My new laptop, and absence!

Well, I finally received my new laptop (a month or probably more ago.. :p) And with it, I've been ignoring pretty much everything except gaming! However, the laptop I previously listed;

The specs of the one I ordered previously are:

CPU: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8700 (2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB, 3 MB L2 cache)

Memory: 4096 MB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM på 1333 MHz [2 x 2048 MB]

Video Card: 1 GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650

Harddrive: To SATA-harddiske (7.200 rpm.) at a combined 1 TB (2 x 500 GB)

OS: Original Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit

Optical devices: Blu-Ray ROM Drive (read/write CD/DVD & read Blu-Ray Disc)

LCD: 17,3" Full-HD (1920 x 1080) LED-screen with TL

Wasn't the one that I actually bought. The one that I did actually buy is this (for the same price as the above one cost):

It's an Acer Aspire 7740G:

Intel Core i7-620M processor (2,66GHz)
6144 MB DDR3 ram
640 GB Sata harddisc 5400 rpm.
Super Multi DVD-Burner
17,3" HD+ CineCrystal Screen
ATI Radeon HD5650 1GB GDDR3, DirectX 11
WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n, LAN 10/100/1000
Webcam, Cardreader, HDMI.
8-cell battery
Windows 7 Home Premium

It has the fourth best available mobile CPU, the 40th best mobile graphics card (and believe me, up until the top 10, there's really no noticeable difference on the graphics, imo anyway)

Sadly it has no blu-ray, which I got a little saddened over - but nevertheless, one day I will own a PS3. :P

It doesn't have the amazing screen the other one had either, but considering the CPU and graphics card - I'd say it was well worth the trade.

As for the list of games I listed previously as well.. Well I haven't tried all of them, and some I have only played for a short while.The list was:

Prototype

Dragon Age

Grand Theft Auto IV

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Crysis

FEAR 2

Dark Sector

Borderlands

Saints Row 2

Star Wars TFO (Heard it's bad? But I'm a major SW Buff, and I'm highly anticipating SWTOR)

Dead Space

Demigod

And well, except for CoD: MW2, Crysis, FEAR 2, Dark Sector, Saints Row  2, and Star Wars TFO, I have tried the others, some more than others.

Prototype: I tried it for an hour or two, I love the sandbox aspect, but not so much the other aspects.

Dragon Age: LOVE IT, haven't had time to finish it, but it is amazing.

GTA IV: Is another of my all-time favorite replay-games, as a sandbox it has endless fun, which prototype comes nowhere near close to having.

I also bought Mass Effect 2 (and did another play through of Mass Effect 1), and I must say - those games were amazing on full graphics! The first game became ten times more amazing (which I thought impossible) than I previously had thought was possible.

Anyway.. I'll possibly do some actual reviews of the games later, but I'm also starting up another blog called CallenTech, which can be found at http://CallenTech.blogspot.com

I don't know how much I will further either of these blogs, if at all, but I love experimenting with my interests like this. At one point I may combine them. It seems like a logical choice to me anyway.

So.. What is Realism Mode? (L4D2)

Well, I've been playing L4D2 for a while now, I read up on the game before buying it, but even until then I was still really stumped on what Realism mode truly was. I tried to read the game's site, here I could not find any substantial information. I tried to google it, and came only to a few hits on different things.

So what is realism mode? Here is the features I could find:

• No player glows, that is, you will not see your team mates glow when they are in another room. If you, or they, run off, they will disappear from your visible sight.

• No item glows, this goes for both weapons and items such as the petrol cans. These items will not glow unless you are practically standing on top of them.

• Common infected takes more damage to the body - but not to the head. If you ever wanted to cut limbs off an infected and still have them walking, then you will want to play realism mode. However, head shots are still able to hurt them quite a bit.

• More witches, yay! So with the 'walking' witches that were introduced in L4D2, you will also face more of them in realism mode. And unlike the normal gameplay modes, witches will kill you in one hit in realism mode.

• No incapacitation. You will not be incapacitated when you loose all your health the first time, no, you will die. But with the defibrilators introduced in L4D2, this is less of a problem.

Dark Carnival Achievements (L4D2)

Three of the Dark Carnival Achievements are actually pretty fun. There is the one with Gnome Chompski, there is the gong, and the wack-a-mole.

They are all pretty simple, and relatively easy to win. (And on a side note, I love it how they got the gnome from HL2 into this :D)

Anyway, here is how I did them:

GUARDIN' GNOME

Resue Gnome Chompski from the carnival.

Gnome Chompski is the first of the mini-games you encounter in Dark Carnival, he's found in Stage 2 at the Peanut Gallery:

Well, this is probably the 'hardest' of them, and I am going to suggest that unless you want a challenge, you play all of them on 'easy'.

First things first. In order to acquire Gnome Chompski, you must beat the Shootin' Range (The so-called 'Peanut Gallery'). And by 'Beat' I mean score 750+ points.

Just for reference; Here is a scoreboard of what gives how many points, it is pretty straight forward really.

