Todays Notes 4/19/21

 Good evening everybody,

You know for whatever reason I totally spaced on writing today's blog post.

Anyway, Sunday Night's stream was awesome as I tackled the challenge variations of the Overwatch Archive missions, getting the three I needed to get done... and the one that I never want to do ever again is Bulletproof Barriers, because getting a team that would make smart selections was getting frustrating. Granted I was using Dva but I discovered that Dva can eat a lot of damage. Also we helped PandaSweet get the 2nd week skin for Zenyatta, so all in all it was a good night last night.

This morning we did do a Fitness Boxing 2 stream, it went about an hour (when factoring in the small breaks between sets), and involved a lot of stepping, the portion of the workout that counted for the daily lasted 47 minutes, but with the extra bit we did, it ended up keeping on pace with the big three days of the week.

Tonight's stream we played and finished Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, and I was reminded of two bugs, one being when the Harvesters invaded Voyager, sometimes the lift to escape the cargo hold does not activate, and also when using God Mode in the Forge, when Biesman dies, it will deactivate. Still it was a good to have that game finished. As people saw with how the enemies swarm you, there is no way to keep up with the action on normal difficulty.

Because we finished that at about 9 PM, we did some bonus gaming, and I thought about doing some Star Trek Online, but instead we played NHL Face-Off for the PlayStation. And It was my first time playing it, it took me a few minutes to get use to using the D-Pad and to figure out what controls did what. We played three games, winning only one of them.

Did some MLB The Show 21 off-stream to advance the Road to the Show stuff, where I basically had to force my player to become a starting pitcher. A few other tweaks has resulted in him becoming a AA All-Star, throwing a perfect game and pitching like Fernando Valenzuela.

Sony announced they are going to keep the PS3 / Vita stores online because a) they like money and b) they know they will have a major lawsuit on their hands regarding denying people access to what they purchased/ The stupidity Sony has when it comes to refusing to accept that there are some people who enjoy playing older games in addition to newer ones just confounds me.!

Tomorrow night, more than likely we'll be starting up Uncharted on the PlayStation 3, giving the Xbox One a rest since it saw heavy duty with Dragon Age Inquisition. 

Which means tomorrow morning's blog post will be rather short, unless something inspires me.

And on that note we'll see you tomorrow over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 4/18/21

Good afternoon everyone,

Last night's stream of ESPN Major League Baseball saw the switch to simulating 6 out of every 7 games, and even with this my lead in the NL East stayed at over 20 games. More than likely we'll finish the 2004 season next Saturday. That said, after discovering the 'power swing' button last week, we certainly made good use of it, because in the games I did play last night we were mashing homers left and right, boosting Jim Thome's total to 37 and not to far off of the league leader Sammy Sosa's 41 with about 5 weeks left in the season.

Randomly, because there was a player named Bubba Trammel, and when I saw him, I instantly started thinking of the old Bell Atlantic commercials featuring James Earl Jones, namely the 'This is the book that got Bubba cooked' and ended with the line of 'And this is Bubba', and showing a big ass fish. Goes to show I'm old.

After last night's stream, I ended up going through some of the lower shelves and discovering even more stuff my pops left behind, including a bunch of old Sporting News Baseball books from the mid and late 80s, because he used to play the APBA Baseball games.This also lead to me discovering that one of the shelves on the bookcase you can when I do Fitness Boxing streams not actually being part of it, and that it was added with some half-ass tabs. Thankfully I had two old heavy duty plastic crates that I fit perfectly in the lower gap, and so I laid the board-shelf on top of it. The result ended up being the shelf is lower than before and now I can stand up some of the taller books I have in my collection.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, 47 minutes with the daily workout plus an additional 15 minutes just to maintain my heavy weekend workouts. Tomorrow's session will of course be streamed over on Twitch as soon as I wake up and have breakfast.

With it being Sunday that means tonight we'll be playing Overwatch, and we'll be taking it easy as we'll be playing more archive arcade modes, rotating through Uprising, Retribution and Storm Warning. Maybe we'll take crack at the variations of those modes, and if there is Mayhem active this week, we'll toss in those to.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Highlights for the Week of 4/11/21

 Here are highlights from my twitch channel (http://twitch.tv/fredcasden) for the week of April 11, 2021 which featured  Overwatch, Dragon Age Inquisition, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise, Tom Clancy's The Division, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force, MLB The Show 21 and ESPN Major League Baseball.

