Ah well, at least it makes for cheap Christmas presents for those I know who use Steam, which is pretty much Avy and… Yea.

So, the “funky” thing that Steam are doing with the sale this year is by playing around by giving everyone gifts via the Steam Inventory system. Using objectives (á la the Summer Sale with its prize tickets), you will either earn gifts or lumps of coal. There are a wide variety of gifts you can receive. One little bit of a “fuck you” though are coupons for however much of whatever, but for the most part they can’t be redeemed until AFTER the sale, and most of them are worthless considering the discount on the coupon is less than the discount offered during the sale. Oh, and they also don’t work for anything released after the sale, either.

So, the other thing is a lump of coal. However, here’s where it gets a bit interesting. You can craft seven lumps of coal into a gift (whether it’s random or chosen, who knows), or you can keep all your coal and each lump grants you an extra entry into the overall sweepstakes where the winners will win FUCKING EVERYTHING ON STEAM. There’s also some wishlist grants (50 x Top 10, 100 x Top 5) and 1k Valve Complete Packs too, but meh.

So anyway, I’ll be updating this post during the sale with my progress with the objectives and what crap gifts, or coal I earned. Yay…

Day 1 – December 19th

Objectives - Day 1 - December 19th

Steam: Check your inventory – you’ve got a gift!

The day’s freebie. It’s not yet determined whether the gift you get when you visit your Inventory is the achievement’s gift or a free gift for nothing, as the achievement description says that you will get another gift for checking what gift you got…

• Earned: A coupon for 25% off any Valve title

Bloody useless. I already own everything Valve. Literally, I added the Valve Complete Pack to my cart just to see and I was told “You already own everything in this package.”

Update: Dec 20th @ 6pm

Seems buying the Bunch of Heroes 4-pack has managed to force my Steam Inventory to refresh. Seems I earned a lump of coal. I am assuming it is from this achievement and not Orcs.

• Earned: A coupon for 25% off any Valve title; A lump of coal (Total: 1)

Update: Dec 23rd @ 9pm

Gave ThoughtsOfGlought the Valve voucher to get the trade objective. Inventories were getting hammered at the time so to make it quick and easy, I just gave him the most useless thing I had.

• Earned: A coupon for 25% off any Valve title Nothing; A lump of coal (Total: 1)

Orcs Must Die: Deck the Halls

Basically, complete the very first level of the game with the very first trap you earn in the game for completing the first level, and nothing else. Yes, you do have to backtrack to do it. No, you can’t earn it on your first go at the first level as you need to have the Arrow Trap owned and selected for it to count.

• Earned: A coupon for 25% off any bitComposer title.

I have no idea who these guys are. A quick check of the applicable games also shows that I won’t use it. Especially not if they’re all at least half-off during the sale.

EDGE: Snowblind

Played: Dec 21st, finished 5:30pm

So apparently this one requires you to find hidden switches on certain levels. Seems simple enough, especially as they’re in the first main level, first bonus level, and sixth extended level. Bonus levels annoyingly make you join the game’s Steam group though…

One big irk I have about this game is the lack of decent analogue control. I assumed that by having my 360 thumbstick only partway pushed that the cube would only move partially, making the “edging” mechanic of the game possible. Instead, you seem to go at full speed, regardless of how much or little input you give! Also, the game is angled at 45°, but there’s no support for using your thumbstick at 45° angles. I can understand the binding of your choice of NW or NE to “up” for a D-pad or the keyboard, but for a controller with a thumbstick, it makes no sense. Related Steam thread.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 3)

Bunch of Heroes: Holiday Survivor

TBD

Day 2 – December 20th

Objectives - Day 2 - December 20th

Dungeons of Dreadmor: Diggle Nog!

So, according to a nice post on the Steam forums, the way to go about this is to:

1. Get a Porta-Still (start as Alchemist to get one)
2. Get a Diggle Egg from killing a Diggle.
3. Buy some grog from the vending machine
4. Get some Aqua Vitae (start as Alchemist to get one)
5. Use Porta-Still to craft it (Last item in the third tab)

Yes, I did buy the game because it was just over €1. That and for the objective. I was honestly not expecting to basically play D&D. Like, I was expecting an RPG, but I wasn’t expecting a real RPG…

So, I eventually managed to get this one on my fourth attempt after dying from various method the first three times (the third time, I was killed by the first monster…) I blame not doing the tutorials first.

• Earned: A lump of coal. (Total: 2)

Wheeee… </sarcasm>

Spiral Knights: Son of a Nutcracker!

TBD

Psychonauts: Holiday Dinner

TBD

Tropico 4: Megalopolis

Played: Dec 23rd, finished 5:30am

Reach a population of 1000. Doesn’t sound all that hard, right? OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU ARE SO WRONG. To get to 1000 pop took me about 7-8 hours in a sandbox game set to the longest length of time possible (1950-2000) on one of the easy maps, and even then I only got it in October 1998. Cutting it a bit fine…

Never mind the fact the game seems to despise my graphics card. Had to endure the display driver recovering about… 60+ times, and actually witnessed my graphics card peaking at temps of 85°. Which when you consider it’s “normal” temperatures are 55-60°…

• Earned: A lump of coal. (Total: 6)

Really…? Really?!?! Fuck you Steam…

Day 3 – December 21st

Objectives - Day 3 - December 21st

Steam: Join the 2011 Holiday Group

Doesn’t really need explaining does it. Join a special Steam-created group, get spammed with notifications from the group for a couple weeks, get a free gift.

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off of Supreme Commander 2.

Lads, I really don’t want to be given an incentive to get into SupCom…

Update: Dec 26th @ 2:18

Traded the coupon for a piece of coal to someone from boards

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off of Supreme Commander 2. A lump of coal (Total: 12)

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Not much I can say about this really. Pick the Adrenaline version of the third map. Build lots of towers and… hold the speed-up key.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 4)

Day 4 – December 22nd

Objectives - Day 4 - 22nd December

DEFCON: Merry Christmas

Mmmm, nuking Santa… There’s not really much of a strategy per-se to getting this, just nuke the bejaysus out of everywhere come DEFCON 1 and hope Santa’s in your blast radius

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 5)

I guess it’s karma that one!

Rise of Immortals: Supporter

I don’t mind some “freebies” in all this, and I don’t necessarily mind having to play a Free to Play game, but please, don’t make us have to play online multiplayer…

TBD

Day 5 – December 23rd

Objectives - Day 5 - 23rd December

Steam: Get what you want – trade!

