Remtard's Era

Something special?

2011-04-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

An old favourite has returned to the online experience. Crackdotexe has returned after disappearing off the internet after a couple of problems with rival hackers. He has now returned under his new alias "Crackdotexe" or "crack.exe." The new alias is what he calls "A new start..." He only hopes his old followers and supporters recognise his work and realise who he once was and who he is becoming again.

Anyway, I can't give any more details than 2 different URL's. There is a link to his new twitter account, and a link to his new blogging site.

Hope you guys enjoy his work as much as I used to :)

Android is my new love.

2011-04-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry but Android is actually perfect. To anyone who doesn't know what I mean by the term Android, it's the operating system used on certain phones. Such as the HTC phones (apart from the Windows based ones) and the phones such as the Samsung Galaxy. At first I didn't really understand Android but after messing around the SDK and watching some short tutorials about the actual software, I have realised how much power the operating system actually includes.

I am currently building a basic application allowing users to sign into different twitter accounts at the same time and tweet to their different accounts by simply typing their tweet and clicking whichever button they want. Each button would represent a different twitter account and therefore automatically update their selected twitter account, displaying their tweets to all their followers. This application may already exist but I want to build it anyway as a project filled with experience more than anything else.

Me and my friend Dan are also trying to build some software for the Android phone which should be available on our gaming community website soon :) so sign up and keep an eye out for the latest posts and updates.

Anyway, thanks for reading guys, sorry if it was a basic post. Just wanted to express my love for Android :D
Remtard x

A little look at some recent games...

2011-03-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

Little Introduction

Recently I have been hammering my PC (once again.) I went back to the Xbox 360 for Black Ops, but after the first month of brilliant gameplay, good community and of course great team play, kids start hammering the game. Naturally, I am all for the younger generation gaming and enjoy online game play with the facilites we have now. But I can't stand it when I am in a game, and just because I may not get 300 kills to 1 death, it doesn't mean they can start shouting abuse and having a go. Stresses me out, so I always end up hating the Xbox and visiting the PC again. In this short but sweet post I will briefly discuss two of my latest games I have been playing on Steam, and of course, the one game I cannot wait for...

Dragon Age 2

To begin with, I was a major fan of the first Dragon Age. Finished the game with each character, unlocked the endings etc etc. It was perfect, everything about it, apart from Sten... he was a bit creepy. But anyway, Dragon Age 2... how can I put this game in a simple sentence, covering the main points. Well actually, I can't there is so much to say about this game, I couldnt possibly describe it's unique game play and story in one simple way. Basically, all I will say is purchase this game. Preferably on PC, as everyone knows that RPG's are terrible on consoles. But anyway, the story (so far) is actually perfect. There are so many things included in the second one that you learn about through the first game (so I advise you hammer the first Dragon Age before battling through the second, it may help you out a lot.) Secondly, the option of importing your Dragon Age 1 character background into the second game introduces a whole new feature of gaming. Although you can choose one of three default character backgrounds, it's always nice to know all those hours played on the first game became useful after months of keeping that game save on your hard drive. The graphics within the game look great, on PC the graphics have DirectX11, so all the textures have tesselation. Making the game like ten times better and the over all appearance of the surroundings, characters and items look much better. The dialogue, character animation and lip sync is all spot on. Bioware really did do a brilliant job with all the small details. Also the new fighting styles within the latest engine are much better than the first Dragon Age, so the fights are much more realistic and gorey :) Anyway, I could write about Dragon Age 2 all day and fill my blog with facts and reviews, but the moral of this short review is "Buy the game... you won't be disappointed."

Lead and Gold - Gangs of the Wild West

Now, I'm not going to lie... I was never a fan of Red Dead Redemption, but a major fan of Red Dead Revolver. To be honest, I don't think I like RDR because it is basically Grand Theft Auto 4, but with horses... and I never liked GTA4 (expecting comments of hatred right about now.) However, I am a major fan of Team Fortress 2, and Lead and Gold is basically TF2 + Red Dead Revolver. The game play is great, the different multiplayer choices are brilliant and the feel to the game is great. Imagine heavy in a cowboy hat... that is Lead and Gold. I only bought it today from Steam so I haven't had much time to play it, but myself and my friend Matt were playing some of the co-op mode which makes you, the player, raid small camps for bags of gold and fight off waves of enemies whilst doing this. At the beginning of the game type the enemies are really dumb and they hardly fight back, but towards the final waves and as the player ranks up they A.I gets much smarter and the enemies become faster and have much better accuracy. So team play really pays off, especially when choosing the different character classes. I will most probably write an entire blog post about Lead and Gold once I have played more covering all aspects of the game, so if you are interested in knowing more, keep an eye out on my blog and I will post some information up soon.

...And Now The Game I Can't Wait For

PORTAL 2. Enough said. Seriously though, the pre-purchase has gone through on steam... it is only a matter of time before my game library is happy once again. I really hope it delivers as much fun and challenge as the first one. Oh and btw, pre-purchase it now on steam and Gabe will allow you to save 10%. What a nice guy.

Anyway thanks for reading, I really need to start using this blog more often as I have so many things I want to discuss about games, software and programming, I just need to find the time and effort to complete all the posts, Thanks again. Buhbye for now.
Remtard.

Changes Occuring to the Blog

2011-03-28T02:28:00.000-07:00

I am currently working on some changes that will be seen on my blog within the next couple of days/weeks. The main change that will be featured here will be:
- A new css stylesheet, but I'm going to try incorporate CSS3 for my interactive features.
- More game reviews, but covering more PC games rather than consoles.
- Software reviews.
- Cover some programming with advantages and disadvantages to different languages.
- General information

What I'm Currently Doing...

2011-02-24T06:16:00.000-08:00

I have currently taken a step back from all the website development tutorials and learning the various languages like CSS and PHP as I am really interested in building mobile applications due to the heavy programming side of things.

