Video Game Diary: Titanfall #1: War Games and My Will To Live

So I got Titanfall a few months ago, and have been having fun playing no matter how bad I might actually be at it. While playing with friends on the War Games map I managed to get myself in the same sticky situation twice and survive it. So… yay for me!

The Dude somehow forgot about that pit in the middle and fell in (he made it out too though), and my loyal Titan stayed by the edge to wait for me as another Titan was attacking it. I don’t know why I thought getting in was a good idea.

Me and Technology

I know I haven’t been here in awhile, and y’all can yell at me about that later, but right now, I’m having some serious technology issues lately, and it’s all related to Windows 8.

So a month ago, I got a new computer for REALLY cheap. I’m my father’s daughter, so when  friend told me about slightly older laptops (about a year old to be exact) going on sale at his work for about $100, I knew I had to pick one up. My old laptop has been on it’s last legs for awhile, seeing that the left click button on the mouse pad doesn’t work, and nobody else but me can even use the thing because all the letters are all worn off. I thought the new (yet old) laptop was going to be a blessing, and for the past month it has been. Until today.

On the opposite end of my cheapness, a week and a half ago I finally had enough money saved up that I could go out and buy myself an Xbox One. After going back and forth about it for a long time (and even writing a post about how I would probably get a used Xbox 360 or a Wii U first) I decided to just pull the trigger on it. I did this partially because I wanted to treat myself and finally buy a console within the first year of it coming out instead of about 2 years later, but also because Titanfall came out, and I was EXTREMELY jealous of all the fun my Xbox One owning friends were having while I was delegated to just watch them stream on twitch.tv.

What do these two things have in common, you ask? Well, you see I got it in my craw that I wanted to post videos of me playing Titanfall on this blog here, and on YouTube. It’s supposed to be a fairly easy process now, considering that Xbox One has a feature where you can record clips of gameplay and upload them (albeit in a roundabout sort of way) to your Microsoft One Drive. This means that recording clips on the Xbox and editing them on my laptop should be a breeze, except…..

Look, I don’t have a surface tablet. All of my tablet and smartphone experience is rooted in Android, so when I bought this Windows 8 laptop I was so enamored with the touch screen and all of the new things going on with it, I didn’t realize that it was going to be a nightmare today. There are queues that I’m used to with Android and that I’m sort of ok with on Apple that just don’t exist on Windows. I thought my experience with my Zune would help me navigate this confusing UI but it barely scratched the surface. After successfully uploading videos to my One Drive account and locating them on my computer, it occurred to me that I didn’t have Window Movie Maker on here, so I set out to download what I thought was WMM from the Windows website, but was instead a whole pack of Windows “apps” instead. The apps included Windows Live Writer (which you can credit for this post), Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Messenger which is somehow already connected to my Facebook account.

I was confused and someone devastated at the fact that now I have WLM on my computer. I don’t even use WLM and it somehow connected to an account that I also don’t even use for sending messages, and even more redundant is that Windows 8 already had a messenger installed that also connected to Facebook Messenger which I still don’t use. It was a mess, a mess that led me to another page on the Windows 8 start screen that shows me all of the apps that are already installed on my computer THAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT! Apparently if you swipe your screen up, it shows all the apps on your laptop, but there’s nothing on the Start screen to indicate that (actually yes there is, if you swipe all the way to the right there’s a down arrow at the bottom to indicate, but that whole right side of my start screen is full of apps I’ll never use). So I went on a hunt on the internet today to find Windows Movie Maker, and it was already on my computer. All of that work, all of that searching, and all of that head scratching and none of it was needed, but hey! at least now I can do my Titanfall videos! So some good came of it. I will say though, that when I decide to pull the trigger on building my very first computer, I’m definitely putting Windows 7 on it.