Are You Ready For This?

Well, well… Well!

It has indeed been a most lengthy period since last I posted anything. However, I’m back in the saddle and about a thousand percent more efficient now that I have my trusty 4th gen iPad 😉

Now I don’t mean to be all “douchey” about it, but excitement is high as it’s my first iDevice and I never realized how much I was missing one until I finally got one 😋

“What is this idiot ranting on about and what does it mean to me?” I may hear you asking… Well dear reader, it means that this particular eejit is going to be up your nose like bad cocaine again! You can expect many more updates to my 360 control scheme section as well as the addition of a new “Guerrilla Gaming On The Go” category featuring reviews and general posts in which I will be focusing on mobile gaming and devices (I would hope for obvious reasons… Unless YOU’re the eejit 😉)

So watch this space closely, for I am already fervently working and tap, tap, tapping away on some juicy new postings, the first of which will be a series covering the good, the bad and the ugly of iPad gaming.

Much love and respect ya’all’ and thank you for showing enough interest in my humble blog to inspire me to give it another go.

Take it easy, and keep it sleazy!

How Many Gamerscore Points Is This Achievement Worth?

One of the first things I thought of posting when I was in the process of setting up my blog, was two articles I wrote about eight years ago when I was still a bright-eyed, idealistic young chap.  They are very special to me as they were, and are currently, the only words of mine ever to have been published into print.  Albeit, a local South African gaming magazine, but my FAVOURITE South African gaming magazine! 😀

I pretty much dismissed the notion as total self-service and moved on.  I then told a very good friend of mine about starting up my blog and the first thing he said to me (a little excitedly, or was that just my huge ego?) was that I should publish those New Age Gaming articles again as he really enjoyed them when they were first printed.  Thanks to him, I would like to share with you some writing of mine of which I am most proud, in fact, I have always considered these two publications as somewhat of an achievement as they were both printed word for word as I wrote them, completely unedited.

New Age Gaming, or N.A.G. continues to remain SA’s premiere gaming mag and has the best content on their cover DVD’s (a positive boon in a country where decent bandwidth is still expensive and inaccessible to the large majority of people).  Sadly, after those two articles I went on something of a personal vision quest (read, lazing about finding myself and exploring the underbelly of society) and never wrote for them again.

Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Mojo

Setting It Up

I have decided to document my progress with mapping ancient games to new-school controllers and control schemes.  As a result, I had to figure out some way to record both onscreen video and footage of the controller being used simultaneously so that I could edit the two together.  Fortunately, DOSBox makes this an easy task with it’s built in ZMBV codec, which flawlessly captures beautiful video AND audio with absolutely no impact on game performance. For the controller footage I have setup my Sony DCR-HC26, some lights and some reflective surfaces to try to diffuse said lights.  I did some camera tests this afternoon in preparation for the big event (capturing footage of both X-Wing and Tie-Fighter) and thought I would post some of the photos that were taken in the interim.

The first trial setup. It’s on the wife’s desk as she hijacked my machine for a morning of Facebook 😀

BRIGHT LIGHT! BRIGHT LIGHT!

Moved the setup to my desk once the wife had concluded her business in the seedy underworld of Mafia Wars

It quickly became apparent that some sort of light diffusement would be necessary.

A little adjustment of lights and reflectors and all is good, shaping up to look like a plausible setup.

Right!!  All elements seem “good to go”, so now the real work begins… speeding, mark, setup… and… ACTION!!

What to do? What to do?

Well, at roughly 18 minutes per episode to process my Raccoons AVI’s, and about 18 episodes to process, I am forced to find something relatively non CPU intensive to do with my machine in the interim.  I have just mounted an ISO file of “Biggest Loser Bootcamp” through Daemon Tools and have shared the drive across the network so that my wife (who is very hot, not fat, but wants to stay that way) can try an experimental viewing of it on her netbook via Wi-Fi… interesting times.

I know that I could start up my trusty new Xbox and jam a little on that, but honestly I am enjoying listening to some tunes (Manu Chao – Sibérie M’était Contée) and watching progress bars tick over too much to tune out of my PC right now. So… I have decided to take screenshots of my desktop in various “modes” for your viewing pleasure 😀 (and my historical reference).

But first, myself and the wife need coffee to be made and the next episode of Raccoons needs to be que’d up to process.

It starts…

Right! So I’ve got the old blog up (finally) and I’m eager to get cracking… just as soon as I get all the necessary softwares installed to trim and extract portions out of weirdly encoded AVI files!!!  It will be worth it though, all the episodes of that classic old cartoon “The Raccoons” all nicely organised, catalogued and stored on optical media. Well, my DivX Pro DL just finished, so it’s back to the grind for Mojo.

UPDATE!!

Great success!!! Apparently a combination of DivX 6.8.1 and and VirtualDub 32bit (it’s the 32bit that got me) is the winner!!

UPDATE THE SECOND!

And this is what it looks like…