For example yesterday I supposed to write-up this article but instead recorded some footage of the Day 1 DLC for Mass Effect 3, which I might add should have been part of the main game considering how you go back to Eden Prime(from the first planet in ME1) and you see the same flashbacks but this time also showing real-time flashbacks of the Protheans fighting the reapers and you learn a lot about their history and how they lived, I’m getting a little off topic here so moving on.

Anyway video editing is something I’ve been doing back when I was in my second or third year at secondary school and whilst I have never been good at it I’ve always really enjoyed experimenting and rendering videos, my first ones I ever made were back in using Windows Movie Maker just pasting in images and music of cartoons like Pokemon and Dragon ball Z, over the years I moved over to pasting in clips from various Anime and syncing with music and this was back when YouTube was very young and the community was friendly this was also the same time I began uploading  the anime music videos to YouTube and due to it being very young, unheard of and a friendly community the videos got many ratings, views and comments(Sadly these are no longer on my channel as I removed them to transition to better quality videos).

Once I got into college I started watching some Call of Duty montages and was really intrigued with them and so wanted to experiment this myself and I stumbled upon Sony Vegas and immediately imported my low quality recordings into the program and began testing.
As time went by I became more discouraged in video editing as I didn’t have the hardware to make better quality videos and so for a good portion I stopped and focused more on college.

A few years later and I got my PC upgraded(July last year) and I thought “I wonder if this new upgrade will be able to record high quality gaming footage and render them properly”.
So I tested this out, at first it wasn’t so great but I searched around for some proper settings and lo and behold I found the correct settings both in Fraps and Sony Vegas to record and render in full 720p.

So after that little enlightenment I set about primarily doing a lot of recording and video editing during my time out of work for 6 months.

Due to this being a hobby of mine along with my blog I decided it would be a good idea to also post them here so I will be able to provide more content and at a faster rate  during the times the blog is lacking in new articles.

Anyway thank you for reading, over the coming weeks I’m going to make the YouTube posts look more interesting on the front page and may do a full review of either Mass Effect 3, the DLC or both aswell as at some point redesigning my portfolio and see about getting it implemented again.

Any suggestions, advice or criticism whether that is for a new article, video or advice to make the blog better, let me know in the comments, thanks.

Thank you for your patience.

I would just like to say that I have been doing a lot of YouTube videos of PC games I play, for example Call of Duty 4, Dota 2, Mass Effect 2, Sonic Generations, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and many more, this is one of many reasons why I haven’t updated the blog for a very long time. Anyway first I’m going to talk about a few changes I have made to the blog.

Changes to the blog:

To start with I have now added the  ”Display Recent From Categories Posts” Feature of my blog which pretty much shows you recent posts and allows my readers to know whether a non gaming or graphics related article has been posted for example news or reviews for smartphones.

The other thing is I have also disabled comments on any future articles I publish(all other posts should have disabled the comments after a few months of being published) the reason behind this is due to the lack of readers I have and how this will look bad for new readers as they would normally look at the comments to see if it’s worth getting involved(or so I’ve read anyway) and so I won’t be enabling the comments until my blog reaches a fairly decent amount of views per post or per month, I know this might be down to the lack of updated articles and mostly boring topics/popular topics but I am trying my best and still waiting on that next niche topic similar to the Vodafone scandal and the HTC Force close error during one of its updates.

Graphics Work:

Moving on, since the last time I posted graphics work I was working on a project a long with a work colleague which was basically for the people we were working for and the project was to design a website for a non-profit charity called North West Veterans, I currently can’t find the psd file or the image of it on the PC and I can’t really link you to the website as we literally got ripped off and found out the people we were designing it for went off and used(back then) a crappy version, it does however now use a nicer looking design, the web layout was initially designed for ourself again for a non-profit charity called Pathways Veterans or something along those lines and it was before North West Veterans was even created/announced.

Along with that I also got in contact with a college friend who wanted me to design a website for him and then he would code it I can’t really give too much away as I was told not to tell anyone about it but it never really got far so I will show a couple of concept designs I came up with.

There have been a couple of other graphics work I have been doing too, one is some random abstract graphics work and the other is my new Twitter and YouTube background due to the new Twitter layout breaking my old background. Anyway here are the follow pieces of graphics work I’ve been doing since March 2011.

If you have any suggetions or questions feel free to email me or tweet me on twitter.

