This one was, in my opinion, a sad case of animal lives being more important than human lives.  There’s something about an animal’s death that causes some humans to feel more sad than another person’s death.  Hell, an animal’s death could be more impactful than a baby’s death!  That’s what it looked like was the case here.

On June 30, 2015, Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer was hunting for a lion.  He saw Cecil and shot him with an arrow.  After 40 hours of tracking, he found Cecil and shot him with a rifle, killing the lion.  Even though he had a permit for lion hunting, Cecil was apparently off-limits and he didn’t get that memo.  Because he had killed Cecil the Lion, he was seen as a villain.

Palmer’s office had to be closed for a few days because of the outrage (an apology didn’t help) and he was receiving hate messages; hunting in Africa has been changed since then.  And while we’re on the topic of overseas, let’s take a look at another incident that involved overseas.  Oops, I mean not happened overseas!

Brian Williams was considered to be one of the best journalists to ever grace our television screens.  Just one look at him and you can be guaranteed that what he’s about to say is very important.  He was a reliable guy to get information from, but in early February, it was reported that Brian Williams had done the one thing esteemed journalists should never do: lie.  The thing he lied about?  Getting hit by an RPG while he was in Iraq!

From his lie, he and a crew were visiting Iraq and his helicopter got hit by an RPG.  Because his copter got hit by an RPG, they had to make an emergency landing and Brian Williams was lucky to be alive.  The lie was told on NBC Nightly News back in 2003, but nobody knew about the lie until one of the people who were a part of the helicopter that got hit by an RPG claimed otherwise.

Brian Williams apologized for the lie and was willing to take whatever consequences came his way.  What ended up happening was he got suspended for six months without pay, had his hosting duties of NBC Nightly News be replaced by Lester Holt and was demoted to MSNBC coverage.  If you don’t have cable, you won’t be seeing Brian Williams on your television screen for a while.

Since we’re on the subject of career killers…

There’s never a sport that has officials where players never argue a call an official has made.  It’s rare if you can watch an entire game with nobody (including the coaches) arguing with a ref or fans booing refs over a bad call or a call that everybody else assumes was bad.  This incident was not the best way to handle a “bad” ref.

During a high school football game, many people saw something you’d never see anywhere else: two high school defensive players tackling a referee.  Normally, if that situation occurred, it would be an accident as the ref was at the wrong place and the wrong time, but in this case, it was premeditated.  If you look at the video, you could see that the high school football players went directly after the referee right when the ball was snapped.  Because the referee wasn’t wearing any protection gear like the players, he could’ve been seriously injured, but fortunately wasn’t.

You might think that they went after the referee because they believed he made a bad call and they wanted to show him how bad of a call it was, but that wasn’t the case.  They went after the ref because one of the assistant coaches told them to.  Why did he want that ref attacked?  Because the ref allegedly used racial slurs towards some of the players.

The ref obviously denied using any racial slur at any part of the game and the assistant coach “resigned”.  As for the players, they were suspended for three games and they regretted doing what they did.  Bad sportsmanship indeed!  And since we’re on the subject of football, we cannot and absolutely must not forget about this non-news that has become big news in the sports department…

NFL fans wish that this problem would go away, but unfortunately, we have to wait until at least the middle of next year for this problem to go away.  It’s a no-big-deal situation because the Colts were going to lose to the Patriots regardless, but Roger Goodell didn’t want to save his already bad reputation by letting this thing continue.

Here’s what I know so far: during the first half of the AFC Championship game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots, one of the twelve footballs was underinflated and was allegedly used by Tom Brady.  With the PSI level being too low, it made the football easier to grip for a quarterback and easier to catch for the receivers.  Despite that, the first half ended with the Patriots up 17-7.  In the second half (the half in which no footballs were deflated), the Patriots scored more than the first half (28) while the Colts scored none.  It was a game many people knew the Colts were going to lose since they lucked their way into the AFC Championship game as they weren’t that good beforehand.

A day after the AFC Championship game, one of the Colts' defensive players had accused the Patriots of using a deflated football and that was basically all what talks were about.  Since the SpyGate incident, the Patriots have had a target on their back and DeflateGate was born.  Like I said before, one of the twelve footballs was found to be deflated and since the PSI levels are usually checked before every game, somebody obviously tampered with one of the balls.  As we all know, the Patriots weren’t stripped of playing in the Super Bowl and won the Super Bowl thanks to Pete Carroll not running Marshawn Lynch, Malcolm Butler making a game-winning interception and Michael Bennett going offsides when the Patriots were about to use the QB Kneel play in their own endzone.

During the offseason, Tom Brady was accused of being the mastermind behind DeflateGate and he wouldn’t cooperate by giving up his old cellphone to be investigated.  Tom Brady was willing to be suspended for it and he thought that he was going to have at most a two-game suspension.  Unfortunately for the Patriots and Tom Brady, he was suspended for four games while the Patriots were fined $1 million and had lost their 2016 first round pick and 2017 second round pick.  The Patriots tried to fight the charges, but decided to pay the fine as they thought that it would help Tom Brady get a reduced sentence after his appeal; that idea backfired as Tom Brady was still suspended for four games.  It should’ve been obvious that the suspension would be upheld since Roger Goodell was the guy overseeing Tom Brady’s appeal, something the NFL Players Association were vehemently against.

As you would expect, Tom Brady and the NFLPA were upset about the ruling and took Roger Goodell to court.  In the end, Tom Brady was relieved of his suspension and was able to play at the start of the 2015-2016 NFL season.  Obviously, the NFL had appealed that decision and we’re not going to hear about this mess until March of 2016, a month after the Super Bowl’s over.  Please let 2016 be the end of DeflateGate!

And since we’re on the subject of scandals…

I don’t have much experience with cars, but even I could see that this was a huge problem.  It’s like anybody who ordered a vehicle from Volkswagen over the past five or so years have put themselves at risk because the vehicles that they’re driving could seriously kill them and/or those around them.

From what I gathered, Volkswagen were using some device that would trick emission tests into giving them a passing grade when in fact they would’ve failed.  Once news of the incident was released, the stock market for Volkswagen dropped by a third.  The scandal was so bad that the CEO of Volkswagen had to resign.  It makes me glad that I’ve never ridden nor drove a Volkswagen vehicle, let alone get hit by one.

Going back to sports and onto another scandal that I’m not familiar with…

If I was a big FIFA fan or even a big soccer fan, I could explain in detail the situation that happened here, but since I’m not, this is going to be brief.  All I know about this case is that there was some corruption that involved racketeering, wire-fraud and money laundering.  Indictments were made, bids were delayed, the president of FIFA stepped down, but not until after he won re-election when the scandal was brought up and FIFA’s probably lost the trust of their fans.  I’m too lazy to do some extra research on this topic, so let’s move on to another thing.

It’s impossible to go through an entire year without hearing about a celebrity’s death.  Not often would it be somebody who was a major icon to an industry and was a great entertainer.  This year, we lost one of the best promo-cutting wrestlers of our time: Rowdy Roddy Piper.

I didn’t watch wrestling until I was a kid and I think it was back in 1992 when I started watching wrestling.  I may have seen some of Rowdy Roddy Piper’s matches, but I don’t remember.  What I do remember was seeing him cutting promos anytime he’d show up after he hung his boots.  Piper’s Pit would be an excellent segment every time (probably except the one from the WWE that involved Chris Jericho, Dolph Ziggler and The Miz, which he made up for in an indy circuit) and I’d love how he’d make a fool out of his guests.  It’s because of Piper’s Pit how The Cutting Edge, The Highlight Reel, The Peep Show and MizTV existed, but none of those shows could ever top Piper’s Pit.

When I saw that Roddy Piper had died, I too couldn’t believe it.  Only 61 years old and just like that he’s gone?  It was too hard to believe, but it was true.  The cause of death was a cardiac arrest (contributed by his hypertension) and he died while he was asleep, so at least he didn’t feel anything when he died.  Also, I’m probably glad I didn’t see a single episode of Legends House.

On a similar note, Dusty Rhodes died this year as well and he was one of the reasons why NXT is the must-see show of WWE.  If there was a reason why people should pay $10 a month for the WWE Network, it’s because of NXT alone.  I didn’t watch Dusty wrestle, but he too was a pretty good promoter.  Both guys will be missed dearly and NXT will continue to be awesome.  One last thing before I end this blog!

On the night of November 13, 2015, there had been some random attacks that happened in Paris.  There were some suicide bombings and shootings, which resulted in nearly 200 deaths and multiple injuries.  There were also some people being taken as hostages during the attacks too.

Terror group ISIS were seen as the people who attacked Paris and in response, bombings were being made at their facilities.  In support for the victims who were involved in the Paris attacks, PrayForParis hashtags were used on social media and in some cities, the lights were done in a way to represent France’s flag.  In stadiums and arenas where sports were being played, extra security was being used since ISIS mentioned that they would attack sports venues in the future.  As far as television went, CBS switched an episode of Supergirl and NCIS: LA to a later episode and ABC had a warning on the intro of their new TV hit series Quantico.

Before I end this segment, I want to mention that the San Bernardino shooting incident happened on the day I started this blog, so I won’t go into more details there other than 14 people were killed, 22 were injured and two suspects were killed.  Damn these terrorists!

There are probably some more bad moments that happened in 2015 that has nothing to do with gaming and me personally, but I’ve either left them out because they don’t need the attention or they’re something I’ve totally forgotten about.  Like I said before, with this blog, it looks like 2015 was a worse year than 2014.  Let’s hope 2016 doesn’t end up worse than this year.  Until the next blog comes, I’m out!

2014 was a terrible year in terms of police officers getting away with murder.  Reading back my Bad Moments of 2014 blog, it still angers me to see those same officers who didn’t get indicted for murdering an unarmed suspect still having their jobs.  That type of injustice (and the injustice of Trayvon Martin’s death) was the whole cause of the birth of a movement called Black Lives Matter.  There was one case that was left out of the 2014 murders from white police officers and it just so happened to have happened in my hometown of Chicago: the Laquan McDonald murder.  It’s because of that why that Bad Moment of 2015 gets a blog of its own.

Before I get to the story of this incident, I will have to address the issue about why Tyshawn Lee’s death was not mentioned in the Bad Moments of 2015 blog.  The reason why is because I’m saving it for the Me section of the blog.  Even though I didn’t know the kid at all, the reason why it’s going to that section instead of being in the Bad Moments of 2015 blog is because his death was like literally around my block; I live in the area where Tyshawn Lee was killed!  I’ll get into more detail about that once we get there.  Now back to Laquan McDonald’s situation.

Even though Laquan McDonald’s death happened in 2014, the reason why it becomes a 2015 blog on its own is because it came to light this year.  So, let’s break down what had happened and how this became a major outrage.  On the night of October 20, 2014, officers were called to confront Laquan McDonald because he was breaking into vehicles and was carrying a knife.  When officers got to the scene, he slashed some tires and broke some windshields.  Not looking to go down without a fight, Laquan McDonald went after officer Jason Van Dyke and because he feared for his life, he shot Laquan McDonald 16 times.  That was the end of Laquan McDonald’s life and that was the end of that incident…or so they thought.

Shortly after Laquan McDonald’s death, some of the officers went to a nearby Burger King and ordered the security tapes to be confiscated, which resulted in the McDonald incident being deleted from the tapes.  If the officers did nothing wrong, then why delete the tapes?  I’ll get to that in a little bit.