 

Today's Notes 4/17/21

 Good morning everybody, 

Well we were up early once again, as PSE&G came out to remove the old gas pipe, having to leave the elbow that connected it to the outside because the only way that can be removed is if they basically dig up the street and part of my yard. But they sealed it so no water leakage should occur.

Last night's stream featured MLB The Show 21, where we played a few games, did a couple of Home Run derbies, unlocked several achievements, started Road to the Show where I made the shortest, fattest dude possible... looks like a mini Bartolo Colon. The two-way player nonsense is something I'm not keen on, even if I have a better understand of the hitting mechanics in the game. Still we had fun with it.

We added three things to my collections, Dead of Alive 5: Ultimate and Vanquish for the PlayStation 3, and Chrono Cross for the PlayStation One. Those who have seen my collection know I had Chrono Cross already, but the version I picked up is the Greatest Hits version that had the Square Enix logo print on it, instead of the SquareSoft logo which was on the original release. As I mention, if you know where to look on Amazon you can find some cheap older games that will eventually become harder to find. 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was 1 hour 5 minutes, but only 41 minutes were for the daily work out, the reason for the extra time is of course on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays I try to do longer sessions, and today ended up being my longest duration for exercising to date. Granted these extra sessions often are around the 1 hour 5 minute mark, so it comes down to just a matter of seconds. In regards to the Sophie's Best Friend achievement, we're up to 74 points, needing 26 more to complete it. Also stepped on the scale and I gained a little to be up around 251-252.

(Note: Twitter was down, so I could not retrieve the screen shot of today's results at the time  this was posted)

Tonight's stream will be focused on ESPN Major League Baseball for the PlayStation 2, as I'll probably simulate several games, and if our lead in the NL East begins to shrink we'll then take it more seriously, this way we can get to the end of the season quicker.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 4/16/21

 Good morning everybody,

Well last night I certainly did not play Star Trek Online, and the reason was, I didn't feel like just doing another stream of just doing Task Force Operations and doing needless grinding.

So instead, we went back... way back.... to 2001 with another Star Trek game, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force for the PlayStation 2. The last time I played it, prior to last night, was September 10, 2008, and keeping in mind I did have a PlayStation 3 at that point, it certainly wasn't capable of playing PS2 games. Now this game is one where you can choose your character to be male or female, and there are subtle differences depending on gender, such as you come across O'Dell in different locations, and some dialog is phrased differently from other NPCs. Now Voyager: Elite Force was originally a PC game ported to the PS2, and thus some (well a lot) of tweaking with the controls is needed as turning and looking up and down can be either too slow or too loose.... which makesGod Mode (when paused hold L1+L2+R1+R2+R3 then press select, you will hear the game say Impressive, when paused, you will see text indicating if its on or off) and almost necessity due to how enemies can and will rush you even on normal difficulty... keeping in mind I have 12+years of rust when t comes to Elite Force.

That all said, because there are a number of puzzles and trying to remember where to go and how to get from point A to point B involved, so we only made it past The Borg cube stage, which leaves 3 stages left. Which would be a good time to mention the following, the load times are frequent, as nearly every section of the game has to be loaded, granted the game runs smoothly, but you will become familiar with the loading screen. Even with god mod on, you can still die from fall damage and stepping into an environmental hazard, and there are several mission critical failures that can happen if you are not careful.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, as I felt pretty god throughout it, missing only one block, and you know how my frustrations when it comes to doing block combos. We're still a long ways away from moving on from Sophie, as we get 3 points per day, and at the moment we're at 69, and so we need 31 more points to wrap up her last related achievement before moving on to the next trainer. Also of note: not as many calories burned this week as compared to last week, but the difference was only like a couple hundred, give or take.