It’d be an alright freebie to get – simply trading coal for coal. Finally got it after 1am when the inventories and trading system were back up and working. Traded with Glought by throwing my 25% off Valve coupon at him, since it was useless to me

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total:

Frozen Synapse: Now I Have A Machine Gun. Ho Ho Ho.

Win an “Instant Skirmish” with ONLY your machine gunner alive. So you have to win a 1-vs-the rest scenario. Which is a pain considering Instant Skirmish always gives you a machine gunner, rocketeer, and shotgunner vs. the AI with two machine gunners and two rocketeers.

Yea, great team balance there…

Anyway, here’s how I did it. Not I made my shotgunner stand there and get killed since in a previous game where it was 2-on-1 like that against an assault rifle, my shotgunner actually managed to kill the last guy. Yay for the game win, boo for no achievement.

PS: While doing that recording, I somehow unlocked “The 4th Wall” achievement

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off Toki Tori

That’s actually pretty shit considering the game’s €4.50, and on sale for the same discount. Why didn’t they just give the game itself?

AudioSurf: Candy Stripe

You mean I can’t play my usual Ninja Mono? Fuck you… Anyway, fill a column with red/white/red/white/red. Pointman works best! I made two here, but you just need the one

Audiosurf: Candy Stripe

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 7)

I probably would have preferred to earn a Candy Cane in TF2…

Fate of the World: Let it Glow

Achieved: Dec 30th, finished 3am

Mmmm, Global Thermonuclear War… So I followed this little step-by-step on the SPUF. Set Japan to research energy, unlock blue everywhere, spread CCS once researched, commit everywhere to nuclear, then fuck up their stability, and sit back.

I got it in 2065 once the Middle East decided to nuke the fuck out of themselves. And that lost me the game but won me the achievement

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 20)

I find it ironic that a game about energy crises, depletion of resources, global warming etc. gave me coal

Greed Corp: Walking in a winter wonderland

1v1 local battle against a hotseat opponent, first map I chose was one with only 1 starting tile each, it was snowy, set the “opponent” to self-destruct. Win!

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 21)

I wasn’t aware those harvesters harvested coal…

Day 6 – December 24th

Objectives - Day 6 - 24th December

And Yet It Moves: Shawn White

In Chapter Two, there are many points where a branch you’re on will snap off and you can “surf” the branch. I don’t know exactly what the in-game distance requirements are, so I somehow managed to get it within the first few branches, so it mustn’t be all that tough.

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off of STORM: Frontline Nation

The fuck is this…? It’s already half off during the sale, but at least this makes the coupon worth something decent (€15) compared to the others…

CrimeCraft GangWars: Snow Ballin’

More F2P game stuff which requires you to actually play the game for a bit beforehand… FFS.

Jamestown: With Your Nose So Bright…

Played: Dec 26th, finished 1am

To get the Charge ship, you have to earn 8,000 in-game currency by completing levels. Then it’s as easy as buying the Charge ship, and beating a level using that ship as Player 1 (which is red).

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 11)

Think Steam is trying to tell me something…

Hard Reset: Blizzard

Played: Dec 29th, finished midnight

Shoot enough of the electricity thingies, make the little enemy thingies run into it. Rinse and repeat until achievement.

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off of From Dust

I’m still never going to buy/play it after the DRM fiasco it originally had.

Day 7 – December 25th

Objectives - Day 7 - 25th December

Steam: Have 10 items on your wishlist

Well, that was easy. My wishlist has had more than 10 things on it since… summer of 2010? Well, whenever they first introduced the wishlist function!

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 9)

Well, having earned both this and the KF achievement at the same time, I have to guess which came with which achievement!

Killing Floor: A Bloody Christmas Carol

This achievement came out with the Twisted Christmas Event 2011 just very recently! It’s a relatively easy achievement to get, as long as you’re playing normally and just kill stuff!

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off of Wings of Prey

Oh good lord, no thanks. I never liked flight games. Even Air Superiority in BF1943 was a pain…

Atom Zombie Smasher: KringleJammer

So, KringleJammer is a mini-game, where you have control of a chopper gun and basically just need to keep shooting waves of zombies. Just takes a while is all. Beat seven waves, whoop-de-doo.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 10)

Better than a coupon, I guess.

Day 8 – December 26th

Objectives - Day 8 - 26th December

Rusty Hearts: All I Want for Christmas is Sewers

Another shit F2P game gets an objective. But the worst part about this one is that the game is apparently region-locked, so some people will have no chance at getting it! Ireland’s not restricted, but I still don’t think I’ll be playing it…

Beat Hazard: Survive Christmas 10

Played: Dec 27th, finished 3pm

I’m not sure what I can really say about this other than, OH DEAR GOD MY EYES! That and I really hate Christmas radio. It probably wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t for the fact that radio stations insist on playing holiday-related songs all during the holiday… I think I lucked out on this one with the song choice. Despite getting death surrounded by big boss snake twice in his only appearance, I then got the star-shaped snake three times in a row, which definitely helped last over 13 minutes!

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 14)

That was more effort than was required.

Rock of Ages: Snowball War

So, this is as simple as winning any level after switching to the snowball ball. It’s under Settings somewhere where you can customise your character and ball.

• Earned: A coupon for 75% off of Torchlight

I guess that’s not too bad given Torchlight is only 50% off during this sale!

Bastion: Ride the Wind

TBD

Worms Reloaded: 12 Days of Winterval

A similar tactic as with the “Summer of ’69″ objective from the Summer sale can be employed: Teleport a worm hight enough so that the fall damage deals the exact amount of damage! Got it on my third go

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 13)

Still not crafting this stuff.

Day 9 – December 27th

Objectives - Day 9 - 27th December

Steam: Write a recommendation

Seriously, why do they always make you have to write a NEW recommendation for the objectives? I recommend stuff all the time on Steam…

Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 16)

Cities in Motion: Winter Wonder

Achieved: Dec 18th

Seriously, if you can’t transport 1000 passengers in just one of November, December or January, you aren’t playing the game right. Even on the smallest maps (except for Tutorial Town), 1000 in a month is piss-easy, even in your first year.

Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 15)

Day 10 – December 28th

Objectives - Day 10 - 28th December

Team Fortress 2: Valve Gift Grab 2011 – TF2

Achieved: Dec 16th

If you play TF2 at all and haven’t yet earned this achievement, then shame on you.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 17)

I always knew those gifts were crooked…

Sanctum: Festivus for the rest of us

Another grind-y one, probably because the rate in which Walkers with Santa hats appear isn’t as high as you’d like.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 18)

Killing stuff with Santa hats never gives you anything nice

Day 11 – December 29th

Objectives - Day 11 - 29th December

Steam: Link your Facebook account

Achieved: Whenever the fuck they asked you to do it as an objective before.

