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A few weeks ago Counter Strike: Global Offensive released a battle royale game mode while also making the game free to play on Steam. Since the update has been out for a while I’ve gotten a chance to play a few games of the battle royale mode as well as normal matchmaking.

The new battle royale mode called Danger Zone is a completely separate part of the game with its own queues. It takes place on an island called Blacksite. The map is quite small since there are only 16 players in games of solos or 18 players in duos and trios.

Danger Zone also includes a few new items and weapons in the game. Instead of a buy menu and mini map you get a tablet that’s pretty much an iPad that allows you to buy things using money you find. Items you buy are delivered by drones that drop a box of your purchase wherever your tablet is. This allows other players to track your location by following the drone or just shoot the drone down and steal your purchase. However, you can come up some pretty clever strategies by dropping your tablet and wait to see if anyone tried to follow your drone. The tablet also serves as a map. It lets you see where the “danger zone” is and where it’s heading. Hexagons that the map is divided in light up if there are players in that area which can let you see where other players are. You can buy or find upgrades for your tablet such as radar jamming for surrounding players and drone tracking for all drones on the map.

Danger Zone has lots of different melee weapons that aren’t available in standard play such as hammers and wrenches. Normally you’ll use them for opening weapon crates, but they can be used as throwable weapons. Weapons aren’t hard to find in the game mode although most of the times you’ll only have an SMG, shotgun, or pistol. In order to find the better weapons, you’ll have to find Paradrop supplies later on in the game. However I’d say that the ammunition is difficult to find. You only get a little bit of ammo when you first pickup the gun, any other ammo you’ll find in ammo boxes that you find or buy. Even then, the amount of ammo you get from those boxes is little. Armour can be found or bought quite easily, but your health can only be replenished through MediShots that can also be found or bought although you start with one or two if I remember correctly.

To be honest I haven’t really played much of Danger Zone, but I have won a few times with some friends. There aren’t really any strategies I use besides using the tablet to it’s fullest, but you can probably find good strategies on the internet if you looked for them.

At first I was a bit concerned when I heard that CS:GO went full free to play. The game has been known to be a popular game for cheaters and the anti-cheat system in place had a reputation of not really working all that well. However, the game did have Prime matchmaking in place for people that associated their accounts with a valid phone number. In my experience this system worked a lot better than standard matchmaking monitored by VAC. A few months after Prime was added another anti-cheat measure was implemented for non-Prime players called Trust Factor. I’m not really sure how it works, but it’s said that it uses an algorithm to put more trust worthy players into matches together and players more likely to cheat matches together. The price of the game was one of the things that supposedly stopped people from cheating since if a cheater got banned they’d have to buy the game again to continue cheating. However, even after the free to play movement games in Prime still seem to be normal with the occasional fishy person, but that was normal even before the update.

Overall, I think that Danger Zone is a pretty cool thing for people that are into that kind of gameplay. I also think that so far the free to play thing that’s going on is good to get more players into the game as long as there’s an efficient way to make sure people don’t cheat.

As of today, my school’s two week winter break has started. There are a few things I want to do during the time I have when there’s no school. Things like making progress in music and games.

When I started thinking about the winter break I immediately thought of making progress in the video games I’m playing. Currently, I’m still playing mostly osu! with the occasional Black Desert, CS:GO, and Fortnite. I don’t have any plans on getting any new games, but that could change depending on what’s on sale.

Overall, I would like to get a tablet before the break is over for osu!, but I’m quite sure that if I ordered one like the CTH-471 it wouldn’t arrive in time. However, it still kind of is in my plan for now. The past few weeks I’ve only made one decent play that brought me up by around 1000 rank that was worth 116pp. Other than that though I haven’t made much progress.