Moving on, after last night's stream I loaded up MLB The Show 21 to give it a test run, and I can safely say the music got real old real fucking quick, so I turned that off within 5 minutes. Control wise, pitching isn't that much different from ESPN Baseball for the PS2 (which we'll be playing tomorrow night), but hitting it a pain in the ass, as it's that zone style / aim type hitting which kind of makes the game not fun to deal with because it forces you to use the strike zone camera (from behind home plate) which is something I hate! Still, I did get a bunch of achievements last night. And we'll be playing this for tonight's stream!

And on that note, we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 4/15/21

Good morning everybody,

It's Tax Day, well it is under normal circumstances, but because of how FUBAR things with the IRS has been with last minute changes to the tax code and them now having to go back and adjust the returns for everyone who filed before the latest stimulus package bill, Tax season got extended.

Anyway last night we started off The Division, and because of how schedules and stuff work out, the first chunk of the stream I was on my own, struggling but doing alright... but then my buddies PowerThumbz and Iceman joined... and we discovered a rather unique bug, in that while I as a lower level player will scale up to match them in terms of dealing damage, my armor and health does not properly scale. This was a bug discovered within The Division back in 2018, and Ubisoft never fixed it, so I spent the second chunk of the stream getting downed in like 1 or 2 hits, which made for great comedy. Now on the other hand, for Thumbz and Iceman, they were practically immortal... except when it came to one wall on the mission to same Benitez, they were too close to it when it exploded... again great comedy. 

MLB The Show 21 for the Xbox One / Series consoles is available for early download and installation, which I took care of last night, so Friday night's stream will be dedicated to it. And with ESPN Baseball moving to Saturday's that means we'll be doing back to back with baseball this week!

Played a little Forza Horizon 4 off stream, and I noticed that I'm progressing pretty nicely towards some achievements in that, I figure if I focus on races for certain paths I can unlock them pretty quickly.

In my search for older games to add to my collection, the following were added to my collection, all of which are PlayStation (PSOne) era games, NHL Face Off, PGA Tour '96 and WWF WrestleMania The Arcade Game... all of which in their classic long box style cases. With them came WCW/NWO Thunder a game I already had, however this is a much cleaner copy with the jewel case being intact.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, if a little awkward, as I  couldn't quite get the rotation I wanted when doing South Paw right hand upper cuts. I was able to stay in sequence to get ducking and weaving motions down, and the results indicate I did very well, I just don't feel like I was at my best. Ah well, tomorrow's another day.

It's Thursday which means we'll be playing Star Trek Online tonight, and probably means this will the shortest stream of the week.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

My High School Cross Country Times

Recently I found the 'Record Boards', that were used to post my race times for when I was on the Pennsauken Tech Cross Country Team in my Junior and Senior years. Hell you may have seen me wearing the t-shirt I kept from my senior year of High School from time to time on my Twitch streams (http://twitch.tv/fredcasden) Races were done at places like Cooper River Park. Gloucester Community College, Paul IV High School, Medford Technical High School. 

You may ask why don't I have records for my Freshman or Sophmore years, well its because I didn't join the Cross Country team until my Junior year (out of spite... but that's a long story), and I missed the first race of that season.  Also a big reason for the difference in times between my Junior and Senior years was because I was conned into enlisting in the Army Reserves via the delayed entry program, and for the summer of 2000 I was at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina going through boot camp for the United States Army.

 

Junior Year (1999)

1. Versus Pennsauken High, Edgewood High & Gloucester Tech - 36:04

2. Versus Bishop Eustace & Woodrow Wilson  - 35:22

3. Versus  Clayton High & Gloucester Tech - 39:29

4. Versus Medford  - 37:00*

5. Versus Camden High, Cherry Hill West and Gloucester Tech  - 32:00*

6. Open Race - 31: 00*

*board damage can't see full time

Senior Year (2000)

1. Versus Paul VI - 24:62

2. Versus Gloucester Tech - 24:17

3. Versus Woodrow Wilson & Camden High - 24:30

4. Versus Camden Catholic & Bishop Eustace - 23:54

5. New Jersey State Tournament - 28:13

6. Versus Gloucester Tech - 24:40

7. Versus Gloucester Tech, Medford Tech & West Hampton Tech - 27:27