ShadowReality

I thought I’d put together a fun video.

It’s the 28th today and in less than 24 hours GTA IV will be hitting the shelves all around the world. Anticipation for this title has been extremely high with the first all handful of reviews all giving this game the rare 10/10 rating and stating that it not only lives up to the hype, but exceeds it.

Well this morning I found something fantastic in my Inbox, I’ll give you a clue, the subject was “Your Amazon.co.uk order has dispatched”. That’s right, not only has Amazon managed to process my order properly this time, but they are actually sending the game ahead of time so it reaches me on the day of release, happy days are here again.

This is my new profile picture for steam and as you can see, there is a wolf pimp on top of the css logo, with the word css sticking out from it to indicate that i love css.

Recently my new graphics card has been playing up a little bit when it boots up into windows, I’m pretty sure it’s just a driver problem but I really hate it when crap like this starts to happen with some of the newer gfx cards on the market, i suppose that is the price you pay for new technology.

Other than that small hitch I am really loving my new computer it’s been really fantastic whilst I have been making and editing some new youtube videos and has made me want to be a bit more creative where as in the past I might of not wanted to because it would be too much effort.

This week I joined in NoobToob’s Community Podcast to cover Sloth and even edited it together, and it really was nice to go through that process and join in on some discussion, I have really quite embraced being part of the forums over there recently as it’s good gaming with fellow gamers that are passionate about games. I’ve added an audio link to the podcast below.

Other than that I really have been in a bit of a gaming funk, pretty much playing bits and pieces here and there but not really settling on any one game, I think mainly because of my anticipation of GTA4 next week. I know I’m going to be playing that a hell of a lot, and have been trying to stay away from as many spoilers as possible.

But one thing I did try this week was the new Mario Kart on the Wii and I must say it really surprised me how true to the franchise it remained and how the Wii remote and Racing wheel was so easy to use, I didn’t need any time at all to get used to it, within my first race I was already firing off red shells and doing stunts over the jumps for extra speed bursts. That kind of intuitiveness in games really makes me happy. I really should save up for a Wii sometime.

I just got Photoshop…like today. And i’ve been having so much fun using it. Well, fun and difficult time. The first thing i made was a forum sig. Not the best, but hey, its my first one. Renders from “Planet Renders”

Update:
This is the second sig i made under my secret alias for Noobtoob. Don’t tell anybody though, cuz ill get banned. Tobin said so.

Update Again?!!!:

Lol im having so much fun with this

Well my hopes and dreams have been a bit squashed of late as last week the European Rockband price was announced at nearly DOUBLE the price of the US, and whilst I could rant and bitch about the “crotch-kickingly unjustice” of it all, I prefer to cut it out of my gaming overview until it’s price has been reviews and reduced as the latest rumors indicate.

So this brings my attention onto GTA4 which is being released over here on the 29th, and I happen to have pre-ordered my copy already and now the excitement is building. It sounds like the attention to detail in the game is going to be incredible, and what’s more I have recently been told that Ricky Gervais is due to appear in the game, in one of Liberty citys Comedy Clubs. But it really looks very polished even down to the fact that Niko now smashes into the cars and hotwires them, instead of just opening the doors and driving off. On this point I recently tried to play a bit of San Andreas and wow it looks dated now, take a look below.

GTA4 (Left). GTA San Adreas (Right)

And that screenshot really makes San Andreas look good, but playing it again was just so hard because it really looked bad and hasn’t dated well for me, the draw distance can be painful in areas, but I think one day It still deserves to be completed. Anyway.. GTA4 next week, me is excited.

First off I have to apologise for my site being down for the past few days, had a bit of trouble with my host, but it’s all sorted out now, power back up to 100%.

This week I have thrown myself back into PC Gaming what with my new computer upgrade, oh man is it sweet. I’ve been playing a bit of Company of Heroes (Thanks Sunflower), Starcraft, Sins of a solar empire (so good), and everything else that I have been missing and craving, including old Amiga games.

I don’t know why I suddenly had a craving for some old retro games, prehaps just because I’ve been talking about it with people recently, in any case i downloaded a copy of WinUAE and amiga emulator and proceeded to find some of the games I remember.

As you can see I have even had a bit of fun still with recording software, now my PC actually lets me be a little more creative, hooray!

I have been having a blast with the new map pack on Call of Duty 4 recently, and this last weekend at the Noobtoob CoD4 Fiesta hilarity ensued. Together with Jam Enslaver and Magenta over on Noobtoob we put together a youtube vid to mark the special occasion.

This is the first blog made from my newly upgraded computer, hooray!

So most of my weekend is has been spent installing XP (I’ll install Vista at a later date), doing a bunch of windows updates, installing drivers, installing more windows updates, removing drivers that don’t work due to windows updates, and then re-installing previously removed windows updates.

Yep as you can see a lot of fun, but now that is pretty much out of the way I am now getting the useful software and games back on this new HDD and I must say I’m pretty impressed with it so far.

Also the new Call of Duty 4 Map pack got released this weekend, and on Saturday a whole bunch of us from NooBTooB had a real blast checking them out. We even managed to play with Wombat from CheapAssGamer which I thought was pretty damn cool considering I listen to their CagCast regularly. All in all a great time.

Also this weekend to top it all off it actually decided to snow here, which it really doesn’t do very often at all, infact i cannot remember the last time it did. Sure we get rain, sleet, hail, angry bees, thunder & lightening, but snow.. it’s pretty rare this south, especially at the start of “spring”.

April marks spring, and perhaps it’s good then that with my replacement harddrive coming tomorrow it gives me a good chance to do a bit of digital spring cleaning, only transferring the files in which I need. So I’m looking forward to that, and I’m pretty sure the next time I post it will be from my new computer!

In the mean time I’ve been messing around with animation shop, I forgot how much fun that was. The animated gif you see there is taken from an awesome video from my good friend Jam Enslaver made of himself playing Condemned, I recently added his site to my list of links on the right of my blog, and I recommend you go watch his video here and then go check out his youtube too as he has many many good vids.

I did get “Rick Rolled” on April Fools by one of the people I subscribe to on youtube (ArtieTSMITW), and I really wasn’t expecting it, the internet seemed to go a little mad this year, the largest one I saw was IGN creating a rather expensive looking trailer for a Zelda movie.