I am currently working on a small application for the Apple iPhone, but as I do not have a Mac at the moment, the development is very buggy and tends to fail when I try and compile it into the cracked emulator that I must try it on. Also, the problem of me not having an iPhone means I cannot try the application on a real handset, but I am sure a friend or two will allow me to try it when it is getting closer to complete.

I can't currently give any details out to you guys as I havent fully understood what my application is about just yet. All I can tell you is that it will be a small game, with (I am hoping) 3 levels of gameplay as well as animated characters and enemies with anh interactive environment.

Apart from that, it is still all underground :) As soon as I have any major areas developed I will upload some images straight away and see what you guy think. I have no idea how long it will take me as I just work on it when I have spare time at home, but I will hopefully have it done in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading :)
Remtard

Our webpage is under development :)

2011-02-07T03:14:00.000-08:00

Me and my friend Matt are currently working on our freelancing website that will offer Web design and hosting. Javacakes is a local company that offers services to individuals and small businesses in the North Wales area. We are taking on various jobs with some clients currently and have successfully finished some tasks that have been sent our way with positive feedback.

We will be including all of the services that we offer as well as various packages that are available for hosting your web pages. If you would like to check out the site visit Javacakes.co.uk and have a look around. The site is still undergoing some major development as we are working on the stylesheet when we have time as well as working for some clients.

When are page is completed it will include a portfolio based page showing the work we have produced to give potential clients a preview of our work. We are also working on a forum that will be shown on our page that will host a community who enjoy gaming, computing and programming. The forum isn't hosted on our web page but it can be found at Javacakes Forum. So feel free to sign up and become an active user posting up content. But bare in mind the forum layout is very basic at the moment as we are trying to edit all the PHP files to look the way we want it.

Thanks guys,
Remtard.

Sweet...

2011-01-18T03:34:00.000-08:00

Runescape will be good again!
Jagex have officially announced that they are bringing back the wilderness and free trade after a long awaited update. For those who play Runescape I'm sure you are as happy as myself and friends who play, but those who do not care at all for Runescape... you really should.

Web development
Myself and Matt have finally got round to buying our hosting for our web design and hosting free lancing so if you know of anyone who would like any work doing, send them our way ;D I will update this blog when our web page is completed and running smoothly, but until then we will be designing the layout and working on certain ideas we currently have.

Minecraft <3
I have started playing Minecraft again on a singleplayer and have once again remembered how amazing it actually is compared to other large scale games. I recently only noticed that the game title won the PC Gamer Game of the Year award. I am extremely impressed that a strictly coded game managed to beat other gaming companies that rely on 3D graphic design programs rather than programming methods to code the game from scratch.

This is just going to stay as a short post as I want to carry on posting on my blog, but currently there isn't much to discuss. When our webpage is up and running with a forum I will post the links up here and see what you think.
Cheers, Remtard.

I'm starting again...

2010-12-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

Wow, I really haven't posted on this at all recently. Which really goes against what my original plan was when I made this blog but anyway. I just wanted to write about what's happening at the moment. Well basically, Cataclysm is fully released for World of Warcraft which is awesome. To be honest, patch 4.0.3 has to be the best thing I've ever seen in a game. The new WoW quests are addictive and much more inviting, so I can actually level a new character without getting bored, the graphics have been revamped, and to anyone who has played it... One word... Water. It looks amazing. Seriously, Blizzard have done such a good job with this new release and I can't see the game improving much more until the next expansion.

WoW cataclysm artwork

The new race additions to World of Warcraft are very impressive. I race changed my Night Elf hunter to a Worgen hunter, and I love the new look and racial advantages. If you are a WoW player you'll know what I am on about, if not... get playing. But seriously, if you have always been inbetween starting WoW and leaving it, now's the time to start. The game is balanced, the community is great and there is so much to do from a low level, including dungeons, PvP battlegrounds and questing. It's great.

Me and my friend Matt also sent off our UCAS forms and literally 12 hours later we recieved an offer from Huddersfield University to study Computer Games Programming. I was impressed that the forms went through that quick, fair play.

Finally, I have been staring at a lot of Java code recently and spending a lot of time trying to figure out various applications that have been made for Android based phones. Just so I can try and make my own. After realising all of these were very complex I decided to try and make my own bot for Runescape. This was much more successful and the code was a lot easier. After around an hour I managed to script a bot to make my Runescape character walk forward, turn the camera and then dance for roughly 3 minutes and then repeat... pointless? Yes. Worth it? Definately.

Old graphics of Runescape, the good days

It's been a while

2010-12-01T13:01:00.000-08:00

I only realised today that it has been a while since I had wrote a post for my blog, so I thought I'd fill you in on some of the new things that have occurred in the time away from this.

Well, to start off, on the 27th I turned 19, which is pretty cool. No special age though, doesn't allow me to do anything else legally, so not much to celebrate really. But I did have some friends over and they bought their computers, so to give a brief example of what we had... 4 computers all hooked up to the internet and basically we played League of Legends and World of Warcraft all night. Geeky? Correct. Sad? No where near. Now to many people, celebrating a birthday in that way would be... well boring. But not for me, I love gaming and I love my friends. So why not combine their ultimate forces and create a night that I'll remember rather than going to Broadway (a local night club) and getting so drunk that I can't remember what I was celebrating.

On the note of online gaming, I just want to say a massive thank you to Blizzard, the creators of World of Warcraft, for releasing patch 4.0.3. It is possibly the best thing that has happened to WoW. There are new quests, new NPC's, all the areas have changed, and OH MY GOD the water is amazing. I cannot describe to you the excitement I have when I see water on World of Warcraft. If your graphics are set to ultra then the ripples, the reflection, everything... wow. The only downside to this patch is... you actually need a half decent computer to run the game itself. The graphics have improved massively and they have gone into great detail with them. Next stop... Tessellation. If they take advantage of Direct X 11 then they'll be rolling in the HD graphics.

