xeer2000 – Page 56 – Something Odd!

Xbox 360 through HDMI to DVI

My female HDMI to male DVI-D connector arrived this morning. I’m still waiting on the Xbox HDMI cable and the PS3 component cables. The seller must have felt guilty about charging me so much for shipping that he gave me 3 plugs!

I grabbed a HDMI cable from downstairs and plugged the Xbox 360 into it, and the other end into the DVI-D port on my Dell 2405 LCD monitor. It reset to 640×480 resolution first, but I quickly bumped that up to 1920×1080. Picture quality is ok but nothing to write home about. The screen is a little dark which I had read about on forums. Brightening the screen helped as did setting the brightness in Battlefield Bad Company 2 but it still looked rather dull. It’s impossible to change the contrast which would certainly have helped.

I fired up BC2, and lo and behold, the screen stayed in 1920×1080! I’ve attached a gallery of shots from the game below. Unfortunately the camera lies and brightened up the screen. The dashboard shot is more representative of what it looks like and that was darkened by 2 stops!

I tried the PS3 through the HDMI to DVI-D connector too, but all I got was a black screen with a slightly less black square in the middle. Thanks HDCP in action there. The PS3 won’t even show the desktop or games without it and of course my monitor doesn’t have it. I really need to just get a new one with a HDMI port don’t I? Any recommendations? It has to be used as a PC monitor too.

As a bonus, do you know who this character is? You’ll really be showing your retro credentials if you recognise him!
Who is this fire breathing creature?

I added this 24 inch monitor to my Amazon wishlist. You never know, some kindly soul who uses my plugins may decide to treat me! 🙂

So, last night’s gameplay was a game of…

So, last night’s gameplay was a game of two halves. I lucked out joining a reasonably good squad by myself. We lost the first game, but won the next two defending. Dave joined me during the second game where I defended the town in Arica Harbour with a tank. Only got 6 kills in that game but plenty of spot assists and kill assists.
We defended on Port Valdez and held off the opposition on the first base to a win too!

At the end of that game Geoff pinged us so we squaded up with him and a friend, joined a game attacking Arica Harbour but then HyperMole joined so we all left the squad. Apparently non squad members can all talk together! I never realised this as NOBODY uses mics, let alone people not in squads. That didn’t last long though as the spawn point is so far away. Dave and myself squaded up and the others formed a squad too. I should have figured out at this stage that Dave and myself would be better off playing against a team matched to our skill level but you live and learn.

Unfortunately the next few games didn’t go so well. We lost attacking Arica Harbour on the last base, and then while defending on the same map lost again. A nemesis is a player who kills you 5 times. I had two of them. I did get a payback pin though, and Dave, “the knife ninja”, got one of their dog tags!

Even though we lost a few times my W/L ratio jumped up by 0.04, and my skill rating almost doubled. My KDR took a dive by 0.01% unfortunately but this proves that the skill rating depends on the skill level of those you kill. We were definitely matched against a great team, well beyond my abilities anyway. The more you kill higher skill level players the higher your skill level goes. The opposite is true too so all my deaths didn’t contribute much to their skill level. 🙂

I leveled up to 13, unlocked the final medic gun, unlock ALT fire too and I’m about halfway to 14. Looking forward to trying out magnum ammo.

Bad Company 2 8 killstreak

MILEYCYRUSTHEVIRUS does a lot of things right in this video:

He reloads in cover
He flanked 3 opposing players and took them out starting with the one at the back
He jumped and dodged out of the way
He doesn’t look down the sights for close range kills.

The sensitivity of his controller is definitely a lot higher than mine is. I couldn’t spin around and move as fast as he is without sacrificing all attempts at aiming.

How not to be seen in Bad Company 2

With help from the Monty Python crew. (via)

Modern Warfare 2 spec ops is great fun w…

Modern Warfare 2 spec ops is great fun when you have friends and family over. MW2 multiplayer may have it’s problems but today all my family and in-laws were over to celebrate my son’s birthday. A few games of spec ops was called for with so many games players in the house! 🙂

On the bridge level I beat my personal best with a time of 5:17 which is probably crap but I’m not being overly competitive when I play those games. Great day, great fun, great people, great chocolate and raspberry cakes from Heaven’s Cakes!