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off GRID

SERIOUSLY?!?!?! I ALREADY OWN THE FUCKING GAME ON BOTH PC AND CONSOLE!!!

Left 4 Dead 2: Valve Gift Grab 2011 – L4D2

Thankfully you can avoid having to actually play Versus properly if you just open up console, enter map (whatever map) versus until you get to be a survivor, and then just play normally, picking up gifts from dead Specials.

Annoyingly though, the game will auto-shut down after a few minutes since you’re the only human player, but just reload from console. Also the gifts seem to not obey the laws of friction; I was on Death Toll, and had to chase one all the way back to the starting point from the first bridge because it kept sliding!

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 19)

But, but, but, the Special Infected weren’t wearing any hats!

The Binding of Isaac: A Gift From Krampus

Played: 30th Dec, finished 7:45pm

So, under normal circumstances this achievement can be a serious pain to get, according to the SPUF.

Also according to the SPUF, there is a one-step method which requires you to make a single file edit. Given I’m not up to spending huge amounts of time for tedious objectives (and having never played the game before!), I took the easy route.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 24)

Suppose that’s what I get…

Day 11 – December 30th

Objectives - Day 12 - 30th December

Day of Defeat: Source: Valve Gift Grab 2011 – DoD:S

Local server, suicide outside of spawn (Panzerschreck/Bazooka helps!). Piss easy.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 22)

inb4 tomorrow they have CS:S

SpaceChem: Polar Expedition

Play the game until you beat the second last level on the second planet (There’s Something in the Fishcake). If you’ve already played past there, annoyingly it doesn’t automatically retroactively award itself, but just fast-forward through your saved solution to re-complete the level and it’s yours.

• Earned: World Basketball Manager 2010

Seriously, what the fuck is that shit. I’d have much rathered coal… Shit like that is exactly why I’m not crafting my current coal stash either. I value the possibility of my Top 5/10 wishlist much higher.

Flight Control HD: Snowball

OH GOD IT’S LIKE FLYING RYANAIR.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 23)

Typical of Ryanair to give coal, cheapskates…

Universe Sandbox: Snowball Earth

Played: 31st Dec, finished 3am

You know, condemning Earth to an icy future is not as fun as barrelling it straight into the middle of the Sun…

• Earned: A coupon for 25% off any Sega title

I wonder if this is Earth trying to pay me a ransom to stop fucking with the planet? Doubt it…

Puzzle Agent 2: Christmas Tree Census

Played: 1st Jan, finished 4pm

You spend about $97,000 every time you submit a puzzle answer, so just submit three answers!

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 28)

So now you know where your tax money is going!

Super Meat Boy: The Golden Gift!

Fuck. This. Achievement.

Day 12 – December 31st

Objectives - Day 13 - 31st December

Steam: Turn on Steam Guard

Achieved: Whenever the hell Steam Guard first became available in a beta client.

It took a while for this to actually register as completed, seeing as I turned it on the second it originally became available in a Steam client beta.

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 25)

Counter-Strike: Source: Valve Gift Grab 2011 – CS:S

WHAT DID I BLOODY WELL TELL YOU!

• Earned: A coupon for 50% off any Valve title

Oh Valve, y u troll me.

BIT.TRIP BEAT: JINGLE.BELLS

Ugh, I really don’t like this game. It’s like playing Breakout with your head tilted 90 degrees. It’s just baffling with the stuff moving right-to-left and you having to move up and down…

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 26)

Magicka: Ice Age

Magicka is very hard to get the hang of. It’s movement controls on keyboard/mouse suck; and it’s spell selecting controls on 360 also suck. Why can’t there be a good combination of the two. Why can’t you move with WASD…

• Earned: A lump of coal (Total: 27)

Ice makes coal?

Trine: Winter Secrets

Upon finishing the campaign, scrolling the credits and returning to the main menu, the campaign time counter read 5 hours, 46 minutes. Five and a half hours for a campaign on the hardest difficulty possible is really not great at all, even more so when you consider how much time you have to use up replaying certain parts again based on how badly you do at it and how much you die.

Bearing that in mind, this would probably indicate that running through the campaign on the easiest difficulty would probably take no more than three hours. For such a high-profile game, this is woefully short. Something that a member of my stream chat mentioned about it:

It’s an interactive action movie disguised as an FPS war simulator.

In fact, the campaign is probably something that’s better made as an action movie. Not that I want to or expect to see a movie tie-in, but if it were to happen, it’d probably do well.

If you have several hours to waste watching the recordings, you can do so. Each recording is two hours long, since that’s what TwitchTV caps each recording video at. Please note that the audio desyncs as the stream goes on, it’s a known XSplit bug that is fixed in newer versions that the one I’m using, but I can’t use those versions as it breaks support for my Blackmagic Intensity Pro.

Firstly, FRAPS is a CPU hog. It does a lot of processing to get your game recorded, converted, compressed and saved. It’s about 40% or so on my Core i5-750 (OC’d to 3.2Ghz), which is a fairly hefty chunk. Because of this, it tends to drag down the framerate of the game I’m playing all the way down to 30, even though I’m telling it to record at 60. However, the end result is good, albeit at a rate of 4GB for about two minutes. All those individual files are quite annoying for editing purposes, and which the audio mixing it offers is helpful, it can be annoying having to set levels before recording to ensure the game doesn’t completely drown out my microphone.

Dxtory on the other hand, from what I can tell, is a hard drive hog. And not just space-wise, it also demands a lot out of the write speed of your hard drive. For me, this isn’t good, as tests showed that my recording hard drives – which are both WD Caviar Green 1.5TB 7200rpm – only manage about 50MB/s. This seems to be enough for FRAPS, but for Dxtory on “out-of-the-box” settings, it was worthless given my 1080p screen size. Given the multitude of options available, I ended up having to fiddle around for a while to come up with my current solution, which offers good recording quality, while maintaining that I can still play the game at normal speed with no slowdown:

Dxtory codec, medium (YUV420) quality, uncompressed, 30FPS, RawCap spread over two hard drives both running 50Mb/s.

The upsides to this setup:

• No game slowdown. Well, I mean minimal slowdown. Normal FPS in the test I did was 120, while recording it was between 60-80, while only recording at 30. FRAPS would reduce my FPS to 30 no matter what.
• No large amount of individual 4GB files. This was something that irked me about FRAPS, especially as when I used Xfire in the past ages ago, even it could record into one large file. Although separate files does have it’s benefits when you happen to have a power-cut during recording…
• Separate audio tracks in the file for game sound and my microphone, meaning no need to play about with levels before recording, it can be done in post editing.
• The ability to use it as a virtual camera to stream with, at a better framerate than XSplit Gamesource offers.

