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Alexander

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Cases that damage your games (& track of the week)

There are slight differences between disc cases for games. Some are better than others and the worst offenders can cause damage to the games you play the most. This has only happened once to me, and I blame this on two things. Firstly the type of case and secondly the fact that Rainbow Six: Vegas was such an awesome game (and maybe I was heavy handed).

I'm not talking about Halo 3: Limited Collectors Edition type damage, I'm talking about how tightly some cases hold their discs and how poorly they release them.

My copy of Street Fighter IV arrived today and I was disappointed to find that it uses the same case as what I found with Rainbow Six: Vegas


You get a distinct "crack" noise every time you take a disc from one of these cases

The problem that occurred was that after putting Vegas in and out of it's case so many times, the disc itself started to crack from the finger hole. At first it was small, hardly noticeable, but in the space of four days it was almost game over - the crack was almost at the game part itself. That's when I emailed Play.com and arranged a replacement. This time I was much more careful with the game and tended to keep in in the manual to avoid a repeat. Below is an example of how all game cases should be.



Produces a "click" noise


Seems Amaray are the company that make the case found with CoD4, it's far better because there is minimal contact between the game and it's case, yet it's still held firmly in position.

Now I am being a bit pedantic, and I haven't heard anyone else with the same issue, so maybe it was just me and my clumsy self. Anyone out there had this problem?


Some other unrelated things:


  • Everyone should have a half-decent camera and be able to take a decent picture, what the hell is up with 90% of photos on the forums and blog posts looking like they're from a webcam? Shame on you!
  • The guy who does the voice of Seth in SFIV is the Agency Director From Crackdown
  • I'm just understanding Twitter
  • Daft Punk are working on an album and it will probably be released this year
  • iTunes has radio stations, only found that out last week - people please, take a look. Like house music?
  • I want a slow-motion camera
  • I still play hella CoD4 and it's the only thing installed on my 360's HDD

Track of the Week #3


Now everyone knows Justice are AWESOME. I have seen them three times now, two festivals and one club set. Every time has been fantastic with the best being at Benicassim Festival in Spain last year. It was unreal and the most intense live performance I've ever been too. That includes the likes of Metallica and Rage Against the Machine.

One Minute to Midnight is not my favourite from their debut album, but their live performance of it was just amazing. This is from their A Cross The Universe album, which is simply a recording from one of their performances while on tour.

  

To any Justice fans out there who haven't been fortunate enough to see them live, you'd be doing yourself a favour getting hold of this album and playing it full blast while you wait for their next album and tour. And for those that have, get it anyway.
10 Comments

Track of the Week #2

I realise I've missed a week, but oh well. Everyone remembers Mylo and his biggest hit Drop The Pressure. That song came from his album Destroy Rock & Roll.... and so I was listening to that album and heard this one for the first time. And what can I say, it's a seriously funky beat. It's called Paris Four Hundred.

  


2 Comments

Facebook is 5 years old



So Facebook has been going for five years and as of now it is something that I use pretty much every day. There are a great deal of bonuses to being on Facebook, namely staying in touch with people you otherwise would not have, arranging events easily (and freely without paying for phonecalls), viewing people's photos and uploading your own, instant messaging... plenty of other things.

Facebook only makes sense if everyone you know is using it. And here in the UK, if you are my age, 21, then the chances are most people you meet socially will have a Facebook. Of course the site originated in the US and I was amazed to see how it came over and blew Myspace out of the water. Interestingly Facebook has yet to penetrate Europe the way it has here.

So with everyone you know on Facebook, it's very hard to not be on Facebook because it becomes so central to everyone's social activity, to not be on Facebook is to be socially disconnected from everyone else.

And that's what the site is about, connecting people. At the same time there are some things about Facebook that I view as negative....

I don't want to be in contact with everyone every minute. You meet up with a friend after not seeing them for two weeks and where before they would have told you about their week, now you probably know all about it anyway.... because it came up in your Facebook feed.

I don't like the fact that someone can upload a photo of me and tag me in that photo without any kind of approval on my part. As soon as that is done, it is in the public domain and if the image depicts me smoking crack (not that I smoke crack) I'm not going to want that up there.

FACEBOOK IS TIME CONSUMING

And off of that, time spent on Facebook could be time you would have otherwise spent with people FOR REAL. Or it may have been time you should have used cleaning your room, doing that project that's due etc.