Anyway, I'm going to stop here and go and enjoy some more World of Warcraft water. This is only a short post I know, but I will plan some new reviews, I bought Alien VS Predator the other day on Steam. I know it's been out a while, but I will come up with some sort of review for that and let you guys see it if you were planning on buying it.
Cheers guys x

League of Legends works again

2010-11-25T17:19:00.000-08:00

Background Information
Unless you are Daz, Jon or Sophie you will not understand the frustration I have had to go through just to get League of Legends (LoL) working. In one of my older posts I was complaining about my PC and how it wouldn't let the LoL client install the patches, and after many attempts at reinstalling Windows and formatting my hard drive, I still had no progess. I was told by many that there were various different ways to fix it, but none of them worked. I was also told that I should not use the official LoL downloader from their website because it is US servers only, and me being in the EU doesn't help. Or so I thought...

The Miracle
Yesterday I was at my friend Bertie's house, and he was playing LoL and it really made me want to play, so when I went home I had a look around various 3rd party download sites where I could acquire the LoL EU client, the main site I looked at was fileplanet. Now for some reason, the fileplanet client didn't connect to the servers, this was when I started raging. So i thought, why not have a look on the main site. So I went to the official LoL site, and what d'ya know they happen to have uploaded an EU client that works perfectly. Just my look. After 15 minutes the client had downloaded, installed and fully patched ready to play. I was amazed at how fast and simple it actually was now there was an official EU client out.

So anyway, I started playing again as a character called Sivir. She kinda reminds me of a rogue off WoW, but one that can't go invisible. She is extremely fast when fully geared and crit's every other hit. Which is very impressive, but I couldn't play here... at all. So I then acquired the character "Irelia."

Irelia, the only character I can play and enjoy at the same time

She has now become the most favoured character of mine. Her abilities aren't that powerful to begin with but used in sync and at the right time, every other champion I have faced has fallen to their knees. At level 18 (the max level in one game) she can almost 2 hit everyone, except the usual suspect Shen, but if you played the game you would realise that he has more armour than the Lich King.

I don't really want to write too much about LoL as not many people will be interested in it, but please check it out. If you enjoyed DoTa on Warcraft 3, then I'm sure you will love LoL. Visit their website here to download the client and create your own account. Oh, one final thing, it's all free. Yeah... that got you interested.

Thanks for reading, Remtard.

Dead Rising 2

2010-11-22T16:01:00.002-08:00

The beginning...
I visited friendly old Game today in Llandudno and saw that Dead Rising 2 was on sale on PC for £20. So I thought it would be rude not to buy it. So I installed it on my PC and to be honest, it has to be the most fun thing I've played in a while.The main character is a professional motor cyclist called Chuck who has tragically lost his wife in a Zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, not only that, his daughter too has been bitten and is slowly turning into a zombie. The only thing Chuck can do is fight through thousands of zombies and collect the rare medication called Zombrex that will help prevent Katey from turning into a zombie until the armed forces arrive 72 hours later to control the situation.

Chuck, the main character

The start is a bit boring, you do the classic climb through the ventilation, go through the mall, learn to fight, grab weapons and food. Sorted. The first task was basically to go get the medication called Zombrex for your daughter Katey. So I followed the kindly placed arrow until I was confronted by some looters equipped with a tomahawk and crowbars. After beating them repeatedly with a baseball bat and a bottle of ketchup I grabbed the Zombrex and asked a pharmacist (survivor) if they wanted to follow me to safety. Naturally they did. After major hassle with the NPC and zombies I reached the safety zone. I ran over to my daughter only to be told that she can have her medicine once every 24 hours, between the hours of 7am and 8am. I looked at my in game watch and it was 3:30am. Yes... too much time to wait. So I went for an explore...

3 and a half hours to spare...What do?
... Attack as many zombies as possible with ridiculous weapons ofcourse. I found so many different weapons to use against them, traffic cones, shower heads, electric guitars, benches, bins, plant pots. Anything with a small gun icon can be used as an icon. It's great. I ran around until my daughter needed the mediciation to prevent her from turning into a zombie herself. Once I gave her the medication I figured I should follow the cases and make sure I get a good ending first time round and then just replay for in game achievements and for the sheer fun of attacking anything in the way.

What am I looking forward to?
Most of all I am looking forward to fighting all of the psycho's and harder enemies that should appear towards the middle and end of the story, just like the first one. Also all of the multiplayer modes that are built into the game. Racing around on motorcross bikes with chainsaws on the handlebars,,, sounds fun right. Not only do you drive a bike round a velodrome guess what the obstacles are...? You got it, hundreds of zombies. I can't wait.

My first glance verdict
Considering I have only played it for a mere hour or so it was so much fun and I can definately see it being a great addition to my PC game collection. Also the specifications to max the game out arent that high so the FPS count is huge, with fraps running I am hitting just over 100 and I have only overclocked my processor (4.00Ghz i7 920) and left the graphics card (ATI HD5770 1gb) standard. So for someone like my friend Simon, he would hit well over 100fps with more to follow. Dead Rising 2 is definately worth a look, whether it is on console or PC, make sure you check videos out or even buy it yourself. Well done Capcom.
Cheer's for reading, Buhbye.


Dead Rising 2 background

It's actually really good

2010-11-18T03:41:00.000-08:00

So as you guys know I picked up Black Ops for the 360 the other day, and to be honest it's nothing like I imagined. I started off playing with a positive attitude thinking "This is going to be like MW2, it'll start off all great and then it'll just get worse and worse." Well honestly, coming from a guy who really wasn't looking forward to it, it's actually very good. There are some minor aspects that should be looked at by Treyarch, but honestly I don't think they'll bother until loads of members from both consoles, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 communities complain. These small things are problems such as the RC cars being able to go up stairs, some players can sponge more than others, when the host shoots he gets like a second head start in the gun fight, so the server registers him hitting you more times. These from the above are only small things, but so far they are the only things that have effected online gameplay in anyway.

