First impressions of Dragon Age: Inquisition--2 hours in

Bioware and EA has done Dragon Age again! So what do I think about that?! Having only played 3 hours of the game and it has me hooked already! There is a lot of different classes to choose from but I chose the duel wilding warrior and then your story begins. Its story starts off where your created character has things crawling towards him and a ghostly figure appears and says let me help you.  Then green stuff starts coming out from your hand, then the next thing you know, your captured and in shackles and your getting accused of opening the rift because green goo was flowing out your hand. Your main character goes on quests to shut down the rift. During my 2 hours of gameplay, the world was lush with activities to do like there is side quests to do along with playing the main quests. You get experience to build up your abilities like any good RPG does. This game is addicting and I want to play it more.

NBA 2K15 Disabled gamer review

Is NBA 2K15 the basketball game to beat this year or did somehow 2K mess it up? Is the game accessible enough for all players to enjoy?! You will find this out in this review. The NBA 2K series has been king for the past two years without question, but it has not had stiff competition either. As expected, all of the game modes in last years game to be back, MyLeague, MyGM, NBA Today, MyPlayer/MyPark and MyTeam. There is also a  new section called NBA 2KTV where they have interviews with players, coaches and the games developers and tips to excel in 2K15. They improved greatly with MyGM and MyPlayer, when an exhibition game or MyGM game is loading, they have a Pre-Game show with Ernie Johnson and Shaquille O'Neal which is actually refreshing and good commentary. MyPlayer got a voice overall where 30 NBA players actually loaned their voice to their actual player that guides you a long as you advance in your NBA career. Another addition to my player is that if you have the Kinect/PlayStation camera, you can actually put your face in the game! The game play is like any traditional basketball game simulation that you would find! The AI is vastly improved, on pick and rolls now, the AI will now follow you or go under the screen. It isn't as easy to go around the buggy AI.

Now for the accessibility part of the game, 2K hasn't given you the choice to remap the controllers and no changing controls besides changing the right stick to shot stick or Iso-motion. That's the only control you can change in the game, SERIOUSLY?! In this day and age, I think developers could make the game configure to what the user wants, but that is another time and another place! So that leaves me to give NBA 2K15 a: 7/10. Fun to play, solid game play but it isn't accessible to all and that is why it gets 7/10 from me. Comments are welcome!

Destiny disabled gamer review: My first thoughts a week in

Has Destiny lived up to the hype? Is it accessible to all? Here are some of my thoughts about it in only my first week of playing the game. At first glance, Destiny looks like a wide open MMO, but after playing it for a couple hours, you will see that it's a linear, no story and a quest based world. I will get more into that. The story is basically about fighting the Darkness and you get no explanation why you are fighting them. So you don't care about the story, all you do is shoot, kill enemies, do quests and collect armor. Kind of like Borderlands, but without the humor. The open world that they were promising isn't there at all. You can basically hoarded between  the Tower and your quests. Yes once you get into your quests, the world gets wide open, but your on a quest so you ignore that basically. This game is also meant to be played with friends, but what if your friends played the shit out of the game already, and you have other things to do besides play Destiny like college, organizations, homework and other stuff. So then you see what levels they are in the game, and I am like oh shit, I cannot play with my PlayStation friends, I am only level four and one hit will kill me from the enemies.

 Now for the accessibility, Activision and Bungie what are you doing?! Having only three controller presets! That kind of limits Destiny's accessibility greatly. This is a ten year project and your limiting the player to three presets of remapped buttons. Really?! Although I can play the game fine, I would have liked to remapped the controls to my liking. I know this is a ten year project, but I will not want to play because the story is not sucking me in! Yes it is a fun game if you like to kill enemies, collect loot and upgrade your character, but is it for me?! No because I want a good story to be told as well as those aspects. Time will only improve Destiny I am hoping!  At this time, I would wait until they make some mass improvements to Destiny, if you are like me and got to have something other then fun gameplay! I will give this is a: 6/10!

Is Facebook getting annoying?

