Words On Wednesday

It’s that time of the year again. Summer Games Done Quick 2017 (or #SGDQ2017) starts this weekend on Sunday, July 2nd. Source: https://cdn.mobipicker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/red.png For the uninitiated, Games Done Quick is a biannual conference where people from all over the world come together and play video games quickly in order to raise money for charity. It started back in 2010, and has become a massive undertaking since the early days. Across every event, the conference has raised over $10 million. Awesome Games Done Quick 2017 raised over $2 million alone. To a lot of people, watching speed runs is nerdy and pointless. “Why watch them play when you can just play the game yourself,” is something I’ve heard more times than I can count. My rebuttal is typically, “why watch sports when you can go outside and play them yourself?” I won’t go so far as to praise video games with the same sort of athleticism as sports, but people who are particularly good at video...

“ The Legend of Dragoon ” is a Japanese Role Playing Game released on the PlayStation in 1999. Intended as a competitor for Final Fantasy, did the creators achieve their goal? Does The Legend of Dragoon hold up over time? Let’s break it down and see. Story - 8/10 From a story perspective, The Legend of Dragoon is undeniably a JRPG. This isn’t an insult or compliment, as much as it is simply an observation. A band of unlikely heroes must save the world from a grandiose threat to all of humanity. It’s a trope that has been done time and time again with basically any RPG that comes out of Japan. Some games do this really well, others just flop. Fortunately, TLoD fits into the former category. The tale is fantastically entertaining. There are ups and downs, with twists galore near the end of the game. Some of the twists are a little half-baked and seem forced, but they do come as complete surprises. The idea that “some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends” is taken...

Father’s Day, as a complement to Mother’s Day, has always been a vastly different holiday. For one, and I’ve mentioned it plenty of times before, my own father has been gone for a decade. I have other male relatives in similar positions, uncles, a grandfather, even other men who have acted as almost surrogate fathers to me, but my own biological father hasn’t been in the picture for years. That sort of absence puts a different sort of spin on the holiday. I don’t want to downplay the roles that any other guys have had in my life, I appreciate them tremendously. Still, it just isn’t quite the same. Beyond that, I myself have been a father for now 4 years. I could never be a mother (obviously), so Father’s Day is more personal to me. Not that I’d want to latch onto it as celebrating me, I feel like that’s entirely too narcissistic. But I feel like it serves to make me evaluate myself, and whether I’m being the best father that I can be for my kids. I’m not perfect, no parent is, but...

For the past 2 years, I’ve used a OnePlus One. That changed on Tuesday, May 30th, when I got the Moto G Plus (5th generation). I got my OnePlus One (abbreviated OPO) on May 12, 2015. I got it because my wife’s Nexus 4 was dying, so she got my Moto G (2nd generation) and I got an upgrade. After shopping around a good bit, the OPO seemed like the best balance of price and performance for me. Broken OnePlus One Even after 2 years, I was and am still pleased with the purchase. The OPO remains to be a solid device. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be upgrading if it weren’t for the damage from general wear and tear on the phone. It’s extremely responsive and powerful, I’ve just dropped it so much and had the kids do so much harm to it that it’s falling apart. As much as I hated to pay for a new phone when I still had a working phone, it was getting more and more to the point that “working” was a stretch. Screen Damage The biggest issue is that the capacitor in the touch screen is dama...