Weekend Update

     I haven't written in quite a while but now is the perfect time to do so. Work has cooled down and I'm back to my regular hours so although I won't be making that extra bread I have been making the most of my time outside of work. I've been hanging out with my friends, gaming, and most importantly, practicing the guitar every night. I'm starting to get a good rhythm going with my guitar practicing. I've found that since I'm late night person I should dedicate that time practicing instead of just chilling on the laptop and listening to music-which is fun and great to do as well. I've been making good use of my daytime hours waking up early (which is around 11 am for me), and doing all my hanging out with my friends during those hours. My friends pretty much work the same hours I do so the only times we get to hang out is during the day, when everyone else is working. It's a bit strange but we've made it work and its been fun. Lately me and the guys have been playing a lot of Project M. Today I even downloaded it onto an sd card for my friend so he can play it at his place without my sd card.
     In addition, today was our other friends birthday. I got him a $20 Gamestop card. Apparently our other friend gave him a $20 Gamestop card as well so I guess he will be buying more games. I wish my other friend could've gotten him something else. We all have enough games really. It would've been more thoughtful to get something a bit more interesting. Although I can't blame him because I was thinking of video games too! As the birthday boy's mom said to him today," You have enough games." Seriously. We all do. But we are all thinking we can never have enough. Just look at my older brother's steam account on his PC. Or just our shelves in our room. Nothing but video games. We're just big gamers and that's how I like it. So anyways, its been awesome playing Project M with the guys. I'm really good at it, even in four player free for all. I would say I'm better at Project M than Smash 4. I would also say that I like Project M way better than Smash 4 just because PM has Snake, a character that I just have to have in Smash 4. They really need to get on that and add him as dlc because we all know its bound to happen sooner or later. Snake's a beast in Brawl and PM. Somehow Snake has become like my favorite video game character and I don't know anything about the Metal Gear Series like at all. I'm thinking about playing my brother's PS3 because he has Metal Gear Solid 4 on it, and maybe I could learn a thing or two about Sony's golden boy from playing that.
     Also, I've been listening to a lot of free-jazz. Its a lot different from the stuff that I'm learning to play, which is just plain ole' straight-ahead jazz. I think its much harder to learn how to play free-jazz because I think you have to be a great jazz musician that can play straight-ahead before you can abandon the rules and go all free, with no time signatures, melodies, and rhythm. I'm working on standards from the real books. Songs like Four on Six, Billie's Bounce, Fall, and Autumn Leaves are all things I'm currently playing. As I keep practicing playing over changes the more I realize that the changes aren't hard to play over, and that in some cases you can play whatever you want, as long as your hitting some of the key chord tones. I'm a novice at music theory but my guitar teacher is explaining it to me in bits and pieces here and there. I'm not really interested in theory and I don't think I could really fully understand it unless I studied it at University or even a community college nearby. But at the same time you can't just be completely ignorant of theory.
     Lastly, I subscribed to an anime streaming site called Crunchy-roll. So far its been terrific. I'm currently watching Hunter x Hunter and Jojo's Bizarre Adventures, two of the latest and greatest anime to come out of Japan. Hunter x Hunter is about a kid named Gon who wants to become a hunter because of his father. Jojo's Bizarre Adventures is about a mask that once worn, turns the wearer into an immortal vampire. It's pretty cool. With these less hours at work, life has gone back to a slower pace and I've been able to focus more on my music. I'm looking forward to next month when Starcraft II Legacy of the Void comes out. I'll be playing that a lot with my online friends. My friend said something interesting to me today. He said that although I'm a Nintendo fanboy right now, that he will always see me more as a PC guy. I responded with "PC master race, right?". It was a great little moment in the day. I also wanted to say that this blog has become a personal blog for now. Eventually I will go back to writing about jazz album appreciations and talk more about music and my thoughts on that. That's all for now. Keep on keeping on. And as Tavis Smiley says," remember, keep the faith." 

Project M

     

     I finally got my copy of Brawl in through the post. So I downloaded Project M onto an sd card and tested it out. I gotta say that the game is really well made, however, there are some bad things about it as well.
      First of all, the animation and graphics in this fan made mod aren't that great. It's kind of grainy and pixelated for a game mod made on the Wii. Brawl looks a million times better than PM (Project M). Some of the characters downright look horrendous, especially Zero Suit Samus. Her skins in this game are some of the worst looking graphics I've seen in a game since the early PlayStation days. The stages in the game look terrible as well, especially the backgrounds on the stages. We put up with the terrible graphics because the game has amazing gameplay!
      The game-play in this game is terrific. PM has some additional characters that aren't from Brawl, like Roy, Mewtwo, and Dr. Mario. There are some cool skins that come with the characters as well. I really like the Mewtwo skin where he has the helmet thing on his head that was used to control his powers in the first Pokemon movie. I also really dig the Snake Big Boss skin, which is basically Snake wearing some army espionage type clothing with an eye-patch. So the characters are all pretty cool. Now let's discuss some of the game-play mechanics.
     Basically, this game is like Brawl with Melee mechanics. It's hard to describe with words but that's the best way I can explain it. There is wave dashing for one thing, which completely changes the mechanics from Brawl. You can move around and attack much faster in PM. Also, the way you grab and hold onto the stage is the same way as in Melee. You can only grab the stage if you are pointed in the direction of the stage.
     What I really like about this game is how Fox plays. Fox plays pretty much like how he does in Melee, which is a much slower paced Fox from Smash 4, but still quite a deadly and effective character with plenty of potential for nasty killer combos. The main thing that I don't like about PM is how Snake changed pretty drastically. In Brawl I'm a Snake main so the first thing I did on PM was test out how Snake plays and he plays in a more aggressive manner in PM but I still don't quite like the changes. I preferred his missile special attack even though sometimes it was slow and would miss. In addition, I don't like his down B in PM where he throws down land mines and they automatically blow up as soon as you plant them, so you have to immediately spot dodge away and hop that it hits your opponent. It's kind of stupid but it is very effective if it hits. Instead of the missile from Brawl, Snake gets a sleeping dart, which puts opponents to sleep. It's pretty nifty but it only puts them to sleep for maybe 2 seconds, at best. It's an effective tool for getting in that last hit to kill. Lastly, I don't like how they replaced his forward smash with a double knife attack, which if you hold, can add a third hit to it. It kill pretty nicely but its just not flashy enough for Snake in my pinion. Snake should have missiles! I haven't really messed around too much with any of the other characters except Fox and Snake so I can't really say too much about the other characters. I'll mess around and try out other characters and see how they play. I did like how Dr. Mario played when I tried him out today. I'm looking forward to play this game with my friends. It's going to be a big competitive game with the guys, just like Melee, Brawl, and Smash 4, we really play them all. Although I would say our main game that we play a lot is Smash 4 on the Wii U, which I just got recently. If I had to give this mod a rating I would give it a solid 9 out of 10. The graphics need work but the game-play makes up for it. Plus this game is one of the big Smash tourney games at the moment. Every Smasher knows of it but not all of them have played it, making it a nice little add-on addition to the Super Smash Bros universe.