Hello once again people, it's time for an update. If you hadn't read the previous blog and the comment I left on it, sadly I did not make IMEA, but I feel that it was a good experience because throughout practicing I had to take a good look at what I was doing right and wrong with playing music, so I feel that I have grown practicing for the auditions.
       People in my school who play videogames always ask me, what game are you playing? Since the unfortunate death of my Xbox 360 2 weeks ago I have been too lazy to fix it, and so I have been playing the PC/Xbox 360 Team Fortress 2 on the PC. Although you can get it for the Xbox 360, it is highly recommended that you get it for the PC because the amount of support the company Valve gives it as well as the support of the mod community makes the PC version completely different from the 360 version.
        When I answer with this people usually say, "What is that? that sounds like a dumb game," unless they are nerds like me. Well here is the description of the game. Team Fortress 2 is a cartoon styled objective based team shooter. There are 3 types of classes, and 3 of each. For offence, there's the scout, a Boston boy who's very quick but has low health, the psychotic Soldier whose main weapon is the rocket launcher, and the maniacal pyro, who uses a flamethrower. On defence you have the Scottish demoman, sticky bombs are your friends, the Soviet Heavy, wielding a fierce minigun, and the good ol' boy from Texas, the engineer. The last three are the support classes, who more indirectly help out the team, the Australian Sniper, the French Spy, and the German Medic. As you can tell from the descriptions all of the characters have their own unique personality and abilities when used right can help out the team well. An example would be the feared heavy medic combo. Heavies are slow but have a lot of health, making them an easy target, but put a medic who can constantly heal him then he is practically a walking tank.
(Warning following videos have lots of blood)



       Those two videos were just two examples of the crazy personalities of Team Fortress 2, also notice the violence. They have one video for each of the classes except for the Medic and the Pyro, don't know why. There are 5 modes you can play, payload, where you have to push a cart to an objective, one team defends the other is pushing, arena, basically team deathmatch, control points, where there are 5 control points, both teams push foward to capture all 5, king of the hill, there is one point and both teams want to capture it for a set amount of time, and one mode (not sure of the name) where there are 3-5 points which one team must defend and the other must capture. Notice the fact that none of these modes are free for all, meaning that teamwork is a necessity to win a match. The beauty of the game is that certain classes have certain areas where they can work efficiently and the fact that a lot of the classes have good chemistry together and can destroy the other team if used properly.

         I prefer to play as a rotating cast of the Spy, the Engineer, Heavy, Soldier, and Medic, depending on what the situation calls for, although if I have my choice I always go Heavy. The community is a great part of the game it is the community who keep the game relevant and move it forward. It is also a pretty mature community that don't usually spam their mics and aren't 10 year old children who somehow got a hold of the game. It's a great game with lots of personality and something that "casual" gamers don't usually know about. Also this story is a testament to how supportive Valve is to the modding community. http://www.giantbomb.com/news/valve-team-fortress-2-community-creators-get-some-fat-checks/2663/. Basically now that Valve has updated all 9 classes since the initial launch in 2010, they allowed some people in the community to make a new update and with the newest update gave them 25% of the profit, which was a big $39,000 for just making a couple of new weapons and hats. Crazy, right? This game continues to change and develop, and it is for sure not going to stop soon, showing that PC games still have a lot of steam.
        Like I said before, my 360 is broken and I don't know when I'm going to get it fixed. Does anyone know a good repair shop or an electronics shop? The holiday season this year seems packed with some good releases. I also just got the new Kings of Leon album, "Come Around Sundown" and I gotta say, it's pretty average. It's not a great album for sure, but it's also not a bad album. Something about it felt a little too formulaic, but you have to give the KoL credit for making their albums varied and their pretty impressive playing. Once again, check out Arcade Fire and their albums, if you don't you're missing out on some great music.
       Glak Out