Welcome to my web page about gaming and other things. Feel free to browse around and enjoy yourself. Links to other pages can be found at the bottom and immediately below is the latest news and updates I have performed. Please keep in mind that this page was created entirely with html… no editor used.
Check out the Olds News Page for last months news.
Thursday Sept 12, 2002
Well, a lot has happened since I last updated this page. Most significantly September 11. Although I am not an American, the impact of this event on the Canadian way of life has still been substantial. I am now in my 4th year of university, am still programming and have plans for other webpages in the future. However, I shall no longer be updating this page ... mainly because I ceased playing video games and I do not have the time (the same old excuse as everyone). If you're reading this: smile! Everyday is a great day to be alive!
Friday Dec 22, 2000
Well, as you can tell the updates I talked about back in May never happened. I just can't keep myself interested in updating this page. Anyway, I just wanted to check in and say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I'm looking forward to a wonderful Christmas this year and I'm really really enjoying the break from university. It's great!
Just to bring you up to date on the gaming situation I'll give you a little blurb. I quit playing EverQuest not long after my post in May... I only managed to get my character to level 14. Isn't that pathetic? Oh well, it wasn't that great of a game. I took a fairly large lull in game playing during the first semester of school this year and barely played anything. Right now I've started playing a little StarCraft again along with a few console titles. I'm enjoying the SC and I'm really looking forward to the release of WarCraft III next year (here's hoping). The only new game I've asked for this year is FF9 and I will probably play that some over the holidays as well. So that's basically it... I've once again reverted back to SC. Again, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and if you are of the age to drive ... please drive safe and don't drink while you are driving! Chill out.
Monday May 29, 2000
I know there haven't been any updates in a while but I have been fairly busy and I just haven't felt like doing much work on this page. However, a lot of interesting things have happened in the past month so you can expect some updates soon with one fairly big announcment among them. I have gone through a lot of changes in my gaming habits recently and I will provide more information on this in the next few days. Until then remember... life is good!
Friday April 28, 2000
I'll tell you the most annoying thing about EverQuest has got to be the servers going down. With games like StarCraft you can always play a game whenever you want and even if for some odd reason Bnet is down I can always use kali. However, the EverQuest servers seem to go down periodically and lately it has been every 2 days or so. This just isn't acceptable... at least not to me. I'll grant that they do try and take the servers down fairly early in the morning but since I live in such a late time zone it always affects me. Because I am out of school now I usually roll out of bed at around 12 and want to play a game at around 2 if I have the time. Nearly 50% of the time I can't do this because the servers are down!
They will often take the servers down at around 6-8 am but that is PST... and my time zone is AST ... four hours later. So the downtime doesn't start until 10-12 and then the servers can be down as long as 6 hours or more. It truly is frusterating. Anyway, enough of my server woahs. If you are interested there are a couple of new WarIII previews up and an interview with Rob Pardo who is one of the head guys at Blizzard. To get the links head on over to Tao of Gaming.
Thursday April 20, 2000
Well folks I was browsing my EQ directory and I found that I had a lonely screenshot in there of one of my adventure. It is really quite pathetic but there is a story behind. I was travelling in an orc infested place known as crushbone for the first time and I was trying to get to my group after I had died. Anyway... there were orcs guarding every path so I had to traverse a river to make it safely and while trying not to drown I accidently hit the screenshot key. It isn't much but without further ado go see it here. As you can see when looking at it I am using my tracking ability to find Cathornica, a Dark Elf Necromancer who was in our group. It works really well!
Well it has been a long time coming but Blizzard has finally made an update to their website to include five brand new screenshots of warcraft III. In light of their hard work on Diablo II and all the attention it is getting it is good to see they haven't forgotten about War3. All 5 of these shots are of high quality and are definitely worth your time to take a look. They demonstrate the full effect of the new direction War3 has taken and what it means to graphics and gameplay. I am not sure I like this new direction but I am sure it will still be a great game. So, what are you waiting for? Go over there and check them out now!
Wednesday April 19, 2000
I am currently on a short break between studying for my two exams tomorrow so I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about my character in EverQuest, Chillin. I chose Chillin as a name mainly because Chill was taken, but also because that is what I am usually doing when playing EQ... just chillin. Chillin is a Level 6 Wood Elven Ranger who is currently located in the vacinity of FreePort. I just traveled from my homeland of Kelethin in Faydark on the continent of Faydwer to there (continent Antonica) so I could meet up with some of my friends.
As far as armour goes he is wearing a mixture of leather, patchwork and cloth armor... with the majority being patchwork. He also is wearing two dexterity rings that, as the name suggests, add 2 points each to his dexterity. He also sports a low level shield at times when a two handed (2H) weapon is not in use or a lantern is not required. For a weapon he uses a cracked staff which is fairly low level but also has a high rate of attack. It is a good weapon and looks cool but I am on the lookout for a fine steel longsword. Most of the time, seeing as he IS a Ranger, he carries a Rough Hickory Recurve bow with him (DMG 10, Range 50) and a good supply of arrows.