Another major downside, to me, compared to FRAPS is the inability to record the dekstop. This is a big thing for me given that I play a fair amount of emulated GBA and DS games. It’s also a good backup for when I’m playing a game that isn’t DirectX or OpenGL, like Rollercoaster Tycoon.

This pretty much means I’ll be using both programs in the future, both for different purposes.

But, if you’ve come here looking for my opinion of which of the two to take, solely for game recording purposes, I’d take Dxtory. It may be more expensive at ¥3,600 (converted to €33.50 when I bought it) as opposed to €27 (I bought it at $37 ages ago), but the increase in functionality is very worth it. However, do make sure that you have a fairly decent hard drive, and ideally have several hard drives available to record onto.

Not much has really gone on over the past few weeks. I’m still making my YouTube videos, doing a lot of streaming over on NGame, and getting pissed and annoyed with a few people as always. The NASCAR, F1 and IndyCars have also sucked away a fair few hours.

More recently however, there has also been a couple of cases of conflict in areas.

Aspies

Over on one of the many forums I regular, it was noticed that there was a member on the forums who seemed to have quite a bone to pick with a few people with regards to having an opinion on things. I really can’t remember what sparked it at this stage.

A few threads later, and after a temp forum ban iirc, another brawl brewed between herself and a couple of people, during which I noticed that she claimed to have Asperger’s. Upon noticing this, I took it upon myself to try and use that common ground to try and reason with her and to try and figure out what was upsetting her and causing all this conflict.

Nope. Got my attempts at calming thrown right fucking back in my face.

It was then in that same reply that to me pretty much read out like she used her Asperger’s as a defence whenever things go wrong. This pissed me off to no end. I can understand people with Asperger’s having trouble communicating and getting things across, especially as it took me the best part of primary and secondary school to get around several of my issues when it came to anger management, social interaction and the like. But using it as a shield so that after you cause havoc, you can hide behind it and feel untouchable? That’s just fucking wrong.

Edit @ 2011-11-08 00:03 - Just to add more to this, this is the same person who says:

Why are boards.ie moderators some of the most corrupt individuals on earth? The site is a joke and seems to do little to improve it’s reputation. You may as well call the “Dispute resolution” forum “Forum where you get to be shouted at by a SECOND mod”. I am deadly serious, they are some of the most disgusting people I have met online who do nothing but abuse their power and defend each other.

A quick browse of the DR forum, I seem oddly drawn to this thread!

Comment Trolling

So, I had a video up recently which has a bit of a questionable motive about someone I had had a few problems with recently; when not too long after it going up, I started receiving a ton of spam from people who really didn’t grasp the full extent of the situation.

I’m not sure what these people are thinking, but it is obvious that they don’t understand the full extent of the situation, are are attempting to use my mental health issues as ammunition against me. I really don’t know where the hell they all came from, especially as only a few weeks ago I would have considered most of them to be alright people, but now they are seriously turning into asshats.

Donation Streams

The whole donation stream aspect is also complete bullshit to me. Why the hell are people, like UltraJMan, who make videos and play games for the Internet looking for their viewers to foot their bills by sending them money to buy new equipment or whatnot? I paid for all of my equipment out of my own pocket: my 360, my PC, my Intensity Pro, FRAPS, XSplit, everything; and I don’t even get all that much a week. Yet people who work for ages – or in same cases, don’t seem to work at all – are looking for money from the everyday viewers.

I wouldn’t take so much offense to this if it was maybe $100 every year or so with a small amount from loads of people. But no, they can earn from $500 up to $1000 for all of this. And sometimes they do it at least twice a year! I mean, just check JMan’s last donation stream he did with someone else, where they gleaned $1130 from their viewers, and they even specifically state that they money is going straight to them! I’m sorry, but that is just the epitome of laziness. If you want money for your videos, get a partnership with Machinima or something (like raocow recently did) and earn your money that way, don’t suck the wallets of everyone who watches you. It’s not a full-time job until a proper contract is signed, don’t work to rule or for a bounty provided by everyone else.

I’m done ranting here, I’m off to play some video games, and stream and make videos for the Internet for no reward other than self-esteem and experience.

Thus begins the rather large thought process.

So firstly, obviously, how would you make Steel? Thinking back to a few older games I played which had Steel as a commodity involved – Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and Railroad Tycoon II – it is made using equal parts of Coal and Iron. So that makes that part easy: one Iron Ingot and one piece of Coal (real Coal, not Charcoal). But now there’s the issue with making it. Since crafting them together is a little unrealistic and it requires smelting, this would need a new “double furnace” or something to be able to smelt the two things together. So that takes care of creation, for the most part.

Now, since Steel requires Iron to create, this should place Steel between Iron and Diamond on the resource scale, which is probably needed given the current tool uses scale of Iron @ 251, compared to Diamond @ 1562. However, this brings up the next problem of the fact that at the current recipe of Iron + Coal, Steel is very easy to upgrade to immediately upon finding Iron (although Iron in itself is still possible to get quite early). Thus, the recipe would possibly need to be made more expensive to dictate the difference in durability/damage.

As such, perhaps the Coal part of the recipe – which is the “cheapest” and easiest to acquire – should be made more expensive. This brings to mind the possibility of adding another recipe, to turn Coal into Coke (as in the fuel type, not the drink). Perhaps crafting 8 Coal in a box fashion, or even just all 9 blocks to create one piece of Coke. Thus, Steel would now require an Iron Ingot and a piece of Coke (8-9 Coal).

However, this to me still does not seem expensive enough, so perhaps the smelting in the double furnace should require more fuel than normal, possibly requiring eight or sixteen heat cycles to create that piece of Steel? This would then make Steel require a lot of time and effort to make, but the results would be worth it.

In short:

• Flint and Steel requires 1 Flint and 1 Steel.
• Double furnace for smelting stuff together.
• 8-9 Coal can be crafted into Coke.
• Iron + Coke need smelting in a double furnace, requiring 1-2 bits of Coal as fuel, to create one Steel Ingot.
• Steel lies above Iron in the durability table, but still leave a nominal gap to Diamond.

Or maybe just toss out the whole idea, leaving everything as it is, and just add Bauxite Ore to create Aluminium?