Because the incident caused some questioning, officer Jason Van Dyke was reassigned to desk duty and he stayed there for 13 months with no other incidents happening.  Unfortunately for the Chicago Police Department, a whistleblower had mentioned that there was video footage that showed that what officers claimed to have happened didn’t happen at all, but was instead a cover-up.  When freelance writer Brandon Smith filed a Freedom of Information Act order in late May, his request was denied.  Because of that, he sued the city of Chicago for the release of the video.  On my mother’s birthday (November 19), the judge hearing the case (Judge Franklin Valderrama) had ordered that the tape should be released to the public no later than November 25.  That’s when some oddities started happening.

Back in April of this year, the city gave Laquan’s mother $5 million so that they wouldn’t be sued by the McDonald family.  As background info had shared, at the time of Laquan’s death, he was in the foster system and he hadn’t been living with his mother for years.  Laquan’s mother didn’t really need the $5 million since she didn’t care for him anyway, but she appreciates the donation.  Then, a day before the video was set to release, all of a sudden, the CPD were “doing the right thing.”

Jason Van Dyke was removed from his duty as a police officer, got arrested, and was charged for first-degree murder against Laquan McDonald.  It was a move that was done to not only save face, but to also prevent a protest from happening, but because it took Anita Alvarez 400 days to charge Jason Van Dyke for the death of Laquan McDonald, protests were going to happen anyway.  It was a peaceful protest and the protest started a little after the video was shown.  Remember the story I told earlier about how Laquan McDonald got murdered?  Well, that’s what the CPD wants you to believe; what really happened was a contradiction to the initial report.

Everything that was said was probably true until the confrontation.  With one dashcam video (which had a ridiculously low audio volume), it didn’t show Laquan McDonald slashing tires and breaking windshields, so I can’t say if that happened for real or not.  What I can say though is that even though Laquan McDonald may have had a knife in his hand, he didn’t use it to attack the police officers.  As a matter of fact, when he got shot, he was doing the complete opposite of what was said in the police report: he was walking away from them.

Police protocol says that an officer should not use his/her gun unless they’re about to be attacked and they fear for their life.  Without the audio, you could see that Laquan got shot and went down, followed by some smoke popping up behind him and later on showing up around his face.

There’s another version of that same video, but with an increased volume so that you can actually hear what happened.  From the sounds of it, officer Jason Van Dyke fired more than 16 shots at Laquan McDonald and it sounded like he emptied a clip on him when he went down.  A little bit later, officer Jason Van Dyke unloaded another round at Laquan McDonald while he was already on the ground.

Ever since the video was released, three people had been blamed for letting this cover-up happen: police superintendant Garry McCarthy, Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  Garry McCarthy was being blamed because the incident happened on his watch and all he did was reassign Jason Van Dyke to desk duty and helped cover up the incident.  Anita Alvarez was being blamed because she took waaaay too long to charge Jason Van Dyke for murder, let alone let the situation go unnoticed until the city couldn’t hide the truth anymore.  Last, but not least, Rahm Emanuel was to blame for not only doing nothing about the situation, but also hiding it so that he could win reelection as mayor of Chicago.  Black Lives Matter, the people of Chicago and the entire nation wanted those three people to lose their jobs.

On December 1, 2015, after initially saying that he had Garry McCarthy’s back, Rahm Emanuel fired Garry McCarthy.  It was obviously done to save face, but the public didn’t think that was good enough.  Anita Alvarez and Rahm Emanuel won’t step down from their position (since they can't be fired from their position) and their trust from the public’s completely shattered.  Now that we got all the facts out of the way, it’s time for me to offer my opinion on this matter and fair warning: this may be my biggest rant since the Amazon blog.

With the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III and all the other deaths of 2014, at least there was no cover-up to them; this was the worst cover-up I’ve ever seen my entire life.  I did hear about the officers going into a Burger King to get the surveillance tapes, but there wasn’t much info at the time.  The fact that the city tried to cover up what really happened to Laquan McDonald’s death and tried to fight the release of the video (until they lost the court case and didn’t appeal) makes everybody who tried to cover it up look really guilty.

Jason Van Dyke really went overkill.  Once Laquan McDonald was on the ground, he should’ve stopped firing, but he didn’t.  Or rather, if the second video with the fixed audio’s to be believed, he reloaded and shot him some more for good measure.  Then again, HE DIDN’T HAVE A REASON TO SHOOT LAQUAN MCDONALD IN THE FIRST PLACE!!  Even if Laquan McDonald said something racist towards him, there was no reason to pull the trigger.  Also, why didn’t any of the other officers try to stop him until it was already too late?  THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!

I don’t know who looks worse: Bill Lee or Garry McCarthy.  Bill Lee was the Chief of Police in the Trayvon Martin murder and he did absolutely nothing to George Zimmerman and even believed his bogus story while Garry McCarthy did pretty much the same thing.  Maybe Bill Lee looks worse because Trayvon Martin’s murder made national news months later while Laquan McDonald’s murder had no action to it until 400 days later.  On second thought, it sounds like Garry McCarthy’ worse.

If you have this guy covering up a police officer’s wrongdoing, what makes you think the citizens of Chicago will feel safe with police?  It’s bad enough that you have some black people implementing the No Snitch policy because of their distrust for the police and with that guy being the superintendent, it would’ve justified the reason why blacks will continue to implement the No Snitch policy and this situation could be why the city’s nicknamed Chi-Raq.  I’m glad he’s removed from his position, but like I said, it’s not enough: Anita Alvarez and Rahm Emanuel have to go as well.

With Anita Alvarez, I wonder this: what was she doing for 400 days that she couldn’t get Jason Van Dyke arrested?  She didn’t have access to police footage?  She couldn’t question witnesses who might’ve been around when Laquan McDonald got shot?  How the hell could she not find anything on Jason Van Dyke for 400 days and it took a freelance writer to do her job for her?  If it wasn’t for Brandon Smith, how long was she going to “investigate” the situation?  Yeah, when there’s that many questions (and many more) asked, it’s a sign that somebody sucks at their job; it’s even more amazing that she feels she’s being bullied by her political opponents since then.

I hadn’t read any of her quotes about being bullied until I was about to do this blog.  Here’s her statement about the situation in full:

I am a professional prosecutor and I am not driven by politics. I will not be bullied by politicians who do not have a full understanding of the facts of this investigation. I offer no apologies for enlisting the FBI to investigate Laquan's murder because obviously the Chicago Police Department could not investigate themselves in this case. And I certainly do not apologize for conducting a meticulous and thorough investigation to build the strongest possible First Degree Murder case against Officer Van Dyke.

After looking at that quote for the first time thanks to NBC Chicago, I have one more question to ask: why the hell did it take 400 days for Anita Alvarez to get the FBI involved?!  THAT SHOULD’VE BEEN DONE MONTHS AGO!!  It’s because of this why we want Anita Alvarez to resign as our state attorney; this is just plain awful.  Oh, and I’m not done with her yet!

When she finally charged Jason Van Dyke for murder, she used the wrong charge against him: she used first degree murder.  He’s obviously going to get away with it not because he’s a police officer, but because what he did does not fit the crime of first degree murder; it fits second-degree murder!  Looking at this site, he could’ve fit the bill of first degree, but it can’t be proven that he intended to kill Laquan McDonald or cause bodily harm to him.  Since that’s the case, second degree murder would be the more appropriate charge, which continues to show how much Anita Alvarez suck as our state attorney.  Why won’t she resign!?

Last, but not least, we have our mayor to blame.  If he was so concerned about his re-election, he could’ve made himself look good by doing the right thing immediately.  If he had done that, there’s a high chance he would’ve never had to do a run-off election against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, something that hadn’t been done in Chicago history until that point.  As a matter of fact, there was a case where he shouldn’t have been running for mayor back in 2011 in the first place!

Before Rahm Emanuel ran for mayor of Chicago, he was the White House Chief of Staff, which meant that he lived in Washington, D.C.  In order to be eligible to run for mayor of Chicago, you have to not only be a citizen of Illinois, but you also must be a citizen of Chicago for at least the past year before running.  Because of the timing of him leaving the White House to run for mayor of Illinois (October of 2010), it created controversy, but luckily for him, the court system allowed him to be eligible to run and as we all know, he won the election.  The sad part is I voted for him too.

When it came time for the 2015 Chicago Mayoral Election, he was going against five people and one of them was Chuy Garcia.  If I remember correctly, Rahm Emanuel needed 50% of the city’s vote in order to remain mayor and avoid a run-off, but because that didn’t happen, a run-off happened.  Both times, I voted for Chuy Garcia.  The first time was a success as I wanted to see the run-off election happen.  Then, on the run-off election, I voted for Chuy Garcia as my trust in Rahm Emanuel was broken and it was disappointing to find out that he won.  Thanks to this incident, Chuy Garcia could’ve been blamed for the cover-up instead of Rahm Emanuel, so for that, I’m glad Chuy Garcia lost.

There was talk that if the Laquan McDonald incident was brought up during the run-off election, Rahm Emanuel would’ve been in big trouble and it could’ve and probably would’ve cost him the election.  Like I said before, he would’ve looked very good if he had handled the situation from the get-go, but he didn’t, he sucks as a mayor and he needs to go.  Maybe Bruce Rauner can do a better job as mayor of Chicago instead of this guy!  Rahm Emanuel is a walking controversy everywhere he goes!

Now that I officially got that stuff out of the way, it’s time to move to the gaming edition of Bad Moments of 2015 week.  That blog will be released in a couple of days and until then, I’m out!

Welcome to another Bad Moments of 2015 blog!  For this edition, we’re going to strictly do everything related to gaming!  Fortunately for us, no GamerGate 2015 happened, so that’s sweet!  However, that doesn’t mean that controversy hasn’t happened this year in the world of gaming.  With one company not being named EA, they’re fortunate that The Consumerist didn’t do a Worst Company in America 2015 tournament because if they had, that company wouldn’t have been in the category because what they did would’ve been after the “ceremony” instead of before it.  I’ll get to what that company is in a little bit.

Unlike my previous Bad Moments of 2015 blogs, this blog will be in chronological order, or at least the best chronological order I could do since one of those categories I can’t remember when it took place exactly.  But, without further ado, let’s take a look at the first bad moment of 2015 related to gaming, starting with probably the first AAA game of the year…

In 2013, the gaming world had experienced some bad news: Toy Headquarters, also known as THQ, had folded.  With the closing of THQ, many of their properties went to different gaming companies.  Deep Silver had acquired the Saints Row and Metro franchises and 2KGames had picked up some of THQ’s franchises like Evolve and the WWE games.  With the games that were about to come out, Deep Silver decided to honor the strategy that THQ was going to use for their games and that ended up being a bad idea.

WWE 2K13 went fine, but Metro Last Light came under fire with their bad DLC practice.  For some reason, THQ thought that it was a good idea to have the hardest difficulty level of Metro Last Light be a DLC rather than an unlockable item and Deep Silver thought that it was a fair idea to leave that idea intact.  It’s because of that why I’m wondering if the same thing still applied to Evolve.

Evolve was aTHQ project acquired by 2KGames and the DLC strategy was mind-blowing.  So many DLC on just the first day of gaming and the grand total of all the Day 1 DLC cost more than the game itself.  To make matters worse, there were many different editions of Evolve and none of them got you everything, not even the most expensive version!

Day 1 DLC has become the norm, but too much DLC for Day 1 looked like greed to many fans and THQ-sorry, I mean-Deep Silver were called out for it.  Couldn’t they have learned from Metro Last Light’s mistake?  How about a mistake NVIDIA made that went unnoticed until after this mistake was made?

