Matts Blog

Have I got your attention? Yep? Good. Recently I have noticed the gaming industry has received a bit of bad press, especially in regards to violence in its games. Its not entirely surprising, except that the media feed off it a lot – a gloom and doom story after all does sell well. Initially ITV have done three case-studies (yep, three) of children and their gaming addiction, how it was taking over their lives; the reporter herself then writes about her son and his “gaming problems”.

I feel like I should point out that games are a form of escapism, and given the right environmental scenario they can become extremely addictive, so-to-speak. Certainly in the case of Ned the reporters son, but alternatively they can give hope to those who have never had a good life… curing depression to some extent. Online communities^[1] (given the right one) can be terribly supportive to the point of gullibility and exploitation.

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I find it less and less shocking these days, you see plenty of desktop threads and reports of a slow system it just gets dull to hear. So once again I am willing to take up the banner of cleanliness on your computer, all in the name of some better performance. I find it rare that many users keep a clean system, so there is a good chance you won’t be (apologies if you do, and well done).

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So you want to have a 2 player beat-em-up on Street Fighter 4 on the PC? Having trouble setting it up so one player can use the pad and the other the keyboard? I have a solution for you, but it may not be pleasant.

There is a slightly broken logic in the idea that whoever has the 1P controller gets the keyboard, the idea being if the controller isn’t performing than there is a backup option to return to the menu and so-on. But this means that the second player is left without a controller, even if you attempt to assign the keyboard to the first player. To get around this we came up with a rather ingenious little trick – but it will require a second controller (which itself can also be a classical flight joystick, it really doesn’t matter what it is – as you won’t be using it).

Essentially you plug this second controller in and assign that controller to the first player (you may want to find out what the Start button is, or assign it yourself) – once done the Pad in question should work absolutely fine as the second players controller – game away!

I’ve had my eye on this game for quite a long time now, when I say this game I mean the entire series – mainly through its wonderful art both concept and after-release from UDON Entertainment. But in all gaming seriousness, I have never touched a console controller (much) — being a PC player has kept me out of the fighting game loop for many years, only now has one of any serious worth appeared on the computermabob. So I am getting in on the action, there are no shortage of reviews for this game – but this opinion outlet has an angle whereby I have no experience of this genre. I won’t jump into the multiplayer action in fear of getting totally trounced… so instead this review is based upon the harsh AI and QWERTY of my choice.

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Recently patched so a large number of players can now progress beyond a certain percentage of the game, Far Cry 2 attempts to immerse the player in and amongst a civil war happening in Africa. So with the recent patches I figured it’d be worth attempting to finish the game at least just this once… and so, I continue my ventures across this world.

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So we’ve just pre-ordered Windows 7 (W7), with news that the new shiny OS is flying off virtual shelves everywhere, I have to say it feels somewhat exciting. I spent some time with the Release Candidate earlier today and actually started to warm to it (more than I was before) as I came across options to bring back text and shrink the icon-size… I can actually see how it might function in my work-flow compared to Vista’s pointless file-cabinet scroll idea.

But it is too early to say whether I will truly fall in love with it, or whether I will be among many other thousands/millions of customers unhappy with their OS. But it hasn’t stopped me thinking about what I plan to do in October when it is released. I am already hatching a plan to ensure the safety of my current work and game-progress, both hobby and college/real work. Backups, browsers and even FTP programs are all going accounted for in this cunning plan of mine.

Its almost like getting the decorations out for Christmas, except in this case its packing everything away and moving home. But don’t worry — I’m just hatching the plan and making preparations, I have no plan to start doing everything now, I may have finished my blog-theme by then

My combat plan is to start with a fresh and clean hard disk, an empty canvas with no old and unused operating systems, no junk in its documents folders and no un-installed game remnants… I must really calm down. I am also thinking of splitting off another partition for a Linux Distro, perhaps as my primary web-development OS… I’m just not sure yet!

• Part 1

Before leaving the Dryad city – we decide to complete some quests not least of which one includes bringing kittens back to a child, except rather than saving these felines from the trees, we have to retrieve them from the ground — my rather helpful shadowstep/teleportation spell quickly sees my trip shortened to the ground-level, though my trip back up proves confusing and much longer. We than proceed South to do a number of other quests — although to my dismay there are some rather well produced giant spiders in our way. Although easy to dispatch, they are non-the-less just as creepy to an arachnophobic.

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So in an attempt to rekindle a little love for the often-ignored Action-RPG genre (ARPG) myself and a clan member have started playing Sacred 2. Released in late 2008 it has seen a small following on the PC, and has recently seen its release on the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 consoles.

Our journey begins where it left off many moons ago, both of us a little rusty on the controls. We opted to play on closed servers (hosted remotely) allowing our characters to be tracked through sacred2.net – we also chose the softcore mode (aptly named, as hardcore sees a one life only approach). This journey of ours starts in the jungle (after a marathon trek across a dessert, volcanic island and many a green-hilled county of the elves, humans and orcs — a journey which we undertook long ago).

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It doesn’t quite have the same ring as Left 4 Dead, but its pretty much the game-mode we’ve been playing for the past 2-3 months now in L4D. Without some regulars being able to attend our usual session, we’ve resorted to kicking the 4th (well only) AI from the match using the console. This does not invalidate achievements (as of yet, and I hope it never does), and it adds an extra level to it… the casual nature of our matches means we don’t generally do anything more or less than normal difficulty.

We have our fantastic matches, and sometimes our off matches – sometimes its just a fantastic roller-coaster (it depends on how tired we are) last-night was no exception, we’ve had a number of near-misses with tanks… only having a last minute rifle punt save to take the tanks aggro off the now beaten to mash TSM (as Francis).

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Seems an odd title, aye… its come from my experiences with customising Windows Vista with all sorts of little features which just seem to gobble up extra processing time for something I already do to some extent, i.e. a gimmick.

After reading a recent SmashingMagazine article (and not to pee on their fire, it was pretty good) I decided to explore some seemingly good ideas to bring Mac features to the hulking Vista OS – its safe to say most of these additions where promptly uninstalled.

Albeit I already had some of them such as the ever wonderful Notepad++, but among other features was a number of Vista themes, and while perfectly fine looks and style wise, just would not have been practical for long term use – I am still after all this time finding the simplistic Vista Aero theme the perfect style for me.

They also forgot the completely free IIS (built into Windows XP, and can be installed with Vista) which now has more support with the PHP plug-in and ability to work with a local database server such as MySQL. I won’t deny it often feels cumbersome even when used locally – but its a smidge easier to set up. Mind, I do use WAMP too and that works just as well – if not much more quicker than IIS.

The article also covers object-docks and various other Mac features which have been recreated by third-parties for Vista – safe to say I wouldn’t waste my time with them; though no-doubt they could be useful, I have just got into the rythm of Windows.

I should point out the article stems from an earlier Mac-supporting article on SM, so it was another answer to this. I’ll give it one thing, it does prove that there is yet again another alternative to Mac for web-design tasks.

In other news of my own – I’ve had an idea, but ssshhh… its my precious