Firstly, I should give a big shout-out to ThoughtsOfGlought and IrradiatedGamer for hooking me up with the game after winning a contest they were holding for a pre-order copy of Portal 2. And also I get to hopefully enjoy Glought dying a lot in VVVVVV soon

The game itself is brilliant, very well made, great story, and actually lasts for quite a while when you compare it to the original Portal. Overall, you get three distinct environments in which the puzzles take place, and I’d have to say that each one is about the length of the original Portal testchambers – and only the testchambers.

To put a time on the length of the game, I’d say six hours is a good figure for the story length, based on my stream video containing pretty much the entire game bar the first while lasting five and a half hours, and also the timespan between me getting the first story achievement, and the last one was 5h32m. Although that timeframe did include a couple of puzzles that well and truly had be stumped for a while, I must say.

Co-op I haven’t had much of a chance to dive into yet. Both myself and MegaGWolf played the single player from launch and were pretty damn tired afterwards, but we completed the first “intro” part of co-op, and the first set of testchambers proper – before G had to get ready for work, and I had to go to bed (after having had three hours of sleep and running on a bottle of Mountain Dew).

One thing that some people may say about it – seeing as it is released to retail on 360 and PS3 as well – is that the PC version is pretty much a console port. I would normally disagree with that, but seeing as they did screw up in where you’re manually saving the game and it advises you to “not turn off your console“, I’m on the fence about that.

Overall, it is a great game, but I do have one major bone to pick about it: the price. Full retail price of €50 for something as short and kinda unreplayable as Portal 2 is a bit of a rip-off. As with Portal 1, once you’ve gone through the game and have an idea of how to do the puzzles, future playthroughs aren’t exactly the same. This may seem a little biased considering I got Portal 1 on PC for free (special Steam offer to all); and Portal: Still Alive on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 MS Points (€15) which had even more content that the regular Portal – but I think maybe something like €30-€35 would have been the most fair price for the game. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 back in the day and that too was €50, and I do kinda regret it considering how much I haven’t really played it, how similar it was to L4D1, and also the fact it dropped in price to €30 within a few months of launch…

Anyway, I’m not going to spoil any of the game for you, go play it for yourself if you haven’t already.

Link to my NGame recording: http://www.ngame.tv/thechrisd/thechrisdsrandomgamingstream24787

PS: If you bought it on 360 or PS3, SHAME ON YOU!!! VALVE GAMES ARE SACRED THINGS THAT SHOULD ONLY BE PLAYED ON A PC WITH A KEYBOARD AND MOUSE!!!
(I know it seems rich seeing as I bought Portal 1 on 360, but I hadn’t otherwise paid for Portal before. And the extra content…)

• Rocking the boat (15)
  Finish ahead of your senior team-mate in your first season with a new team
• Crushing victory (20)
  Outclass your team mate at each race, over one season
• Consistency is the key (25)
  Score a point in every round of a season

Maybe after I finish it completely – and I finish up doing my Let’s Play of Pokémon Black – I might do a Let’s Play of one of my future seasons in the game on a harder difficulty, which should ideally offset the fact I’ll be in a much faster car, particularly as I have both Force India and BMW Sauber interested in my services for next year

FUCKING EMOLGA

Emolga (Japanese: エモンガ Emonga) is a dual-type Electric/Flying Pokémon introduced in Generation V.

Emolga is a rodent-like Pokémon, primarily white in coloration, that most resembles a flying squirrel. It possesses facial features similar to Pachirisu’s, such as its eyes, tiny nose, and yellow cheek patches. Its ears, positioned at the top of its head, are rounded in shape and black in coloration, with yellow and white sections of coloration in the inside of its ears. Emolga sports a vaguely hood-like patterning of black around its head, with a spiky extension of the pattern above its face. Emolga possesses winglike, yellow-colored flaps connected to its three-fingered arms. Its feet are white-colored and fairly small and its black-colored tail is in a jagged shape.

Similar to Pikachu, Emolga can store electricity on its electric sacs located on its cheeks. When threatened, it releases this electricity to fend off other Pokémon. Emolga lives in the treetops and glides from tree to tree using its cape-like patagium, sometimes discharging its electricity.

This fucking thing. Oh my god, THIS FUCKING THING.

Emolga is the worst possible thing to come out of Pokémon in Generation V. It’s Electric/Flying dual typing gives it immunity to it’s primary weakness: Ground; and instead replaces it with a weakness to Rock and Ice. Normally this is fine, as the only other Pokémon with this typing are either legendary (Zapdos, Thundurus), or only acquired the typing in Gen V and aren’t available in Unova anyway (Fan Rotom).

However the primary problem with this thing is the fact that it appears so early in the game, and when it does start to appear, it appears in force. Through a combination of it’s 103 base Speed, Static ability, and early access to Double Team; this is the most annoying Pokémon you will come up against, especially if you lack the necessary tools to be able to dispatch it.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Emolga appears prominently in the Electric-type Gym of Unova, in Nimbasa City. It is the 4th Gym of the region, which differs to the other Electric Gyms in Vermilion (3rd), Mauville (3rd), and Sunyshore (8th).

Another part is the lack of availability of Electric-types in general in Unova. At that point in the game only Blitzle/Zebstrika and Emolga are available, and as such the Gym also features only those two evolutionary lines. The other Electric-types of the region: Tynamo/Eelektrik/Eelektross, Joltik/Galvantula and Stunfisk all appear after the 5th Gym.

And finally, the lack of viable counters. The Ice-type does not come into play until the next town, which you cannot access before the 4th Gym battle. As for the Rock-type, there are a few more options, but unless you already have them, it may be too “out of the way” to bother with. Pokémon-wise, there are Roggenrola/Boldore/Gigalith or Dwebble/Crustle. Both have a high physical Attack and Defense, but suffer with a lack of Special Defense, opening them up to Volt Switch. Also, their lower Speed means getting an attack off before a Double Team is nigh impossible.

As well as that, the available moves aren’t great either. Smack Down is the best as it renders them vulnerable to Ground, but requires that it actually hits, which may be a pain given Double Team. Rock Slide requires a higher level, and has less accuracy, as does Rock Tomb from TM39 found in the desert.

In general, these fucking things were designed to make you tear your hair out, swear profusely at your DS, and to rage-eject the game cartridge before running it over with your car. Add to this the annoying strategy they employ with the Gym Leader (Double Team, then Aerial Ace in case you try the same, and Volt Change to GTFO to Zebstrika when the going gets too tough).

FUCKING EMOLGAS.

PS: On my Facebook page, you can find an album of images with other people’s expressions of anger, with regards to these little rodents. Also, feel free to express your anger at these things in the comments, or rant on Twitter with the hashtag #fuckingemolgas.