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 had been released for approximately 5 months before people had discovered a little problem with the card.  Gamers were trying to play a game like Shadows of Mordor and couldn’t understand why their game was running slow when they weren’t using more than 4GBs of GPU memory.  Upon looking at software like MSI Afterburner, they had come to discover that no matter how hard they tried, the GTX 970 couldn’t go any higher than 3.5GBs of memory usage.  Because of that, NVIDIA was accused of lying about how much memory capacity was in their GPU, thus a new controversy was born!

Did NVIDIA lie about how much memory capacity was in the GPU?  Not exactly.  Technically, there are 4GBs in the GPU, but what NVIDIA decided to do with this card (and apparently not their other cards) was to have the card split the memory into two partitions (the main one being 3.5GBs and the remaining 512MBs be the second one) and the ROP count being 56 instead of 64.  If anybody’s partitioned their HDD to use two operating systems, they would know that trying this idea on a GPU is a bad idea.

How this thing went unnoticed for 5 months is beyond everybody.  When being asked about why the true numbers of the GTX 970 weren’t disclosed to the public and the people who were reviewing their cards, their answer was that there was a miscommunication between the development team and the marketing team.  A miscommunication…that went unnoticed…for five months?!  What the hell NVIDIA!!  Trust in NVIDIA was shot for a while because of this, but what better option did any NVIDIA fan have if they wanted a kick-ass GPU without having to shell (at the time) more than $500 for it?  If a GTX 960 Ti had existed at the time, the GTX 970 numbers could’ve plummeted.

Sticking with NVIDIA, let’s look at somebody owning an NVIDIA/Intel combo PC and caught flack for it…

I’ll have to go ahead and get ahead of time from my first blog of next year: this is one of those blogs that I had done this year that I’m not going to release this year.  It’s too late at this point as this month’s Reflections Month.  I wasn’t angry at Angry Joe because he had gotten an NVIDIA/Intel PC since I’m an AMD guy and I’m used to more people having NVIDIA/Intel PCs than the other combinations; I was angry because he was supposed to be for the PC gamer as well as console gamer, but showed his inexperience with certain PC terminology.

Before I can continue on with why others were mad at Angry Joe, here’s the video I’m talking about.  You can take your time if you want; this blog will still be here once you’re done with the 20+ minute video.

I know some of you might be wondering what the big deal is.  Well here’s the big deal: not only did Angry Joe buy a pre-built PC (something you should NEVER do as a member of the PC Master Race), but he bought an Area 51 PC.  Angry Joe’s speculation was so off the mark with why people were upset about it; they were upset because Alienware (the makers of that PC) are known for overcharging their PCs!  People on Twitter and YouTube let him have it, though I wasn’t one of them.

It’s cool that Angry Joe got himself a better PC so that he can run games better and have his videos upload quicker, but using Alienware was like sleeping with the devil; he’s got a long way to go before he could come back to the house of the PC Master Race.  Don’t worry: I’m not a part of the PC Master Race since I’m Team AMD, even though I do build my own PCs.

Since we’re on the topic of PC, this didn’t get much news (I think), but it’s still going to be on here because of the disrespect…

It was quite surprising to find out that Dead or Alive 5 Final Round was coming to PC, let alone any DOA game.  Tecmo were aware of modders having the ability to have their female characters fight nude and wanted those modders to give the game some respect and not do that.  It would’ve been alright and the modders would’ve delayed doing it had Tecmo not dished out some disrespect to the PC gamers.

The future of Tecmo making games on the PC rested on this game and from the looks of it, PC is one-and-done with Tecmo.  The first problem with the game is that it’s a port of the PS3 version and not the PS4 version, meaning two extra levels are missing that were exclusive to the PS4 and Xbox One version of the game.  The second problem was no online gameplay from the very beginning; it took months before gamers had the ability to game online.  The third problem was no Steam achievements.  How does the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4 have achievements and trophies, but the Steam version’s absent from it?  It makes no sense!  You’d think that’d be the end of things, but we’re just getting started.

There are no Steam trading cards for the game, no cloud saves, problems with saves if your username have certain characters on them, no keyboard remapping (though I’ll assume most gamers don’t play fighting games on keyboards anyway) and NO VIBRATION SUPPORT FOR CONTROLLERS!!  Oh, and to add to that misery, there’s the numerous amounts of DLC you had the option to purchase within the first week of the game’s release that were overpriced.  All of that and they wanted modders to respect their women?  You can guarantee there were nude mods for that game instantly!  I feel so insulted, I don’t even think the game’s worth pirating.  Eww!  The amount of disrespect Temco gave to PC gamers is beyond disgusting!  Tecmo staying away from PC would be the best thing for PC gamers and Tecmo at this point.

Since we’re on the topic of disrespect, let’s look at the list of things that went wrong with this other company…

Man oh man is this a nightmare that seems to not know when to end.  If there’s anything that can come close to last year’s GamerGate, this is it.  This started off bad and it seemed to continually get worse as the months went on.  Let’s start off with the teaser demo called PT.

PT was released for PS4 gamers and they experienced a new kind of fear.  It was so terrifyingly awesome that they couldn’t wait until Silent Hills came out.  And it was going to have Guillermo Del Toro involved and star The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus?  You can bet that gamers were getting excited for the first Silent Hill game in the 8th generation.  But then, out of nowhere, Konami decided to cancel Silent Hills.  On top of that, they removed PT from the PSN a little afterwards.  To this day, there has been no explanation as to why the game got cancelled.  We wish this was the end, but this is sadly only the beginning.

The next surprising turn of events was Hideo Kojima’s name being absent from the cover of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.  With his name no longer being there, it would’ve meant that Hideo Kojima and Konami were parting ways.  In one instance, it was said to be not the case, but some time later, it was confirmed that Konami and Kojima were separating.  In another odd twist, it had been announced that Konami was going to do away with AAA games (though a US rep denied it) and were going to focus on mobile games and pachinko machines.  Quite surprisingly, they still owned the Metal Gear franchise.

There were also reports about the poor working conditions at Konami Japan.  With so many bad news concerning Konami, you would think they would do something to at least look partially good, but they couldn’t even do that with YouTube.  YouTube has been notorious for letting copyright holders bully their way into taking YouTube videos down, but Konami ended up being a final straw.  Famed YouTuber Super Bunnyhop had done a video called Kojima vs. Konami talking about this whole mess and one day, Konami had the video taken down.  The initial reason was because he used a copyrighted material (which ended up being Metal Gear Rising Revengence), but the video was instantly put back up because Konami’s claim ended up being frivolous.

MGS5: The Phantom Pain was released on September 1 and there had been some generally positive reviews.  So much so that the game won a couple of awards at the past Game Awards ceremony.  Right when it looked like the controversy was over, Geoff Keighley had made the announcement that even though Hideo Kojima wanted to be there to accept the award, he was told by Konami’s lawyers that he was prevented from accepting the award.  WHAT THE HELL!!  Are we going to receive some more bad news about this after this blog’s over?!  When will the madness end!?

A couple days before this blog was going to be posted, it looked like the madness will end as it was announced that Hideo Kojima took a couple of members from his team with him and they all left Konami, making this the official end between those guys.  If it’s not the end, then at least it is the end as far as Kojima dealing with Konami while he’s still working for them’s concerned.

This next subject is driving IGN commenters insane (more so with bloggers)…

There had been problems with Disqus in the past, but it was a fine commenting system.  Reading comments was easy and the use of images was pretty sweet.  Because Disqus was costly to IGN, they decided to move to another commenting system and that commenting system was Livefyre.  On paper, Livefyre looked like a great improvement over Disqus, with the exception of you needing to join IGN in order to use the comment system.  Once Livefyre replaced Disqus for MyIGN, things went south fast.

The first problem was the editing feature.  If you posted a comment and you felt like needing to edit it, you could only do it within 5 minutes after posting the comment; otherwise you was screwed, which is a mega-downgrade from Disqus.  Later, it was changed to 9,999 minutes, which later on was changed to (as of right now) 0, meaning you can edit your comment at any time, just like Disqus!

The second problem Livefyre created was notifications.  MyIGN looked like it was created solely with Disqus’ technology implemented in it because once Livefyre came, notifications were absent.  The only time you’d receive a notification was if you had received a follower or if you got a new rank.  I can’t remember if you’d receive a notification if somebody typed on your wall, but I believe you could.  When it came to the blogs, however, you was left in the dark as you’d have no idea if somebody commented on your blog or replied to your comment on your blog.  Thankfully, IGN fixed the notifications issue, but only within Livefyre; Livefyre wasn’t on the articles until the notification issue was fixed.

Another problem I personally have with Livefyre is the random time they’ll let paragraphs be paragraphs.  If I’m writing a comment that requires paragraphs, I’ll be lucky if Livefyre will let the paragraphs stay.  Most of the time, no matter how many spaces I make, a paragraph doesn’t exist.  Can Livefyre try to fix that problem?  The lack of accepting paragraphs are starting to be aggravating!

The next problem I have with Livefyre is the commenting itself.  God forbid if you have something to say and it takes more than three lines!  Instead of Livefyre expanding its box like Disqus does, it stays the same and resets on every keystroke you make, making you not being able to see what you typed and making editing before posting very difficult.  I’ve had problems with Disqus before, but NEVER in this magnitude!

Thanks to the switch to Livefyre, MyIGNers are no longer able to see if one of the people they’re following had commented on somebody else’s blog (or their own) and to this day, MyIGNers still don’t receive notifications if somebody commented on their blog.  I don’t know if IGN is doing anything to fix that, but from the look of things, unless one of the tech people at IGN tells me otherwise, it looks like MyIGN is an afterthought to them.  There had been no updates given about this situation (unless it was addressed on the message boards, which I don’t check out unfortunately) and until that situation’s fixed, MyIGNers are still screwed with the switch.  Bring back Disqus!

Speaking of bringing something back, gamers rejoiced when this news came about, but I’ll explain later why this is in the bad news section instead of the good news section…

Kickstarter has been a program that’s been known for allowing people to create their projects using the money of donors; more particularly, anybody who can contribute to their project.  If certain people pledged a certain amount of money, they would get some special prizes.  There have been some hits and misses with Kickstarter, but the one thing that people don’t like about using Kickstarter is if they find out that their contribution was for nothing.  With this year, Shenmue III was of no exception.

On Sony’s stage show at E3 2015 (which was held in mid-June), they had brought out Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki and he announced something that Shenmue fans had been waiting for for 13-14 years: Shenmue III is being made!  Not only that, but the game will come out for the PS4 and the PC!  Also, the project was going to be funded through Kickstarter!

I was a Shenmue fan and after having played Shenmue II twice in 2010, I found Shenmue II to be boring and the fighting mechanics more frustrating than the previous game and I had no care in the world for Shenmue III, so I didn’t take any part in funding the game.  With the amount of support that Shenmue III was generating beforehand, it didn’t take long for it to reach its goal.

Shenmue III had a $2 million goal and that goal was shattered in less than a half-day.  Hell, within the first hour of the Shenmue III Kickstarter announcement, the Kickstarter page was crashing due to too many people accessing the site at once.  You would think that with the help of the fans, Shenmue III was going to be made very soon and that there was enough money to make the game as awesome of an experience as the previous two games.  Well, maybe not as awesome since they’ll need some big company to fund big money to make that experience happen and…..oh wait!  It turned out that Sony is putting money on Shenmue III and that the people who funded Shenmue III on Kickstarter got played!  What the hell!

