Blog Theme Testing

 

Hey all,

It’s been brought to my attention that this blog can take a really long time to load sometimes, I myself have tried to access my own website, and many times I’ve been left waiting for awhile.

So for now I’ve removed the background image of the blog so that its quicker for those people to read, also it gives me time to think about where the theme may be heading in 2011 . . . should I change it? or should I not.

To change or not to change, that is the question. What do you think?

 

Halo Reach Review

 



Halo Reach
By Bungie

XBOX 360






About:
Halo Reach is the final Halo game to be made by Bungie, and the final chapter in the series, Halo Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3: ODST and Halo 3 in that order of storyline.
You play as Noble Six, a Spartan with a mysterious past, and the same ‘no taking off the mask for the player to see’ policy.
The story takes place on Planet Reach, a human colony and military outpost, the Covenant are invading Reach trying to find the location of our home world, Earth, in the end there’s a lot of deaths, and planet Reach, is lost.

Review:
Many people have said that it’s the best Halo game released, I have to say I agree, the graphics are simply amazing eye candy, the forge is amazing with the degree of creation possible, and the campaign and multi-player really do the game good.
The campaign isn’t some cheap short campaign, this campaign actually goes for considerable time, unlike other games in which it ends practically when you started playing.
Forge is Bungie’s way of allowing gamers to create their own maps and masterpieces, and the user-created maps I’ve seen are stunning. One thing that does annoy me though, is just like Halo 3, and Halo 3: ODST you can’t play the campaign, in co-operative with 4 player split-screen, its limited to 2 person, yeah it can get cramped on the screen, but come on.

Summary:
Great graphics, some awesome secrets that you can find, and the new abilities make online a lot more fun, all those people who say it ruined it are just idiots that can’t get the gist of using the new features, it makes the online experience heaps more fun.
Campaign did let us down a little bit here and there, I noticed the Spartans that were helping me did some stupid things, like when I got in the turret of a Warthog, the Spartan wouldn’t drive, she just sat there, and one time I fell off the cliff with her in the passenger seat, and she didn’t die, she climbed out of the burning warthog at the bottom of the cliff and said “Six is dead” . . . along with them occasionally using the armour-lock-up ability when there’s nothing happening. The online is the most fun I’ve had with a Halo game, and the new armour and better ranking system keeps you keen to keep on playing, although I was annoyed that Offline players got points faster than those that have played or are playing online.


Apart from the minor AI faults, it’s an awesome game.
Rating:


5.0 / 5.0 – Game Play
5.0 / 5.0 – Cut Scenes
5.0 / 5.0 – Fun
5.0 / 5.0 – Visuals
OVERALL:


 [review pros=”Lot’s to do, brilliant forge mode, great graphics, fantastic physics, great online when you can find a match” cons=”various AI faults, short campaign” score=100]


P.S. Did anyone notice that the Jackals are holding their shields in the opposite hands? In every other Halo game they’ve held it in a different hand. I didn’t even notice.

A Half-The-Midlife Crisis

Hey all

Recently time feels to have gone, fast. Too fast.
Maybe because it’s the school holidays and time actually has a consiousness and is ruining my plans for all technological creation. I’ve got games to make, music to create, videos to amuse and a few mornings to snooze.

But I’m running out of time, sigh…the constrictions of school come again. 3 weeks to go, brilliant, I can look forward to PAT testing, more lovely pressure to be put under. :/
Then again, Private School kids have it much worse, they don’t get a life or time to create or explore imagination, apart from learning the ways of ridiculing all public school kids’ poor education and how crappy their lives will be compared to their apparent “rich” lives ahead they get time to do work at school and work at home so that they can later become business men and/or women which will then will get time to repeat the childhood pattern with work at work and work at home, while the public schooled kids live a more relaxed less stressful more social life, and learn to live without so much money.
Hmmm, man I wander about in some of these posts…

There’s just too much pressure on people to do well, that’s why you have some young dilinquates roaming the streets, because they couldn’t take the pressure, or couldn’t even meet the minimum size requirement for a human brain.

