Quick Update

Thought I'd update a little on my goings-on. My laptop has been having issues for a while with gaming, and I think I finally got it diagnosed! It appears to be an overheating problem. It also seems like a bit of a pain to fix, and I had been planning to build a new PC soon anyway, so I'm just going to tolerate it for a few months. I have my PS3 to keep me occupied with gaming for a long while. On the PC I've mostly just been playing 2D games and emulators because that's all it can consistently handle. Played through Super Metroid in its entirety in 4 hours last week, which I had never done before, so I figured it was about time to! I have the Starcraft 2 beta downloaded, and it's as amazing as I had hoped, but unfortunately the framerate is just not that consistent. I'll be building a new PC this summer so I can play the full game properly.

On the PS3, at the moment I'm going through Just Cause 2 and having a ton of fun. This game is absolutely massive! So many crazy situations and so many things to do, I highly recommend it! Beyond that, the two games I continue to come back to are BlazBlue and Guitar Hero. In GH, I got into it pretty recently, so maybe I'm behind the trends here, but the plus side is it was pretty cheap. I'm working my way through the game (Metallica, and occasionally World Tour for Tool and Dream Theater songs) in hard mode right now, after beating everything on medium. Adding the 5th button was a real challenge, but I've finally got it and it's so much more fun because if that! Soon I'll try to transition to Expert. In BlazBlue, I'm playing a lot more online, and winning more. I think I'm around level 28 right now, playing almost exclusively Tager.

Currently I'm getting super-hyped for Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's western sandbox game coming up in May. I haven't been this hyped for a game since the Orange Box, I think, and this game just cannot come soon enough!

Finally, some non-gaming stuff, but I just want to mention it anyway, I had a big epiphany in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu last week. I've been training in BJJ for 4 and a half years now, and I'm sure any hardcore gamer can identify with the awesome feeling of a major epiphany in any game of skill and strategy, which is what BJJ is for me. The rest of this paragraph won't make a lick of sense to you unless you know about grappling, so if you don't you might as well stop reading. I had been having some issues with my guard in the last year or two, and then last Friday, all of a sudden, I was rolling with a friend and something in my brain just clicked. I was using rubber guard pretty much exclusively, all the time, from full guard, no matter if it was gi or no gi. When it works, it's awesome, and I get an omoplata and probably finish them 60% of the time. Side note, so many people don't actually finish the omoplata submission, I've been working really hard on learning that skill and it's probably my #1 submission now. Anyway, when I was starting out in BJJ I was doing everything standard with my guard game, and had good success with it. I have long legs, and my guard was fairly good. Around the time I got my blue belt, I started trying to learn rubber guard, and just stopped doing my fundamental guard moves in favor of rubber guard. I would break them down and go straight for mission control, and if they tried to break out, I'd just work rubber guard stuff on them regardless. So last friday, I had my friend in my guard, and broke him down properly, with the intent to go for rubber guard. He started standing up, in anticipation of mission control. Instead of going for mission control ANYWAY, as I normally would, I just went to a completely textbook armbar from the guard, got it, hooked under his leg and rolled him over for the finish. I realize now that I was getting tunnel-vision about the rubber guard. I wasn't being adaptable and I was neglecting the fundamentals because of that. I don't doubt rubber guard is fantastic, and innovative, and effective. But there's a time for it, and there's a legitimate time for the traditional closed guard game, as well.