The matchmaking system is just like Modern Warfare 2, many games are great, others not so great. The host migration system has improved massively and there aren't many disconnections unless the host does the "dashboard" technique, but that's not every game so it's all good.

Now myself and Will have been playing a lot of Domination, and to be honest, it's amazing. I was using the enfield, which is an amazing weapon and was finishing games with around 30 kills and 10 deaths, on average. But now I reached rank 20 (lol) I unlocked the Galil, formerly known as the GILILILILILILILILbalalalack. Which is an amazing weapon. Now, Domination should be placed on a large map right? different points, lots of vantage areas, enough room to have large shoot offs. WRONG. When it's on Nuketown there are 3 points in the space of about... a kitchen floor. It's ridiculous, but so much fun. As you can see below, the image shows the map of Nuketown, but the problem is it is only the area on the left consisting of the bus in the centre, the small bit of road around it and the two houses opposite each other. Too much space.

Nuketown - Black Ops

Treyarch released a patch today I believe for Black Ops, so I'm going to go check that out, and hopefully write up about it later, and if I get a chance to play the singleplayer I'll give a short review on how that compares to the multiplayer. Let's just hope that the it's not like Medal of Honor, great multiplayer engine, bad singleplayer engine.

Treyarch 1 - Infinity Ward 0

Finally, keep an eye out of Will's youtube channel, hopefully we'll get some montages up when he sorts his capture card out :) Cheers for looking.

Black Ops...

2010-11-16T01:51:00.000-08:00

After days of hassle off my friend Will, I have decided to go and buy Black Ops, and my amazing girlfriend Levi decided to pay for me. Aha, so technically saying, heres £40, see you in a couple of months. As bad as I personally think it looks, this could be down to the mental image of Modern Warfare 2. I'm not gonna lie, but Modern Warfare 2 was amazing when it was first patched, once Models had been nerfed and all the elevating bugs had been fixed the game was great. Then the wave of younger members came in. It was around Christmas when this... apocalypse hit. Every lobby I joined after Christmas was full of 12 year old kids, screaming at anything. Me and my friend Mikey would be on CoD at like 3am having a nice quiet game until one member of the community would shout "Hey, N O O O B ii E (me) and Mr Dr Mikey (Mikey), you guys are so bad at this game. You should f*** off back to your mum." Now to be honest, from someone older it would've been quite funny, but the fact this kid went out of his way to say this. I mean, I'm sure he plugged his mic in and waited for it to connect just to say this one thing. Considering me and Mikey were just chilling, messing around, doing the casual trap each other in corners and spam the crouch button, he actually started raging.

I've been told that Black Ops has the exact same audience and the community is even worse. With the new Xbox being released in a package with CoD, the ever increasing new-wave of gamers, if they can even be called that, is increasing. I remember the days of CoD 2 when you could join a game and have a good laugh with both teams. Whether you won or lost there was no abuse, no confrontation, nothing. Just a faint "Good game" and "well played" could be heard. Even of Gears of War, for such an aggressive game the online community was amazing. I can't wait for Gears of War 3, but I reckon the community will be full of 6 year olds who reckon they're hard because their un-caring parents let them have one of the most brutal and violent games in the market, just to keep their kids quiet. Little do they know, their child is screaming down the microphone and causing a potential World War 3 at members of the public who don't live in their country. Just cause they know they can get away with it with their identity as nothing but an alias. In a perfect world, Microsoft would clamp down on this and make a system to block kids playing, or even make dedicated servers for different age groups. For example, 10 - 16 year olds on one map, so they can shout "Ya mum maaaate" at each other without annoying the gamers who remember the days of CoD 2. This server would also have gore turned off etc, so if they managed to get their hands on an 18+ game, then they don't get the full gaming experience. Sure, gaming companies probably cant be bothered to take the extra time to create these servers, but if they cared about their gaming community and want members to enjoy playing games rather than having to unplug their microphone just to restrain themselves for shoving pencils down their ears causing deafness. I mean,,, it's only a quick copy/pasta method of code, well.... ish.

Well hopefully Black Ops is better than Modern Warfare 2, I might as well give it a try, and just hope the community is a bit better within the games that I join. I'll create a post with a review of what I think, then you can get a CoD 2 fan's review rather than a 12 year olds review who only discovered what an xbox was when they first played Modern Warfare 2.
S'inabiiiiiit. x

WoW...is back

2010-11-14T16:01:00.000-08:00

So today Matt came around, basically to learn some new java and work on a project we have been planning for extra experience for University etc. We started following some tutorials to learn short cuts around certain procedures that need to be taken to continue with our project when I figured I may as well let my World of Warcraft update ready for Cataclysm. Well, after that had all updated I had a look at Matt's character. He plays a level 80 Night Elf Warrior called Sarakus, and to be honest, just by the way the warriors look at 80. I wanted to play one. Now as everyone knows I stick to WoW characters for as long as I stay alive on CoD. For the record, we're dealing with around 5 seconds. So anyway, I re-subbed my WoW account for the beautiful price of £8.99 a month, and started rolling a warrior. So far so good. They have nice hits, the gear will be nice and simple to follow, and hopefully with the help of SWIFTY <3<3<3 I will learn some good tactics for leveling and fighting in both PVP and PVE when I am a higher level. The realm I have joined is called "Defias Brotherhood" so I can join Priest and Matt in their epic journey of destiny, just like the journey Gollum takes with Sam Wise. But anyway, my character is called "Gahoogley" so if anyone is on that realm, feel free to add me etc. Or not... either one.

