I enjoy blogging and I always try to keep up with the latest gaming news over all platforms and the industry in general. I may be inclined to post the odd gaming story/review/preview.
My website is always updating, some of these updates can be fairly small and insignificant but I find it important to keep a log on these errors and how they were fixed.
Want to know what I'm currently working on? My website has some of the projects I am/have been working on including some of the more intresting projects from my work place.
Years without knowing, days of waiting, the GTA V trailer has finally hit the internet in fantastic fashion spilling the beans on Rockstars latest edition to the series, but what did I think about it?! If I'm a 100% honest I wasn't expecting much from this trailer as I already knew what the new Grand Theft Auto game would look like, play like and feel like due to GTA IV coming out a few years ago but in saying that I was still defiantly excited to see where Rockstar were taking the series. It's pretty clear after watching the trailer for some time that the game is going to be based in Rockstars fiction city of Los Santos, it is still unclear who you play in the game even though a few characters stand out more than others. I really enjoyed the emphasis on the recession with the selling of houses, countless bums and dialogue about lack of money.
The graphics look as good as ever with attention to detail making even the most OCD of us pleased, I am slightly concerned what this will do to the scale of the game. The wording form Rockstar's press release does seem to try and stray away from announcing a re-imagine of the whole of San Andreas, so we might be stuck with just Los Santos for now (maybe the other cities will come as DLC Chapters?!). The main thing I'm personally hyped at from the trailer is the return of planes! I loved flying around San Andreas in the tiny stunt plane along with the Dodo from GTA III. From the trailer along I'm already 80% more excited than I was for GTA V even if it does mean a smaller map than San Andreas, as long as it keeps the humour in touch with the mature and in-depth story line then I'm going to be one happy bunny! Check out the comparison trailer past the break to see how far GTA has really come!
It has been a long time coming but finally Rockstar are ready to revel their latest Grand Theft Auto game this afternoon. At 4pm UK time www.rockstar.com is going to fall to its knees with thousands of desperate gamers spamming up the interwebs trying to get their first glimpse of this exclusive trailer. The teaser image above doesn't give much away on what to expect from GTA V but rumours have been floating around for a while about highly paid actors which might be aiming towards using La Noire's facial animation technology. My personal hopes are for a more refined engine with the years of knowledge gathered from Red Dead Redemption, La Noire & Max Payne with an more expansive world to rival GTA:SA or other titles like Skyrim that have taken the leap from being just a "sandbox" game. But more than that I just hope this trailer is just as good as the GTA IV reveal all those years ago, we shall see in a matter of hours!
We recently ordered some Viliv X70s to be used as portiable registry systems around the school which meant I needed to figure out how to setup the devices (5x X70's, 4x S5's)to be as accessible as possible for teaching staff. Here I'll go through the steps I took to get the X70 working as a HID compliant touch screen device rather than using the driver that came bundled with it. Here is a fairly in-depth tutorial of the process I took, enjoy and good luck:
Another Need For Speed game and another broken set of controls for us with enthusiast wheels but yet again I've managed to find some pretty sweet settings for the Logitech wheels (G25, G27). These involve slightly modding some of your Shift 2 files for the best results but even without modding the game you can get a much better feeling by tweaking the Logitech Profiler and cancelling out Need for Speed: Shift 2's terrible controller options. The biggest problem I had was the game over writing my Logitech settings which was pretty annoying due to me playing at a very low rotation so each time I started a race I would end up with an uncontrollable wheel swaying back and forth or a wheel that needed 2 roations to go round a bend (which I'm not used to). So I hit up these settings and it now feels a 100x better if not more:
Another racing game hits the PC in the form of Test Drive Unlimited 2 a perfect candidate for ATI's Eyefinity setup, but how well does it perform? First off Eden isn't know for being the most advanced developer in the world and generally they bring pretty poor PC ports from the console counterparts this fact alone doesn't give me high hopes for Eyefinity. When loading up the game all the options are there where you can easily set the Eyefinity resolution and change the advanced graphic settings to get the most out of performance. Now let's dig a little deeper to see where the Eyefinity support slips up...
Now on to the physical cabinet itself, there has been a fair few changes but nothing dramatic thus far. This most visual improvement has to be in the above image, the marquee has finally been custom made after many of moons with the generic defender logo. To make this awesome marquee (haha) I just downloaded various video game sprites from the interwebs and make a collage of game characters in Photoshop, added some text with some fancy lines and I'm done. Keep reading for a download link to the Photoshop file.
Well isn't this a sorry sight, my arcade cabinet has been going over some drastic changes over the past few months from PC replacements to slight hardware tweaks such as extra hard drives. Saying that it hasn't gone to well as the PC has never been working a 100% with it often taking 10 minutes of faffing around to get it to boot. So over Christmas I was generously given this old PC that was unwanted from a friend, the specs are as follows:
The Shenmue series has certainly been getting a lot of news coverage over the past few months and now some fantastic fresh new tid-bits arrive from the creator himself. Yu Suzuki recently had an interview with Famitsu which has now been translated to say:
“I want to make 3 (Shenmue 3) with the same volume as in the past,” said Suzuki. “There have actually been a lot of requests from fans for 3 as well. There were even petitions signed by tens of thousands of people.”
With Sega also working with Shenmue City it could spark discussion on maybe bringing back Ryo Hazuki and chums, Yu Suzuki is adamant on reproducing the same level as innovation for a new game and would probably want a similar budget as he had for the original titles. Shenmue keeps creeping up in Sega news and with the Yakazu series slowing down maybe that team could be used to continue the Shenmue saga?! Let's hope so!