From the outside looking in, it does look like Yu Suzuki didn’t need Kickstarter since Sony was funding the development of Shenmue.  What was the point of Kickstarter if it looked like it wasn’t needed in the first place?  Well, the answer is we don’t know (or at least I don’t know) how much Sony’s funding Shenmue III and what backers’ money is going to be used for.  This was another case of miscommunication and what happens when you let hype (or overhype) get the best of you.

This next one, it has to go down as the biggest release failure of 2015 for PC gamers.

I have been gaming since 1992 when I was seven years old.  Throughout my 23 years of gaming, not once, on either platform, have I heard about a game being taken off the shelf 24 hours after it had initially been released.  When that happens, it usually means that the company that released the game is going under.  Well, Warner Bros. Games isn’t going under, but their reputation has definitely been shot with a rocket launcher with the release of the last Batman game by Rocksteady called Batman: Arkham Knight.

Back in April, Warner Bros. Games had released Mortal Kombat X for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC and the PC version had the biggest problem of them all.  The problem stemmed from an idea that sounded good on paper, but failed in a real-life scenario: having the gamer being able to play the game while the game’s downloading.  With a fast internet connection, it wouldn’t have been noticeable, but the problem was despite a fast internet connection, gamers couldn’t play the whole game.  Many features were missing and you couldn’t just wait for an entire game to finish downloading before you could play the whole game to avoid that problem.

The reason I didn’t have Mortal Kombat X as a problem for 2015 in gaming is because at least on the PC you could still play the game without any game-breaking bugs; with Batman Arkham Knight on the other hand, it was pretty much unplayable.  The Batman Arkham series has always had issues on the PC (and you can read my blog about the subject here), but this game had it the worst.  It had gotten so many negative reviews and so much bad press that it had to be taken off of Steam and Green Man Gaming pretty much immediately.  Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady had announced that they were going to work with Iron Galaxy Studios (the guys who ported the PC version of Batman Arkham Knight) and fix the PC version to make it right for gamers.

In late October of this year, Batman Arkham Knight was put back on the shelf on Steam and GMG with a $50 price tag instead of a $60 price tag.  Before the game was put back up, there were some patches that were released for owners of the PC version of the game and it was said to have fixed a lot of issues, but not all the issues.  Well, when the PC version came back, it was reported that the game either took steps back from the patches that were released beforehand, it didn’t make any progress whatsoever from the first release, or it ran even worse than Day 1.  Instead of taking the game off the shelf again, Warner Bros. Games decided to refund the game themselves all the way to the end of the year.  At least it’s the final Batman game from Rocksteady, which should mean that PC gamers shouldn’t have to deal with a new form of bullcrap coming out from them with a new Batman game.

With the next subject, just because I’m an AMD guy doesn’t mean I don’t see any problems with them.  This next problem came a little after Batman Arkham Knight came out…

AMD hadn’t released a new GPU generation after the R5, R7 and R9 200 series cards when they debuted back in late 2013.  2014 saw some new members of the 200 family, but nothing of the 300 family and fans had clamored for a new GPU lineup (although more for the CPU lineup as there hasn’t been a true successor of the AM3+ line, which made its debut back in 2011).  Well, in June of this year, AMD was finally going to give their fans their wish as AMD not only released some R9 300 series cards, but were also going to introduce the R9 Fury X card, the new beast card of AMD.

The 300 series cards were a little disappointing as they were basically overclocked versions of the 200 series cards, but with twice the memory.  The Fury X was the card to look out for as it was supposed to be the best card that AMD would release and it would have some new memory (High-bandwidth Memory, or HBM for short over the traditional GDDR5) which would help the GPU produce less heat than GPUs of the past.  Not only that, it would also be the first GPU by AMD or NVIDIA that was liquid cooled as a reference card.  Unfortunately, like the Titan series GPUs, no vendor has made a customized version of the Fury X, so every Fury X looks pretty much the same.

With liquid cooling, it would mean that the GPU should run cooler than before.  The good news is it does run cooler than normal (under or around 60 degrees in a stress test).  The bad news though was the coil whine noise generating from it.  Coil whine, from what I’ve heard, is a typical issue when using liquid cooling (or all-in-one cooling) and it can be a problem when not gaming, converting videos or stress testing.  That’s where a traditional air-cooling GPU would come in handy, so that’s where the regular R9 Fury comes in.  If you wanted to go smaller, then the R9 Nano was your answer.

From what you’ve read so far, it looks like there’s not much controversy and that the Fury series could be your average decent-to-great cards.  Well, let’s talk about the price first.  The R9 Fury X cost $650 and the R9 Fury cost $550.  The R9 Nano on the other hand cost…$650?  With the Fury X and the Nano costing $650, it would mean that one of those cards would look bad when one outperforms the other and that’s exactly the case here.  On benchmarks, the Fury X outperforms the Nano pretty bad, but the Nano is like 1 frame-per-second behind the regular Fury.  If a $550 card can outperform a $650 card, then what’s the point of the small card costing $650?  It basically comes down to one thing: competition.

Yes, AMD is competing with NVIDIA in the GPU market, but when it comes to ITX or mini-GPUs, the R9 Nano has no other competition.  The closest NVIDIA has to compete against the R9 Nano is a mini-GTX 970 and the R9 Nano outperforms it.  As a regular GPU, the R9 Nano does outperform the GTX 980, but a GTX 980 cost less than that.  And speaking of the GTX 980, NVIDIA pulled a major surprise before the release of the R9 Fury X: they released the GTX 980 Ti!

The GeForce GTX 980 was supposed to be the card the R9 Fury and Fury X were competing against, but AMD were pretty much too late to compete with the GTX 980 Ti.  The card contained 6GBs of GDDR5 memory, was air-cooled and had the same price tag as the R9 Fury X and R9 Nano.  When it came to benchmarks, the GTX 980 Ti and the Fury X were neck-and-neck in 4K resolutions.  When the resolution quality went down, the FPS gaps went up.  The lower the resolution, the more frames-per-second the GTX 980 Ti had over the Fury X.  On that end, NVIDIA wins again!

Man that’s a lot of info to get through!  Maybe I can talk about something I know less about with the next subject.  And that I sort-of do!

Before I begin this segment, I want to mention that on my previous blog, I forgot to include one extra person who died this year: Minnesota Timberwolves’ General Manager and head coach Phillip “Flip” Saunders.  Flip Saunders had died on October 25, 2015 due to Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Back when I was a Timberwolves fan, I was a fan of his and he’s the only coach to get the Minnesota Timberwolves into the playoffs and even to the Western Conference Finals back in 2004.  He even led the Detroit Pistons to three straight Eastern Conference Finals before he was fired by Joe Dumars.  His death was such a blow to the entire NBA that NBA coaches are wearing lapels on their sportscoat with his name on it for the rest of the 2015-2016 NBA season.  Now let’s move on to Satoru Iwata!

Before Satoru Iwata was the CEO of Nintendo, he was running a company called HAL Laboratory, which we all should know is the company that created the Super Smash Bros. series.  He took over for Nintendo from Hiroshi Yamauchi in 2002 and helped pioneer Nintendo to their greatest successes in the 21st century with the DS series and the beginning of the Wii.  When Nintendo was going down, Satoru Iwata would cut his paycut in half on two separate occasions to help the company’s and his own reputation.

I hadn’t seen any of it, but many people enjoyed him being the host of Nintendo Directs.  He was very honest, open and such a lovable guy to watch.  Unfortunately, for the past two years, he had been fighting a bile duct complication and on July 11, 2015, the gaming world lost Satoru Iwata.

I hadn’t picked up a Nintendo system since the GameCube and I had seen Nintendo make some good decisions and bad decisions, but even I couldn’t help but feel shocked and sad of his passing; it was like 2009 when Billie Mays died.  The gaming world gave their good-byes to Satoru Iwata and Nintendo didn’t find a new CEO for their company until September when they picked Tatsumi Kimishima as the new CEO.  It still sucks typing all of this today and it’s only been a few months too!

Since we’re talking about death…

Back when DRM mechanisms like SecuROM and Games for Windows Live existed, there was one website that would let you know what type of intrusive DRM was in your game: ReclaimYourGame.  With SecuROM for example, you’re never informed that the DRM is installed or even came with your game.  Even if you uninstall the game, you didn’t uninstall the DRM.  With ReclaimYourGame, you could find out if SecuROM was in your game and you could do something about it.  Unfortunately, on August 24, 2015, the website owner shut it down for good; the next time you go to ReclaimYourGame.com, you’ll get nothing.

Why did ReclaimYourGame go away?  I wish the reason why ReclaimYourGame got shut down was because games nowadays use Steam and Origin as their form of DRM, but that’s not the case.  The reason why ReclaimYourGame had shut down was because of the unfortunate case of gamers are idiots; more specifically, gamers no longer cared about what kind of DRM was in their games.  In fairness though, since most games require Steam to play nowadays, why bother with other forms of DRM unless you’re that much of an asshole company?

It was fun while it lasted and if anybody wants to find an archived version of the site, then they can go right ahead and check out what they missed or have been missing.  One final bad moment of 2015 in gaming!

I remember the Writers Strike of 2007 and how it affected me.  I wasn’t much of a television guy at the time as the only shows I watched were Ugly Betty, 24, WWE, TNA and sports.  For a while, it looked like I wasn’t affected by it at all until I saw that Ugly Betty’s season got cut short while 24’s seventh season was put on delay.  Even though it sucked with Ugly Betty, I was happy with 24’s delay because season six SUUUUCKED!!  The Voice Actors’ Strike isn’t going to affect me that much, but it’s still going to suck.

The good news though is that a strike hasn’t happened yet.  There was a vote in favor of a strike, but the strike, as far as I know, hasn’t been done.  If the actors don’t feel like they’re being compensated the way they’re supposed to (with two negotiations this year so far falling flat), then they could go on strike.  If a strike was to occur, many games would see delays and that might buy some time for game developers to stop releasing unfinished and broken games.  On the other hand, big publishers could hire different voice actors not a part of SAG-AFTRA to voice the characters in their games (and possibly have poor voice acting in the process).  Either way, we gamers will be the ones suffering through all of this.  Again, it’s not going to affect me as much, simply because I haven’t even played a 2014 game yet!

This blog ended up being longer than last year’s blog and that blog contained every bad news I could think of.  Even though I’ve gone in more detail this year than I did last year, it’s still not that bad of a year in terms of gaming.  Hopefully 2016 will be a better year for gaming and also hopefully, games will not be broken on Day 1.

Finally, to end the Bad Moments of 2015 blogging series, the next blog will involve bad moments involving yours truly.  What bad things happened to me this year?  You’ll have to see on the next blog and until that time comes, I’m out!

Finally, we’re at the end of Bad Moments of 2015 week!  To end this week, I thought it would be fitting to have this edition be about something, or rather someone, I have experience with more than anybody I know: myself.  This year has had some ups and downs and for this edition, I’m only going to talk about everything I can think of that went wrong for me this year.

To start this off, I’m going to talk about something that I actually had last year, but started the year off with it…

I actually got this thing on the day before New Year’s Eve of 2014, but I wasn’t able to diagnose the problem until sometime the start of this year.  The ringing of the ear was louder than normal, certain sounds started to cause me pain and I couldn’t even watch the New Year’s countdown on TV without that painful feeling in my ear and the TV wasn’t even loud.  I didn’t go to the doctor’s office for it, but when I looked online to find out what a painful ear could mean, I saw a perforated eardrum as a condition and when I read about the condition, I was like yep, that’s what I got.