Been spending most of my time working on more videos for my YouTube channel. Hopefully all this effort will pay off soon, as right now I feel like I’m putting a ton more work in that several high-profile YouTubers who dapple in the same subject areas as I do, who are still more popular and gaining even more views and subs every day, whereas I’m sitting here just hoping that even a few hundred people will watch it.

Judging by the entire patch notes (which include a few changes already made in previous patches), the core gameplay itself looks to be changed quite drastically, hence why I have held off starting a new game after winning my last game as America – somehow via Diplomacy when I had just spent the last third of the game wiping my equal rival off of the map after he was stupid enough to declare war on me – so that things won’t radically change during my game.

So, a few things I’ve noticed in these notes that I’m more than a little interested in:

Changes to happiness

Happiness has been pretty radically changed, with cities no longer capable of producing more happiness than their population, as well as changes to the happiness producing buildings.

This major change really means that you only ever really have the supplemental happiness to play around with – that being the happiness gained from the luxury resources, your difficulty level, social policies, wonders and the like – all of which has to cover the base city unhappiness of 2 for each city, any unhappiness caused by your population that isn’t covered by a building yet, or the extra unhappiness caused by annexation. This is a pretty major change, particularly as you amount of bonus happiness you can get is limited. It also means hell in the late game when all of your starting cities now have a very high population and you have no more buildings you can build to keep them happy.

While the amount of happiness each city can theoretically provide has actually gone up by 1 from 15 to 16 (excluding Wonders), since it can’t overflow to the rest of your empire, it’s not going to be any use anymore in having small cities dotted around with just the Colosseum, Theatre and Stadium (and Circus if possible). This is combined with two other main changes:

• The decrease in food requirement for population growth in the higher levels.
• The decrease of effectiveness of some happiness-based wonders, particularly The Forbidden Palace.

Pretty much means you’re screwed if you have a very large empire. The introduction of the new Circus Maximus national wonder is nowhere near compensation enough, as it only provides 5 bonus happiness.

The reduction in happiness needed for a Golden Age is a welcome change, seeing as you won’t be earning anywhere near as much bonus happiness per turn, but the fact that the happiness needed will go up as your empire expands is not good, especially the fact that you won’t be able to earn as much with a large empire anyway, meaning that there will be a certain point when it’s no longer viable to expand. And the new rebels for hitting a certain level of unhappiness isn’t good either, as your empire will be on an even faster downward spiral having to fight in your own borders as well as the 33% combat penalty and 50% production drop. I’ve only ever hit major unhappiness once, and that was at the very end of my afore-mentioned America game, what with being in control of enough land for eight Civs and currently razing half of another landmass worth four more Civs…

Science Nerf

tbh, this really was needed. Most games I’d be hitting Future Tech before 1950, particularly as in the later stages I’d be churning out the Modern and Future Era techs in about 7 turns each (Marathon game speed). It also seems to be making Great Scientists harder to come across with the reduction in Scientist specialist slots on the early Science buildings.

On the plus side, at least they fixed the research overflow issue.

City Defense

I suppose this is all in the grand plan to nerf going to war and taking over your enemies. Cities now heal more quickly – and even quicker still with the defensive buildings – melee horses now get a combat penalty, the mounted and armour unit city attack penalty increased, less effective archer units against cities…

Also on a related note, yes while siege units now get more attack versus cities, but they can’t bombard units as well anymore, which is a damn shame (at least on my attacking side, I absolutely hated when the AI had a Cannon garrisoned in a city bombarding the shit out of my assault.

Units

Well, a few minor things, some annoying, some that make god-damn sense and wonder why they weren’t in to begin with:

• Lancers upgrade to Helicopters, Cavalry to Tanks – Now they’re no longer redundant in the Modern Era!
• Reduced bonuses to flanking, Generals, Discipline, and Military Tradition – boo!
• Naval combat inflicted damage increase – thank fuck, used to take me 3 Destroyers just to kill a bloody Caravel…
• Air units have a visible XP bar – would’ve been really helpful on my trio of B17′s with Logistics in the last game…

City-States

A couple of minor changes, but changes nonetheless. The Maritime changes are a HUGE nerf, dropping from +5/+3 to +3/+1 – although I suppose this is in line with the general population reduction and happiness nerf etc. I think overall this change will make you want to build cities five tiles apart instead of seven, since getting more than 18 pop to work the third ring of tiles won’t be worth it anymore, both time needed and happiness wise.

Also the new buffer preventing Influence drop when in their territory after killing a barbarian was a duh, duh move. So many times I helped out a City-state and got the 5 Influence for killing the barb, only to lose 6 immediately at the end of the turn, thus leaving me worse off then before I began…

Diplomacy

The fact that you now get a list of what it is that the AI’s attitude towards you consists of is much fucking needed, particularly as it was one of the staples in Civ IV to help you shape your relationship with them. So many times so far in V I’ve just been biding my time when all of a sudden I’d get three AI suddenly talking shit to me, even going so far once to have eight people declare war simultaneously for taking over a single City State… (needless to say after that action I took full advantage, wiping out three Civs and quintupling my landmass!)

Also the new declarations of friendship and, well, not friendship will be pretty good for strategic use. A much easier way of basically telling other Civs to fuck off and leave my mate alone, else I’m nuking the shit of you.

I think that’s it, now to wait for this damn patch already so I can start my next game, wonder which Civ to take… England, Russia, Egypt, Songhai, Persia, Siam, China, Aztec or Turkey…

Mainly this issue affects Source engine games, in particular Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2. It’s an issue that really irks me as I can’t stop it, it just happens randomly through no fault of my own, and it’s not very clear what I’m supposed to do to alleviate it.

It’s an odd problem to describe, but I’m going to try:

• Upon starting to play whatever sound, game locks up, loops the last half-second of sound and freezes the game.
• Sound then loops through the same half-second of audio for a few seconds, sometimes changing what is looping while my screen is now black while it reloads.
• About 5-10 seconds later the game comes back, and hurriedly catches up to where it’s supposed to be. However sometimes upon coming out of the crash, it crashes again.
• On checking my Process Explorer, I see that before the game crashes it is using over 1GB of RAM. After BOTH my screens reload (that is to say when it crashes it locks up both the game and my other screen), I find it’s RAM usage down to under 700MB, and before it works again, the RAM usage climbs back up steadily to what it was at.

I really am stumped as to what it causing this. I recently updated fucking everything, including graphics drivers, audio drivers, verified game files, adding a page file to the drive that the games run from, disabled Windows Aero while it’s running… And still.

