chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Final Fantasy XIII UK Advert is… WOW
Mar 9th
Love this advert, almost makes me want to buy a Final Fantasy game, but then I realise I could never endure all the random turn based battle “arenas”. Airing in the UK and some of Europe this advert features music from Leona Lewis.
Also available on Youtube
Also available on Youtube
Darksiders
Mar 2nd
I learned of this game from adverts on TV, they were sponsoring all the shows I watched apparently, the adverts made the game look really nice and so I got it on rental. The first thing needed to be said about Darksiders is that the game’s title floats entirely on it’s own, no reference is made in game to “Darksiders” and it really doesn’t describe any part of the game. Secondly this game is not really a God of War copy, a lot of people seem to think that because the fighting is similar the rest of the game is the same, but it’s not, if I had to liken Darksiders to another game it would be Zelda. Same kind of dungeon/room setup where you have to work your way through puzzle type rooms and fight the bad guys until you get to the boss and kill it, but the similarities end there, read on for more Darksider crap.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 Wallpapers
Nov 18th
I like the artwork from Bad Company 2 but there aren’t any good wallpapers out, so I used the fan kit from DICE to create a few of my own, not the most creative but I think they worked out pretty well, currently adorning my laptop desktop 
Please enjoy and feel free to share, if anyone wants any custom resolutions or aspect ratios let me know and I’ll make it up for you, alternatively download the fan kit yourself and have a go 
16:10
4:3
16:9
Inside the Xbox II
Jun 25th
Well I managed to get my hands on a smaller Torx screwdriver, got it all to pieces and god rid of those dreaded X-Clamp mofos, now I’ve put it all back together and it’s working fine. The only problem is that the xbox seems to think that it’s getting too warm as the fans are constantly stuck on “shuttle launch” mode so although the xbox now works it’s not exactly playable… So I’ve ordered myself some thermal paste from ebay to see if that improves the heat dissipation. Although I can’t really feel too much heat in the xbox to warrant the fans being on full blast so much.
And here’s a little close up shot of those dreaded X-Clamps you’ve been hearing so much about:
Any way, here’s some more Xbox innards: Read the rest of this entry »
Xbox goes to the towel clinic
Jun 16th
So after I told you in my previous post my Xbox has joined the legions that have developed the demonic red ring of death I decided I should try out the “towel trick” to get rid of those nasty red lights and get myself playing halo again.
First off we get the Xbox ready by removing the hard drive and taking it into the kitchen so in case something does go wrong I’m not going to damage anything and it’s close to a water source. You may also notice from the first picture how dirty my Xbox looks, I think it’s his age maybe I’ll give him a good clean when I’m finished.
Red Ring Red Ring Red Ring!!
Jun 15th
Flashing torture
So yea, I was in the middle of a fast paced game of Halo 3 when I got a crap load of artifacting and then it froze, when I switch it back on again guess what happened, I got the dreaded Red Ring Of Death, three red lights or simply RROD. I had a mess about and it worked again for a few minutes until it froze, now all I ever get is the 3 LEDs blinking a horrible shade of red.
My xbox is no new model either, it has survived so far with no red rings, no scratching of disks or anything and looking at the back it seems it was manufactured in 2006, launch model I believe and therefore has weathered the storm of RROD criticism well. Sadly it does mean that my warranty is well and truly over and I have no hope of a replacement from Microsoft. So basically I’m pretty much screwed and I was going to go out and buy a new console today as I am shamelessly addicted to Halo, however it seems there are a couple of avenues open to me and I will probably try them all before I go out and buy a new one, although, having two xboxes might be nice
Option 1: The Towel Fix
This involves wrapping up the xbox in some towels and leaving the console on for about half an hour. This makes the xbox cook in it’s own juices and heat up to a very high temperature then leaving it to coool. Apparently the RROD issue is caused by the “X-Clamp” processor sinks becoming loose or losing complete contact with the processor bed. Somehow the heat causes the chips to settle in again but is supposedly a temporary fix. I was thinking of banging it in the fridge afterwards to set it a little better. Maybe it will work I don’t know, but either way I’ll update here with what happened with the towels. Don’t worry I’ll have a bucket of water on standby in case it sets itself on fire.
Option 2: Fix the X-Clamp
Repair Kit
There are lots of guides online on how to open up your xbox and replace a loat of small nuts, bolts and washers to fix the heatsink issues of the “X-Clamp” it does take an hour or so to do but people swear by it. The main problem is having all the parts, thankfully there are many dealers on ebay who are selling all the correct parts to repair the box and quite cheap. If the towel trick doesn’t work I will buy the kit, put on my working gloves and operate on the box, it’s probably a much more efficient solution than buying a new console.
