Sunday, August 26, 2012

Drum Corps

It is decided! I shall try out for DCI! But what corps?  Ah so many fantastic corps to choose from! But there is only one that I would ever care to be a part of.... Carolina Crown! But unfortunately audition materials for the 2013 season are not yet available... so I must wait. I will be auditioning on mellophone and will hopefully make it in! If I do then I have the chance to do 5 years of corps which is magnificent.   This is a short post but there really is not much more to say on the matter except that I cannot wait for the audition materials to become available so I can jump on practicing! Wish me luck!



                                                                                                                 -Matt

Friday, August 10, 2012

SWTOR Review

So I am a fairly enthusiastic Star Wars fan, so when I heard about a Star Wars MMO was coming out I was extremely excited! (One that was going to be different from the previous one that shall remain unnamed) I spent quite a few months researching the factions, races, classes and advanced classes that seemed so amazing. The graphics are beautiful and that is an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised that it is such a beautiful game seeing as it is made by BioWare. They did a very good job at making the appeal very evenly spread out as far as the classes. I won't do a discription of the classes because you can just go on their site. But in my opinion there was no class that I just would not play. I obviously had my preferences which happens to be a Trooper Vanguard dps. But as I got into the game, I started to find several faults. First, it is not a particularly social game. You don't really hang out on planets or the stations. Questing was very solitary and there was no real incentive to do missions with your friends. They have just released an LFG (looking for group) system which should alleviate some of that tension.   Crafting in the game was one of its stronger starting areas. There was a wide variety of skills to choose from which is always a plus. The companion system was very cool, but some companions were useless and you generally ended up using only one the entire time. The best part of the game to me was the voiced chat interactions for every NPC encounter. The NPC and your character would talk and you could see emotion in both faces and it was just a very well developed system. The legacy system is also a very cool feature that provides numerous privileges which i will also not go into due to its extensiveness. Though the game has all of these very good utilities available to each player, it lacks the main assets of an MMORPG, social interaction and the combat sequences. Combat was just slow and in PVP it took too long to kill people and the scaling system is not very popular. Ever player's character would scale to the highest player in that warzone. So it was possible for a level 13 to kill a level 40, which was not a good feeling. I give this game a tentative rating of 3 out of 5 due to some very key issues. Though I believe that if they fix many of the key points that I mentioned this game could easily move up a point or two. Thanks for tuning in


                                                                                                    -Matt

Epiphany!

Aha! I have discovered the purpose of this blog! It is clear to me now! All the questions about what I shall share with the people of this world! But now there is no second chances and no going back... Here is where I shall begin my sharing of music! But why would you put music on your blog TMcSpanks? Well I'll tell you why! It is music that you can get nowhere else, for it is composed by someone who has yet to be discovered! His name is.....is.....IS.....isss...... ME! I am in a class called music technology this year and I shall use it as a chance to further my musical understanding and also as a learning experience in composing. I will upload what projects I can from the class and you al shall be the judge of its quality. It is still unknown when my first shall be released but I shall keep you all updated! Wish me luck!