The amount of personal information Facebook has on us is frightening, if you ever looked more closely at the ads plastered over the right panel, you'll notice that they are clearly targeted at you and your interests. Some would say that's a good thing, but personally I find it uncomfortable that Facebook is essentially selling my "personal" information. But then I guess if you put the information on Facebook, you are essentially giving up your privacy with regard to that information.

I don't want to stay in touch with everyone. I saw a girl not so long ago and after I didn't really want to see her again, she asked me if I had Facebook and I just had to lie. Because Facebook is personal and there are people out there you do not want to have see your profile. Example: Your mum. So you have this contradiction whereby you are giving up your privacy with personal information on one hand, and in the other you want to retain it in certain cases.

But for the most part we are Facebook's willing victims, it is up to us to sign up, up to us what information we upload to the site and up to us if we want to leave. But I will keep using Facebook despite my reservations and mostly, I'll be enjoying it.
35 Comments

Track of the week #1

I don't really blog that much. So I thought I would just post my new track of the week that I'm into.

This is:

La Musique by Riot In Belgium


  


Heard this in a club just the other day and decided to Google "la musique" low and behold that's the title of the song!
5 Comments

I had a go with the Replay Editor in GTAIV

The Replay Editor might well have been the reason I bought GTAIV on PC despite already having and completed the 360 version some time ago. GTA is one of those games where things happen that you then tell someone about, and now you can capture those moments and watch them to your hearts content. What a great idea...

The good thing is that despite GTAIV's quite frankly shit PC optimisation, the replay videos you create are all prerendered, so playback is free of any frame rate hiccups and such. There are some downsides, the main one being that you are forced to use Rockstar's own flash player to view these things, you can't make an avi and then take it away for some editing. And with the limited soundtrack and the fact that the Editor isn't the easiest thing to use, that is an option sorely missed. Not to mention the site they use is slow and has major issues.

Anyhow here are the three I've made so far (in order), they are very short.

  

fgh

  

  

I do plan on making more, longer ones but first I'm looking to unlock the whole city in the story for more locations.

Wondering if anyone else got round to fiddling with this thing?
3 Comments

PC gaming isn't dead yet.

I just bought a new PC. This is mainly because tomorrow I will be starting a new year at university - and a half-decent computer is required. I study architecture and we tend to use 3D apps, video editing, picture editing and so on and so forth. Of course this also means that I'll be able to test the PC gaming waters. So to start I downloaded Steam and my how it has come along! I downloaded CS:Source, couldn't find my disc. Despite being out of the loop for about a year I kicked some serious ass. At the same time though, the game is old, I didn't really enjoy myself all that much. In thinking what I will get my mind wanders toward Red Alert 3 and how the RTS has always felt more at home with a mouse and keyboard. This is also my first time using Vista at home, and for all the complaints I've heard it seems to work pretty well. One of the coolest things about it is it's optical drive which has both Bluray AAAND HD-DVD support.

Now while HD-DVD might be dead, there are some steals to be had on Amazon and in stores. I need to find me the Matrix Trilogy, then my life will be complete.

My Spec:
Nvidia Geforce 9500GT 512MB
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Quad Core Processor (2.4Ghz, 8MB Cache)
3072MB DDR2 800Mhz (4096MB) RAM
640GB (1x640GB) SATA300 Hard Drive (16MB Cache)
20 x Super multi DVDRW
Realtek 5.1 (maybe integrated)

and there are some other things like multi-card reader, firewire...

Time for the 360 blog, backdated a little as I haven't touched my Xbox the past couple of days.
Oct1 2008
I didn't think I would see him yesterday, but OneManArmy IUKI was back and ready for action. Total gamer score is 9995 points. That is an improvement of 45 points over last time! He made some progress on The Orange Box gaining an amazing 9 achievements, and then OneManArmy IUKI developed a funny twitch and went to try and sleep it off or something. Crazy humans...

So I'm real close to the 10,000 gamerscore mark, I'll probably look to tip it over with some random GTAIV fun.

1 Comments

My friends list is more empty than it should be.

It's not that I haven't added more friends but for some reason I'm suffering from some bug where some friends are not coming up in my feed or my friends list. Yet when I visit their profile page there I am! What the hell is going on, this has been the same way since the site launched and it's the main reason why I haven't been here more. The site is nothing without its community and I would have thought something like this, apparently experienced by quite a number of users isn't being addressed. Someone do something, I want to get all community like....