Facebook is a company that is huge in the social media market today, but it is driving users away I think because it wants to be more than just an social network. I think that Facebook is going to crash like Myspace did, just faded away into the social network abyss. How is Facebook driving users away you may ask? In my opinion, Facebook has created a large number of users that want to share statuses, and look at other people statuses. As a result of this, Facebook has a captive audience, so Mark Zuckerburg, the creater/co-owner of Facebook, decided to place advertisements and game to create revenue for Facebook. At the beginning of Facebook(I joined Facebook in 2007), I didn’t really notice these ads and games, but a year or two ago I started to notice them. It didn’t annoy me so much then because I didn’t use Facebook as much as I do now. Plus, the advertisements and games weren’t as noticeable as it is now, in the advertisements are everywhere. The right side of your Facebook page, is littered with advertisements, saying so-and-so liked this page so you like it, who cares! Along with targeted advertisements to your liking, where they are taking companies that you liked or showed interest in on Facebook and putting it into an algorithm then they post advertisements based upon that algorithm. Games bug me to now because my friends will notify me of a game they played and then it goes to my phone and my I Pad. I don’t ever play Facebook games because I like to play console and handheld games. So why do my friends keep sending me messages to play so-and-so? I don’t know! The game notifications go into my notification feed. I know you can turn that off, but it is very hidden in the settings and I don’t have time to mess with the settings being a full fledged college student. I hear the advertisements are going to just increase over time, so that won’t help out any. So as you can see why I think Facebook will fade out just like Myspace did. Why cannot Facebook be just a social network? This next segment is how to change Facebook to not lose as many users as it will if this continues. Promote a company in a different way, such as if you like the company, you will get a code for a percent off your next purchase. For the games, make it easier to turn off the notifications like in the notification bar, you have an on/off button of what you want to be notified about, instead of having to go into settings and select whatever you want to get rid of. Another idea is to have advertisements on the notification bar and no place else. That way Facebook can still make money and you don't have to see the advertisements in and around your news feed. Do you feel like these ideas will get you not to leave Facebook? Do you have any other ideas that would work?  

Four essential messages that advertisers do to get your attention

Today I am going to discuss what are four essential message objectives advertisers’ do to get your attention. The four essential messages that I am going to tell you about are promoting brand name recall, linking a key attribute to the brand name, persuade the costumer and  scare the costumer into action. Then I will tell you what I think is the most important essential message is out of the four messages that I have selected. Now I am going to show you a variety of videos to show you examples of what companies are trying to get you to buy their product. 

Promoting brand name recall is what the advertisers call repetition of the name or they create slogans and jingles to get you to remember the product they are trying to advertise. For example. in this State Farm commercial,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3IV22FJIbc, they have a jingle “like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” and that goes along with the song that is at the very end of the advertisement(0:26 through 0:32).

 Linking a key attribute to the brand name is like the Subway commercial where they became associated with the $5 footlong. Now Subway is known for that $5 footlong song.  News companies do that all of the time when they broadcast special reports like this NBC Special Report(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPcepBSrC9g) where you know something important and we know when we hear that, that something is about to happen on the news front.

 Next on the four essential messages objectives advertisers’ do to get your attention is persuading the customer. This involves creating and/or strengthening beliefs around the selling point of the product. The beliefs can be a reason why you should by the product, comparison between their products and others, testimonials of people who use their product, informercials about their product. For example, Progressive Car Insurance in their commercials uses persuading the customer by showing the other competitors rates  verses theirs. Another example would be this ad(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDO9hP-xKL8) for a Nikon camera, in which Aston Kutcher uses their camera as a celebrity endorsement. 

The final message that I am going to cover is the tactic which is scare the customer into action.  The Allstate Mayhem(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9hQNdXYbI) commercials are a good example of scare the customers into action. There are many commercials on the YouTube clip.  All of them involved a man that does something stupid and then says “if you have cut rate insurance. your not covered so get Good Hands Roadside Assistance”. They  want you to buy their insurance because it’s supposedly better than your cut rate insurance.

I think the most important essential messages that I covered in this blog post is the first one that I covered which is promoting brand name recall. I think that because most people remember more often a jingle or slogan that they hear during an advertisement. So therefore, I think it is a more effective strategy because more people will remember your product better.

Can a girl play football in a Catholic school?

