ShadowReality

One of the reasons I enjoy coding if the really interesting things you can do with it, recently I stumbled upon a public XML feed which contains live gamertag information and have been playing around with it a little.

So far I’ve just got it caching some data, and creating an image on the fly with some info. Here is some concept art of what I hope the finished thing will look like.

And the possibility for adding custom backgrounds..

I thought it was about high time we started reviewing some games. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time and although I don’t play a lot of PC first person games that are appreciated on this site; I thought I’d start reviewing some Wii and DS games that I’ve been playing over the last 6 months.

First up then…it’s an easy one Mario Kart on the Wii.

This was an innevitable release the moment the concept of the Wii was born. But there was some considerable concern by Nintendo fans for some time over this title, just as there was over Mario Galaxy, that the company might get this game wrong. Thankfully the fears proved unjustifed and this is probably the strongest game in the franchise since the old classic on the SNES.

The game looks and plays like a dream and despite the steering wheel controller; feels no different to any Mario Kart game you’ve ever played. It’s so user friendly that even your first race is likely to be a successful one. The wheel itself merely houses a horizontally held wii controller but works perfectly and allows for a very forgiving yet responsive control. Plus you get to use a steering wheel - how cool is that? All the problems games like Excite Truck suffered from are no-where to be seen.

The game itself is split into typical Mario Kart modes; singler player races and tournaments; multiplayer matches and tournaments; time trials etc. There are a good selection of characters; vehicles and tracks to choose from initially with numerous hidden characters and vehicles to unlock. There are the DS style 16 new tracks and 16 retro tracks which balance out nicely. Playing those old SNES levels with the original music and carefully remodelled circuits is a real treat. So to is getting to play Mario Kart with your own Mii - an unlockable feature. Having made Mii lookalikes of Steve Merchant and Larry David this was particularly enjoyable.

Another new feature is the use of bikes instead of cars for 100cc races. In 150cc races both bikes or cars can be used. Some thought the bikes might not work but again there was no need to worry - they play just as well as the karts but add some original appeal.

In summary this is probably the perfect Mario Kart title; great looking with strong gameplay; nice little touches and hidden unlockable content; great multiplayer; a control system that gets it spot on; retro appeal; well designed new tracks…this is as good as could have been expected really.

GRAPHICS 8, SOUND 9, GAME PLAY 10, OPTIONS/MULTIPLAYER 9, LIFESPAN 9

OVERALL SCORE 90%

Instead of giving another episode of my amazing “Journey For the Perfect Screen Recorder” series, I’d thought to give just the result of my success. The program that I have found is My Podcast Recorder by Deskshare. This video is a Counter Strike Source Custom Skin Tutorial. Now, instead of giving you the Youtube link(It still exists), I will try something new and give you the link to the Vimeo video as it is a much higher quality than the standard YouTube.

Hope you like it and I really hope this goes on Smokey’s refrigerator. Or on the right side under his Spray Tag Tutorial.

Having been spending more time in irc on the noobtoob irc channel I happened upon another channel on slashnet, it had the most users in it on the whole server, but no one was speaking.

Upon further investigation the channel (#G7) was devoted to an irc iRPG. Well i know what the RPG stood for in that acronym but what about the I? Well apparently it’s an Idle Rpg, meaning the more you simple idle away and remain in that channel, the more you play the game, find items, battle other idlers and other strange things.

So I can play an idle rpg whilst talking in #noobtoob? Hell i signed up straight away. More info about this strange entity can be found at http://idlerpg.net/

So in addition to playing with Irc I have also decided to try and use twitter once more, previously I had only added a few “tweets” from twitter, and it lost my attention rather quickly…

• SmokestormX - Eating Doritos and Playing with Twitter for my website.
• SmokestormX - Found a firefox plugin for twitter.
• SmokestormX - Giving Twitter a break and gonna watch some TV

So this time I’m going to try and use it for a month or so, to see if I like twittering or tweeting from it or whatever the hell the cool kids are calling it (Such a stupid name). And if I can find a space I’ll add it on the site. So if anybody out there in Internet land uses twitter or wants to give it a go with me, sign up, find me, and follow my twitters and I shall follow yours. The fun in twitter seems to be in twittering together.

This is to be my second recommendation of some DS Homebrew that I stumbled upon. I was looking to stick an irc client back on my DS as I was going to be away from my computer for a bit, and when I checked to see if there was anything better out there than the Irc in DS ORGANISE I found this, quite frankly AMAZING piece of homebrew made by Cluster.

A bit dissapointed in other Irc clients on the DS he took it upon himself to code this amazing piece of homebrew, it is the most feature packed Irc program on the DS I have ever come across, it’s like having a handheld version of mIRC.