Also. I downloaded the bikes for Paradise, and I have to say it's not really enough for me to get back into it. Sure it's a lot, and it's free! Well done EA but still...why I preordered Midnight Club is beyond me.... I just can't stick with racing games. Give me some guns. I think it's just the gamer I am, shooting stuff is what interests me most.

Been playing Castle Crashers in installments, basically it's the same 2 dudes coming round my house each time, I haven't even tried playing it alone. I think I'm near the end on that one.

I also signed up to 360voice.com, a site that links to your gamertag to create a blog based on your 360 activity. I've decided that to fluff up my blog here, I'll just copy and paste it to the end of each entry. That way my posts will look meaty. Might also encourage me to blog more?

Here we go:
23 Sept '09
I didn't think I would see him yesterday, but OneManArmy IUKI was back and ready for action. Total gamer score is 9,930 points. That is an improvement of 25 points over last time! He rallied Castle Crashers, The Orange Box gaining 5 achievements, and then he started getting all these friend requests because of high awesomeness levels.

Pretty cool, short but what are you going to do? So yeah I completely forgot, I started Half Life 2 again, I never actually finished it on the PC - CS:Source made sure of that. That's not to say I didn't find it interesting and I think I'm enjoy this second time through even more (got pretty close to the end before). The controls are wonderfully mapped to the 360 pad. Also playing through Portal, another one I didn't finish and I have to say I really loved it, the way such a character is created in what really is a simple game is fantastic. I was juuust shy of finishing it last night, so I'll try and do that today if I get a chance.

4 Comments

Don't make me get old skool.

So I have just bought myself a wired 360 controller, and I have to say that I'm very happy with it. One of my frustrations with it's wireless counterpart is battery. Now I have every type of method to recharge those controllers, I have the quick-charger, I have the plug-and-play set and I have rechargeable AAs. The latter is without a doubt the best way to go, the battery life will be considerably longer and it's also cheaper than buying controller battery packs that are overpriced. I just hated the situation where all I want to do is play the game, but then I'd have to go find some batteries, charge a battery pack etc.

Wired 360 Controller
Wired 360 Controller




























Compared to the standard wireless controller, this one has a number of advantages and one disadvantage:

Cons:
It's wired

Pros:
It's lighter
There is no battery holder allowing for a slightly different grip
It's always going to work
Rumble is slightly more powerful

The wired controller isn't for everyone, it really depends on your setup. If you have your 360 in the main living room with the big TV then cables really do become a hassle. If like me however, you're setup is at a desk and you won't be sitting so far from the console, then I would recommend you get one of these.

I also got Castle Crashers. It's good, but overpriced. Only worth getting if you're going to play with friends.
2 Comments

Trash Talk Online Gaming

Now I've added a good few more North American's to my friends list on Live. As a result I've been playing in more North American only servers, something I don't have happen normally as I am in the UK. Now I've always heard trash talk but I don't think I've heard it quite as bad as I have recently with the American folks. Just about every insult is something to do with dick and ass it is this constant back and forward between idiots to see who can phrase the exact same thing differently.

I'm in one server and make comment...."fuck England....or wherever you are from" is the response. And this isn't from some 13 year old kid, this guy sounded older and it pains me to know that there are so many unbelievably ignorant and stupid people out there. I can see how people are put off by online gaming, especially where mics are involved; it can be quite an intimidating place and many just can't be bothered to deal with it. Personally I don't have it get to me, I enjoy playing real people too much, but considering how widespread this trash talk is I would say something more needs to be done from MS to deal with these sorts.

With millions of Live users that can't be easy, filing complaints does work but many don't bother and some have just come to accept the state of things. I think there should be some sort of immediate response. i.e. you file a complaint there and then, that person is flagged and if a Live Team Member is available, they listen to that conversation. Or something..... or at least make a great example of people. When someone is caught continually insulting other players, have them named and shamed just like they did with the gamerscore boosters. Have their gamertag permanently edited, blacklist them to play with all the other morons.

There is nothing wrong with a bit of ligh-hearted banter or taunting. It can make for a better game, but something needs to be done with the abundance of racists and prejudicial half-wits.

6 Comments
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