When I had gotten the perforated eardrum, I was in the middle of re-recording Sonic Unleashed music from the game to my PC.  I was re-recording because sometimes, a hardware change can produce better sound quality and that was the case there.  I had to take a break from doing that and I had to take a break from listening to music through my headphones.

To try to recover from my perforated eardrum, I had to put a cotton ball on the ear and put some petroleum jelly on it any time I had to wash my hair.  Since I didn’t want anybody to notice that I had a cotton ball on my ear, I would take it out when I knew I was going to be in the presence of somebody.  Oh, and the first week of attending church?  A mega church might I add?  And you had a female vocalist with a high pitch sound being the lead singer?  Oh, the pain was unbearable!  It was actually quite difficult for me to pay attention to Agent Carter and Empire the first few weeks because of it.

Every week, the condition was getting better.  Unfortunately for me, it took me like four months before the condition subsided to the point where I was able to listen to music through my headphones without any pain.  Of course, I took it slow at first, listening to music at a lower level and then gradually work my way up, but I didn’t really get back to re-recording Sonic Unleashed music until after Anime Central 2015.

When my condition got better, I had a sudden realization: I had a perforated eardrum a long time ago!  The sound of my PC fans used to annoy me and my old PC was ridiculously loud at first.  When my condition got better, my old PC didn’t sound bad at all; it was ridiculously tolerable.  My current PC was ridiculously tolerable when I could put my CPU fan and case fan on Turbo, although I never attempted to leave them on Turbo while I’d go to sleep.

It’s because of my healed eardrum why I haven’t picked up any new headphones this year, but I definitely need to replace the Sennheiser HD 201.  The sound is much better with a healed eardrum through those headphones, but they suck in comfortable longevity; I’ll still get some Sennheiser headphones however.

Sticking with January of this year, something else horribly happened this year…

This one pertains to my debit card, so no real identity theft, but theft still happened.  So anyway, one day I was looking at my account balance on my smartphone app and noticed that I had less money than I should have.  I logged in and checked my transaction and noticed that two payments were made out of my account that I didn’t make: the first payment was $60 for a parking fine and the other one was a little over $90 for Groupon travel.  The parking ticket one I felt like I was going to have trouble fighting even though I don’t have any violations on my license or have any tickets to my name, let alone never being pulled over by the cops; the Groupon thing though I felt like I could fight.

I looked at the FAQ section of my bank’s website to see what I should do about that situation and the only option I saw was to call.  I’m the type of guy who prefers e-mail or text (a little bit old school) over the phone, but if I had to call, I had to call.  I made the call, told the rep about the situation and my debit card was cancelled and they shipped me a new card.

The card I had was the first debit card I ever had, renewals not included.  I had that card for like 12 years and, believe it or not, I woke up one day remembering all 16 digits of my debit card.  All of that and I had to remember a new number.  A day after the call, I had received my new debit card, so I won’t get a new debit card with the RFID technology in it until 2018, which I’m fine with since RFID card users can become victims of identity theft worse than non-RFID users.

My bank temporarily gave me back the money that was taken from me by Groupon and a couple months later, after a review, it was determined that the purchase was not done by me and the temporary money was now permanent.  Since my bank is Chase, I had to have been a late victim of either the Chase Mobile App hack or the PSN Hack of 2011.  Either way, not cool!

So far, I haven’t seen any fraudulent purchases on my debit card, so fingers crossed there!  Now let’s go to the worst moment of C2E2 2015 this year…

Ever since my friend and I attended C2E2 back in 2012, the parking spot we would always go to was the one that was across the street from the West Building of McCormick Place.  It would usually cost us $20 per parking and the walking distance to the North and South building wasn’t far.  I had gotten one part of bad news when my friend told me that I had to pick him up and drop him off two Wednesdays before C2E2 was to begin.  Then, once C2E2 2015 happened, we made it in time for the event to start, but we were late getting in because what used to be the parking spot ended up being nothing.  That was something I did not see coming and it was something I wasn’t prepared for.

Remembering the time I went to McCormick Place for the Chicago Auto Show a couple years ago, I went south of King Drive to 31st Street and made a left and went to the McCormick Place parking lot there.  The cost was $16, which was cheaper than the other parking lot, but I had to deal with some pot holes; I’ll have to check next year to see if anything replaced that old parking spot my friend and I used to go to before making the McCormick Place parking lot the new spot.

Since that’s all the bad things that happened to me in the first half of the year, things must’ve been pretty good so far.  It’s the second half where more bad things happened to me and this one I can see the average person thinking it’s no big deal, but for me, it was huge…

After six months of waiting, I finally decided to pick up my new GPU which was the Sapphire Tri-X Radeon R9 290.  Since I had already upgraded my CPU and I had upgraded my GPU, it meant that I could finally play Tomb Raider!  Thanks to the Family Sharing program on Steam, I was able to play Tomb Raider from my brother’s gaming library.

You might think that I ran into some problems trying to get the game to work, but I didn’t have such a problem at all.  The problem I did have was the experience of the game.  It was like ever since I was able to control Lara, every story moment was cringeworthy as the story was not only weak, but also pretty much pathetic.  I had lost hope in the story when I found out that Rhianna Pratchett was doing the story, but I didn’t expect the story to piss me off that much.

I could explain some more about my experience with the game, but I’ll let this blog I did before do that for me.  In the end, I don’t care for Rise of The Tomb Raider anymore, so you won’t see me playing that game anytime soon in any capacity, and that includes torrents too.

Let’s move on to the worst moment that ever happened to me at Wizard World Chicago 2015…

It’s a little bit past 3PM and I was in Hall G (the upstairs floor room) waiting in line for my photo op with Brett Dalton, the guy who plays former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Grant Ward on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  I was just standing there thinking of ways how to kill time before the line could move and the next thing I knew, my Legacy Dragon Dagger falls down.  I was thinking at first that the handle came apart thanks to hot glue not being that strong after it dries out, which was the case, but it was more: one of the buttons came apart and wouldn’t fasten back up.

A little after C2E2 ended, I sat on the bus and most of the dagger holster ripped because of that.  I completed the rip cycle after I got back home and hot glued it back together afterwards.  It held up just fine at Anime Central, but on the only day I was the Fighting Spirit Green Ranger at Wizard World Chicago, it just couldn’t hold on any longer.  I wasn’t going to use the holster anyway with my photo with Brett Dalton, but it was a bummer that I had to keep the dagger in my bag the rest of the day.  I’m in the process of either getting a new button for my holster, getting a replacement holster or a combination of both.  Either way, I expect this problem to never happen again next year.

While we’re on Wizard World Chicago weekend…

I’ve explained this on my Day 4 blog, but I feel like explaining it again because something a little bittersweet came out of it.  Anyway, I had no problems getting to Wizard World Chicago on the first three days of the event.  On the fourth day, however, traffic was the worst I had ever seen my entire life; the construction people chose that day out of all days to start doing construction.  I was stuck in traffic for like 2-and-a-half hours and with that allotted time, I could’ve gone straight south from my house to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with time to spare.

I was fortunate that I didn’t pick my friend up because if I had, I would’ve been in my car for like 3 to 4 hours and we probably would’ve been later than when I got there by myself; it certainly made me wish that Wizard World Chicago would move from the Donald Stephens Convention Center to McCormick Place.  The reason why it’s probably never going to happen is because from what I’ve read somewhere, it’s cheaper to rent at the Donald Stephens Convention Center than McCormick Place.  In the word of Ron Simmons, DAMN!!

Do you want to know what the bittersweet moment is?  In order for me to go to the Donald Stephens Convention Center, I’d have to take the Kennedy Expressway.  Just recently, it had been announced that the Kennedy Expressway is the most bottlenecked freeway in the United States this year.  Los Angeles is notorious for bottlenecked traffic and their highways were the next six on the list, but according to stats, none of LA’s freeways bottleneck worse than Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway.  I hope that’s a wakeup call for the city to fix!

At least with the slow traffic I had to endure, I was able to listen to music that lasted just as long thanks to my phone.  Oh, if you have a Moto X and your carrier’s Verizon, in the old words of Bad News Barrett, well I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news…

Android 5.1 had been out since October of 2014, but Moto X users were still stuck at Android KitKat 4.4.4.  They had been on 4.4.4 since June of last year if I remember correctly and we had been waiting for the update for a while.  When September 17, 2015 came, people using the Moto X on Verizon were finally able to upgrade their phone to Android 5.1.  It’s not the Android 5.1.1 update, but it’s better than nothing, right?  Well, it’s actually better to have stayed with Android 4.4.4.

When I upgraded my phone, I ran into one huge problem: battery life.  Battery life was fine when I was using Android 4.4.4, but when I upgraded to Android 5.1, my battery would drain quickly.  Last year, I checked online once to see how I could save battery life on my phone; with 5.1, it became a constant thing.  I wasn’t the only one who suffered from the battery drain problem: my sister, my mother and every Moto X user was suffering from battery issues.  Oh, and before Moto X picked up Android 5.1, every phone that had Android Jellybean (the nickname for the 5 series) had battery issues.  Somehow, Google messed up with Jellybean.

Normally, what I would do is I would plug my phone to my PC and use the Verizon Wireless Software Upgrade Assistant program and use the repair option without factory resetting my phone.  Things would go fine at first, but then, the battery drain issue would happen again.

When I would look at the battery option, it’s usually one of two things that’s the main culprit of my battery drain: the OS and Standby, with Standby being most often.  With KitKat, the percentage use would be less than 5% for the most used portion of my battery, but on Jellybean, Standby would take up 20% to nearly 40% of my battery power and that’s just with my phone doing absolutely nothing!

The situation was getting so bad that I even contemplated doing the factory reset option.  I had backed up most of the stuff on my phone onto my computer and was ready to do a factory reset, but I never got around to it.  I had heard about Marshmallow (Android 6.0) being out in October, but once again, in the former words of Bad News Barrett, I’m afraid I've got some bad news: if you use any 1st gen Motorola phone, you will not get Marshmallow on your phone in the future!  So that means if you’re using a phone like mine, you’re totally screwed!  Or are you?

When I looked up info on how to solve the problem with Standby causing problems, one forum user mentioned that the radio being used on the phone is causing the problem to occur, so if you find the culprit, you’ll solve the problem.  Another user suggested that you should go to the More option in the settings under Wireless and networks, go to Cellular networks and on Preferred network type, choose LTE/CDMA over Global.  Ever since I did that, my phone’s battery life has acted like it was using KitKat 4.4.4.  Then again, I had the setting at LTE/CDMA on 4.4.4!  Why the hell did Jellybean set it to Global?!  In case anybody asks, no, I have no plans to jump ship to the iPhone, especially since the next one’s rumored to not come with a headphone jack.  I’ll stick with Android for now, but the next phone I get better not be a Motorola!

This next problem became a major pet peeve of mine and it had something to do with TV…

I’m sorry if that didn’t make any sense, but I had to shorten the title of it.  What it’s really supposed to say is that I had to miss an episode of The Muppets and Fresh Off The Boat thanks in large part because the Cubs advancing to the National League Championship Series was more important.  I don’t know about the rest of the state, but here in Chicago, anything that came on at the 7PM hour on local television (CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN and Fox) got interrupted by the Cubs beating the Cardinals and advancing to the NLCS.  If you think that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is.

There’s been no secret that this city has been favoring the Cubs over the White Sox.  More specifically, local television has been favoring the Cubs over the White Sox.  Being a South Sider, I’ll always favor the White Sox over the Cubs and I don’t even watch baseball; I hated the Cubs before I found out that the Cubs were the North Side team.  That ridiculous move brought back my hate for the Cubs, but even more hate to the television stations.