Technorati Tags: backgrounds, blog, call of duty, changes, fallout, graphics, skyrim, twitter, web design, youtube

You heard me right, after being cancelled for a PC release back in 2009; Alan Wake will now be released for the PC February 16 2012 via Steam and then as a boxed retail version later on, it will include all the game’s DLC packs which were released for the Xbox after its own release over the years and will feature high-resolution graphics and enhanced PC features, with support for stereoscopic 3D technology.

Remedy Entertainment quotes:

We’ve done our best to do justice to the PC version and do things the way they should be done for PC. The PC version looks absolutely beautiful. We’re bringing the game to life in a whole new way,

The key PC enhancements and features include:

Experience Alan Wake’s Pacific Northwest in higher resolutions and higher fidelity than ever before.
Refined and fully configurable mouse and keyboard support (or if you prefer to play with the Microsoft gamepad connected to your PC, you can do that too!)
A wide selection of customizable graphics settings and support for 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios.
Multithreaded engine that takes advantage of quad core CPUs.
Additional options our fans have sought after, such as field of view adjustment as well as “hide HUD”.
Works with AMD Eyefinity 3D 3-screen mode.
Works with NVIDIA NVISION2 Stereoscopic 3D.

Alan Wake is a story-driven action game where players assume the role of a best-selling author who escapes to a small town only to find out that his wife is missing. It’s a suspenseful, engaging title filled with twists and turns at every corner.

Technorati Tags: alan wake, console, game, games, Gaming, News, pc gaming, remedy entertainment, video games

There is no guarantee that you will get all your stuff back, but from people I have spoken to(friends, guildies etc) they have had their stuff back

Clean your PC

The first thing you should do when you’ve become a victim is to simply scan your computer for viruses and any malicious or rogue software, the reason why you should do this before calling Blizzard support is that once you’ve received your new password from Blizzard you have a better chance of not being hacked as soon as you use that new password. I will give a list of recommended anti-viruses at the bottom of this article(And no I will not recommend Norton if you want to know the reasons, do some research and you will see why.)

If you do find any viruses on your PC and the anti virus cleans them up and you’ve checked there are no spyware then proceed to the next step, if however the anti virus can’t remove any viruses then you will want to reinstall your copy of Windows(this is usually the best option for those who are paranoid)

Retrieve your password

Once you’ve made sure there are no viruses/spyware/malicious or rogue software left on your computer you can go through the password retrieval process(or change the password yourself if you still have access to the account) the links to go to are as follows EU and US

Contact Blizzard

If you didn’t email them during the password retrieval you can contact a Game Master by Opening a Ticket either on the battle.net website or ingame, in your ticket tell them your account has been compromised and your equipment/gold/cookies etc have been taken. Once you have done this you will need to keep an eye out for emails or ingame mail as they will then guide you on getting your stuff back.

Temporary Ban

During this process your account will be temporarily disabled, this is standard procedure which Blizzard takes in order to make sure they aren’t being contacted by hackers, whilst your account is disabled Blizzard will ask you to confirm certain confidential details which will be kept confidential.

Restoration

Once you’ve gone through the required details with Blizzard your account will be re-enabled and the restoring process will begin, it should take between 3-10 days depending on how busy the Account Administrations department are.

Now it’s time to make sure this never happens again.

Preventing another hack

Normally accounts are hacked by either sharing account information, entering account details on phishing websites(these are normally emails making you scared that you’ve done something wrong, remember Blizzard will NEVER ask for your username/password via email, ingame mail or ingame whispsers. These are scams. Another way is via keylogging, these are usually hidden within viruses or have infected various legit websites. It basically logs your keystrokes.

You can prevent these sort of hacks by getting yourself a Blizzard Authenticator which binds to your Battle.net account, whenever you login it will ask you for a random digital code which will be found on the authenticator that changes over time. You can set it so that when a new computer logs into your account that it will ask for the digital code preventing anyone outside of your home from accessing your account.

Software to combat viruses/spyware

Here are some recommended antivirus and spyware software

Microsoft Security Essentials(Free and provided by Microsoft) – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/products/security-essentials

Nod32 or Eset Smart Security(Both from the company Eset) – http://www.eset.co.uk/

Kaspersky Lab – http://www.kaspersky.com/

AVG – http://www.grisoft.com/

McAfee http://www.mcafee.com/

Avast – http://www.avast.com/en-gb/index

Spybot Search and Destory(Can be installed along side any anti-virus software for the best protection) – http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Malwarebtyes – http://www.malwarebytes.org/

And there you have it, if you have any questions then send me an email or follow me via twitter

Technorati Tags: blizzard, game, games, Gaming, hacked, keylogged, keylogger, News, pc gaming, trojan, video games, virus, world of warcraft, wow