Anyway, this blog post is pretty pants as I haven't accomplished anything over the weekend, so happy days.
My next blog will hopefully cover my own personal review about my soon to be new CPU cooler, the Thermalright Silver Arrow. Within this review I will post up my Overclocking temps, the max power I got out of my processor and whether or not it will be at a stable temperature for 24/7 usage. My goal is to reach 4.2ghz with nice temps. My current overclock is 3.7ghz with around 60 degrees celcius on a stock cooler. Which isn't bad. Anyway, thanks for reading. Buhbye.

Saw 3D [SPOILERS]... kinda

2010-11-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

Saw 3D was actually pretty good to be fair. The 3D effects made it seem much more real and the gore looked fantastic. I went to see it on the 10th of November with Matt, Dan and Craig (priest). At first I thought it was going to be terrible but after seeing Chester Bennington (singer of Linkin Park) glued to a leather seat and rip his entire back off, it was starting to look like a good film.
The effects in the film were really good, as well as the story. Well that was until the ending came. But up until you realised what the hell was happening it was really good. I hope it is the ending of Saw though, as much as I like the films, they can't possibly make anymore.


Meh, she gets rolled

CRAWLING IN MY SKIIIIIN

This is just a short post tonight as I am currently trying to get my head around CSS stylesheets when using a photoshop website template as the main basis. meh, i'll get there. The next post should hopefully include a review of my new CPU cooler which should be arriving tomorrow, but you'll have to wait to see what it is ^_^ Also I will hopefully have made some sort of website template and possibly some CSS styling which I will try and put on a temporary web page for you too see and let me know what you think.
Cheers guys, G'night x

PC...GTX 580... First Java Application

2010-11-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

My Computer Build (At the moment)

I figured seems as though I love writing about computer components and hardware that are in the market at the moment, I might as well write about mine and see what you all think. My PC build is quite powerful, not the best, but it gets everything done quickly that I want to do. My PC consists of multiple components that I bought seperately and put together myself. These include:
Case - Coolermaster HAF 932
PSU - Corsair 850watt TX
Processor - Intel i7 920 D0 2.66ghz overclocked @ 3.75ghz
Motherboard - Asus P6T SE
Memory (Ram) - 6gb (3 x 2gb) DDR3 1600mhz Crucial Ballistix
Graphics Card - ATI HD5770 1gb GDDR5
Physics Card - Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT
Hard Drive(s) - Western Digital Caviar Green 2tb
- Western Digital 500gb
Keyboard - Logitech G11
Mouse - Razer Imperator

I love the specs of my PC and considering I have overclocked my processor, the temperatures I get are around 55 degrees celcius which is very good considering it is a stock cooler. But I have been told that my case has great air flow which helps dramatically with the cooling of the system. Here are some pictures I have taken of my computer, they're not the best of photos, but you get to see the majority of it.

My PC, closed

My PC, open

I have some plans to improve performance of my PC. These are:

- To purchase a new cooler, either Noctua DH-14 or possibly build a watercooling system into my case to allow me to overclock my components more, causing more stress, more power and very low temperatures.
- Purchase a new graphics card, either a GTX 480 depending on overclocks, a GTX 580 after more reviews have come out. But first I want to wait for the new AMD (ATI) card to be released. The HD6990. This card looks amazing already, it has two GPU's, so in effect it is two graphics cards in one. This card should be so fast, it's going to be immense. Price's won't be too generous though.
- I am also planning on buying a Solid State Drive when the prices lower, so I can installing Windows and my Steam folders onto it, so all these will open extremely fast. Also programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver so any work I want to do is accessed very fast etc.
- I am still debating on possibly changing my motherboard for the MSI Big Bang, as the reviews for this motherboard are extremely positive and there are so many overclocking possibilities that can be done on this board. Aswell as the Big Bang I am thinking of buying 3 more 2gb DDR3 1600mhz Crucial Ballistix memory to increase my speeds even more.

These ideas are all still in the back of my head, but if I get enough money I think it will be done.

GTX 580 released today at 2pm, (9 November 2010)

Today was the release of the new Nvidia graphics card, the GTX 580. As far as I know this card is extremely powerful and can be overclocked to be even better. The previous card released by Nvidia, the GTX 480 was also very powerful and it can be overclocked to be the same as GTX 580. I know what you're thiking, "why spend more on a new card, when an older card can be made the same." Well, I was thinking this too. But remember, when overclocking components you have to be very careful of the temperatures that the components reach, and to prevent these temperatures occuring on the GTX 480, a new heatsink may have to be bought. This could bring the overall price up to the same as a new GTX 580, which can be overclocked even further with safe temperatures. I will look into the GTX 580 over the next couple of days and hopefully try one out if someone I know buys one and I will get some benchmark results. But until then keep having a look around forums such as the overclockers forum, as many members have already bought them and are messing around with the overclocks as we speak. Also I will be writing a comparison post between the GTX 580 and the HD6990 when they are released. As well as giving my own opinion and the graphics card which I will be purchasing for myself, exciting stuff.

GTX 580, current price £425 approx

First Java Application Made by Myself and Matt

Me and my friend Matt went over some Java today, as we want to learn it for both university and freelance use, and we managed to make a simple application. It will sound so terrible and boring, but every bit of code we cover now will help in the long run, guaranteed. Anyway, we were being told what to by one of our tutors called Inge, and at the end of it we had made a small calculator that asked for various digits and ran some small equations which added the given numbers together giving the correct answer. Although it sounds very simple, it took a short while to get my head around some of the commands used. But they all seemed simple by the end of it, and although it was just a calculator it felt good to be able to write a couple of sentences and have the computer run something I had asked it to.

Wow this post is long, if you read to the end I thank you for taking the time and increasing my views :)
Thanks, Remtard.