Also, when trying to enjoy just a little bit of GRID, I find it happening there too, but a little bit different: On crash the sound doesn’t loop, and a few seconds later the game comes back having not paused at all, so I’ve still continued in whatever direction at whatever speed for a few seconds, and when the screen comes back it’s very drained of colour and massively bright until I pause the game at which it returns to normal.

Fuck’s sake, why can’t this shit just fucking work like it’s supposed to…

Love KFC

The first was finding out of this odd promotion being run by KFC here in Ireland, known as Love KFC. In return for offering vouchers for two regular meals for a tenner, people can submit their names for a possible new limited-edition burger. I decided for a laugh to put the bear in, in the off-chance that he somehow manages to win it by using his cuteness and charm across his social media outlets on his blog, Twitter and Facebook.

But now towards the end of the day. I get the feeling that this is going to turn into a popularity contest over the funniest and weirdest burger name, rather than helping based on the person themselves. Case in point, the bear managed to grab 200 impressions in the first day and was quite out in front for a while, until a wave of retweeting on Twitter which started with Mulley means that the “Human Centipede Burger” is now king…

ETF2L

The other thing was a practice match with some of the college folk in Team MonG for the ETF2L Highlander competition starting up soon. Y’know, the one where you can earn fancy badges to put onto your TF2 characters in-game so long as you complete your group matches. Well, we had a good match tonight, but the one thing that really pissed me the fuck off about the opposing team was their Natascha Heavy.

This weapon is 25% weaker than the Heavy’s regular Minigun, but when it hits it slows their speed down to a crawl, thus making them easier to hit with more bullets and keeping them massively slow. Under normal public circumstances, Heavies generally can’t go on a rampage as much since there’s so much more that can take them out, like multiple Snipers, or a hail of Soldier rocket spam. But in a Highlander environment, the single Soldier can’t do enough damage to take out the Heavy while he’s being healed by his Medic, the Sniper’s being taken out before he can kill the Heavy, and the Spy can do nothing as he’s convinced the enemy Heavy was using sound mods to more easily hear our Spy decloak.

It was especially infuriating for me since I was playing the Scout, the really fast moving class, and it was as if everywhere I turned that damn Heavy was there and I was dead no matter what. Even the enemy Scout, while annoyingly good, wasn’t as rage-inducing as this Heavy. Seriously, Valve really do need to nerf it soon. Reduce the speed cut on hit, reduce the chances for the speed cut, anything to make this damn weapon a lot less usable that it is…

Ugh, I’m off before I end up trolling somewhere with either of these rants…

I mean, I really do like making these videos, not really because I’m specifically trying to get views and subscribers on YouTube, rather I just want to make them, even if only ten people decide to watch it, as long as even one of those people like it, I consider it a success.

Yay, for the Intensity Pro!

So now that I have my Intensity, I definitely think I’m going to be making way more console videos. It probably won’t eclipse the amount of PC videos I make, but there should still be a decent amount of them. The fun part is that even though I’m already recording and editing them at 720p, I still have the capability to turn them into 1080i if I really want to show off

After a very quiet Friday (which was the actual day itself), with just a trip down to the bar in TGI Friday’s in the Centre for some bar food, cocktails and watching the Dutch dump Brazil out of the World Cup; I met up with a few friends for most of the day on the Saturday, with some general hanging around and doing whatever came to mind. One thing of note was the odd trip to the Asian market grabbing some very cheap Pocky, which I unfortunately munched through rather damn quickly after getting him, seeing as it’s so damn addictive. I really need to make some plans to go get a crate of so of them and start stocking them up in the wardrobes before Eirtakon…

Speaking of that, I really need to go sort out my plans for Final Form Sora now that I have time – and money.

Dinner with family later on that night was a massive affair – sixteen of us in all squeezing into the restaurant part of Ho Wun here in Dunboyne. It was a great night, getting everybody together for a night out to celebrate not only me, but my aunt Paula as well (whose birthday was the day before mine!), before heading home for more drinks and cake. And unfortunately no dog seeing as a couple of my aunts have some issues with canines.

Felt great the next day after a great 24 hours prior to it – and maybe a little bit because of the “personal ATM” feeling I had in my wallet following it.

So, what’s left in the summer? Well, finding a damn Blackmagic Intensity Pro somewhere in this country would be a great start, as I want to get into streaming my 360 online and maybe doing a Let’s Play of something on it – specifically Naughty Bear, which I was given on my birthday itself and I haven’t yet played it because I want to LP it blind if I can…

So, after buying Modern Warfare 2 yesterday evening in GAME in Blanch for €35 (not the €25 I definitely remember it being a little while ago – but at least it’s not €60 on Steam), I sat down last night for a long session of it. And by long, I mean really, really, really, really, really long. Like, started at midnight last night, ended… about twenty minutes ago, long.

The main plan for the night was to attempt to complete as much of the campaign on Veteran as possible to earn maximum Gamerscore from the game. That last until about 7am. The campaign, although it is incredibly diverse, thrilling and entertaining, was way short. Thankfully Veteran difficulty this time wasn’t as painstakingly cruel as MW1 with the infinite respawning enemies and allies that would rather just sit there while YOU kill them all, and so progressed at a nice steady pace filled with waiting for health to regenerate and retrying certain parts over and over.

Veteran is no more of a challenge than Hardened was in the original. Which is probably better.

So after the entire Veteran completion, off I went again on Recruit to pick up all 45 pieces of intel. Cue 9am, and I have quite a large chunk of Gamerscore gleamed from the game from everything not-Special Ops. That can wait for some other time, or not be done at all.

So, I decided I may as well have gone onto multiplayer, since there was nothing else left to do. Now after my foray into MW2 multiplayer during the Steam free weekend, I wasn’t getting my hopes up on how this would work out. The changing of controls from 360 controller to keyboard and mouse didn’t go so well, plus I felt as if my reflexes weren’t as sharp and that everyone else had massive huge scripts helping them out.

Cue the first game in Mercenary Team Deathmatch.

I come out 18-6, absolutely decimating a team of several-times-already-prestiged noobs. However, overall my team lost because of the noobs on my team having significantly worse K/D ratios.

Oh boy, I’m home again

Not to brag, but I was pretty good at the original Modern Warfare a while ago, so that does transfer over to 2 a good bit. With that in mind, I then proceeded to play another 13 games. All 13, I won. I only had to get off because it was daylight, I was hungry, and the dog needed attention.

So far after what was only 1h 43m of playtime (apparently), I’m a Level 16 Staff Sergeant, with a win/loss record of 13-1, and a K/D ratio of just under 1.8.

