Journals

Working in an office just off the town square can certainly have it's benefits. The market is in town today so lunch consisted of dangerous amounts of cheese, meat, batter and cider.

Just finished Duke Nukem Forever. I stopped with the playthrough videos because it was prolonging the experience and taking an age to render and upload the videos between each session.

If you want to watch playthroughs then there are hundreds of others online which are already played the whole way through.

Also FYI, the game gets progressively worse towards the end and I cannot recommend it to anyone.

Archie's recent GTAIV video did not demonstrate clearly enough how much I seem to hate my own face. Here are some more clips from the same session.

"Yes, I AM responsible for this head blood.

On the fence about buying Duke Nukem Forever or just simply not getting it?

Why not watch the SnC Playthrough starring myself. Experience the game without paying a penny.

Part 1 here

(Yes I need a widescreen monitor and yes the apparent HD render fucked up because I need a widescreen monitor.)

Apparently I did a thing yesterday and I have a wife now. What are the odds.

( And no, it wasn't a bhuddist ceremony... seriously )

Anyway yeah, I got married. Go me!

Happy Star Wars day TWHL.

May the 4th be with you.

Dream Time

Bit of back story...
I am very fond of cats and as such, own a cat. I also live on a main road which travels from one county to another and as such is very busy. 2 years ago I learned the hard way that the 2 things do not mix and my relatively new cat, Mizzi, was knocked down and killed.
My new cat has been a house cat for 2 years to the point where the concept of going outside absolutely terrifies him. You open any of the doors and he shoots upstairs and out of sight. If he needs to go out (to the vets, in his cat box) he usually tenses up and pisses himself (literally)

The Dream
I am standing in my kitchen and I am quite aware that my cat is outside scratching the door and trying quite desperately to get into the house. I let him in, quite confused about the fact he was out there. He comes in and casually strolls into the house and up the stairs. I then watch as exactly 12 clones of him wander in and follow him up the stairs. This apparently does not phase me.
A few moments later, I hear a shriek from up the stairs. It is my fiancée. She then storms into the kitchen, looks me straight in the eye, as if I have gone completely mental. She then shouts, at the absolute top of her voice:
"WHY THE FUCK DID YOU JUST LET 12 FOXES INTO THE HOUSE!?"
I run up the stairs and find the 12 cats, (now quite obviously foxes) ripping my poor cat to shreds. I stroll back down the stairs, rather aloof to the whole situation and respond to the misses. "Fuck, I have no idea..."

Then I woke up...

wat?

5 mods that people need to stop making

The 'Horror' Mod
Dark hallways, small quantities of weapons and ammo, cheap scare tactics. There are so many so called "horror" mods already out there and very few of them actually manage to pull it off. Far too many people are using darkness as a scare tactic, whereas for the most part, it is just annoying and disorienting.

The Zombie Mod
They Hunger did it well. They Hunger 2 and 3 got old fast. Every other zombie mod since then has been dire. Zombies are all well and good but there is little variety in the combat throughout. Slow shambling enemies make for slow shambling mods.

The engine upgrade / downgrade mod
Black Mesa looked incredible back in the day but now the level design is starting to show its age before the mod has even been released. Then there are the ones that go for the opposite approach. Take a new game and remake in for the old engine. The word 'downgrade' is rarely a good thing and more often than not implies that the 'latest' version is not stable enough to work with. HL2 works fine on it's current 7 year old. HL2 would not work fine on an engine that is 7 years older than that.

The Halo cross over mod
Nobody wants to play Halo in the Half-Life engine. Nobody wants to play Halo in the C&C Generals engine. Nobody wants to play Halo in the Homeworld engine. Nobody wants to play Halo on the GTA:San Andreas engine. This doesn't just apply to Halo, but it's certainly the most common culprit.

The "realism" mod
Mods that claim to bring realism to a game never EVER do. Real world weapons? That's a model pack. Better textures? That's a texture pack. Updated sounds? I... I have no idea what the hell that is, but it is not a mod. A true realism mod would make bullet impacts inflict more damage, resulting in instant death or bleed-outs. Health kits would be removed and instead, wounds would need to be tended to by a doctor / surgeon. Fall damage would result in broken / sprained limbs, reducing speed and inflicting pain damage the more you move around. All of this would make most games impossible. HL1 for example, Freeman would not be able to enter the test chamber because his suit is lacking a helmet. If he did, as soon as the experiment starts, he would drop dead of radiation poisoning.

There are probably more, but these are the main culprits...

tl;dr?
Don't FUCKING post then.

So, I ordered something on the 2nd of Jan and got pretty anxious when it hadn't arrived on the 29th...

Click here to see the delivery day

Skip to 9:18 if you don't want to see all the talking business and want to get to the details.

Well, it's done. I just ordered my new PC. Now it's just a case of waiting. It's killing me already.

Case: ANTEC NINE HUNDRED TWO - UK, The Ultimate Gaming Case, Evolved
Processor: Intel? Core?i7 Six Core Processor i7-970 (3.20GHz) 6.4GTs/12MB Cache
Motherboard: ASUS? P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory: 12GB SAMSUNG DDR3 TRI-DDR3 1333MHz (3 x 4GB)
Graphics Card(s): 2x 1280MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX570 - 2 DVI,mHDMI - DirectX? 11, 3D Vision Ready
1st Hard Disk: 80GB Intel? X25-M 2.5" SSD (34nm / upto 250MB/sR | 70MB/sW)**SPECIAL**
2nd Hard Disk: 2TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
Power Supply: 1200W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (?169)
Processor Cooling: COOLIT ECO A.L.C (ADVANCED LIQUID COOLER) (?59)
Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence

Comes to around ?2345 when you add on VAT. O_O

Got myself a Cyborg RAT3 today as well for ?45. Damn nice mouse that looks like some kind of Combine tank.