Anyways.

My main issue here is that life feels like it’s too short, I only turned 15 awhile ago and I feel like I don’t have that much life to live. How can I possibly be having a midlife crisis at the age of 15??
Has the average age of death for a human male dropped by a couple of decades due to the medicines, foods, and lack of exercise? Meaning that I’m going to live till 30?
Or has the Ancient Mayans somehow cracked into my brain telepathically from the cold darkness of the underworld and given me the ability to feel that the end is near.
(Um… In case I have any serious conspiracists here, THAT WAS A JOKE! 🙂

Anyone else feeling like your life is going to be constrained?
Or that your life is feeling shorter? And shorter?

Times flying, and I can’t catch the clock.
I’m really not quite sure, if I can take the shock.

I must have caught the Dr. Seuss bug while I was away camping…

Yours Elderly,

Ben

Fix: AOE2 & SWGB, “Can’t find saved scenario files in explorer”

Can’t find your Scenario you made in Scenario Editor? You’re trying the find the “.scx” file but it just doesn’t save to the “/Scenario” folder. It probably is pissing you off as much as it did me.

This is a problem that happens with Age Of Empires 2 and Star Wars Galatic Battlegrounds when run on Windows Vista or Windows 7, it’s to do with Administrator settings, and the program/game not being allowed to actually save in the ‘/Scenario’ folder.

Text Instructions:

  1. Go to the game install directory
  2. Right-click on ‘Scenario‘ and then choose ‘Properties
  3. Click on the ‘Security‘ tab, then click on ‘Edit
  4. Click on ‘Users‘ and then tick the ‘Full Control‘ tickbox

Then run Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds or Age of Empires 2, open your map in the scenario editor and ‘Save As,’ and choose a different name. The scenario will have saved into C:/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Age Of Empires II/Game/Scenario or C:/Program Files/LucasArts/Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds/Game/Scenario

Image Instructions:

aoe_fix
Info Image

ALSO: With both games, if you ‘Run As Administrator,’ you won’t have any issues with permissions. Unfortunately if you have maps in the scenarios folder that were created as non-admin, and then you run the  game as an administrator you won’t be able to access those save files.

Thanks,

 

Ben

 

 UPDATED: 23/09/2014

AoE 2 can’t find saved scenario files in explorer
SWGB can’t find saved scenario files in explorer
AoE 2 can’t find .scx file
SWGB can’t find .scx file

2011 . . . Meh

Hello!

It’s 7 days into 2011, and I’ve done . . . Hmmmm . . . nothing . . .

You can blame this disappearing act on the thing that I brought with my Christmas money, which dragged me away from every video, blog, graphics, programming stuff that I do normally. But I’ll tell you about that in a minute. (Well, could be in a second depending how fast you read)

The other thing I want to talk about is dreams, and how they may be trying to tell us something, for the dreams I’ve had recently relate to this game that I bought, well, I spose you can say anything relates to anything when it comes down to it, but this I feel is greatly linked to this mysterious item.

So what is it that I brought with the Christmas money, well it was Halo Reach, which is a video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360, I got it for the cheapest price that I’d seen around, $70, from Dicksmith. I’ve played every single Halo game in the series, when I got Halo 3 the same thing happened, I was taken by it, because of it’s forge mode and online play. ‘Forge Mode’ is where you can create your own levels, choose where the weapons all go, and on some levels like Sandbox you can completely create and choose the layout of the whole map.
I love creating things, and also enjoy a little online play here and there, and Halo Reach offers it perfectly, BUT, I’m not going to talk about the game in detail here, I’ll leave that for a post on my Gamers Spot Blog.
It will be there when I get the chance . . .