Netgear + Windows 7 64bit... Terribad

2010-11-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

Today was a very stressed day due to Netgear and their terrible support. To explain, I reinstalled Windows 7 64bit and was trying to install my Netgear WN111V2 wireless adapter, when I was then told via unofficial netgear forums that the drivers for this adapter didn't work for Windows 7 64bit. After researching the net and reading up on Netgear's website about the adapter, the only thing they had said was "We didn't want to make the drivers for the Beta of Windows 7." So where the hell are they now? Last time I checked, every computer bought at the moment has Windows 7 installed, many are 64bit, but most are 32bit. Now lets just say PC World were to do a bundle, a nice fast PC with Windows 7 64bit, oh and look you get a free Netgear WN111V2 adapter thrown in so you can connect straight away... Think again. I have to say their website seems to be the most useless website I have seen in terms of support. I had more luck on a Belkin forum that I did on the Netgear forum, and they're rivals.

Netgear WN111v2 wireless N adapter

To be honest, the wireless adapter's by Netgear work relatively well most of the time, unless you happen to be running Windows 7 64bit as your operating system. There was another post that made me laugh, someone had said "You could always replace the 64bit operating system with the 32bit." This is probably the worst post I have ever seen... ever. Who would want to to replace the "faster and more capable" operating system with the "slower, restrictive" operating system settings. Honestly,,, why would anyone put that?

After a good 4 hours of trying and messing around with drivers and facepalm-ing at some posts on the netgear forum I decided to go to PC World and buy a new wireless adapter. I had Daz and Sophie at my house and they both recommended I give Belkin a go. So when I got to PC World I bought a Belkin F5D8053 v6 wireless 300n adapter. So far,,, everything has been perfect. No problems at all. Windows recognised and installed the drivers within seconds, and since then I have been getting a solid stable connection that hasn't dropped. I am up one floor and the on the other side of the house to where my router is situated and it is still keeping a solid 93% connection. In my eyes, that's high enough. 100% would obviously be best, but nothings perfect. For £30 I would definitely recommend this wireless adapter.

Belkin F5D8053 v6 wireless N adapter

In other news, I have had to restart Fallout: New Vegas due to my hard drive wiping. Which I don't really mind too much about as the game itself is like... WOW, so that's alright ;D
But to contrast this positive point, the new Windows Live Messenger installed on my computer through an update. And I have to say... DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT. I think it is by far the worst thing I have ever seen. You're contacts are tiny now and hidden away, and the MSN homepage has useless news that just sits right infront of everything else. It's easily the worst mistake I've made when installing new software on my computer. If you haven't downloaded it already, I'd wait it out until they cancel the other servers and you HAVE to download this. But for those that want to stare at pointless news articles instead of being able to find your contacts list, feel free to download it. Follow this link to download it.

Ultimate faggotry

My final point of this blog post is to just get across my feelings towards the new Call of Duty: Black Ops. As we all know it is released this Tuesday, but for some sad members of our gaming society they're going to walk to their local Game store and stand outside in the cold for midnight release and get some raging hard ons over the fact they are within touching distance of it. To be honest, I enjoyed Modern Warfare 2 for about... an hour of first playing it. I loved it until people started spamming Akimbo Models, and the M16. I'm not going to sit here and cry over MW2, that's old news. I just want to say that in my eyes Black Ops looks rushed. The graphics looks terrible, the gameplay is just the same as every other Call of Duty game out. But the developers know it will sell cause most players slaughter it and then continue living on it after they've done everything on it. It's ridiculous, but the developers have got their customers right where they want them. If I were everyone I would save myself the £40 and buy a take away (£10), a G11 keyboard (£25) and the GTA collection off Steam (£5). Totaling around £40. Now that, would be my ideal Call of Duty midnight release.

hmmph...

2010-11-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

The Night Has Been Ruined

Today I arranged for Daz, Sophie, Jon and Jake to come over for a night of gaming... So this morning I installed an official copy of Windows 7 64 bit to fix all the problems I was having with a previous copy as it was capping some of my computer software and was causing my computer to run slower than it can.
Whilst installing, I sadly had to format my hard drive as I had not previously set any partitions in my hard drive that has Windows installed on. Due to this I lost everything. After a while searching for all of the correct drivers I started installing the most important pieces of software for my computer. These were Steam, iTunes, Opera and of course League of Legends.

Whilst installing and updating League of Legends I believe I obtained a virus as my computer kept flashing up an error saying "Windows has encountered a critical error...System will reboot in one minute." This has happened all day and I had not realised. Up to now I still don't know but it hasn't happened since.

So anyway, I decided to try and copy pasta Daz's LoL files from his PC to mine and the game ran fine... Until trying to connect to the server PVP.net. This caused major problems as all the directory files were assigned to Daz's PC and not mine, so it broke and kept disconnecting my character from the game. Resulting in further crashes each time I loaded up LoL. Sadly, I had to delete any trace of LoL from my system and I am now reinstalling it and updating it. Hopefully it won't take too long. Once this obstacle has been passed I will need to focus on reinstalling all 70gb of Steam games and replaying them to get my game saves back. This including my beloved Fallout: New Vegas save which I had played all last night and was looking forward to another night of it tonight. Luckily for me the game is amazing so I don't mind too much about having to restart it.

HD 6970 or GTX580?

Okay... I'm so confused about which new graphics card to follow? I used to be an Nvidia fan boy so naturally I have looked at the GTX580, but currently I have a HD 5770, and it runs amazingly. The initial plan was to buy a 6970 as they are Dual GPU and the FPS rate will be perfect, especially for benchmarking. Although ATI have got their new Dual GPU card, the GTX580 will once again have Nvidia's famous PhysX which will give games amazing in game physics, but sadly not all games used PhysX and have a built in physics engine within the game engine. So to be honest, it's just wasted technology. Unless of course the games are made to suit PhysX like Mafia 2. I believe I will go for the 6970 as I am extremely impressed with the 5770, and looking at benchmark results from the 5970 they looked brilliant. I don't know for a fact, but I have been told that a 6970 works as well as two 5970's. This again is just something I have heard online, but I will keep checking out the overclockers forum and youtube reviewers and keep this updated with any news on the 6970 and the GTX580. But honestly, I cannot wait for the end of the November, as that is the rumoured date for the release of the 6970's :D
It'll be an expensive end to the month, but it'll be cooooooool ><

Please Check These Out...

