Chris Algoo

This week, I (along with several others) will create a game from scratch in 24 hours. I’ve made games before, but never in this sort of setting. Here’s hoping I get to pwn some scrubs

Consistency is awesome. If you do something every day, you’re going to get better at it. My morning exercise is coming along well, but I’m also supposed to be writing 500 words of a book every day. The blank page is daunting, and I’ve skipped out on several days of writing, which is lame. I want to get to 100,000 words as soon as possible, which won’t be very soon if I keep sucking. Do any of you have a suggestion for keeping the words flowing?

What are some things you do consistently?

As you may have noticed, today is not Tuesday. It isn’t even Wednesday, for that matter. It also isn’t Friday (which is a bummer, since Fridays are awesome). It’s Thursday. My bad, guys and gals.

I got some toast this morning with my pepper, onion and cilantro (or maybe it’s parsley) omelet. It was made in one of those cool toasters that’s essentially a conveyor belt over a Very Hot Thing – they heat bagels really well (really warm in the middle, and really crispy on the edges). I was watching the breads and bagels slide slowly down, inexorably moving towards the end where they would fall. Some of the slices of bread would cling to the conveyor belt towards the end, their weight keeping them in the toaster for a few more seconds.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I’m a slice of toast, and you are too. (I don’t think I’m literally a slice of toast – I don’t think I could afford that much therapy). But we’re all on this conveyor belt for a limited time, and then the ride’s over. Let’s try to get as brown and crispy as we can.

Also, Obama’s Inauguration speech was awesome – the dude’s got at least 20 Charisma. As great as his oratory was, the really amazing thing was the message – he was telling the country to be awesome, to get up and do something great. Let’s do that too.

I’m working on an article about the many reasons people play games, but I also want more people to read that Grinding article – I think it’s pretty good. Time to step up the publicity engine (which is currently three hamsters in a box).

If you had 48 hours and a team, what kind of game would you make? Game Jam aims to find out. The teams are given some contraints around which they must build a game in the space of two days. NYU alumni that I am, I can go to the NYU branch of the Game Jam. This is the first Game Jam ever hosted, which is a bit lame, since I’d like to see some previous winners. But there aren’t any, so oh well. We’re going to be working in XNA, which is Microsoft’s genius game-development language. I call it genius, because it brings independent game development to the Xbox 360. Any developer can run his or her games right on his or her Halo machine! It’s created a huge, wide-open canvas for aspiring console gamedevs. I’m… not sure if anything has arisen from this, but it’s a great idea, certainly worthy of a hat-tipping. I hope the constraints are actually game-interesting, maybe something like “The player must control two entities”, and not something like “isometric camera”. 48 hours seems like a short time, and it is. John Romero had, like, a million years to make Daikatana, and it turned out… bad. We do not have a million years, but we can avoid making Daikatana, God willing. Wish us luck.

First off, I realize that today is not Tuesday, and I apologize. If anyone comes over, I’ll bake them a cake in apology (note – no cakes will be baked, unless I feel like eating one. German Chocolate, maybe.) So, this week has the unlikely combination of Snowboarding and Ham.

A two-hour drive brings me and several good friends to Camelback Mountain, where we eagerly disembark after a hearty Chinatown breakfast of steak and eggs. Then we wait on line for our lesson package, then another line for our boards, then another line to actually start the lesson. Total line time was about three hours, which was about as much as you’d spend in three hours at Otakon. The lesson starts, and I’m easily the worst out of our group of four. But I plow on, imagining a soundtrack of awesome 80’s music. I make a good deal of progress, although not enough to actually make it all the way down a very slight slope without falling. Oh well, it’s still fun, and I’ll be back.

Searching around Citysearch, I found a nifty Ham Bar. Run by Mario Batali, it serves cured Spanish meats… from Spain. I’m not much of a Ham or Wine conisseur, so all I can say is that I really liked the Ham and Wine. The ham was subtle, and the wine was… I don’t have the words to describe wine. I’ll say it’s good. The atmosphere was nice too, crowded but not aggressively so.