In Black Desert Online the new Archer class was released this week. Usually when new classes are released there are special sales and events, so I’d like to check out if there’s anything I could benefit from. Additionally, my Dark Knight is at level 55 which is only one level away from getting the awakening quests at level 56. Before the break ends I think I’ll spend some time every now and then trying to get closer to leveling up since now it’s taking me many hours to level up just once.

Although I’ve been trying to play some more Counter Strike, I haven’t really been playing as much as I thought I would be. The past few weeks I’ve only played a few games for fun with some friends, but I haven’t had the confidence to jump into solo queue on my own that much. That’s why over the break I want to at least play some more.

There’s not really much I want to do with Fortnite since I don’t really feel like it’s worth my time to try and get better at the game. Nowadays there are players that you die to every other game that seems to do nothing other than play the game 24/7. It makes the game feel like no matter how much you play and practice there are always people that just play way more than you do. That’s why now I kind of just play for fun not expecting to win or get better.

As for music, I’m planning on trying to figure out how to write my own music even if it’s just writing a few seconds of music. As long as it sounds nice then I’d be happy with it. I also want to finish practicing the arrangement I wrote a while ago so I can record it.

This year our family isn’t really planning to travel anywhere, so I have time to stay home and do all the different things I want to do. I’m pretty sure most of my other friends will also be just staying home playing games as well, so we’ll just be having fun playing games.

Two days ago, my brother Jason and his school’s music department were having a winter concert. I’ll be writing about what I thought of their performance this week.

Since the concert was made of the student’s music department the musicians were students from grade 9 to 12 except for the main conductor who was the school’s music teacher. The programme consisted of different bands, orchestras, and things like that. Each “group” performed around one to three pieces with a 15-minute intermission in the middle of the show.

Being around winter time there was a Christmas medley played in the beginning by a flute choir. For the rest of the show, it mostly consisted of themes from shows and movies as well as other classical pieces. There were a notable amount of performances made from the side stage where a duet or quartet was performing.

The actual performances didn’t sound too bad in my opinion. I haven’t really been to many orchestral performances, so I can’t really say what a good one sounds like. However, there were some pieces where I thought a few of the musicians were playing a bit flat for some reason. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to sound like that or if it was just me. I personally thought they should’ve been playing at a higher pitch at some parts though. Besides that and a kind of sloppy electric guitar solo for one of the songs, the rest of the show was quite good.

Overall I think the show went quite well, and I enjoyed most of it. I pretty much didn’t know any of the musicians that were performing, but I did see a few people that had graduated from my school in previous years.

This week, specifically yesterday, Season 6 of Fortnite Battle Royale ended and Epic Games introduced Season 7. After they buffed shotguns again around a week or so ago I might actually start playing the game more.

There were a lot of things added in this update, but I’d like to start with the new battle pass of the season first. Just like every other season, there’s a new battle pass, and this time it seems pretty good. There are new additions though with the wraps which change the way your weapons and vehicles look. Other than those, the battle pass is pretty much what you’d expect with new skins and emotes.

For the gameplay aspects, a few items were changed and a new vehicle was added. The clingers, chillers, port-a-forts, double barrel shotgun, shockwave grenades, and shadow stones have all been removed. I think most of these items’ removal can be justified besides the shockwave grenades which I feel like they could’ve left in the game. The balloons were changed so that you can have up to three balloons on your back allowing you to use items and weapons. I think this makes the application of balloons a lot more useful. The stack size was also reduced down to ten. The new vehicle addition is the X-4 Stormwing Plane although I can already predict people will just call it a plane since the name is way too long. The X-4 Stormwing Plane can seat up to five players and has a mounted machine gun that can overheat. Many different movement controls on the plane make it quite mobile. They spawn pretty much all across the map in certain locations though it looks like if you go to Frosty Flights there’s a better chance you’ll find a few.

Speaking of Frosty Flights, there was quite the map overhaul which introduced the new snow biome. It takes up almost a quarter of the map replacing Greasy Grove and Flush Factory. There are ice patches that players can slide around on and zip lines in certain locations where players can also use their weapons and items on them.