Chillin also has a few special abilities and a trade profession. Seeing as he will require better bows and a large supply of arrows as time progresses I decided to take up fletching as my major skill. I am currently around level 25 and can make most low level arrows and medium to low level bows. He also possesses the following skills: Tracking (GREAT skill), foraging, bind wound, sense heading (8), kick and hide, along with a few others. When he reaches level 9 he will gain his first magic abilities and I am looking forward to that day. Overall Rangers are good all around characters that can do a bit of everything and that is why I chose to be one, along with the fact that the idea of archery has always intrigued me. I will continue to give you updates and possibly screenshots as time progresses.
Saturday April 15, 2000
None of you may know what EverQuest is or that I was part of the phase 3 beta test for it. However, at the time I only had a p166 computer that just met the minimum requirements for the game and therefor it took about 5 minutes to just load the game and change zones etc so that kind of ruined the experience. As a result I didn't play much and I also decided not to buy the game when it came out because of that and because it was so expensive to play. Well recently StarCraft just hasn't been doing it for me so I decided to make a new game purchase. And because most of my friends are now playing EQ that is the game I decided on.
I now own a PIII 600 computer that would run the game very smoothly and I was able to buy it online for around 20 US which even with shipping and exchange rate is relatively cheap here. So I've have only played the game for two nights (while in the middle of final exams) so time is limited and I ALREADY have 12 and a half hours played. This game is ADDICTING. Is it a great game? Well the graphics, design, and concept are good but it is so hard to make a perfect world that of course it is lacking in some areas. Also they make it sound like there is so much to do in the game, and there is, but I'm sure after a while it will become mundane so it just isn't worth the 10 bucks a month (15 for me) to play. So overall I don't recommend buying this game if you don't have it already even though it is addicting and fun for now. The real reason I have it is just to hold me over until Warcraft III is released.
Update: I have uploaded the game and you can download it here.
If you have ever been here before you know that I made my first video game with Visual Basic a month or so ago. I have been planning to upload it to this page except I ran into some problems which you can find out about if you scroll down a bit. Anyway I got my marked copy back (which I ended up not needing) and was able to fix the problems. My Visual Basic exam is this Monday and I thought it would help me study if I tried to debug the program .exe file. Well it didn't take me too long to figure it out and after some testing it appears to work fine. So far I have only had good reviews. I should have it uploaded very soon. If you download and play it make sure that you try to move the frog out of the playing area and you are in for a surprise. Try it out!
Sunday April 2, 2000
Yet again I have more information on the frogger game that I developed. I have sorted out the problems with the .exe file so that it will run properly ... however in doing so I managed so make one other minor screw up. It shouldn't take me too long to find it but in the worst case scenario if I can't find it I will only have to wait until I get the disc back with the original version on it and go from there. So, it shouldn't be long until I upload it to this page. Stay tuned!
Thursday March 30, 2000
An interesting thing happened today... I was working on my Calculus assignment in my room when the phone rings and it is for my dad. Well, my dad wasn't home and we ended up talking about a few things and it led into my program that I had just completed recently. My dad's friend isn't a programmer but is knowledgable about how programs work and how computers function so I thought maybe he could give me a hand. We discussed the problem for about 30 minutes and came to the conclusion that the problem was probably timer related however we couldn't uncover what was causing the problem. However, I think we came up with a bandaid that just might stop the problem from occuring. It is more like avoiding the problem rather than fixing it... but it just might work. Look for further updates in the future.
Wednesday March 29, 2000
Well I played my first ladder games in over a week, excluding one game, today and of no surprise is the fact that I lost both of them. I was fairly rusty but I think that my opponent would have likely beaten me even if I wasn't. He was lower ranked than I was but also quite good. I don't really have the time to play SC lately because I have been so busy but hopefully in the summer I will have enough time to actually improve my game some. I'll keep you posted.
Oh, btw there are some new battle reports online you can find links to them over at Smackdown, a division of Tao of Gaming. Check them out.
Well, as promised I finished my first ever video game, frogger ... but that is where the good news ends. The final product was VERY good (IMO) for a first attempt and everything runs smoothly and pefectly in Visual Basic (the programming language I used to make it). However, Visual Basic allows you to run your programs from within the Visual Basic program so you can test them... and of course this is what I did. Everything went smoothly and there was happiness in the land. Until one day, when the game was nearing completion, I made a .exe file out of the game (ONLY 160k) and ran it to see what it was like outside of VB. Well it looked good to begin with but as I played for a minute or so bugs started popping up /everywhere/. So things would happen as I would lose two lives for dieing once and get two msg boxs telling me so. 5 game over screens would come up when I lost instead of just one and many other random errors. As a result of this I am going to wait until I can find a solution to this problem before I upload it to this page unless someone e-mails me and says that they would like to try the broken version. It may be a while before it is fixed ... but hopefully it will eventually get done!
