ShadowReality

I’ve had a pretty busy week this week and I’ve been meaning to find a second or two in which to update my blog, but as more time passed I wanted to find a longer period of time free as I then had more things to write about, until I found myself in this situation where the blog has not been updated and all the things I wanted to say no longer hold any relevance, that’s procrastination for you.

The video above was shown as a little advert before my cinema showed Indiana Jones 4, which I watched just this evening and man the first half is an Amazing film but then it decides to take a left turn into the realms of science fiction and fantasy departing from the traditional Indiana adventure and I found myself quite disappointed. All the negative reviews I had heard thus far complained that Harrison Ford was looking too old, but I don’t think thats true at all , sure he’s older, but the date in the film is ten years later anyway.

Yesterday, I bought a Mexican Standard Strat in Olympic White. Below, is a picture of it. Rather horribly extracted from the original photo with Photoshop.

This week I have been doing battle with my Realtek HD Audio Input drivers. All of a sudden my microphone stopped working, at first i thought it was just another headset that has given up on me but it turns out its a problem with my drivers. It seems to have disabled my microphone input and replaced it with stereo mix and has locked up. I have been pretty much trying everything to solve this, there are various forums around the internet with people with similar problems and all their “solutions” are not working at all for me. So if I find my solution I’ll make a post about it here and on the tech forums in hope that i can help someone else with this as I am clearly not the only one. So after successfully trouble shooting my video card I get this, and I’m not impressed.. especially since I started recording podcasts recently.

:sad face:

Today we visited the church from the brochure I posted earlier this week. Liberty City is sure sunny this time of year. We took a few photos, and then stole a sweet ride. Tomorrow we go looking for pigeons to shoot. I’m not sure when I will come home, there’s no rush.

Wish you were here

-SmokestormX

I have to give an applause to anyone who can guess who this is. It was drawn completely by freehand and you can actually see, if you look closely, why I’m not an artist. This portrait was taken off directly from a photo of the person.

A few days ago, I had messed up my exe for starcraft and so I couldn’t get on b-net and play with Smoky and company. How did I do it? I installed a no-cd crack wrong and I pretty much fucked up my Starcraft. Now today, I went on a journey to find a cd-key grabber so I could get back my cd-key and re-install the game. So after about 3 hours of web searching. I found my redemption and now I can play Starcraft again. But this time, I’m not going to be stupid. In case of “mess up game by no-cd crack”, i have backed up all of my important files so that I don’t have to search for anything ever again.

What else do you use a blog for other than to rant about stuff? Well I haven’t ranted in a while so let me tell you something that has been bugging me lately, and that is people expecting GTA4 to be the perfect game.

First of all, I’ll let you in on my feelings about the game, I like it, a lot. And just recently I feel people have been holding up this games flaws rather than looking at the amazing game that it is, almost akin to a small child at Christmas getting the bike that he wanted but it’s in a slightly different RED than he expected. I went into this game expecting it to be a better GTA game than I had played previously, and knowing that the graphics were going to be better on this next/current generation of consoles, and that is exactly what I got, and a bit more to boot.

It seems so very strange to me that some people I know are complaining about this game, or state that they are trying really hard to like it. What’s not to like? It’s an absolutely gorgeous city, rich in detail, the general population all have their different lives going on and (thanks to the euphoria engine) so very realistic. And all this goes for the city itself, the level of detail that Rockstar have squeezed in here really impresses me, and has really brought the city alive, and I haven’t even opened it all up yet.

I think the main reasons for this is the sheer size of the hype surrounding this release coupled with the recent scores that GTA4 received just prior to it’s launch, one site IGN rated it a 10/10 before most of the other sites were allowed (due to an embargo) and this has set a trend for the game to score perfect 10s across most sites. Does this game deserve a 10? At the moment I myself rate this game 9.5 and I see myself definatly giving this a 10 once I have finished the game and tried the multiplayer more, but I think there is nothing wrong with giving this game a 10 across the board. At this point GTA4 is apparently averaging out at 98.8%, some other high scoring games include Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64), which up until this point led all games with an average GameRankings score of 97.7% , and that is closely followed by Super Mario Galaxy (Wii), which has an average of 97.3 percent. Yea thats right 97.3% for SMG, that 98.8% looks a bit better now huh, I certainly think think SMG is a fabulous game, but I also know that I am enjoying GTA4 much more than I did Super Mario Galaxy so far.

I personally am loving my vacation in Liberty city, and i really hope their working on a GTA4: Insert new city here, because I could play these games forever, their always fun, and their always just the right mix of what I like from a game. Sure I could wish they added a bunch more things, but who says they won’t with Downloadable content. Well that’s it rant over, time to get back to playing.