ShadowReality

A new mod is being developed for HL2, probably for the HL2 Ep 1 Engine(Half Life 2 Episode 1). The game puts you in the shoes of Adrian Shepard once again as you fight your way through combine forces just after the 7 Hour War(Portal Storm(the war that the humans lost against the combine blah blah blah blah)). Anyway, the game looks good but it is only about 1/5 finished. If you want to check out more news, go to: http://www.moddb.com

More Info:
Forums: http://opfor2.forummotion.com/index.htm
YouTube Vid 1:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6dYBbIINw
YouTube Vid 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

This last weekend I finished up my custom gamercard code and it works very well, and I am now working on a central control panel where you can customise it further, and then i’ll be adding different sizes / designs too.

Here’s what the card currently looks like, very close to the concept.

The information refreshes every couple of minutes, and should convey the same information as the gamercard in my sidebar. I’ll be posting updates as I add more over the coming weeks.

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

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….

For the 2nd time, my Xbox 360 has broken…

Having been through the repair process once already last year (I even blogged about it) I know what to expect this time, and didn’t freak out as much at all. I was enjoying some great Call of Duty 4 with some friends when all of a sudden the textures had a wierd matrix effect on them, it looked pretty cool. Then upon rebooting I got an E 74 error which I hear is often referred to as “The black screen of death”, how original.

So it’s queued up for it’s repair already and since theres not many big games out for the Xbox360 at the moment I think I’m quite lucky and should have it back soon enough. I think i might even blog about my Xbox’s second adventure to the magical repair shop.

As discussed on the recent Noobtoob Community Podcast I have picked up a copy of Condemned and have contributed to Jam and Locke’s fantastic videos. Seeing as Jam started in the shopping mall I decided to flesh out the beginning of the story, and after this who knows which part I shall cover next (suggestions welcome). So turn down the lights, turn up the volume and enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2: