Weekly Blog Post #6 - StarCraft 10 Years Young

StarCraft, a real-time strategy game from quite possibly the top PC developer today, Blizzard, has turned 10 years young. StarCraft, originally released in 1998, slowly took the world by storm. The game is known for its perfect balance between all 3 playable factions in the game: the Terran, the Protoss, and the Zerg. The game by no means revolutionized the real-time strategy genre, although it refined the genre to perfection.

StarCraft had become a huge competitive online multi player game within a couple years of its release. Tournaments are still going on today with StarCraft and shows no sign of slowing down. In South Korea, with a huge online gaming culture, has basically made StarCraft its national sport. Yes, you read correct, "National sport." Just like America's national past-time, baseball, or America's favorite sport, football, a video game in South Korea has become their national sport. For years now, world tournaments in StarCraft are held in South Korea and they even broadcast StarCraft matches on television. StarCraft players that turn professional make the big bucks and has become their full-time job. Some of the top StarCraft players in South Korea, America, or Europe, can make a salary in the $100,000's from playing and wining in tournaments and money from their sponsors.

Clearly, the standards of what is shown on TV is changing. If watching other people play a video game on TV is crazy, just wait and see what happens next. The sequel to StarCraft, StarCraft 2, has been in the works for a few years and will be released in a couple more years. Who knows how popular StarCraft 2 will become.

Video Project: Champions League in Review

Here is my video project: Click Here!

If the quality is to low then I need to know what is an ideal megabyte size for the video.

Reflections:

The video project was probably the most difficult so far. The blame could be put on me for missing my first ever class of the semester during this project, so I lost a lot of valuable time with iMovie. I decided to do the project at home on my PC using Windows Movie Maker (WMM). WMM gave me a lot of problems from freezing and hiccups when I tried to edit my video camera footage. Surprisingly, I had no problem transferring video off my miniDV tape in the video camera to the computer using a firewire cable. After researching WMM freezing issues, I found out the problem with WMM freezing all the time is from other video codecs that WMM conflicts with. It is extremely difficult to fix all the codecs individually so I just closed and re-opened my video project every time it froze. WMM is easy to use just like iMovie and I would have to give it a gold star sticker for that, but be warned to all who have an older computer that can't close and re-open WMM as fast as I could to finish the project.

My Lunch

Here is the video of the delicious lunch I had.

My Lunch

Weekly Blog Post #4 - A new platform for musicians

Everyone wants to be a rock star, right? Well, with last November's release of the smash hit video game Rock Band, millions of people have been getting their rock star on. Rock band allows up to four people to play music together using 2 guitar controllers, 1 drum set controller, and one microphone. You play cooperatively as though you were an actual rock band hence the title of the game.
Guitar Hero originally popularized this home console phenomenon to play some of the most popular rock songs of the past few decades with a guitar controller.
Musicians have now caught on to the popularity of Guitar Hero and Rock Band by officially licensing their songs to the game developers to put in to the game. This has became a new source of revenue for current bands and bands of the past. Songs have been downloaded illegally over the Internet for quite some time now and having another way for bands to make money again by allowing their songs to be put in to these games, has created a new market. People not only want to listen to their favorite musicians, put play their music interactively as well.

Weekly Blog Post #5 - The World is Flat

Recently I have been seeing Cisco Systems commercial where a man is talking to his family through video over the Internet from a remote location. But he is video chatting with his family who are across the world from where he is. Cisco’s slogan for this phenomenon is the “Human Network.” A similar commercial from Cisco has an elementary class in the U.S. connected over the Internet through video with an elementary class from a different country and working together. These examples are somewhat confirming that the world is becoming more flat and our society is becoming more and more globalized. But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. The technology Cisco advertises is still in a very small fraction of the population to video chat with someone across the world in a remote area.
Thomas L. Friedman says that information, money, and people can move around the world much faster than before. Countries like China and Dubai are boosting their economies like crazy, but what are they sacrificing? China and India accept these petty outsourced jobs from American companies that could stay here in the U.S.
Another problem I have with Friedman’s book is that most people, who live where they live, invest, make phone calls, and search the Internet there. One example, where Friedman is right about global investment, I recently read and heard about a Dubai company making a bid for the English football club, Liverpool, although buyout talks have been dissolved.

Weekly Blog Post #3 - Ziff Davis and Chapter 11

Sadly, Ziff Davis, publisher of a variety of tech magazines and websites, has filed for Chapter 11, which is basically bankruptcy. One of my favorite magazines, Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), and the website 1up.com where all of Ziff Davis's video game publications post for the web are all affected. Now Chapter 11 doesn't mean Ziff Davis is finished. Yes, they are in a $225 million debt, but by this summer they are planning to cut it to $60 million by giving up nearly 90% of their equity to private investors.

After continually hearing Professor Mack and Michael in my news editing class talk about the dire situation at the Mercury News having a fire sale of lay-offs to my magazine Professor, Tom Ulrich, telling us the magazine business is somewhat thriving, I can't help but think how the hell could this happen. How can the magazine industry be thriving when a publication company as huge as Ziff Davis has to file for bankruptcy? Lately, it is very hard not to doubt whether I made the right decision to pursue a journalism major, I mean, will there even be a job for me when I graduate?

I need to go cheer myself up somehow right now...

-30-

Weekly Blog Post #2 - Parsing the Future

We should all stand up and applaud Ryan Sholin for digging up these fascinating news spin-offs, some of which are created by old fashioned newspaper outlets. For example, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly's "PolitiFact" website. At this website they compile multiple quotes from the 2008 presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and put the quotes through their "Truth-O-Meter" (basically a bullshit meter). Rarely do I ever see a news outlet have the balls to report from the horse's mouth whether what these presidential candidates are saying is true or not in such a simple manner to understand.

Besides websites that report news in new and interesting ways, Sholin also posted websites that can make things more convenient in our everyday life. Take Las Vegas Sun's "Flight Delays" feature. Similar to going to a southwest.com or a jetblue.com, it shows a visual map of the U.S. with flight paths. But this map adds an extra layer of depth by having the choice to pick any airline that fly to Las Vegas and any city that can fly into Las Vegas. After picking a airline and your city location to Las Vegas or vice versa, the map tells you how many flights and delays a certain airport has. It also shows the rank of the airport in descending order of who has the least to most flight delays.