That’s all for the Season 7 changes, but there was also another gamemode that was added in called “Creative”. Creative is pretty much an improved version of the playground mode where you can create multiple islands, spawn in any items, have infinite materials, create prefabs, and even fly. To be honest it’s pretty much Minecraft mixed in with Fortnite, and there are lots of different things you can do with it since your islands will also save. I think it will be very interesting to see what other people can do with it and what my friends and I will do with it.

Overall, the past updates from Epic Games seem pleasing and I think the game is slowly going back into the right direction. I’m looking forward to getting back on and trying things out.

This week I was originally going to write about how I was getting back into the game Black Desert Online, but it turns out I haven’t written about it before. That’s why I’ll just be writing my whole experience in general this week.

Black Desert Online or BDO is an open world MMORPG which mostly revolves around its graphics and combat mechanics. First of all, the graphics in this game are extremely good. Out of every single video game I’ve ever played BDO has the best graphics I’ve seen. This is especially true after the remastered update a few months ago. Black Desert is the one game where I prefer high settings over fps.

The combat in the game is generally the same between the different classes although there are some differences. Usually, a character’s skills use only a few keys, but there are many different combos that you can use if you memorize them. The usage of different classes in combat differs though. At the start of BDO, I started with a Witch class which is more of a support class. Therefore, it wasn’t that fun and it became difficult to grind mobs, so I moved over to the Dark Knight class a few weeks ago and I’m having a lot more fun.

Up until endgame, most of BDO is PvE and then it moves over to heavy PvP. When you level your character to the higher levels there aren’t any dungeons like in other MMOs. The game mostly focuses on Node Wars and Castle Sieges between players at endgame.

Besides the gameplay aspects, I think the game’s character creation is really good compared to other games I’ve seen. The controls in the creation menu are kind of complicated, but usually, you can get something close to what you want your character to look. If you aren’t interested in PvP, the game also offers a large variety of life skills such as alchemy, cooking, and fishing. You could also just explore the world if you really wanted to.

Originally I had taken a break from the game as my current class wasn’t really enjoyable without friends all the time. Now I’ve started getting back into the game with a different class. Overall, for my first MMO experience, I’m having fun so far. I’ve heard that endgame does get really “grindy” in terms of gaining levels, but I’d like to try out the life skills in the game by then.

Around a month ago one of my old teachers from a few years ago had invited me to a workshop called “the Quest” that took place last week. I’ll try my best to describe the workshop and what we did.

From my understanding, the Quest has been around for many years. Each year there’s a different theme. This year’s theme was The Quest For Well Being: Making Connections, Making Commitments. The goal of the Quest is to educate participants about these different themes. You can read more about the Quest here.

The thing that I was doing along with multiple other students from other classes had to do with identity. The teacher said was that there would be an art project that people would along with recording a statement about themselves. The art project required you to think about various things you identify with and draw those things onto a piece of paper that had a picture of you glued onto it. The statement was one where you said something that other people might not immediately notice about you. For example, “I am more than an Asian boy with glasses”.

However, my job had nothing to do with the art project and more with the statements. The way our booth/station worked was that there would be a slideshow updating with different people’s statements. My job was to wait for people to upload their statements to a shared folder and then add the video files to an iMovie project. I was actually supposed to have a few more things to do, but there were other students there who were happy to do them for me.

Originally while we were setting up our booth at the venue, we had problems with the printer for the art project, but we managed to sort things out. We were also worried about not being able to keep up with lots of people coming since it was a pretty large event. On the other hand, when people actually started coming out of the auditorium where they were waiting, they weren’t who we were expecting. From what the teacher overseeing our whole project had informed us, we expected kids that would be doing our project. However, the people that were at the workshop were actually people like educators and board directors. Therefore, most people that walked by our booth didn’t really have time to sit down and take half an hour to do an art project.