If the Cubs had advanced to the World Series and they interrupted my TV, I would’ve hated it, but I’d understand.  The Cubs hadn’t been in the World Series since the end of World War II, so making it to the World Series would’ve been a humongous deal.  The Cubs hadn’t won the World Series since 1908 and if that happened, I’d totally understand why TV stations interrupted their regularly scheduled broadcast to talk about the Cubs.  But this is the Cubs advancing to the NLCS, something they hadn’t been in since 2003 before that day.  I remember watching that series and that was 12 years ago!  Did TV stations really have to make a big deal out of it?  It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever experience!

I didn’t see any part of the NLCS and I was aware of Back to the Future Part II predicting that the Cubs would win the World Series by October 21, 2015.  With the way the playoffs went, it was impossible for that to happen.  I was secretly rooting for the New York Mets and on October 21, 2015, the Chicago Cubs were not only eliminated from the playoffs, but they were swept from it too; that was the biggest bittersweet moment of the year for me.  Take that Chicago TV Stations for jumping the gun too early!

Now here comes the portion of the blog that you’ve probably been waiting for since I started this thing…

Just like the Laquan McDonald story, I’m going to start this off with facts first and then I’ll offer my opinion on the matter.  From what we know so far, Tyshawn Lee was attending an elementary school called Scott Joplin Elementary School.  On November 2, he was walking to his grandmother’s house, who lived around the 80th and South Damen block in Chicago.  While he was going there with his basketball in hand, some random thugs lured him to the back alley of the block.  It was there when he got shot and he died there with his basketball near him.

The story was incredibly shocking to those in the neighborhood because why would anybody want to kill a 9-year-old?  Especially when it’s an adult who did it?  It used to be local news, but it quickly became national news because as I said before, why would an adult want to kill a 9-year-old?  From what police hypothesized, Tyshawn Lee was murdered because his father, Pierre Stokes, was a part of a gang and the people who killed Tyshawn Lee were rival gang members.

Pierre Stokes denied that he was a part of a gang and the city was hoping that whoever killed Tyshawn Lee would be found and put to justice.  His mother, Karla Lee, had used GoFundMe to get enough money to cover Tyshawn Lee’s funeral.  Unfortunately, she picked a wrong time to buy herself a 2015 Chrysler 200 because by her doing that, she was accused of using the money from her GoFundMe page to purchase the car instead of for the funeral.  She claimed that she used her own money for the car and not the funds from GoFundMe, but some people didn’t believe her.

As far as the killer or killers go, we went nearly a whole month before two suspects were found and arrested, and one more is in hiding.  I could reveal the names of the alleged killers, but I won’t because they don’t deserve it.  At least we have some progress there!  With all of that being said, it’s time for my thoughts on this.

After all of that, why did I put this on the Me section of Bad Moments of 2015 instead of the regular Bad Moments of 2015, especially since I didn’t know Tyshawn Lee nor his family at all?  It’s because of this: where Tyshawn Lee got murdered is right around the block from where I live.  I live a block east from Damen and I was at home when the murder occurred.  I didn’t hear any gunshots, but I did hear two police sirens, which I thought was weird since I’m used to ambulance noises.

When it was around 6PM, I had to pick my sister up from school since she’s a teacher at Ralph Emerson High School, which is the next door neighbor to Scott Joplin Elementary School, a school me and my siblings graduated from.  When we were about to turn to 80th Street from Damen, there were a lot of police cars with their lights on, people standing around the block and news trucks.  I was glad that my sister told me about what happened before I got there because if she didn’t, I would’ve been confused.

Once we got back home, I took out my camera, went outside and took a couple of photos of the block that night, which you can see right now.

The next night, the police were going around blocks that were near where Tyshawn Lee was murdered and they were handing out fliers letting people know that there was going to be a meeting at 7PM at 80th Place and Damen to talk about what can be done to stop the shooting.  Just in case you guys don’t believe me, I scanned a copy to my PC and here’s a copy of that flier.

Before 7PM came, I had to hear a police siren like every minute.  I ultimately didn’t go to the meeting, but I can tell you for sure that I’m glad I wasn’t shot and that I wasn’t in the neighborhood of where Tyshawn Lee got shot.  But I am angry that you had some cowards who went after a kid and shot a kid instead of dealing with his father.

What kind of sick human being do you have to be to lure a kid into an alley and then shoot him?  The kid was 9, not 19, and he didn’t even have a gun on him.  If you’re going to kill a kid because of the kid’s father, then you deserve to burn in hell if you’re not sorry about it.  I hope that the two guys who were arrested are the people who were involved in Tyshawn Lee’s death as they would deserve to be charged with first-degree murder; they ought to be ashamed of themselves!

There’s one more bad thing that happened to me this year and it is a personal thing.  You guys might think it’s not that bad, but for me, it is.

How is my MyIGN activity a negative part of the year for me?  I’ve probably written some more interesting blogs and have delved in deep with my critical thinking, more so than ever.  Why is this a bad thing?  It’s because I haven’t been active on here as I have been in years past.

I’ve commented on less blogs than normal, I haven’t posted on some people’s walls (even though I typically don’t do that anyway) and the number of blogs I’ve posted are lower than normal.  Hell, I’ve even gone a whole month with no blogs at all and it had nothing to do with me being on a blogging fast.

Looking at my list of blogs that I’ve typed, not counting the Reflections Months blogs, I’ve posted a grand total of 25 blogs, which is like two blogs per month; that sounds very unusual for me!  Looking at the number of Word documents I’ve typed out this year, I’ve got 40 blogs and some of them will never see the light of day here; again, I’m not including the Reflections Month blogs.

What caused my activity to be lower than normal?  Did I get sick and tired of visiting the place?  Did I end up hating the people involved in the community?  The answer is a little bit of it had something to do with Livefyre.  I would’ve definitely seen more blogs if Livefrye implemented itself better with MyIGN like Disqus did.  The biggest reason is…I don’t know.

I wish I could really explain why my activity level’s gone low on here and I’m slowly fixing that by releasing some more blogs recently.  I still visited my MyIGN page on a daily basis and every Saturday, I’d read as many blogs as possible from the past week from the people I’m following, but when it came time to comment, I’d have nothing to say.

Sometimes,  I would think to myself just say “good blog” as it’s better than nothing, but every time, I wound up saying nothing because good blog just isn’t good enough for me; I HAVE to give my two cents on the blog.  If I don’t have any two cents, then I can’t say anything and that having to have two cents mentality usually always trumps good blog; I guess that shows how much I love writing.

Will my activity pick up next year?  I have no idea; that’s up for 2016 to tell us.  What I can say though is that there will be some of this year’s blogs coming out next year as I have no series planned for next year except one, which will show in 2016.  I may give out some info about it too, so check this blog often; RSS it if you need to too!

After that many bad moments, they’re finally over!  Next week, which is the final blogging week of the year for me, I will blog about the Best Moments of 2015, all regular, gaming and yours truly.  I can’t wait to post those blogs since we definitely need to end this on a good note.  Until that time comes, I’m out!

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Reflections Month 2015!  Last week, I listed everything bad that happened this year and for this week, I’ll be talking about the good things that happened this year.  Just like last week, this category will be split into three parts: gaming, yours truly and everything else.  Just like last week, this one will start off with everything else.

Unlike Bad Moments of 2015, this one will be in chronological order, or in chronological order to the best of my ability.  With that being said, let’s start the blog off with something special that happened in the first month of the year…

So far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Lord and Captain America have never met, let alone Star Lord coming back to his home planet for the first time since his mother died; I’m sorry for spoiling that moment to anybody who has yet to see Guardians of the Galaxy.  But that didn’t stop Chris Pratt and Chris Evans from making a Super Bowl bet.

Chris Pratt was a Seattle Seahawks fan while Chris Evans was a Patriots fan (go figure).  They had a Twitter war with each other over which team was going to win and they ended up having a bet.  The bet was that the loser of the bet would have to dress up as their Marvel character to a children’s hospital of the winner’s choosing.  But, there was an extra stake: if Chris Pratt lost, he’d have to wear a Patriots jersey as Star Lord, but if Chris Evans lost, he’d have to wave the 12th man flag.  Since the Patriots won, Chris Pratt had to fulfill the bet and dressed as Star Lord wearing a Tom Brady jersey.

That bet was a fun bet to watch, but it wasn’t even the best part of the bet.  The best part was that a month later, in good faith, Chris Evans dressed up as Captain America and visited a Seattle children’s hospital with Chris Pratt.  It’s a fun moment to look back on while we’re waiting for Star Lord and Captain America to really cross paths in a future Marvel movie.

Speaking of waiting, this next one was something we weren’t really waiting on happening, but it was a major surprise when it did happen…

It seems like every year, Super Bowl ratings get higher and higher, even with each year being the highest it’s ever been.  Some people watch it for the game, others watch it for the commercials (which can all be viewed later on YouTube thanks to Ad Blitz) and some watch it for the halftime show.  There are also others who watch it for all three reasons and it can be rare if all three live up to expectations.

There was no doubt that this year’s Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks was a well-played game (except for the passing play that keeps getting questioned to this day).  What had also been talked about a lot is the Super Bowl halftime show.

The Super Bowl halftime show has been paid much attention to ever since Janet Jackson had that “wardrobe malfunction” back in 2004 and the NFL had been playing it safe since then.  The last few have been excellent and it was quite interesting to see how Katy Perry was going to do at this year’s event.  Maybe unfortunately for Katy Perry, she was not the talk about the Super Bowl halftime show; it was two (or rather) three people: the dancing sharks and Missy Elliott.

The dancing sharks got some attention because of the way they were dancing (although I never noticed them), but when Missy Elliott made a surprise appearance, the internet blew up like crazy.  She hadn’t been seen since 2008 and for her to show up and look amazingly different (she had lost weight) was something to behold.  She was back, she hadn’t lost her step and nobody couldn’t have been happier.

If anybody talked about Katy Perry at the halftime show, it was her fire dress and how she got memed.  Also, the lion riding thing too.  And since we’re talking about fire…

Let’s just go ahead and face it: nobody likes Internet Explorer.  People from overseas definitely hated it back in the 90s when Microsoft made a stupid decision by preventing Windows users from being aware of web browsers that weren’t Internet Explorer, forcing them to use Internet Explorer.  Thanks to the courts, Microsoft can’t have Internet Explorer be in any version of Windows by default unless the user downloads it on their own.

Internet Explorer had security vulnerabilities and was slow compared to other web browsers.  It didn’t matter how much improvement Internet Explorer made, it fared no better than the likes of Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.  Oh, and to make matters worse for Windows 7 64-bit users, Microsoft Update KB 2670838 is needed for Internet Explorer 10 and 11.  What’s so bad about that update?  If you happen to play games that utilizes DirectX 10, it’ll cause that game to crash.  Since Internet Explorer’s not needed, it can be held off.

In March of 2015, when Microsoft was giving updates about its then-upcoming operating system Windows 10, they made an announcement that Adobe should’ve made with Flash: Internet Explorer will be no more.  The new internet browser that was going to come with Windows 10 was Microsoft Edge.  Since I don’t use Windows 10, I don’t know how Edge is like compared to Internet Explorer, but Internet Explorer’s death was way overdue.

There was one night when I was watching the NBA playoffs and I was watching the Golden State Warriors playing against the Houston Rockets.  Like what usually happens to me, I fell asleep during the second half of the game and missed it.  When I woke up, SportsCenter was on and I decided to watch it until it was time for a commercial break.  I happened to have watched it in time for Stephen Curry doing the usual Q&A with the media.  All of a sudden, there was a baby girl doing some crazy and funny things and she had me laughing.  That baby girl ended up being Stephen Curry’s daughter Riley Curry.