Today was an interesting day indeed. To start this story off I will begin with what happened yesterday. After I got done classes on Tuesday (yesterday) I wound up with 3 untouched assignments all due on Wednesday (today). As you might have guessed, this was going to be a problem. Anyway, after hours of work I managed to get 2 out of 3 done and a start on the third, maybe 10% done. The assignment I left for last was Java (the hardest) but it was also due at midnight today... which provided some extra time, but it was still going to be a tight squeeze.
So anyway, my classes ended at 7pm today and right after class I went out for dinner with my dad until about 8-8:30 leaving less than 4 hours until it was due. I had also managed to get two of the four questions done during the day. The remaining two questions were definitely the hardest. Well, it came down to the wire and I had an hour left and still the hardest, and final question remained. I worked vigorously and it was 11:40 and I still wasn't done. I was getting an infinite loop, if you know what that is, and I just couldn't find the problem. All of a sudden it hit me and I fixed it with 15 minutes left. I knew I had JUST enough time so I raced to print out the assignment and get up to the university to drop it off. When I got there I ran down the stairs to the doors.... LOCKED! I couldn't believe it. I proceeded to check ALL of the doors on 4 other buildings and was just about to give up when I found ONE open door in the place and proceeded to follow a network of tunnels to get to the proper building. I dropped off the assignment at 12:03 ... so I was late but it wasn't my fault because I was there at 5 minutes to 12. It was a real experience because I was so happy to have finished on time, then I went from an extreme high to an extreme low when I encountered the locked doors... and right back up again when I found that ONE open one. If you are interested in what exactly the assignment was you can view it here.
Saturday March 25, 2000
I just heard about this new site a short while back. It has an interesting layout and some very interesting content. It isn't your standard normal gaming site that we have all come to expect. They cover a wide range of topics but the thing I found the most interesting was the music that they are creating. If you have a fast connection and you like to hear original mp3s that have warcraft or starcraft content in them head on over there right now and check them out!
BroodWar.com decided a while back to host a 256 player broodwar tournament with large cash prizes to be awarded to the victors. This tournament is sponsored by i2e2 and promises to be a huge success if it ever gets off the ground. They are currently having some problems recieving payment from all of the individuals registered in the tourney. In any case they have decided to run some pre-season games between some of the tournament competitors to get people excited about what is to come. Each of these games will have a battle report written up by a broodwar.com staff member. There are already two reports completed both of which are an enjoyable read and contain many screenshots. Head on over there to read them for yourself. You may have to scroll down the page a bit to find them. Enjoy!
If you haven't heard yet that Blizzard Entertainment is releasing the next installment of the WarCraft storyline in the form of WarCraft 3 you must have been living under a rock these past 3 months. Everyone knows that this version of WarCraft will be a RPS (Role Playing Strategy) game which is the combination of RTS (Real Time Strategy) and RPG (Role Playing Game). What this means is that there will be less focus on resource gathering and town management and more focus will be shifted to the actual combat. But, much to the surprise of Blizzard fans everywhere, Blizzard has announced that they have yet again changed the direction of the project. The game will remain a RPS but they have decided to once again incorporate a few more RTS elements back into the game. Some examples of this are free-scrolling and building construction. In light of these changes Blizzard has updated their Scrolls of Knowledge with all of the important details on the transition.
As you already know I play in almost every Tao of Gaming tournament that I can so I, of course, signed up for the Beta Kali Ladder Tournament. The idea behind this tournament was that the top 64 players on the ladder who registered were admitted into the tournament and amazingly enough I was able to secure a spot. However, due to standard tournament regulations I, as a low ranked player, was forced to play a high ranked player in the first round. The high ranked player I happened to draw was LustedSmurf.
LustedSmurf is a former number one on the ladder and he is still in the top 5. I did end up losing the best of 3 series that we played on Lost Temple but I had much more success than I expected versus such a high caliber player. Read the full report to get all of the details!
It has been a while since I have updated the page but for good reason. My plate has been plenty full with midterms, assignments and lots of programming. I am currently making a video game called "Frogger" for my Visual Basic class which is due on Monday. That is where most of my efforts have been in the past few weeks. There has been a lot of stuff happening recently that I hope to find the time to report on in the near future. There is never enough time is there? Anyway, once this video game is finished I will upload it so everyone can download it and then hopefully some time will open up for more detailed updates.
Feel free to drop me an email with questions or comments at weyman@nbnet.nb.ca