Although our project didn’t go as planned, we still got a few people to stay throughout the whole process. One of those people was our old principal who we weren’t expecting to see. Even by the end of the day, the printer started having problems again.

In conclusion, the Quest was quite different from what I had expected. I can’t really say I had fun or that it was particularly a bad experience. One thing I was surprised by though while researching was that Justin Trudeau was a previous speaker at the Quest.

This year, I decided to try out for my school’s intermediate volleyball team which is made up of grade 7’s and 8’s. The reason I tried out was that since I’m in grade 8 I wanted to try being on one of our school sports teams for once besides the track and field team. I did volleyball since it was at the start of the year without much school work to do, and one of my friends who already had volleyball experience said I should try out for the team. I’ll write about my experience since the season just ended this Tuesday.

At first, when I got to the first try out I was surprised about what the coaches were looking for in people for the team. They didn’t seem to care too much about the skills like spiking or blocking, but more so basic passing and serving. It would make sense if it was gym class and we were just learning the basics. This was just something I noticed. After the first try out the coaches chose a group of people for a second try out a few days later including me. I don’t really remember the second try out all that well except that we did pretty much the same things as the first try out.

After I made it on the team, there were a few of my friends as well as some other classmates I’ve had. There were a few grade 7’s I didn’t really know, but I pretty much knew everyone on the team already. Our team was quite small compared to other schools’ teams with only 11 people. This meant we couldn’t even play a proper six on six practice game with our own team. We had only one practice before our first group exhibition games. By the time we had our first game with other schools, most of our team just focused on getting the ball over the net on serves, passing the ball to our setter, and then setting the ball to my one friend who plays rep volleyball. We basically relied on him to score most of our team’s points since he could actually spike and jump serve properly.

Between our first exhibition game and areas, we had one more group exhibition and a few more practices. By the time areas rolled around, I don’t think much changed about the team besides improving our communication and basic skills. However, by improving those basic skills we went from losing or tieing all our games at the first exhibition to getting third at areas.

The areas were held at a school close to ours this Tuesday (Although technically you could say it was held at two schools). The way things worked from what I got is that there are two different schools that other schools gather at. Each of the schools’ gyms has two pools of schools. The top two schools from each gym meet at one gym and play against each other. I’m not sure exactly how they gave out the different placements though.

Our pool wasn’t too bad in terms of that many difficult opponents except for one powerhouse school that won all of their games before the other gym’s schools came. Out of our gym, we placed second behind that powerhouse school. I don’t exactly remember how many games we won or played after the other gym’s schools came, but we came third in the tournament. Our teammates and my friend’s older brother who also plays/played competitive volleyball were pretty mad after we lost our last game though. The referee called a lift on our setter’s one-handed set even though it was pretty obvious that it was clean. We lost the game 27-25.

Overall, I had fun playing on a team sport although our coaches didn’t really seem to care that much about organizing practices or games with other schools that much.

 

I’ve mentioned before about how I’ve started to use Guitar Pro to write arrangments, but so far I’ve only actually worked on one song for a while. There have been two songs I’ve done, but one of them I’ve only done the first few seconds of it. In this post, I’ll write about some specific things that I had a hard time with on a specific song.

The song I’m currently spending most of my time on is W: Wonder Tale. I pretty much chose it because I liked the song. I wasn’t really thinking ahead of time which aspects the song had that would make it easier or more difficult to arrange. One thing I noticed is that there’s a lot of things you won’t really notice in a song until you actually start looking for them. For example, when I was arranging W:Wonder Tale, there was often a bar or two of just sustenance of another chord. So for parts of the song it kind of felt empty. When I listen to the original song though, you can hear some of the smaller things that fill in the gaps. For this song specifically, it was mostly keyboard and synthesiser, so I decided to use some harmonics occasionally.