I wasn’t the only one who thought it was cute seeing Riley; the media and social media thought the same thing.  Every time she was on TV, she was entertaining and it was a little something we needed from an entertaining playoffs.  Then again, the Western Conference Semi-Finals were pretty much nothing but blowouts and the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals were excellent games.

If the Warriors kept on winning, that meant more Riley Curry and the internet couldn’t get enough of her cuteness.  She even won the internet by doing the whip and nae-nae on her 3rd birthday; her new little sister Ryan’s got big shoes to fill in the cuteness department two or three years from now.

Speaking of the Warriors, that’s my next subject…

Talk about a start that hadn’t happened before since the ‘95-‘96 Chicago Bulls had a record 72-10 season and ended up winning the NBA Finals.  The Golden State Warriors had fired Mark Jackson after they were eliminated by the Clippers last year and it looked to have been a bad decision.  When they were looking for a new head coach, they could’ve picked up Derek Fisher, but he decided to go to the New York Knicks.  There was probably one more guy they could’ve gotten, but in the end, they went with a guy who had never coached before in his life: Steve Kerr.

Steve Kerr won 5 NBA championships during his time as a player (3 with the Bulls and two with the Spurs) and he seemed to have found success in everything he’s done.  He led the league in 3pt percentage, he’s done a pretty good job as a general manager for the Phoenix Suns, and he was a great commentator for TNT.  There was no telling how he was going to fare as a head coach, especially coming off the heels of Mark Jackson, but what ended up happening was a 67-15 record (best record in franchise history as of now), 1st in offensive points per game, 1st in defensive points per game and 1st in three point percentage.  They were a pretty entertaining team and in the NBA Finals, they did what LeBron James haters wanted to have happened: they beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in 6 games.

Steve Kerr became the first rookie head coach since Pat Riley to win an NBA championship.  The Warriors also proved to Charles Barkley (a guy who never won an NBA championship) that jump-shooting teams can win a championship.  What was an even sweeter moment was when Charles Barkley had to wear a shirt that says Jump Shooting Teams:1 Charles Barkley 0.  The next time somebody wants to say this team or that team can’t win a championship because of their style, make sure that someone has won a championship first.

With this next one, I talked about how getting hacked was bad for me, but this one was pretty much a good thing…

For anybody who don’t know, Ashley Madison is the name of a website where people go to hook up with one another.  It’s basically another dating site with one distinction that makes it stand out from all the other dating websites: it’s a dating site for cheaters.  If you’re unhappy with your relationship, go to the website and find somebody who wants to cheat just like you do.

Their commercials were straight up wrong.  The fact that a website encourages fornication was just…pretty much an evil thing to do; somebody should’ve done something to that website and get it to shut down.  As it turned out, a hacking group called The Impact Team hacked into the Ashley Madison website and threatened them to shut the site down or risk getting their customer information released to the public.  Ashley Madison didn’t care, so on August 18 and 20th, gigabytes of data were released to the public and plenty of cheaters have been ousted.

There were two surprising things that were revealed about Ashley Madison thanks to the hack: the vast majority of members on the site were men and every deleted profile from the site was never deleted.  Because of that, the parent company of Ashley Madison (Avid Life Media) ended up lying to their customers, even when they paid to get their profiles removed.  As you would expect, a class action lawsuit was filed against them.

With regards to famous people getting caught using the website, Josh Duggar was the biggest name on there.  Besides molesting multiple women (four of them his sisters when they were little), he had been using the website and was unfaithful to his wife.  Sam Radar, a famous YouTube celebrity who broke the news to his wife that they were pregnant (only for a miscarriage being announced a week later), also had used the Ashley Madison website.  The hack even caused the CEO of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, to resign.

Some of the accounts on the website may have used fake e-mail addresses, but we do know that there are some people who used the website and have either suffered or are suffering for it.  Good luck giving people $500,000CAN to anybody who wants to help an infidelity website!  Websites like that should be illegal!

There’s one question I have about the website that probably doesn’t mean much: do the pictures stay as well?  I’m asking because the next set of good news has something to do with pictures…

If there was one reason I could explain why I didn’t join Instagram, it was because of one concern: pictures.  No, it’s not the filters that people had been using on like every single one of their pictures that concerned me (although that situation kind of reminds me of MySpace’s early days when almost everybody’s webpages looked like a complete mess).  What concerned me was that every picture had the aspect ratio of 1:1; basically, every picture on Instagram was a profile pic.

In order for your pictures or videos to fit, you’d have to do one of these three things: take a picture or film in the 1:1 aspect ratio (something I think smartphones can’t do with their default apps), crop parts of the content or find a way to put the full content in and add black or white bars around them.  My friend had trouble putting one of my pictures on his Instagram page because I take pics in 1080p; here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

Non-black bar version when you click the link.

With that being an issue, I didn’t know if I could handle Instagram, so I didn’t create an account for them.  Then, on August 27, 2015, some good news came our way: Instagram now allowed their users to post pictures and video in portrait and landscape!  Thanks to that update, Instagram users will no longer be required to post their content and make some adjustments to make the content be in the 1:1 aspect ratio!  I still haven’t joined Instagram yet, but if I do, I’ll know that my pictures can be posted the way they were meant to be posted, unless I add some filters to them of course.

This next set of good news was something that should’ve been done before I was even born…

What if the situation that happened back in 1983 happened today?  Nude leaks are never fun and they can ruin people’s lives, but at least in 2015, nude leaks are thanks to hacks into private accounts and uploads to the internet or an ex got mad and decided to get “even” by posting nude pics.  Since the internet didn’t exist for the public at the time, how could nude pics get leaked?  When you’re Penthouse magazine, you do it one way that’s despicable: you publish it to your magazine; that’s exactly what happened to Vanessa Williams back in 1983.

Vanessa Williams broke ground by being the first African-American woman who had won Miss America.  That accolade was quickly tarnished when Penthouse magazine posted some unauthorized nude photos of Vanessa Williams on their magazine when she was a teenager.  Okay, she was 19 at the time, so she passed the age of consent laws, but the fact remained that the pictures were never supposed to be published and they were.  To make matters worse, she was blamed for the nudes by the Miss America people and she was forced to give up the Miss America crown.  Despite that major problem, she went on to become a successful singer and a more successful actress.  There’s no way Vanessa Williams would go back to Miss America in any capacity, right?  Well, she did come back for this year’s pageant and she was one of the judges for the show.

Of course, she was hesitant to come back, but she agreed to come back on one condition: that she would sing Oh How the Years Go By.  After she sang her song, she was told to stay on the stage and to wait for Sam Haskell to come to the stage.  After the commercial break was over and Sam Haskell was right on stage next to Vanessa Williams, he had done the one thing that should’ve been done years ago: he apologized to her on behalf of the Miss America pageant.

Even though nobody in the organization now were around at the time Vanessa Williams was scrutinized, it was the right thing for that guy to do.  She didn’t deserve any of the hate she received at the time and it was about time that a wrong had been righted.  Does it also help that the founder of Penthouse magazine’s dead right now?

This next story is a little bit of a jawdropper because you wouldn’t expect everybody in one group to stand up to something, but it happened…

It really shouldn’t be amazing to find out that racism still exists today.  What is amazing however is how people could get away with the racism that exists in this country thanks to people in charge not doing a damn thing about it.  The state of Missouri already had a bad rep thanks to the racism that was exposed after the Michael Brown murder, but the fact that it existed in the University of Missouri and the higher ups did absolutely nothing about it made this situation completely appalling.

There were a few protests made at the school, but the cries of the black students fell on deaf ears.  The change came though from the most unexpected group of people who decided to do a protest: the Mizzou football players.  It wasn’t just some black football players who decided to join the protest; it was all the black athletes on the football team who joined in on the protest.

Not only did the athletes join in on the protest, they also had a stipulation of their own: they were going to boycott all of their football games and practices unless Timothy Wolfe, the president of the Mizzou system, had resigned.  Timothy Wolfe decided not to resign, but would try to solve an issue that hadn’t been addressed for a long time.

The boycott and the non-resign happened on November 8.  The following day, because Mizzou was going to incur a $1 million fine for not playing their next football game against Brigham Young University, Timothy Wolfe stepped down.  Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin had announced that he was going to resign by the end of the year.  There are a lot of steps to go to change the culture of the school, but this is a great start.

Sticking with sports, this next one gave us a big scare…

Lamar Odom had gone through a lot of stuff prior to this year.  He lost a son six months after that son was born, he was arrested for a DUI and he was getting divorced from his wife Khloe Kardashian.  There was one video that was posted where he was rapping and you could tell he was on something.  Whatever he was going through the past few years, it was sending him on a downward spiral.

On October 13, 2015, Lamar Odom was found unconscious in a brothel in Crystal, Nevada and was rushed to a hospital in Las Vegas.  He had suffered several strokes and kidney failure, which caused him to not only be put in a coma, but also be put on life support.  It was because of his condition why Khloe dismissed the divorce between she and Lamar, despite the fact that both parties signed the divorce papers only for a judge to not approve the divorce.

Everybody were concerned for Lamar Odom’s well-being.  It was feared that he might’ve tried to kill himself and was going to be successful in doing so.  Heartfelt wishes were sent his way everywhere and by the grace of God, Allah, Budah or whatever higher power people worshipped, a miracle happened: Lamar Odom woke up!  He survived a major scare and he gets to live again!

The road to recovery’s slow for him.  Since he’s been in a coma, he’s going to have trouble remembering things, people, and even himself.  He’s walking barely and his speech is slurred, but he does have support from the Kardashian family and his fans, whether they are basketball fans or Keeping Up With The Kardashian fans.

Speaking of coma, this last one has something to do with a knockout, but it became big news and in a big way…

Earlier this year, I had done the one thing I’ve never done before: I watched the entire fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.  George Foreman was the champion at the time and he was undefeated, with 40 wins and 37 of them by KO and those KOs were no later than the second round.  With his youth and Ali’s age, George Foreman was the overall favorite to win the fight.

When the fight began, George Foreman was throwing some aggressive punches to Ali, forcing Ali to hit the ropes every time, absorbing the punches and throwing some punches himself.  After two rounds, nobody went down and George Foreman was looking worn out.  Round after round, Foreman’s punches were getting weaker and Ali still had a lot of fight in him and he had the upper hand.  When the 8th round came, Ali threw enough punches that knocked George Foreman down to the mat.  Foreman didn’t get up in time and Ali became champion again.  Why am I explaining The Rumble In The Jungle?  Because the Ronda Rousey-Holly Holm fight reminded me of The Rumble In The Jungle almost by the book.

The fight between Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm was a case of The Battle of the Undefeated as both women were undefeated in the UFC, with Ronda Rousey being the Banterweight champion at the time.  Ronda Rousey was more known for ending her fights very quickly while Holly Holm was known for using her boxing skills as a setup for her kicks.  When the fight began, everybody could tell that Ronda was going to lose by the end of the first round.

Ronda went aggressive, but it wasn’t working.  She was pretty much worn out by the end of the first round and she needed to come up with a new strategy.  She didn’t adjust well and when the second round got started, that’s when things looked bad for her.  She went for a punch, but Holly dodged it like she was one of the Z-fighters in Dragon Ball Z, which caused Ronda to go down on one knee.  With Holly’s crazy punches, it caught Ronda off-guard, then the next thing you know, a kick to the face knocked Ronda down and out.  It was the biggest upset in UFC history (or at least in the women’s division) and the internet wasted no time memeing Ronda Rousey’s loss.