Twas the night before the night before Christmas...

Urby's special christmas vlog

Just so you know what to expect. A short holiday poem, quick reviews of 8 games from 2010, and some updates.

So, I finally decided to delve back into the world of Minecraft. Well, actually that is a total lie because I have never left the world of Minecraft. However, I have decided to revive the blog in light of PCGamer's Tom Francis also writing one and despite the fact that I have pretty much seen it all and done it all, it is still pretty entertaining to read.

So!I spawn on a sandy coast area looking out to a small body of water with land and trees on the other side. Turning around I notice that I am actually standing halfway up a hill, at the top of which stand more trees. My first job is to find some kind of cavern or sheltered area to build my first, temporary hovel to stay in for the first night.Having scrambled to the top of the hill I realise it is a lot smaller than I anticipated and after smashing down 2 trees with my fist, I come to another small pond. Not wanting to stray too far from the spawn point in case I die, I decide that this will be my primary base when I get the supplies together, but for now I really need to get that shelter underway. I turn to my left where the hill continues upwards and start to climb to get a better idea of my surroundings.Not bad. Looking back towards the spawn point I can see that the large body of water from before is in fact the ocean. Therefore the best way for me to go for now is further inland. I turn around to see nothing but tree. I scramble to the top with haste and as a result, fall and lose 2 hearts from my health bar. Bugger it. I try again, taking my time.Wow. In the distance are a collection of massive mountains and cliffs. I will definitely want to explore those at some point in the future. Not to mention mining for minerals and supplies and obsidian. Then it's The Nether. There is so much for me to do. But I still need that bloody shelter if I'm going to survive the first night. I scramble back down the tree and onto the hill, then climb back down to my pond. First, I need a work bench to make the tools I will need to gather my first night's supplies. I break the logs from the tree's down into wooden blocks, then 4 of the blocks into a work bench.And there it is. My first crafted item in this world, a work bench, plonked right next to some mud. Using the remains of the wood I break some of the blocks down into sticks, to be used as handles, and then create a pick and a shovel. I then use these to make a small hollowed out space in the mud and stone.This is fine for now but when it gets dark, my little hole is going to get even darker. I need light, specifically in the form of torches. I need to find coal. I could very well dig further into the rock in an attempt to locate some, but the further I go it, the darker it will get and if I hit a cave I am basically screwed. I scramble back up the hill in order to spot rocky areas nearby. Unlike other minerals in MC, coal can form on the surface as well as deep underground so it is fairly easy to come by with little effort required. I travel in one direction so as to try not to lose my way back, before long I notice a dip in the ground. I have found a cave, and there, right at its mouth is...Steel... fuck. There is no way I'm going in there without coal either so it's back up to the surface to keep trekking. I walk around for a few minutes without any luck until finally I spot some coal. Remember that thing I said about being able to find it with minimal effort?Harvesting it is a different matter entirely. This could end badly. To make matters worse, it just got a little darker. I don't think I'll be making it back to my hovel. I shall probably have to dig another around here somewhere. I tear up the cliff face with my shovel like a man who fears the black of night. This is mainly because I fear the black of night. It brings death. It brings death at its most explosive. I rip through stone and mud in seconds until I finally hit coal. I mine through it and it drops into my inventory. I whip open the crafting screen and slap a stick and the coal together to make a torch. I then ram the torch into the nearest hard surface I can see. Phew. Then I turn around.Oh shit.

It is nighttime. I know it is nighttime because I can see the fucking moon. I know it is nighttime because the mooing of cows and clucking of chickens has been replaced by the hungry groans of fuck-knows-what. I turn back to the cliff face and make the most comfortable hovel I could ever imagine.This game could be a cure for claustrophobia. There is a massive expansive world out there to explore, but when the sun goes down, this 2x2 block hole, hastily dug into a cliff, with a single torch as a source of light... It's so good to be in here. I would like to say that I didn't panic, since it is only a game. Truth is, I never even noticed when my pick broke and I have no idea how many stone blocks I obliterated with my bare hands. I could very well mine further into the mountain to see what it has to offer, but with no weapons or armor, you can forget it. I spend the night watching orange glowing eyes moving around in the trees below the cliff. I can worry about those in the morning.

Luckily, I still have wood left over from the 2 trees I knocked down earlier and I now have a plentiful supply of mine stone as well. I use these to make 3 of each of the tools, pick, shovel and axe as well as 3 stone swords in case I need to deal with any mobs in the morning on the way back to my spawn area. I wander over to the window to see that the sun is finally starting to rise...OH HOLY FUCK! Out of nowhere a creeper pops up into view and I almost literally shit my pants. Had I got a few steps closer the resulting explosion would have probably taken out the entire hole and sent me tumbling down into the trees to my death. I approach to try and swing my sword at it and it stares back, letting out a loud, dry hiss. I back off. I am trapped. Stuck between a rock and a very nasty green thing with a tendency to explode walls and people. I carefully mine out the stone block next to the window so that I have a wider space to swing the sword. The last thing I want to do here is charge the creeper and bash my sword into the rocks. I take a deep breath, grab my sword and lunch. I hit before the creeper even has time to charge its attack, it staggers back and vanishes over the edge, out of view. I have no idea if it is dead. The only thing to do is go outside and check. As the sunlight spreads out across the land I approach the window. I'm sure things can only get better from here, right?

Hallo thar, new video.

It's been a long time since this last one. I go all out in this one, including a poem and special segment I like to call "cat butt"

There is 1 cat in each of the 4 corners of a room. In front of each cat, are 3 cats. On the tail of each cat, is 1 cat. How many cats are in the room?