Oh, did I also mention that one game where I went 27-4? Oh and the one other game where I managed to get a pretty decent kill-streak of 12, which included actually being able to legitimately call in a Stealth Bomber that I didn’t get from a Care Package for once?

Dead chuffed, I am

As such, cue the impromptu ”here’s my guess” post!

Being the nice person I am, I’ve taken the liberty of hiding my answers by disguising them the same colour as the background (or at least the background when this was written!), to avoid anyone who’s come straight to this post from being spoilered.

1. Portal
2. Bioshock 2
3. Donkey Kong
4. God of War
5. -
6. Sonic
7. Dead Space
8. Pacman
9. -
10. Half-Life
11. Pokémon
12. -
13. -
14. Halo
15. Final Fantasy (specifically VII)
16. Megaman
17. Fallout
18. -
19. Street Fighter
20. Assassins Creed
21. Frogger
22. -
23. Gears of War
24. -
25. Left 4 Dead
26. -
27. Oblivion
28. Duck Hunt
29. Mario
30. -
31. Zelda
32. Excite Bike
33. -
34. Mario Kart
35. -
36. Castlevania
37. Metroid
38. -
39. -
40. Team Fortress 2

So, how do you fare?

Now I really hate the annoying YouTube “10 minute” time limit – which is actually more of an 11 minute limit – because it means anyone with longer videos either has to edit them down to that length, or split them into parts. What makes it even more annoying is the way that partners have no time limits, yet it’s practically impossible to become one. And even more annoying is the fact that old Director account from back in 2006 still have unlimited time uploads because of the grandfather clause from back then – and if I had known this back in 2006 I would have tried getting it…

So either way, to avoid too much fancy editing and whatnot, I just decided to take the circa 160 minutes of footage and split it at every eleven minute mark, before spending the entire day rendering them before uploading them. The results are seen in this video below:

Seriously, fuck that. I edit them to the exact frame (and yes, I had the quantize to frames setting on, so it really was to the exact damn frame!) and YouTube’s processing thinks it’s 11:01, and rejects the video for that. Go fuck right off…

I really wish that I could just pack up and move to another video sharing service, but the problems with other places are also prevalent. Vimeo doesn’t allow gaming videos and has upload limits I’d surpass in a single video unless you pay them, for example. Plus, I’d have to re-establish myself there, even though I already have a bunch-load of subscribers, comments and views on YouTube.

I wish the engineers or admins behind the scenes would actually get up off their asses, look into the community and take note that many people wouldn’t mind being burdened by stupid restrictions such as these. Sure they upped the file size limit to 2GB, but I’d never use that in 11 minutes even if I tried. Recording on my camcorder at full 1080p with maxed settings – I still get over two hours of footage onto my 16GB card, which is about 15 minutes for two gigs.

Well OK, one major exception to this would have to be raw FRAPS footage. That eats up four gigs every two minutes or so…

But still, I’m rather pissed off at how I’ve lost an entire day rendering only for it to be made useless by a processing bug. Fuck this shit. Now I have to spend the entirety of today re-rendering everything, and I can’t play any games while doing so because Vegas takes up nearly all my CPU…

So it started off with Major Nelson doing another one of his free code giveaway puzzle things, which in this instance was a code disguised in the form of Xbox 360 lights set in such a way as they resembled semaphore flags.

Now the astute person will notice that this is a 31-signal code, which is longer than the 25-character codes used on Xbox Live. Out of those 31 signals, seven of them are “number” signals, meaning the next signal represents a number.

“But wait”, I hear you saying. “That makes 24 characters”. Right, there were only 24 characters posted, and there was quite a bit of debate over where the missing character was. Despite that, Major Nelson announced around 12:36am BST that the code had been won. I was sitting there on the Xbox.com “Redeem Code” page waiting to hear what the story was when I read that.

So after that I started checking the Twitter search for @majornelson, and I had a look at the profile of the person he said came up with the puzzle: Laura Massey. After a little bit of refreshing, I noticed Laura was replying to other people who had replied to her stating their confusion with the presence of only 24 characters. Eventually though, I noticed a reply of hers to someone, where she specifically mentioned “I forgot the G after the two 9′s”. (That tweet has since been deleted.)

I then decided to give it a whack, fully expecting to see that someone else had somehow managed to randomly suss it out.

Instead I got this:

Yea, you get what I mean.

Now I just need a damn working 360 so I can play in the Halo Reach Beta…

It really doesn’t help when I have a pretty good Raptr rank achievement-wise either…

Starting this week is the RedBrick Halloween Intersocs Ball thingy. Tbh I’m really not sure what point there is to it other than to go to a bar, get buy one get one free drinks all night, and have an excuse to wear your Halloween costume again. None of which really helps me since I don’t drink, generally go to bars unless they serve good food (like the nuBar!), nor did I have a Haloween costume, since I laid low this year. Well, technically I could go in the costume that I’m planning for…

Eirtakon – the weekend after next. Otaku and other anime, manga, and possibly video game nerds congregating in the Hub to do what we would usually do, parading around pretending to be people we’re not, and making the place smell so bad that everyone will notice it on Monday morning

I’ll hopefully be there for the whole weekend, or at least that’s what my pre-registration ticket is saying to me. I actually found it a little scary that my reference number was number seven, and I’m not even a bigger nerd than some of those who frequent the Eirtaku forums, and IRC channel that I always lurk in when I even get the chance to connect because the server the channel is on doesn’t like so many connections from Redbrick at the same time… No matter what, I’ll be going as Hibiki from Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, even if my costume is half-assed and nowhere near as accurate as some people have managed to do.

Please no glomping, as I may be carrying my laptop in that bag, as well as having my DS in one hand playing some Pokémon game, and my internet tablet in the other tweeting my way through the con via LapLan. That is, if they keep LapLan on. They better fucking keep LapLan on, else I’m breaking into either Clubs and Socs or the Mezz and then tweeting my way through.

Then the weekend after that again is the Games Soc BYOPC LAN, which will be the first one I’ll have attended with an actual desktop computer of mine that can actually run Source! Sure, it’s not going to be the most blinged out thing there (I’m looking at you, you Alienware-purchasing knobheads), but at least it’s something half-decent. Don’t expect much tweeting as I’ll be too busy gaming

And finally in the last weekend of the month, several of us from Games Soc are going to Video Games Live. It will be epic. Maybe I’ll se some of you there, provided you’re going on the 29th?

Anyway, I’m off to go source out a supplier of very cheap energy drink, since I’m going to need a hell of a lot of it to keep me awake this month…