LIFE • 7
the telescope GRADUATION
Staff prepares for commencement ceremony sydney davison the telescope
As students recover from midterms and anxiously await the mid-semester mark of Spring Break, Palomar faculty begins to plan for the end. Faculty and staff of Palomar had their first meeting in January to begin planning the end-of-theyear Commencement Ceremony for graduates of Palomar who have received their associates degrees and certificates of completion. A lot of work goes into the ceremony, evident by the amount of checklists Student Affairs Director Sherry Titus and Communications Director Laura Gropen came armed with. “A lot of work goes into it,” Gropen said. Yet, “it is literally only a half an hour long.” But for such a modest ceremony, the faculty does a lot of planning and work to make sure that the students of Palomar and their families have a wonderful memory to share. “Tons of players and people have responsibilities that we rely on them. They know that it is the premiere event and they are excited to help,” said Titus, the head planner of the event. The “players,” as Titus calls them, are all members of the departments, faculty and students that help make this event
Palomar students participate in commencement ceremony on May 18, 2012 on the football field at the San Marcos campus. • Deb Hellman/ Telescope
a memorable one. “It is an all campus event,” Gropen said, “Everybody is involved.” Almost everyone at Palomar has a hand in making this a special day for students. From the Student Affairs, Facilities and Records offices to the groundskeepers and Campus Police, each one has a certain role in this memorable day. “It is such a combined effort,” Titus said, “We used our own services as best we can.” The Music Department is also
involved with a student singer who will be performing the national anthem. The Disability Resource Center also provides two interpreters to accommodate deaf students and their families. Campus Police will direct traffic for the ceremony, as well as the color guard who will present the flags at the beginning of the commencement. The Graphic Communications department produces the pro-
grams, which need to be signed off by 3 to 4 different faculty members before printed. The bookstore has also had a large part in the student’s big day, they provided the caps and gowns for the students to purchase right up to the day of the ceremony. That is how the faculty knows how many students to plan for, because they don’t have any formal way of having students notify that they plan to walk. “That’s the hardest part,” Ti-
tus said. “We don’t have an RSVP because we want every student to feel welcome.” Last year at the 2011- 2012 ceremony about 3,000 students were eligible to walk, but only about 10 percent of those students participated in the ceremony. “We would like to encourage students to attend, to be a part of it, and enjoy the moment, it is all done for them,” Titus said. sdavison@the-telescope.com
review
New SimCity video game is unplayable in its opening week Matthew Slagle The Telescope
SimCity 5 was poised to be the big PC video game release of the start of this year; the hype was immense and the reviews were glowing, touting it as the next great simulator game. Then the game was released. It was deemed a massive failure almost immediately. In the case of the SimCity, it wasn’t a matter of the developers missing the mark on a few aspects of the game—which they did, but those were overshadowed by the overarching problem of not being able to play the game—it was a colossal failure in the sense that on release date, very few people could actually play it. When they could manage to connect to a server, game play was far from what was advertised. When people cannot download the game, let alone login to the servers—something that is mandatory to play the game—you have a problem. Because of the issues with the servers, many people deadpanned the game. Reviews that were once glowing were changed to indicate that until one could play the game the way it was intended, anything less than a mediocre grade would be inaccurate.
Screenshot of EA Games’ recent SimCity release. • Matthew Slagle/Telescope
To combat piracy, publishers EA and Maxis, decided that to be able to play “persistent Internet connection [was] required.” Known as Digital Rights Management or DRM, video game companies have started creating measures that make it harder, perhaps impossible, for a gamer to pirate the game—which is the motive behind making it mandatory to connect to the Internet—or sell the game second hand.
DRM has been a major point of discussion in the gaming world, and the fiasco did nothing to quell the concerns of the consumers. I was a lucky one. Once I installed my copy of the game, I was able to immediately play the game without having to wait for hours to be able to connect to a server. This was the case the next day and I was ready to give them a pass on the sever issue. But then the next three times I
tried to play, I was unable to connect to the servers or was booted from the game after a few minutes of playing. EA had announced that, in order to hopefully reduce the stress on their servers, they were going to roll back some of the features in the game. With that knowledge, it is hard to grade the game without knowing how exactly the developers intended the game to be played. With that being said, I can-
not give the game more than an incomplete grade, as it would be unfair to give it a failing grade knowing that I haven’t played the complete game. The game play was great and the controls and functions were easy enough to figure out, however, the graphics looked like they were out of a game from the start of the 2000’s. One can hope that the massive failure in being able to deliver a product to the market that relies exclusively on servers to make the game functional will at least delay future games being moved to the online only model. On Saturday, March 8 EA announced it had increased its server capacity 120 percent and the number of people who experienced disrupted services was down by 80 percent. The company also went on to say that anyone who bought the game before March 18 will receive a free EA game. Not the best way to herald in what was going to be your marquee game of the year, but if they get the issues resolved quickly and the game ends up playing like the original reviews said it would, the great game play would make up for the disaster that was the opening week. mslagle@the-telescope.com