And that’s about the size of it, I’ll report back to you after the towel trick with photos so you can see how it goes. Hopefully it will not be a post entitled “I killed my xbox” and of course I will continue to look into other resolutions to the situation, and ooh this site looks like a good place to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcyYG-boWvM
Just my luck in Halo 3
May 9th
This man should thank his stars and garters that he survived 3 point blank shotgun blasts, 3 melee hits and more. The only real explanation for this haemorrhage inducing death is lag, for some reason the only packets my connection managed to drop were those that contained my gun and my bullets;
Turok (2008)
Feb 6th
I never played the original Turok much, but did play Turok 2 quite a bit and I found it brilliant. The graphics were awesome for the time and the universe it was set in was brilliant, you had a native American taken out of his tribe to fight mutant dinosaurs with space ships and a massive evil overlord. Not to mention very varied weapons that were a lot of fun.
The real mirror’s edge
Jan 31st
Yep, that’s right, get used to looking at air vents and dingy enclosed areas if you’re going to play Mirror’s Edge. In my older post I wsa very impressed with the Mirror’s Edge demo, it looked and felt brilliant. However the full game for me was a big disappointment;
Firstly you can forget leaping from rooftop to rooftop with grace and a feeling of ‘flow’, after the first few levels you’re pretty much confined to subways, sewers, air vents and cramped buildings full of the worst AI EA have on offer. The game seemed to tout this ‘flow’ thing as a way to enjoy the game, using runner vision to guide you effortlessly making you feel free. That would be great if runner vision actually worked but after the first few levels on rooftops it’s mostly lacking, obvious anyway or completely misleading. For example, there was on [cramped] bit where runner vision indicated I should go up some pipes, after a good while trying to make the jump from where the pipes were I had a good look around and found it actually possible to do it another way. Nice.
The other major problem is the margin for error, after I had played the demo I conluded it was me being a noob that caused me to drop off rooftops like a lemming, alas the entire game is filled with relentless and unforgiving jumps. There are places where you could make is straight away but they were trumped by jumps I had to try more than 3 times, there was even one instance where I had to try a jump way over 50x and when I finally made it i had done nothing different than the million times before, yet somehow made it with room to spare. This leads me on to another problem: Consistency the game seems to decide on it’s own which jumps are high enough for you to have to make a hard landing, which falls mean you “die” and normal landings. There are many examples throughout the game where I could fall from a really high platform and land fine and ones where I jumped from a low platform and either did a hard (ow it hurts) or it all went dark and I had to start again.
The other major problem I had with it is combat, it was completely and utterly superfluous. I can count the times I had to actually fight anyone on my fingers, having guns was completely pointless and the AI for the most part was just the following algorithm;
10 Get closer
20 Shoot
30 Goto 10
The bits I found good were the first few levels where Faith was placed on rooftops and where they deployed unarmed enemies that could jump across rooftops after you. That’s it really.
If you liked the demo of Mirror’s Edge then keep that, do not buy the full game because you’ve got some of the best levels right there. Rent it maybe, but you won’t rent it for long either because the game is so short. As in my first post about Mirror’s Edge I applaud the uniqueness of the game, but I feel that something went wrong right around the time the developers decided to swap beautiful outdoor cityscapes, leaping from roof to roof with dark, sewers and enclosed spaces.
Halo 3 Panoramas
Jan 15th
Not feeling in the mood to actually play the game and having a short attention span I for some reason set about making some Halo 3 panoramas (or halorama if you will). I think I saw something about it on a halo website and as usual thought “oooh I’ll try that” and set about taking multiple screenshots to stitch together.
The program I used (Hugin) is quite brilliant for a free app, all you do is select all the images that you took and click go. After that it stitches them all together and shows you what it’s made, then all you do is select where the image should be centered and there’s your panorama. Just as a side note the images it creates are tif files and and be quite big, I stitched together 10 – 15 for one panorama and the output file was around 350MB!
After that it’s a simple task of cropping the picture as there’s no way to make a completely rectangular image without losing data. I also do a bit of post processing on the images too because the images that come down from the Bungie website are a little washed out I find. I’ll probably write a little tutorial on how to do it with pretty pictures and everything. Look for that soon More panoramas after the fold.
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