Chuck Dries

My first vent:

A lot of kids at my school have Beats by Dr. Dre.

My nerd vent: listening to beats plugged into your iPod is not using them to their full potential. MP3 files are compressed using a method called lossy compression, which reduces the file size a lot, but also reduces sound quality. The reason MP3 uses lossy compression is simple: space. For example, take Betsie Dries’s campaign video, it’s not even HD, in fact it’s less than a normal tv, but when I used lossless compression to encode it, it took over an hour to upload it to YouTube. When I tried again using lossy compression, it took less than 2 minutes. Same thing with audio, if mp3 used lossless compression, your iPod would fill up fast. Recently apple added the ability to convert your songs to AAC format, which is higher quality. I recommend doing that. P.S. I’m kind of an audiophile.

My next vent:

Call of Duty gets too much hype, but also too much hate

Call of duty is the most successful gaming franchise of all time, and recently with the release of Modern Warfare 3 it’s gotten alot of hat. For one thing, people say it gets too repetitive and boring and there is nothing different or new from MW2, and I agree, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Modern Warfare 2 is a great game, and when creating Modern Warfare 3, the developers realized this and left most of it unchanged, after all, why fix what isn’t broken. As for being repetitive, it is an FPS and there’s only so much you can do but shoot and explore. The game doesn’t have to be repetitive for you though, because in multiplayer, which by the way is the games single best attribute, you can change it up. If you find yourself getting bored by multiplayer, try picking a game mode you’ve never played before, then go through and change all of your classes to weapons you’ve never played with before. Step outside your comfort zone if you want something interesting and possibly challenging. The campaign itself, though, was way too short. Call of duty is a great game, it just gets boring if you do the same thing over and over again. If you just flat out don’t like First Person Shooters, that’s fine, just don’t hate on COD. I would like to point out that every time a new COD comes out it gets alot of hat but then about 2 years later it gets remembered as a great game. I realize that I take the unpopular opinion on this one (as far as the PC gaming community is concerned), but hey, I enjoy call of duty.