Another thing I’ve noticed with this specific song is the drums in it before certain song sections. Going from the intro to the synth break there’s a drum roll and going from the verse to the bridge section has a really noticeable fill. I wanted to include these things on the guitar, but I still can’t really seem to figure out the right sounds to use. For the drum roll at the beginning, there are two beats of sixteenth notes. On the guitar, I couldn’t figure out a way to maintain a roll for two beats, so what I did was replace the last beat with a bass drum and then snare hit. This works, but it doesn’t really sound like the original. The same problem kind of happens for the drum fills since it’s hard to find a sound the matches the toms on the guitar.

The last thing that I found difficult with this song was keeping the original feel of the song. Later on in the song where the chorus picks up, the song sounds really energetic and lively. I think this is because of the sustaining chords played by the synthesiser and the fast drums. The song is at 158 bpm which is supposed to be around the speed of Allegro, but slightly faster. Allegro is considered a “lively” and “cheerful” tempo which I think is true with this song. I couldn’t really capturing the liveliness of the song, but I think that’s just because I had a hard time sustaining the chords while also playing the melody. The chords in the song are difficult for me to hold while also playing the melody.

Overall, I feel like I learned a lot from just this one song. I think that the problem with capturing the individual feel of a song will always be something people who make arrangements deal with since it’s always different with each song. However, I still had fun making this arrangement.

 

Ever since I’ve stopped playing as much Fortnite around a month ago, I’ve started to play a lot more osu! which I’ve made posts about before. The game is basically clicking circles to the beat of different songs.

Around a month ago, I went from the gap of rank #150,000 to #140,000. I’m also closing the gap on accumulating 2k pp (performance points) on my profile. Currently, I’m sitting at 1,944 pp which is a few hundred more than I had a few months ago. However, with these improvements, I’ve noticed that ever since I’ve gotten out of that #150,000 range my progress has slowed down. It shouldn’t really be because of school either because the plateau started only a little more than a month ago, and school has been going on for around two months now. In my opinion, I think I know why.

I think the reason why I was doing alright even after school had started was because I still had the consistency from playing over the summer. However, once I started to only play on weekends my consistency has gotten a lot worse. I mostly started noticing last week when my aim felt really off. Since I’ve started playing more 5-6 star maps, there’s a lot more aiming involved. I can pass some 6-star maps, but can’t pass even a 4-star map if it has a lot of jumps. I feel like since I’m not playing as much I used to, I’m using the mouse a lot more for other things like normal web browsing. However, using the mouse for osu! feels a lot more different. Now, whenever I get on once the week ends it feels really weird to adjust back to using the mouse to jump to random points of the screen.

The reason for inconsistency would be me using a mouse to play in my mind. A large part of the osu! community uses drawing tablets to aim which usually provides greater accuracy and more refined movements. Since tablets also use absolute location, wherever you point on the tablet is where your cursor goes on the screen. This resolves the problem of mouse drift where sometimes you run out of mousepad space. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of great players like AngelSim and FunOrange who use mouse or at least used to and were successful. However, in their cases, they were/are able to play almost every day and play competitively. In my case though, I just want to get better at the game and have fun. As such, I’ve been looking at some drawing tablets for osu!.

The tablets that I’ve looked at include two models of Wacom tablets, a Huion tablet, and an XP-Pen tablet. The four specific tablets are the Wacom CTL/CTH 480, Wacom CTL 471, Huion 420, and XP-Pen G430S. The CTL/CTH letters are just the touch functionality of the tablet and whether or not it has it. That doesn’t really matter for osu! though. These four tablets are all pretty well know in the community for being the most recommended tablets for osu! players.