To Ronda Rousey fans, the loss sucked, but for UFC fans, it was one of the greatest moments in fight history, far surpassing the disappointing Mayweather-Paquiao fight.  That fight can be seen again and again until the inevitable rematch and if the rematch happens, that’ll be one thing that’s different from this fight and The Rumble in the Jungle.

I know there are some moments I’ve left out and that would be because I forgot about them.  If you’re disappointed that I didn’t post any gaming blogs, then you didn’t read the first paragraph where I mentioned that the blogs were being split into three parts.  Come back here in a couple of days where I talk about the good moments in gaming.  Until then, I’m out!

On this edition of Best Moments of 2015, it will be strictly about the games portion.  Since I haven’t played any game that came out in 2015, I can’t say whether this game or that game was a great moment of 2015; it’s probably because of that why there aren’t that many great moments of 2015 that I can recall.  With that being said, let’s take a look at the best moments I can think of that happened in the gaming world this year, starting with…

Last year, I decided to make a conscious effort to fully upgrade my PC.  I started off by accepting the ATX format after staying with the micro-ATX format for 7 years and upgraded my case and motherboard.  I also upgraded my hard drive and since I was making the transition from DDR2 to DDR3, I had to get DDR3 memory.  There was a little bit of a problem though with getting DDR3 memory: they were expensive!

I bought this memory unit when I was memory shopping.  Do you know how much it cost when I bought it?  $88!  That was like $11 per GB!  To make matters worse, that was either one of the cheapest or the cheapest memory unit I could find that could run at 1866mhz and was 8GBs total.  If I had known what I know now, I could’ve waited until this year to decide to fully upgrade my PC.

Earlier this year (January actually), Intel decided to release their then-new motherboard unit called the LGA2011-v3.  With those types of motherboards, they would power Intel’s new 5th generation processors and they introduced us to the new type of memory: DDR4.  I noticed that right when DDR4 arrived, prices of DDR4 were the same as DDR3 last year and DDR3 prices went down.  Since DDR4 and LGA2011-v3 were expensive, that meant that PC gamers could buy DDR3 memory at a very affordable price.

My current memory’s no longer being sold, but I did have one memory that was on my Amazon Wish List and it was this memory.  When I had it on my wish list, it was $85.  As of December 15, it’s $50; $50 was how much it would cost to get a 2x2GB (4GB) unit last year!  What a great time to upgrade DDR3 memory if you’re using LGA1150 or AM3+ motherboards!

This next one is good news for people who sometimes forget to check out Rooster Teeth’s website…

I forgot how I found out about Red vs. Blue and I wasn’t much of a Halo fan.  I had played Halo: Combat Evolved and I did play a little bit of Halo 2, so that might’ve been a factor of me watching Red vs. Blue.  Every time I watched that show, it would crack me up, even though I had no idea what exactly was going on with the show.  It proved to be the show that made Rooster Teeth famous and that was before YouTube was created.

Following Red vs. Blue on YouTube through Rooster Teeth was a painful process, mainly because if you watched a new episode of Red vs. Blue on there, you was actually watching an episode from the year before that was already posted on the Rooster Teeth website.  If you were like me and sometimes forgot to check out the website for new episodes of Red vs. Blue, well you were in luck this year.

On March 4, 2015, Rooster Teeth had done something they never did and was surprising they didn’t do it a long time ago: they created a Red vs. Blue YouTube channel!  Thanks to that channel, it meant that no new Red vs. Blue videos were going to be posted on the Rooster Teeth channel, but everything Red vs. Blue was going to be in the Red vs. Blue YouTube page!  Sweet!

Not only were all the Red vs. Blue episodes going to be on the channel, but so were the mini-specials and PSAs.  With regard to the first 5 seasons, you wasn’t getting the original videos; instead, you was getting the remastered episodes that used the PC version of Halos 1 and 2 in 1080p!  There’s no word if they would’ve been remastered if the Halo Master Chief Collection got released earlier, but judging by the patches that had to be released for the game, I’d say sticking with the PC versions of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 was the best decision, even though Halo 2 can’t even do 1080p for no apparent reason!

This year’s season would be Season 13 and on YouTube, that would be Season 12.  What Rooster Teeth decided to do with that was something unprecedented: they uploaded Seasons 12 and 13 on the channel while Season 13 was going on!  Since I was late to the party, I have no idea what the upload gap was between RoosterTeeth.com and the Red vs. Blue YouTube page, but the fact that YouTube had Season 13 was great!

The next three had something to do with E3 and they were in the category of it’s about damn time!

With the 8th generation upon us, it looked like the Wii U had won in this one category by default because the other companies failed to follow suit: backwards compatibility.  Sure, it sucks that the Wii U has no backwards compatibility for GameCube games, but it has full backwards compatibility support for Wii games and controllers.  The Xbox One and the PS4 on the other hand have no support for Xbox 360 and PS3 games…until E3 that is!

When it was Microsoft’s turn to make a stage presentation, one of the announcements that they made was that the Xbox One will have backwards compatibility to Xbox 360 games after all.  Not every game was going to make it to the backwards compatibility list at the beginning, but slowly, over time, new games were going to make the list.  Some gamers had early access to the feature right after the announcement was made, but everybody else were going to get their turn at a later date.

Despite the list of games, the Xbox One doesn’t have full backwards compatibility.  Xbox 360 controllers don’t work with it (I think) and the Xbox One doesn’t play your games straight from the disc at the start.  Once you put a disc in, the Xbox One uses the disc to download the game to your hard drive and you get to play your games from there with the help of your disc-based game.  Oh, if you installed a game digitally from your Xbox 360, they’ll work on the Xbox One as well!

You don’t have to worry about game saves and achievements as those will carry over to the Xbox One also.  There are some improvements that’ll have to be made, but it’s a whole lot better than what Sony’s doing with the PS4 backwards compatibility, which is nothing at all.

Oh, and speaking of Sony, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have some good news of their own from E3…

If there was one criticism I had with the PS4 before it came out (besides why the hell did gamers have to download a Day 1 Update right off the bat), it was the exclusion of media player support that was great on the PS3.  There was no DLNA, meaning you couldn’t stream content from your PC to your PS system.  There was no MP3 playback, so your only option to listening to music in your PS4 was through Spotify and the only video support besides Blu-Ray and DVD (that required a Day 1 Update, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever) was MP4.  I could understand the removal of features to make the system be at an affordable price, but it looked like there was no reason for people to throw away their PS3 for entertainment purposes…until E3 that is.

When it was Sony’s time to host their stage show, they introduced two big news (with one coming right after this) and one of them was the PS4 Media Player app.  With that app, you could do on your PS4 what you could do on your PS3, meaning you could finally get rid of your PS3 for entertainment purposes.  DLNA made its return along with MP3s and when it came to videos, you had the usual AVI, MPEG-2 and MP4.  There was one extra format that was supported on PS4 that wasn’t supported on PS3 at all: MKV.  With support of MKV, that meant anime lovers could watch their anime shows directly from their console instead of hooking up their PC to their HDTV!  It also means that people who pirate TV shows and movies no longer have to convert to MP4 in order to watch them through their PS system.

Looking at the list, it shows MPEG-2 as MPEG-2 TS: that format’s a hard format to use.  I didn’t see MPEG-2 PS (which is the much easier and widely used format) on the list, but I’ll have to assume that it’s trusted too; if not, then stick with the PS3 in that department.

This last news is news fans have been clamoring for for years…

Final Fantasy VII fans have been waiting for a Final Fantasy VII remake ever since a tech demo of it was shown for the PS3.  If I’m mistaken, then they wanted a Final Fantasy VII remake ever since the PS2 came out.  Each and every time a SquareEnix rep was asked about a remake to Final Fantasy VII, he would give the same answer: it’s not happening.  When E3 arrived, we were in for a surprise: a Final Fantasy VII video announcement was made showing us that a Final Fantasy VII remake was in the works!

For the past couple of years, SquareEnix had been releasing remade versions of Final Fantasy with Final Fantasies III, IV and more recently VI.  V is rumored to be in the works, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that VII is getting remade.  But, unlike the previous Final Fantasy games that have been remade before, FFVII will get a major remake.  Not only will the graphics and gameplay be changed, but so will the music.  It’s too bad that Nobuo Uematsu won’t remake the music for the game, but his music will still live on in the memories of the FFVII fans.

The engine that’s going to be used for the game is something unprecedented: it will use Unreal Engine 4, making this the second biggest Japanese game to use Unreal Engine 4 after Tekken 7.  Because of how massive SquareEnix wants this game to be, it will be split into multiple parts and that was something fans didn’t like, since episodic games tend to not finish all the way.  The reason given was because the content was going to be so huge that cutting content would’ve been the only way to jam everything into one game.  That should alleviate concerns from those with internet connections and this problem probably could’ve been solved for disc users if Blu-Ray had released single-layer 200GB discs.  At least we’re still getting FFVII Remake right?

The next two are a little bit more personal for me, but it’s still good news nonetheless…

Ever since SaintsRow.com existed, gamers have been having problems with the inconsistency of the website.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but the problems continued to get bad when THQ shut down and sold the Saints Row property to Deep Silver.  In August of last year, Saints Row fans suffered some bad news: My Steelport was down.  Not only was it down, it was down for a good long time.

Since My Steelport was down, it meant that gamers couldn’t get an achievement or trophy for uploading their character to the Saints Row website.  It also meant that nobody could download a Saints Row the Third character into Saints Row IV.  For 13 months, gamers had to create their characters and keep their game save with no option to store their character elsewhere; this was a situation where the Mass Effect option would’ve been a better idea.

On September 23, 2015, some good news came from the website: My Steelport’s back!  PS3 gamers still had some problems with it for a bit, but Xbox 360 and PC gamers had no trouble uploading and downloading their characters.  There was some bad news though for Saints Row the Third players: not everything came back.  The characters came back, but the stats didn’t.  With the redo of My Steelport, they couldn’t find a way to bring stats back, so those stats won’t be transferred over to Saints Row IV; it still would’ve been a better idea if they had went the Mass Effect route.

This last one was something I’d never thought would happen, or maybe I wasn’t in the right areas when this happened…

This has probably been stressed too much, but it bears repeating: 2014 was a crappy year when it came to hype and the result of the hype.  Gamers were too excited for Titanfall, Watch_Dogs and Destiny and all three of them ended up being disappointments.  With that happening and the history of gamers getting too hyped for some games, it was just a matter of time before gamers would get too hyped again for this year.  There was one little problem with that theory: it ended up being wrong; there was more hype for Star Wars: The Force Awakens than there was for any game this year.

IGN tried their best to hype up Mortal Kombat X by putting up new info on the game every single day before it came out, but nobody was getting all hyped up for it.  A true Metal Gear Solid 5 game was coming out and if there was any hype for it, it slowly went down thanks to Konami vs. Kojima (#FucKonami).  Fans were excited for Fallout 4 (which ended up being the most anticipated game of 2015 in my opinion), but there wasn’t much hype for it.  Overall, gamers got smarter and were being careful about what kind of hype a game deserved.

Will that follow through into 2016?  Only 2016 can answer that question for us!  Until then, here’s a gif of Vegeta letting you know who the hype is.

With this blog being done, there’s only one more left to go, which is the Best Moments of 2015 Me Edition.  There have been more good things that happened to me this year than bad and more this year than last.  What are those things?  That’s what the year finale blog is going to be about!  Until then, I’m out!