Anyways

This game took me away from everything, I love the creation and everything about it. But I noticed that the game was changing me. I was getting short tempered and angry, really quickly, over very silly things, and I didn’t like it . . .
Then the other night, I had a dream. I wasn’t sure where I was, all I knew is that there were some of my classmates, one of them, who annoys me with her “smart talk” always trying to beat my score in order to either boast about it to herself or on the one occasion telling me that “my score was worse than . . .” and then stating a name. Being smart isn’t just about bloody knowledge, I don’t know how many times I have to say it, I know someone that is a wizard at history, reads a lot and always thinks he’s clever by correcting things that I say, but when it comes to common sense and knowing when to say or do things, he’s terrible!
He told some woman with a make-up malfunction the other day that she looked like a clown, and other times done things that when questioned about stated that he “didn’t know” why he did it. This girl that keeps trying to compete is one of this people, obviously up themselves from previous years of success, and all they have to do is beat the next clever person to give them self the impression that they are the best person in the world.
Hehem! Back on topic.
Anyways, the ‘smart’ girl said something to me, in the dream I could hear it in crystal clear definition, and know it still feels as if I know exactly what was said, but I just can’t remember . . . aaaaagh!
Whatever it was annoyed me, because I started swearing and pointing fingers, and from memory throwing stuff around, and all the people, including a person I think very highly of, all talked disapprovingly, I had turned into some tyrant. When I woke up in the morning, I linked the dream to my life, dreams are said to be your brain’s virtual reality system, which tests you in different situations, these often include things like running away from something, confrontation with a certain being or foe, and falling, down a really deep abyss.
Which in my case was running away from a giant panda (From Crash Bandicoot), confronting a robber breaking into our caravan, even though we don’t have a caravan, and of course falling, for whatever reason.
I also use to have these dreams of this cold white hand reaching out from underneath all the furniture and grabbing me, pulling me under.
With my dream of anger, I instantly linked it to the game I’d been playing, and how I was getting short tempered, easily by playing it, it’s almost as if the dream, or the unconscious was telling me what I could become if I didn’t do something about it. So that very day I had a half an hour meditation session, where I just close my eyes, sit on the floor, and just breath calmly. I’ve done it before when I felt that my anger wasn’t acceptable, whether it actually works, or I’m just tricking myself with the placebo effect, I wouldn’t know, but now I’m not so short tempered, but whenever I play the game, it comes back, so I just have to be mindful of that, and go into the game not feeling so attached to it, and just seeing it as what it is, a game, I have to go in being calm, taking it easy, not only will I feel better, but I’ll also play the game better too.

Dreams are interesting things, you can have dreams where the thing that you dreamed happens the very next day, you can also have dreams of relatives or friends that have passed away, like the dreams I had of my Grandfather when he passed away, and these weren’t warm happy dreams, they were dark cold and sad.
You can also have good dreams, like the flying dream, that you can control and fly around, then you wake up and try flying, and can’t get that amazing jump lift-off thing working like it did in the dream.
There are also weird dreams, fighting dreams, sad dreams, dreams that appear to be warning you, like the dream about smoking that many people have had, and in some cases have given them that push to quit smoking, or to vow nether to touch a cigarette.

What’s also interesting is that people who play video games regularly have been proven to have less nightmares, because the brain doesn’t need to use its dream simulation program to test you in a fighting situation, because you’ve already done it time and time again in the games you play.

When your playing the video game, it takes on your reality, you are in the game, you become the character and so forth, really whether your dreaming, playing a video game, or living real life, our perception of what’s real and what isn’t is judging by your senses, when your in a dream, it feels totally real, then when you wake up you realise it was odd.

By the way, anyone really interested in dreams should watch the movie Inception.
I recommend it, if you’re good at following multiple story lines, and like dreams, go out get the movie, and after watching it, watch the small documentary on dreaming included on the special features disk.

Well, I’ll catch you later,

Next post I’ll be saying a few words about Facebook.