The two Wacom tablets from what I’ve seen are the best of the four. The difference between them is one is slightly inclined and one is flat although if it’s my first tablet I don’t think it’d matter too much. However, the one problem with these two tablets is that they’re discontinued products. The newer Wacom models seem to have lots of input lag and are overpriced for what they provide just for osu!. Being discontinued products you’ll usually have to get them second hand. Specifically, the 480 model is less common to buy. I personally think it’s because of one of the or the best osu! player ever (debatable) Cookiezi uses this tablet. At his peak, he was by far the best player of his time setting numerous records and plays. Even now he’s still within the top #10 rankings. I’d say he’s the most popular osu! player as of now and is a lot of players’ idol. For me, if I do end up getting a tablet it’d be either the 480 or the 471 since the company has a reputation for producing good quality products, and the community has given positive opinions in terms of input lag and the sort for both tablets.

The Huion 420 used to be the same model of the official osu!tablet which the website no longer sells. The company Huion has a reputation for producing good tablets for art at a cheap price, but their history for osu! is a bit controversial. Huion’s 420 model is marketed towards osu! players, but has a small active area of use. Another thing about the tablet is that it’s made of a lesser quality plastic, and people have reported issues with the tablet surface picking up pen movement. Although some people do use the tablet without an issue, I think I’d rather choose another tablet.

The last tablet is the XP-Pen G430S. This tablet has a reputation for being a good tablet of people that use smaller active areas. For me, I’m not too great with my pen/pencil precision in tight areas represented in my handwriting. Therefore, I think I’d prefer a tablet with a little more room to work with. If it wasn’t for that, I think I would choose this tablet instead of the Wacom ones. Overall it holds a good standing amongst the osu! community for its reliability.

In conclusion, I’m still not completely set on getting a tablet even though I’ve been thinking about it for a while. However, if I do I’ve come to a decision. I’ll see how things go with the mouse for a bit longer, and then perhaps we’ll see about the tablet.

Until recently, I’ve almost completely forgotten about my New Guitar post which actually has already arrived and I’ve been using for the past few months. The AR11C/ACE from Baton Rouge arrived mid-June instead of March due to shipping issues, but I’ll still be writing about what I think of the guitar.

Previously I’d been using an El Degas guitar which is a company that makes Gibson replicas. It was a guitar my aunt had that she wasn’t using. I changed the strings with a set that she gave me with the guitar, but they still felt rusty and awkward. When I first used the AR11C/ACE the first thing I noticed was how much more comfortable it felt compared to the glossy finish of the El Degas guitar. The AR11C/ACE has a more natural finish and isn’t as sticky when you hold it. This makes the body feel better as well as makes it easier for me to move my hand up and down the neck.

The next thing I’d noticed were the Elixir strings. Almost all of Elixir’s strings have some sort of coating on them that is supposed to change the way they feel depending on the coating you get. When the guitar came it didn’t specify the coating. All I knew was that they felt really nice to play with and my fingers didn’t get stuck on them. When it came time to change strings I went to their website and found that the Polyweb coating best described what I felt with the strings when they first arrived. I decided to go with the 80/20 Bronze, Light/Medium Polyweb strings. They felt pretty much the same as when the guitar first came and I’ve really been enjoying them. I plan on staying with those strings for a while unless I have money to start experimenting with new strings.

The last most notable thing on the guitar for me was the BR-2P pickup system. The AR11C/ACE was my first time using an acoustic guitar that had a pickup system. A pickup system is basically a microphone inside the guitar that you can connect to an amplifier if you’d like. For me, the pickup is sometimes useful when I feel like plugging in or just being louder, but I think the most convenient thing for me is the tuner on the BR-2P. With a push of a button on the side of the guitar, it switches to tuner mode and it lets you know if a string is too “high” or “low”. What I find nice, is that it’s not restricted to the standard EADGBE so it can use open tunings as well. The reason why this is convenient is because sometimes I don’t really feel like pulling out the Fender Tuner on my phone. Sometimes I just want to quickly retune so I can play right away.

Overall, I think that the Baton Rouge AR11C/ACE is a great guitar and with the right strings can sound really good. I’d like to assume that the rest of the Baton Rouge guitars are also of the same quality, but since I’ve never tried any others I can’t say.