In this article(http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/14/us/philadelphia-archdiocese-boys-only-football/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1) from CNN on February 14 by Sarah Hoye, Caroline Pla, a 11 year old girl in Philadelphia, has played football since Kindergarden, but now that she is 11 her Catholic school will not allow her to play anymore. This story is more of a report, not a critique  She plays guard and defensive end. The school put a mandatory “boys-only” policy in last year. The schools reason for not letting her play football anymore was that it is too physical for her and she could get hurt. Caroline says that she has not gotten hurt yet playing football ever. Her mother started a petition hoping that she would get 100 signatures and she has gotten 1,000 signatures. The Catholic schools archbishop tells Caroline that he’s only trying to protect her and not to get the media involved because it is disrespectful.<br> This article points out gender biases in schools particularly in Catholic schools. That being said public schools have a large range of biases going on today. Take for example the special education classes that people with physical and mental disabilities go to. Are they preparing them for the the real world or when they have graduate high school? Could they include them in regular classes and try to interact with normal people? I think not they are lead to believe they are normal and when they are no longer able to go to high school, they either work in workshops or do a low functioning job that pays minimum wage and live in a group home. <br> I read some of the comments over and took this away from them. Some people that commented think that girls should not be allowed to play football at all. They give the excuse that when she grows up, that she will get overpowered. I say what is wrong with letting girls play football when they are growing up, let them play. Its a sport that if a girl wants to play it and takes the risk of getting hurt or seriously hurt then let them do it. I think that the medical doctors could make the decision about girls playing a hard hitting contact sport such as football not the school officials or the archbishop. The medical doctors have studied the effects of concussions and head injuries  So they should have the knowledge and decision making of whether or not girls can play football. There were some negative comments nothing related to the story, but they have nothing to do with the news story.  There are many articles like this on the web. For example, the baseball steroid case that just came out of couple of days ago with Ryan Braun’s name on them. Although it is rumors and not factual yet, Braun had nothing to say to the media about that. I think that the media does not have the right to judge based on rumors because they do no research to back it up.

Twitter is more popular then ever!!

I chose to do a news story about a study about Twitter being the fastest growing social media out there(http://mashable.com/2013/01/29/twitter-fastest-growing-social-platform/).The article says that Twitter in the second quarter to the fourth quarter in 2012, grew 40% according to the Global Web Index. Also the Global Web Index says that amounts to 288 million active users. Since 2009, it was estimated Twitter had only 35.47 million users. Since then, Twitter has seen its user base go up by 714%. This article also points out that Twitter users are more engaged, in that 59% of Twitter accounts are active on a monthly basis. <br> 

I agree with this claim of Twitter is the fastest growing social media outlet out there for several reasons. First, everybody can access it from anywhere they are. More and more devices have some kind of Twitter applications on them. Devices like IPads, phones and even PlayStation Vitas have Twitter applications on them.So it is an ease of access for people to tweet out something.  Secondly, I see Twitter in more popular culture and in main stream media. Almost every commercial has a hashtag in one corner or another, telling you to tweet about their product or TV show. For example, ESPN SportsCenter has a top 10 sports plays where you can vote for the best top ten sports plays every night. The ESPN hashtag is #SCTop10. Then every night they tally up the Tweets and put the most Tweeted top sports plays and then put them on. The third reason why I agree with this article is because Twitter is less commercialized than other social media outlets.  Take Facebook for example, Facebook is filled with games, promoted advertising and advertising in the news feed. Personally I do not like it and I’m sure others are turned off of it because people do not care what other people are liking as advertisements. Facebook for me is a site where you get on to keep up to date with everybody. I do not use it for anything else other then that. The fourth reason that I agree with this article is that I think that Twitter is a niche problem solver. What do I mean by niche problem solver? I mean  that you can search for items that interest you and start a conversation with people that have the same interest you do. Like say you want to know what are people thoughts on the Super Bowl, you would just put #Superbowl in the search on the Twitter application that you have. It would give you Tweets that everybody had Tweeted on Twitter. Another example would be let’s say you want to see what’s the latest PlayStation 4 news is, you type #PS4 or #PlayStation4 and the Twitter application brings up what other people and news are saying. The final reason is that social networking is more popular then ever before. Facebook started this upwards trend of social networking and it has exploded into other networks like Twitter and Instagram.