Sophie's Blog

Daz's Blog

Mikey's Blog

All the above blog's are created by some of my close friends, please check them out and see what they have to say :) Cheer Guys. x

League of Legends

2010-11-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

I can't write a complete blog post just yet about League of Legends, but for those of you who know what it is... it's a lot of fun. Although it is taken very serious when you get into it, the actually layout of the game and the playability is pretty comical. For example, there is a character, a.k.a champion, who is a mummy from egypt and has massive feet, and his standard melee attack is too head butt the enemy. I mean... come on, that's got to be worth a look.

I have been playing it tonight with Jon, and I have to say at first I was happy with a character called Fiddlesticks, but he was missing something. He has power, but no speed. Then I randomly tryed another character called Sivir and this character was perfect, with some extra gear she was even better. She's extremely fast, but lacks power. But by the time I have hit her 3 times, the enemy has hit me once. Within the gear is usually critical hit chance increase and attack power. Overall increasing my attacks and my chance to critical hit causing higher damage.
I think I have found my newly loved character which I will continue with.

The actual game LoL is all online, and is based around pure PvP. So if you don't like playing against other players most of the time then this game might not be your ideal choice. At first I was like... meh PvP doesn't sound to appealing, but after a couple of games you seem to forget you're playing against other people and just keep playing over and over. There are in game levels and outside levels. The in game levels are just from level 1 to 18 for the character increasing their overall stats and gear. Then there is the outside game levels which is the level of the players "summoner" which is their actual account. The higher the summoner level, the better their champions are at the beginning of games. There is so much to League of legends, much of it I have not discovered myself yet. But if I were you I'd download the game client and give it a go. After all it is free.
Click here to download the LoL client. The client linked is for the EU server only.

Good luck :)

OMGOMGOMGOMG

2010-11-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

Fallout: New Vegas... is amazing. This post isn't going to be long, as its 1am and I'm tired and have college in the morning, but basically I just want to give a very small post about Fallout. The playability is perfect, the graphics are stunning especially in Ultra High Quality. The fps rate is massive considering the quality of the models and the amount of objects and textures that have been rendered in the game world. It's unbelievable, everything seems perfect just like Fallout 3. I will write a much larger review once I have played more of the game itself, but after racking up 4 hours gameplay... I can honestly say it's going to be such an amazing game from beginning to the end. I just hope Bethesda are thinking of some DLC that can top the Fallout 3 DLC. It'll be hard, but they managed it with Oblivion and Morrowind so I'm sure they'll manage it again.

Also to anyone who uses at ATI graphics card and has Windows 7 running as their operating system, download this program and it will fix all the bugs within your graphics card and make your GPU run much better and potentially increase the quality of your gaming. Click here for the download.

Happy Gaming :)

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

2010-11-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

... Is currently downloading on Steam. After seconds of persuasion by Daz, I finally decided to buy it. So that's going to be a whole night awake for meeee :D Oh, also check his blog out, pretty cool Fallout glitches found, and all his other posts are wickedddd, specially his Zombie story ;D
I just hope it is as good as everyone is saying, I mean Fallout 3 was perfection, so if it is just like that then I'm hyped. Plus the fact it'll be played on PC just instantly makes it a winner in my eyes.

I still haven't played enough of Fable 3 to write a complete review, but from first looks it has brilliant graphics, escpecially the intro scene. It's crystal, the lighting is perfect, all the models and textures are great quality and it just gets the player ready to play. The actually playability is exactly the same as Fable 2 when it comes to fighting and moving the character around the world, as well as the dialogue options and performing actions are still very similar. I will complete a full review of this game when I have played more hours of it, or have finished the story, giving my complete conclusion on the game. But from first looks, if you enjoyed Fable 1 and 2 as much as myself and may other gamers, Fable 3 is definately worth the price. I sure wish it was released on the PC, sadly I'm having to settle with an Xbox controller rather than the beloved Keyboard and Mouse :(

Minecraft has become a main addition to my PC at the moment as well, it's so much fun and theirs hours to be spent just messing around creating worlds. Although I did start a new game and my character can only pick up sand and wood. So I don't know if thats a problem with my .exe and I need to reinstall or whether it a problem with the actual game. Anyone else having that? :/
HOPEFULLY it will sort itself out (yn) Still a great game though.

New additions to the PC :3

2010-11-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

I have done three new things to my computer today, one is VERY boring, one is Okay, and one is pretty cool ;D

The boring thing first, I bought a new Hard drive to run as a slave along side my original. Initially to just increase space for more general rubbish on my pc :) but it's all good. I bought a 2TB Western Digital Sata II hard drive, installs fine, reads and writes pretty quick. I think its 7200rpm, so it's not as fast as velociraptors but it's still pretty rapid.

The second addition to the PC was a new mouse, I decided to go for a Razer mouse and I bought the Razer Imperator. I've always been quite dodgy with Razers, but this one seems to work perfect, it has 7 buttons in total, it has a massive 5600dpi for precision gaming, and is pretty lightweight so the sensitivity is perfect. The lazer on the mouse is 3.5G so it is extremely high tech and works on pretty much every surface, the same as the last. So where ever it is placed the mouse never lacks. The Razer gaming components are always reviewed by Swifty (Epic WoW Warrior) on his youtube channel so that'd be pretty cool if you checked his stuff out, especially if you are planning on buying anything made by Razer I'm sure he will have some good and bad points about each component. I have only tried the mouse out with 2 games so far, these are League of Legends (LoL) and the new Medal of Honor, but the mouse worked perfectly with both and the high dpi count helped out a lot aswell, especially when sniping on MoH.

