Xbox Kinect was shown off earlier today at a local shopping center. Quite a bit of interest, I was impressed but not impressed enough to buy it!
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Bad Company 2 Rush: Arica Harbor
Duck and myself joined a game of Bad Company 2 rush on Arica Harbor only to lose the first base after a few short moments. Watch as I play havoc with the enemy tanks and get revenge! 🙂
COD Black Ops: GRID TDM
Watch me get killed over and and over, and occasionally kill enemy players in this game of Bad C Call of Duty Bad Company Black Ops. I’m so used to playing Bad Company it’s second nature to write it!
Anyway, this was my 3rd game of Black Ops. In my very first game I managed 1 kill and died several times, second game on Havana was a blast and I did a bit better, and here I did ok, not brilliantly, but ok.
In a recent video Colin bemoaned the fact that he was getting a low 2+ KDR in the game and I wonder what good games are like for him! When I go positive I break out the Champagne!
Thanks Mike for playing, and wish I’d known that was really you in the earlier combat training game!
Next video will be Bad Company 2, and I have lots more footage and great clips to post from that!
Well, two rubbish games of rush on Isla,…
Well, two rubbish games of rush on Isla, and one decent game of Conquest where we slaughtered the opposition. Good night of gaming! 🙂
Next time I’m playing I’m heading to Atacama Desert. I totally forgot about Nick’s video describing a very successful strategy for piloting the Hind on that level. Hopefully I do better than the last time where I flipped it within seconds of taking off. Yes, yes, I have it recorded. So does Duck. Oops.
Black Ops will probably arrive tomorrow so may fire that up in the evening for a game or two. I can’t believe it sold even more than Modern Warfare 2 on it’s first day. Activision are just raking in the money with that franchise, no matter who develops it.
Hanging out with Crate Bashers
This is how Nick discourages C4/UAV bombing of the MCOM stations!
I’ve got a funny UAV clip to upload, one with Duck in it. You guys will enjoy it. Pity the team chat wasn’t recorded though as it was hilarious! 🙂
For Halloween DICE should have modified …
For Halloween DICE should have modified the Bad Company 2 killcam so the enemy player had a huge evil grin on his face. Maybe next year. DICE! Are you listening? These are the important things!
That thought occurred to me as I watched a game from the other night where I got a shed load of points for AT mine tank kills. I was grinning from ear to ear in reality! 🙂
While everyone else is playing Black Ops…
While everyone else is playing Black Ops (seriously, 7 friends online and they’re all playing it!) myself and Duck had some kick ass games of Bad Company 2. We didn’t always win, but some hard fought games were had. I’m sure I have some some good clips to dig through over the next few days! 🙂
Yes, I am getting Black Ops, on PS3. It’ll arrive in the next day or so I expect, but what am I really excited about? The new Bad Company 2 map pack and Vietnam Expansion.
The video recording software I use, HDPVRCapture has been updated, and while the homepage hasn’t been updated I was most excited about “Added support for infinite recording time” that appeared in the changelog. I presumed it was like a FIFO buffer but there’s no sign of that or documentation describing it so who knows?
Parents should parent
I know a good few dads (and maybe one or two moms) read this blog, and they play video games after their offspring has gone to bed so I thought this Penny Arcade article would be of interest.
The cartoon that goes with it is a blast too, and rings a bell with me as I’ve watched my son play through yet another level of Little Big Planet (although to be fair, he plays it in the evening when it’s too cold or dark to go out anyway).
I wonder if he’d enjoy Minecraft. Building worlds and blowing up worlds would appeal to him I’m sure. He already wants to to get an electronics kit he spotted in Maplins. A kit that he’s a bit too young for, but the little boy in me wants to get it for him too, just so I can play with resisters, capacitors and diodes again. 🙂
Good Riddance Modern Warfare 2
WP Super Cache and mod_pagespeed
So I finally got a chance to try mod_pagespeed on this server. I particularly wanted to know if it behaved well with WP Super Cache as I’d read reports that it causes problems.
Unfortunately those problems are real but I’ve been told that a new release will be out shortly to address a few bugs so perhaps this will help.
If you’d like to try mod_pagespeed make sure you disable compression in WP Super Cache and clear the cache first. Even though the docs state that the module always generates uncompressed HTML it appears to do the opposite. In fact, it tries to load mod_deflate:
# more pagespeed.load
LoadModule pagespeed_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_pagespeed.so# Only attempt to load mod_deflate if it hasn’t been loaded already.
<IfModule !mod_deflate.c>
LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
</IfModule>
When things were working, supercached files were processed by mod_pagespeed correctly, I noticed inline Javascript was modified to remove whitespace and I presume other changes were made too but I already minify things and have static files off on another domain so perhaps the changes made on my pages are less minimal.
The changes made by mod_pagespeed, like minifying inline Javascript, are not cached by WP Super Cache so your server has to make these changes each time a page is served. I know that mod_deflate does not cache the gzipped page content, but zips up the page each time it’s served. Mod_pagespeed does however provide a caching mechanism so there’s a good chance those changes are cached there. I haven’t looked at the code so I don’t know.
I did have problems with dynamic pages. A simple phpinfo() refused to load quite often, and backend requests sometimes became stuck. Load on the server sky rocketed occasionally, usually when the module cache directory was emptied.
For now I’ve turned mod_pagespeed off but that might change as this is a young project and maturing fast! I’ll update this post whenever this happens.