Battlefield 3

For the past couple of months I’ve been hooked on DICE’s latest game, Battlefield 3 (BF3). I was a huge fan of Battlefield 1942 so I knew that I would love BF3 right off the bat.

BF3 is the best FPS I’ve ever played. Between BF1942 and BF3, I played a lot of FPS games but most of them were short-lived. One exception is TF2, which I played a lot until it went crazy with all the hats, crafting and micro-transactions.

One of BF3′s great new features is “Battlelog”, which is EA’s social platform for BF3 players. The best part about Battlelog is its stat-tracking. Through Battlelog you can check your kill:death ratio, weapon stats, unlocks, awards, and reports of past rounds. I find myself logging into Battlelog after rounds to see how I did, and whether or not I’m about to unlock something.

As for the actual gameplay, what makes BF3 so awesome is its emphasis on teamwork. This was made even more true when I was one day recruited by a platoon called N7 Spectres. I was asked to join when I was having a pretty sweet game on Noshahr Canals. I was a little worried at first because I thought that being in a platoon meant daily practices and getting super-pissed at one another for messing up, but man, how wrong I was. N7 Spectres is a group of some of the coolest, friendliest and most importantly skilled players, and it makes playing BF3 even more fun.

N7 Spectre’s founder, eGessDub, posts some pretty sweet gameplay videos on his Youtube channel here. Yesterday eGessDub posted a game with me in it! It’s pretty rad to re-experience the match from another person’s perspective.

FITC Toronto 2011

This year I attended Flash In The Can 2011, a conference in Toronto on Design and Technology. I was always under the impression that this conference was mostly about Flash, but my friend Grant Lucas convinced me otherwise. He went to FITC last year, and told me how it was more about design, workflow, and inspiration, and little to do with Flash. This got me thinking about going to FITC 2011, but when he told me that McBess (one of my favourite artists in the world) was going to be doing a talk I immediately booked tickets to the conference.

In this post I’m going to talk about the three speakers that resonated with me the most.

School’s Out FOR-EVER!

Just now, I handed in my last paper ever for school. I can’t believe it – I’M FINISHED UNIVERSITY! It was a long 5 years of Interactive Multimedia and Design at Carleton University, and there were countless sleepless nights, but I’m glad that I persevered and finished it. You may now start the video below.

I thought I’d share some of my university experiences here.

Highlights:

• Diving into the world of web. Learning HTML+CSS was a bunch of fun, and I will continue learning more about it after graduation.
• Learning how to make dynamic websites with PHP. My mind was blown when I got my first PHP script running, and learned how dynamic websites work.
• Co-op at NeuroLanguage and Shopify. Spending a year working for Shopify was a blast – it was so hard going back to school afterwards. I can’t wait to go back there fulltime in May. For future IMDers, I would highly recommend taking Co-op. It’ll really help you narrow down what you really want to do as a profession. Even if you don’t like your placement, at least you’ll find out what you don’t like to do, and you can still make connections.
• Learning Processing + Arduino. Programming things that are actually tangible was an awesome experience.
• Learning how to model, rig, animate etc. in 3D using Autodesk Maya. I hated this at first but grew to like it a lot. I will continue to do 3D as a hobby in the future.

Not-so-awesome times:

• All-nighters in the labs that were hotter than Africa and smelled like B.O. PRO-TIP: Lining up 3 rolly-chairs and using it as a bed is actually really comfy.
• Having to use crappy computers in the labs that would randomly restart
• Having to use WebCT on a regular basis. Why do universities still use this piece of sh*t? There are so many better alternatives.
• Having to take courses that taught me absolutely nothing (I’m sure every program has these).
• Having to learn Macromedia Director. Seriously? It was 2007, and we still had to learn Director? Gimme a break (a year later they switched the course to Flash).

It feels weird thinking that I don’t ever have to go back to campus, or worry about schoolwork. Even though Senior Project’s been done for a week now, I still wake up thinking that I have something I need to do for it. I can’t wait to go back to the 9-5 lifestyle, as it’ll leave me with more time to work on personal projects!

THE END

Move Your Mountain!

On March 5th, Move Your Mountain played its first show at Zaphod Beeblebrox. Move Your Mountain is a power-pop trio that Kevin, Chris and I started in August 2010. We’ve been getting together once a week since September to jam, and March 5th was the night we finally unleashed our tunes. It was pretty intense practicing on weekly basis with school & work, but I’m really happy we powered through and continued to jam.

Needless to say it was a wicked-awesome night. The Start, a local cover band opened the night with some kickass covers of British hits. We played our set after The Start. I was nervous as hell at first since it was our first time playing our tunes in front of an audience, but the nervousness melted away after a song or two (I think I was melting too, I was so damn sweaty on stage… sorry for the B.O., guys). The headliner band, Brainhunter ended the night with some rockin’ tunes (BRAAAAAINS anyone?).

What was cool was that the next morning, we were mentioned in Andrew Carver’s blog on National Capital Rock. He’s also got some sweet pictures from the show on his Flickr.