Week 1 wrapup Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, February 12, 2010 at 11:45 AM, in Labels: Updates

Okay, so after a long period of unemployment and sitting around at home playing games, last year I decided to do something productive with my time. Not that accumulating gamerscore isn't productive, but something that "normal" people would consider productive. So I enrolled for a Tafe course, Certificate IV in Multimedia.

This week was my first week of said course, and I'm having mixed feelings about it. The course isn't at all what I expected... I thought we would be working with mainly sound/video/graphics editing tools, because last time I looked it up in detail (back in '07) that's more or less what the course was.

The course has changed since then, it's now basically a gaming course. Not programming (whew!) but the art side of it. Now, I didn't really want to do this. Sure I like games, but I never want to work in the industry. That said however, this course does cover things that I would like to learn more about just for my own personal interest, not professionally. I've decided to stick with it - unless I manage to find a job in like... 2-3 weeks, I'm going to keep doing the course (because after that time you can't get a refund on your course fees).

The main things I was looking forward to was Art and Design, where we use Photoshop and stuff like that, 2D Animation, self explanatory, and Game Design, which from what I can tell is more the theory of games rather than the technical and visual aspects. Surprisingly, something that I wasn't really looking forward to that much, 3D Modeling, was one of my favourite classes this week, along with 2D Animation. We also have a Project class, where we are going to build a working game (working with the Diploma Multimedia and Diploma Programming students) so that should be interesting.

At the moment I don't really care too much if I pass or fail the course. Passing would be nice, but that's not my main goal. My main goal is simply to learn, and if I pass the course while learning, that's an extra. Having said that, it's not like I'm going to slack off on assessments or anything like that! No way!

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In other, unrelated news, I started a 'cleanup' playthrough of Mass Effect 2 last week, after finishing the game with only 4 achievements left. Finishing this playthrough will leave me with 1 left - the one for completing the game on Insane difficulty. I was planning on doing this playthrough on Insane, but after dying about 7 times on the first group of mechs after the story mode, I decided to give Insane a pass for now, and attempt it after finishing this one.

Now this isn't just for achievements, nope. This playthrough is with a different character, imported from Mass Effect 1, with basically every decision in the original game the opposite of my first playthrough. I wanted to see just how much the story is affected by these choices. Also I wanted to be good instead of evil, see what benefits, if any, it brings.