ShadowReality

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.

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!

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.

Well all my new components came for my new computer upgrade in their new shiny boxes, even the motherboard box was decorated in funky holograms (too pristine for a mobo box in my opinion). It felt like Christmas opening up all the boxes, filled with “new” smells, instruction manuals, installation manuals, Driver CDs and all manner of cables.

The new graphics card has a beast of a heatsink on it to keep it cool so if that is anything to go by I’m sure it’s going to be pretty fast, i’m not sure which game I am going to test with it first, then I opened up the Power Supply only to find it was in a very strange bag.. another over packaged piece of electronics equipment in my mind.

I don’t know when they decided to add all this unnecessary snazzy packaging, I feel i somehow could of bought these things cheaper without the sock bag.
In any case I went about installing it all bit by bit, held my breath and hit that power button and it surged into life, a single short beep of the internal speaker tells me I havn’t fucked up and i go about installing the OS only to find the new hardrive just will not format.

After messing around for several hours afterwards I finally came to the sad truth of the matter that I would have to send back the hardrive for a replacement thus putting me off having my new system complete for a couple of days, drat!

My new PC upgrade parts are arriving soon, and so I thought I would document this process so I know how annoying it is to do to discourage me from potentially doing this in the future. So.. Old PC, Motherboard is DEAD, upgrading, lets get it ready.

How not to remove a motherboard.

First off I had to remove all the PCI cards, that’s easily enough my case is pretty screw-less and everything clips out easily. These included:

Nvidia 5500 AGP card - it was having memory problems so that’s being replaced
56k modem card - i don’t think I’ll be re-installing that
Sound blaster Audigy 2 ZX sound card - which I will more than likely be re-installing due to the digital inputs and surround sound.
A strange extra port that plugs direct into the motherboard, looks like a joystick port.

Next up, I removed all the motherboard screw.. or at least tried to. Unfortunately there is always 1 bastard that refuses to come lose, so after several minutes of trying to get this out instead I opt for finding something to eat.. perhaps I’m just lacking the nourishment to get this screw out, yep i’m sure that’s what it is.

Back again, this time armed with some needle nosed pliers I attack my new adversary, however it has equipped itself with a defense, and that is a pure circular circumference, +0 DMG from pliers, DAMN YOU SCREW… I try the screwdriver once more as if the screw had somehow changed.. it had not.

So thus i reached the conclusion, since the motherboard is dead and of no use to anyone anymore, why not just rip it out, so using brute force and a hammer I went about freeing the motherboard from the evil screw who held it hostage, however this screw is above average as just as i thought it was coming loose it killed my old crappy hammer. CRITICAL HIT!
Bah I needed a new hammer anyway, but mark my words screw.. your going down..

While all this was going down, the onlooker seemed alarmed that I might be going crazy. Fear not, I eventually got the motherboard out.

And so finally the case has been emptied, and dusted and ready for the new bits.. so a cautionary tale for anyone doing this sort of thing, make sure you have the right tools.

Around a couple months back my main motherboard snap, crackled and popped its way into the afterlife, and this week the temporary PC I am using has really been kicking up a fuss and feels like it’s about to bite the big one too, so I have been looking into getting my upgrade done ASAP.

I Intend to go for a nice Intel Core 2 Duo E2180, should be a nice improvement over my last one but the whole process of picking out components has been rather annoying since pc tech has recently made quite a leap forward little did I know.

On many of the new motherboards the double IDE slots are now being replaced by 4 SATA slots for improved performance and speed (1 IDE port remains), so where as before i had 2 DVD drives and a Hardrive, i would now need to either drop a DVD or go for a new HDD (which I indeed went for due to thier low cost and greatly improved speeds).

Not only that but AGP slots are also on the way out making way for the PCI-Express instead, so I can’t make do with my old gfx card, a new one must be obtained (still deciding on that).

All this makes me very sad, but I have really been squeezing in some good components at the lowest price.. and leaving an option to later either overclock or upgrade to better very easily.

I hate not making posts on my site here, it feels me with guilt every time i visit which at the moment isn’t very often, so from now on I am going to force myself to make weekly posts at the least!

I also want to add a proper archive page, and a search box.. where’s my damn search box!

I want to do all this because recently I’ve been showing some older posts to people aswell as looking through my old posts and DS pics and you know it reminds me of what I got up to, and what was going on at a certain point in time and I get fond memories of games I used to play with people I hardly talk to these days.

So just maybe the next time you visit here you might have a whole lot of things to read.

Yeah so January.. I’ve been AWOL.

I guess my blog posts stopped new years day, one of my two cats died to a somewhat unknown cause and it feels from that point on things just have snowballed.

I also got into an argument with my computer, you see it wanted to be upgraded, but I told it it would have to wait, well it threw a tantrum and blew up it’s motherboard, and so the argument is settled, I shall be upgrading my main computer as soon as I can find the spare cash to do so, and in the mean time I am borrowing a friends.

I also got a bunch of Xbox 360 gaming done, having fun with mass effect and still playing call of duty 4 multiplayer.

I will be posting much more in Feb, but I need to finish off my Hellish January first. Until then.

It’s coming up to December already, 3 more weeks to Christmas and before you know it, 2008. It’s at times like these (when I have made no effort to get any presents) that time decides to speed up. I can’t wait to just relax in the holidays.

I sold some (3) of my old PS2 games on ebay, they got more than I thought they would (£25ish total) for the games that they were, so I think before christmas is upon me I’ll take advantage of one on ebays cheap listing days and get rid of a whole ton of stuff. Then I’ll buy a ton of stuff in the January sales.

Also what with all the Half-Life2 and Orange box related stuff, I decided to see how far I had got in HL2, it turns out I had not completed it, so thats another game I can occupy myself with until my Xbox360 is back. Which is currently officially being fixed I am told, but I wont get it back till about the 2nd week in December, how pooey.

Other than that I’m really really busy with work, I’m trying to get everything finished and out of the way, and other than that I feel Fantastic.

Much Like this song my Jonathon Coulton (visit his site NOW!), the same person who wrote the Portal Ending song (Still Alive) from the Game Portal , and also Code Monkey which is another great song of his. Audio clip below, theres also a very amusing Youtub vid.

“All I know is that this steak tastes better when I take my steak taste better pill”