 

Once you have scored more than 750, you will be able to pick him up in the box on the left side of the gallery (which was previously locked).

You basically pick him up as you would pick up a petrol can (default key: e), but you have to let go of him when you want to shoot anything, you can shove the infected back, but not hurt them with any substantial damage.

Now it is practically just a matter of run, drop, shoot, pick up, run, drop, shoot, pick up.

The only hard part I came to was the train ride, he was pretty hard to keep track of during that, but honestly, if you just throw him somewhere, you can go back for him. I chose to throw him to the end of the ride though, you can do that when you go upwards the first time, in the beginning of the track.

Some people asked me; 'Does it matter if I hold Chompski when changing stage? Will he disappear if he's lying on the ground?' - And well, my answer is; 'No, it doesn't matter. I've tested it.'

However, when you get to the final stage (stage 5 - Rescue), I advise you to place Chompski where the Helicopter lands. Which can be seen here:

The helicopter lands above the arch where you enter, just place Chompski somewhere on the stairs before you start the event.

PS: About this particular mini-game, sometimes when you place Chompski down on the ground, he may be thrown or moved around due to Survivor/Infected collisions, he will not disappear from the game (I fear he might, but I have not experienced it myself), so just look for him if he is not where you first threw him.

The next Mini-game you encounter is the gong.

GONG SHOW

Prove you are stronger than Moustachio.

This mini-game (together with the Wack-a-mole mini-game) is found in Stage 4. And is pretty straightforward. You have to hit the plate in order to make the bell fly towards the gong. Once you hit the gong, you win.

Word of advise: Use Adrenaline. You are unable to win this mini-game without it.

The third and final mini-game:

STACHE WACKER

Prove you are faster than Moustachio

This is also quite easy, it is practically, as said, a wack-a-mole game. But as all we have to wack with are our melee weapons, which are swung and not wacked, you can actually just aim at one spot on the board, and hit all 5 holes at once, meaning you will only need to trust your reflexes to hit your 'attack' button.

 (You can see here, that I am aiming for the middle in order to hit them all)

Once you reach 40 hits, you will have won, and the machine crashes. Once it does this, a horde of infected will attack you.

I hope all of this has helped! Good luck, and have fun :D

How to change blog width with Blogger

So I recently came to a certain problem of mine. Pictures were awfully shown here on this blog, half of them were missing, and I couldn't find a way to make the blog expand with them, so I had to go to the next best thing, and change the width of the entire blog.

How I did this was through these simple instructions:

(I would advise backing up your template before doing this, if you feel unsure in changing anything here.)

1) Click 'Layout'
2) Click 'Edit HTML'

(From here on, using CTRL+F to search for certain parts of the HTML part is a good idea)

3) Changed 'Header-wrapper' width to: 820px
4) Changed 'Outer-wrapper' width to: 850px
5) Changed 'Outer-wrapper' Text-Align to: left
6) Changed 'Main-wrapper' width to: 550px
7) Changed 'Main-wrapper' float to: left
8) Changed 'Sidebar-wrapper' width to: 270px
9) Changed 'Sidebar-wrapper' float to: right

For the last step, you need to scroll far down and find one called '#footer'
10) Changed 'footer' width to: 850px


And this was basically how I did it. Doesn't take any HTML knowledge to do.

CR0WND Achievement (L4D)

So.. I decided I'd take a look at the different Achievements, and I came across a funny one, which I thought was impossible - CR0WND - One-shot the witch. G'damn, I thought. But yeah, I figured I'd give it a try.

First order of business, the hunter rifle - what better than a rifle with a scope to take out something in one shot? Well I was wrong. It failed.

Obviously the only other choice was the auto shotgun. It didn't quite do the trick most of the time, but I did manage to get it! And well, I realized later I should have attempted to do this on easy, instead of normal - I'm fairly sure it is impossible on advanced and expert, but if you want to give it a try, be my guest, and do tell me how it goes.

So..
In order to get the CR0WND Achievement - Use the Autoshotgun, on easy, get as close to her as you can, and blow her head off.

F.E.A.R. II

So I came across this picture:

By MrWhitefolks over at Deviantart

And I got kind of thrilled about F.E.A.R. II even more.
I want to play it now.

L4D Multiplayer.

Oh boy, this is probably the first and only thing I'm disappointed with in this game. I've been doing campaigns, versus and survival, and one thing stays the same.

I'm always paired up with godawful idiots. Now, I'm not calling them poor players, but they do run off and shoot their way through everything they want (and die doing it, if they didn't, that'd be sweet, and I'd idolize them), that's campaign.

Versus, well, I'm always on the team where no one but myself does anything, if I'm infected, then my fellow zombies practically do 10 times less .. well whatever that point thing goes for. If I'm a survivor, then my fellow teammates run off or fall behind as always. (I don't run off, but I'm not sitting around for an eternity).

Survivor? I've had some fun in this really, even with the godawful players, but this mode takes some skill I'd say, I've managed to pull off a few gold medals so far, but there are still many many more to go.

I'll probably give L4D2 a wack soon.