Homepage: http://clusterrr.com/
Current Version: v0.4b
Download: ClIRC-0.04-english.zip

Day 2

So in a random forum that I found while I was searching about my problem on Google, this person had the same synchronization problem as me. Instead of getting any answers, he says he found a program called CamStudio, so I went ahead and I downloaded the program but just to be safe, I downloaded another screen recorder programs as well.

ZD Soft screen recorder worked wonders……the first time. The second time I tried it, it wouldn’t actually record so I was stuck with Camstudio. I tried Camstudio to record a tutorial, A CS:S (Counter Strike: Source) Custom Skin tutorial to be exact. After recording, I went ahead and played the file. The problem with this screen recorder was, it didn’t seem to hold up when there were too many graphics on the screen. I guess that’s what you get with a freeware program. For example when I tried going on [http://www.fpsbanana.com] and then playing it back, my voice sounded really fuzzy. When I was on Google it was perfect, but now I’m just still trying to find a decent screen recorder. I might go back to the “ZD Soft Screen Recorder” and try to get that working again.

Until then, you’ll have to wait till next week for me to bring you some news.

• Camstudio - http://www.camstudio.org
• ZD Soft Screen Recorder[Not Freeware but free download] - http://www.zdsoft.com/screen-recorder/

For the past few days, I have been annoyed by the constant bugs in screen recorders so I’m going to blog about my troubles. It isn’t that original but here it goes.

Day 1
Smokestorm recommended me to Hypercam. I’ve known it for quite some time but haven’t tried it until now. When I went to try it, it worked pretty well until I looked deeper into the video. It seemed like the audio had a liking to always go out of sync, usually 30 seconds off which is bad. I googled this situation in hopes of finding a solution to the problem but I didn’t find a solution however I did find another program that was called “Cam Studio,” so stay tuned!

As I make you wait for the next part of this amazing series to come here’s some more stuff to get you interested. What I was trying to do with Hypercam was pretty much make a whole series of videos.
Mostly recording flash games because you really can’t do much with Hypercam.

Some of the few games I was trying to do were:

• Fishy/Fishy Classic (http://www.xgenstudios.com)
• Generic Defense Game[Ultimate Defense, Ultimate Survival, Ninja Storm] (http://www.kongregate.com)

It turns out that “Generic Defense Game” worked pretty good in terms of Hypercam working with it. There were some synchronization problems with it in the middle but it all worked at the end. It sucks though because I never got around to uploading it and I recently deleted it from my computer. Once I do find a good screen recorder, I’ll be sure to get that going again. As for the Fishy video I was going to do. I found that I not only had problems with the audio and the video synchronizing but I sounded really nervous. Well, I can’t be mad about that. I still need to be open and more confident in talking to people through video.

Recently, I also tried to do a tutorial of sorts for CS:S (Also With a screen recorder). More on that after i get that to work also. I also hope to get that tutorial (once its done) to get on the right of the page under Smoky’s Spray Tag Tutorial. Well that’s it for me today wait till tomorrow to get the second part of my “Journey For The Perfect Screen Recorder”

Wanna Get Hypercam? - http://www.hypercam.com

For the longest time now I have had a list of things that I have wanted to do with this site, but havn’t really had the time (nor the motivation) to do them. Back before this site was a Wordpress blog It was a very social site with my friends posting and hosting images, hence the tag “A place for stuff” and I feel I want to eventually get back to that and provide a hub for people to share thier web stuffs.

Being a web developer it’s quite important to keep up with the times, and one of the most enjoyable things for me it to be creative in my coding and one of the ways I have been doing this on this site is with the flexible plug-ins and page templates.

Last November I re-themed the site from the ground up, and since then I feel I’ve just left things up in the air. So I think the time has come to start getting this site cleaned up, and start making this place usable once again, I mean it doesn’t even have a search box at the moment! How did I overlook that?

Anyway, I started off by removing the archive box in the sidebar and now instead it has a whole page devoted to it, so please bear with me as I start to do some modifications around here for the better.

And if you have any good ideas of features, content, or anything you can imagine from a website you would like to see added or improved upon on Shadow Reality then please leave a comment to this post, I really value all the comments I get here.

- SmokestormX

Why do I love Steam so much? It’s because of free weekends. And this weekend is the DOD:S free weekend. I might play a little bit of that since I’m a fan of DOD. It’s weird. I’m a fan but I don’t have the game. Oh well. If you are planning to play some DOD, chat me up baby. We’ll play.

Wow! On Tuesday I arranged for UPS to come and collect my Xbox 360, it was shipping of to Frankfurt in Germany for it’s repair, I believe it’s something to do with repair center queues. So this morning I check the Xbox.com support area to check up on my status and it was marked as arrived, so happy with that I continued my day.

Then this evening, mostly out of boredom or longing for Call of Duty 4 I checked the support site once more only to find they had updated the status again….