This is the Razer Imperator, as you can see it looks very nice in pictures, with the light up Razer logo on the body itself, and the LED's underneath the scroll wheel. The mouse looks perfect in my opinion and it is wired with specific material on the outside which prevents knots in the wire, which is even better for gamers who take their PC to other places. I went from not liking Razer mice to loving them just by risking this purchase, and I'm glad I chose to buy it. The prices of Razer mice are quite extortionate but to be honest, for everything you get and technology within them, it is definately worth the price.

Finally, the best part of today was performing an Overclock on my computer. My friend Fabio came over and showed me how much power I can actually push out of my processor. At the moment my current build is an i7 920 D0 processor clocked at 2.66ghz stock, a stock CPU cooler, 6gb ballistix DDR3 ram at 1600mhz, my graphics card is a ATI HD5770 and these are all sat inside a Coolermaster HAF 922 case, which I now know for a fact has an amazing amount of cool air that flows in and out of the case. Basically, this morning my computer was at the stock output of power, the i7 is a quad core, so it has a total of four cores working together inside the single processor. All of these cores were clocked at 2.66ghz. Tonight we overclocked my processor so each core was pushing out 3.7ghz. For those who don't know what is meant by overclocking, it is when the voltage is changed within the BIOS menu for the processor. Initially making it work harder and push out a lot more power. Considering I am still on a stock cooler, the temperatures I am getting from my processor are really low. The picture below are screenshots taken from two different programs that I use to monitor my computer power and temperature. These programs are CPU-Z and CPUID.

For those that don't know about these programs, the one on the left shows the temperatures of each of the single cores inside my processor. As you can see the lowest temperatures were between 51 and 44 celcius, and the highest temperatures they reached once the processor was being stressed was between 87 and 95 celcius. Although this sounds a lot it isn't actually that bad for the processor, and considering it is all on a stock fan, these temperatures are amazing.
The program on the right just reads every bit of power output on the PC's components. As you can see, the clock speed of the core is 3704.0Mhz which is 3.7Ghz, which is around 1.1Ghz more than the stock 2.66Ghz. You can really feel the difference from the overclock when gaming and generally using the PC :)

Fable 3 and New Hardware for my PC?!?!

2010-11-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

Today is the day my personal waiting for Fable 3 is over. After the years have passed since Fable 2 was released and finished, I have wanted to play the third one, and thanks to Matt, I bought it today. Honestly, I think it looks amazing, although it hasn't even entered my xbox yet ;D I'm going to play it all tonight and try and come up with an honest, non-biased review tomorrow night, to try and get across my views and opinions about the long awaited game from Lionhead Studios.

Tonight I have also been discussing new Graphics Cards with Simon as well as a new Computer case for myself :/ I'm currently wondering whether to stick with my beloved Coolermaster HAF 922 case, or move onto a larger case known as the Obsidian 800D. They are both such great cases, but the extra space in the 800D might allow me to do a bit more with the hardware inside, as well as hiding all the cables correctly and hopefully move onto water cooling the PC build.

This is the Obsidian 800D, as you can see it looks gorgeous ;D

The Coolermaster Haf 922 to the right is my current case

Anyone got any suggestions about the cases with positives or negatives, I've been looking on some forums as well at various different case reviews and many people say the Obsidian is a leading case for keeping the computer cold, but the air flow in the HAF 922 is hard to beat :/ CONFUSED.
Once again, a terrible post, with no point to it at all, just still getting used to the website :)
Cheers for looooooking :) x

Medal Of Honor Review

2010-10-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

I figured the main thing I do at the moment is play PC games via Steam, so why not write about one of the main ones I have been playing at the moment. This game is of course the new "Medal of Honor." Now many people really don't like this new game in the collection, but I personally think it is amazing. If there are any gamers out there that want a decent multiplayer first person shooter then go for Medal of Honor. In my opinion, Call of Duty is terrible and I really like Medal of Honor, there are different aspects to it such as larger maps, weapon customisation with aspects such as new sights, magazine sizes etc. This has a battlefield feel to it, as the multiplayer engine is Dice. Who also created the famous Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which instantly makes Medal of Honor a winner.

The singleplayer of Medal of Honor is terrible, and should be played for the story but the actual gameplay of the story is so different to the multiplayer as it is on a different engine and I think it is really bad compared to other FPS singleplayers such as Battlefield. If I could change one major thing about MoH then it would definately be the singleplayer. I would create it on the DICE engine.

There hasn't really been many bugs due to the Beta release of the game, but whilst playing the singleplayer I have come across a few. One main one was on the 3rd mission, I would try and activate some in game artillery but they wouldn't fire, and then my team mates would start shouting at me and later on the mission would fail as they artillery didn't fire and the enemies weren't killed.

If I hadn't already bought Medal of Honor I would definately purchase it, especially looking at Black Ops. Which looks pants ;D Anyway, This review looks like it sucks, but I hope you guys get some kind of breif view of Medal of Honor and hopefully pick it up ;D

Btw, my SteamID is Remtard :)

Reason For Making This...

2010-10-31T15:33:00.000-07:00

Yeahh I kind of only really made this to follow Daz Noob's blog, and then possibly fill some posts out myself if anything interesting happens, but I'm planning on posting some possible gaming stuff, but not to copy Daz too much I will post some stuff up about general PC areas such as Programming, Hardware, Websites and then my other general interests with areas situated around Cars, Driving and anything else that I like.

As I said this was only really made to follow Daz here at http://www.daz-noob-gamingblog.blogspot.com/ so don't expect anything massive from me ;D

S'inabiiiit, Remtard