I dodged a roadkill death last night in …

I dodged a roadkill death last night in Battlefield Bad Company 2. As a defender I was shooting at a UAV from afar when I ran low on ammo for the M60. I ducked behind cover to reload and something made me look around while doing so. There was the UAV hovering by my shoulder!
In a panic I switched weapons and unfortunately only darted the vehicle (30 points, thank you!), switched back to my LMG and with a few bullets left in the gun destroyed the ~~flying bug~~ UAV!

Dave and myself played a few games of Battlefield Bad Company last night. They were very tough. We need more PS3 players to join us in our squad as the two of us are definitely at a disadvantage. As attackers in one game we just barely managed to take the base with about 7 tickets left. In another game on Isla we defended but were totally overrun on all but the very last base.

On Arica Harbour we had some fun attacking the second bases. We spawned just as other squads in our teams took the tanks so Dave got into one of the light transports and I hopped on the gun. We raced down to Alpha in the town where we tried unsuccessfully to blow the door on that crate with grenades. We failed miserably. Dave shouted, “Let’s go for Bravo!” and we dashed across the road. He set the charge and we raced upstairs, I stayed at the top of the stairs with my sights on the crate and sure enough about 4 enemy soldiers came in to defuse the bomb. None of them managed it and we got Bravo! We eventually got Alpha and I think won that game.

My KDR is nothing to write home about but my win/loss ratio has crept back up to 1.00 which I’m happy about.

PS. I just remembered. My brother in law Mike had a go of the multiplayer game earlier and while his team won the game his KDR didn’t help my stats! I’m partly to blame though, I kept telling him, press B, press B, press B when he was using a PS3 controller … In other news, I lost the game I joined when I was showing him the ropes. I was fuming when I got into an Apache helicopter, shouted at my squad to come back and join me and I didn’t hear a peep from them. Someone from another squad got in with me!

X Scorch 360 Review

Joystiq reviewed the X Scorch 360 I mentioned previously. It’s a mouse and nunchuck device you can use with the Xbox 360 (or PC) that takes the place of the Xbox controller. I would dearly love if consoles support mice and keyboards as gaming devices so I had high hopes for this.

They weren’t too happy with it unfortunately.

The frustrating thing about the X Scorch from Bannco is how close the odd split-controller and mouse combo comes to being really great. As you’ll see in the video, though, the controller, compatible with Xbox 360 and PC, is all but impossible to recommend at $79.99.

Read the comments on the review however, lots of the settings are configurable on a PC so perhaps they’ll do a follow up review.

I’m all excited about Halo again. http:…

I’m all excited about Halo again.

I thought that Halo ODST was a pile of pooh. I enjoyed the campaign in Halo 3 but never played either game multiplayer which appears to be where these games really shine. Shame about ODST but Halo Reach and all it’s game modes and match making could rock online play. Watch the vide above and you too may become as enthusiastic as Anthony is for the new Halo game.

Now I’m glad I got ODST, it has an invite to the beta. 🙂

Way of the Exploding Grenade

When you’re just not up to playing Bad Company 2 online, fire up the single player game and start the first mission again. In that square where you first come across an enemy tank there are 2 ammo refills.

When you’ve taken care of the tank and accompanying infantry there’s something very relaxing and soothing about blasting seven shades of sh*te out of the surrounding buildings with a 40mm grenade launcher.
With a little patience you can earn a demolition trophy for the first house and then wander around as you do your best to demolish all the other overpriced housing nobody wants to buy because there’s a recession going on..

Oh, there’s another trophy for destroying 50 buildings but that might take a while.

Smoking kills, I should know because I k…

Smoking kills, I should know because I killed an enemy in Bad Company 2 with a smoke grenade. Bet he was surprised!

Tough battles tonight. The other team were well organised and we lost 3 and won 1. Or maybe we were just crap? I doubt it because we got best squad at least once and we were top or near top of the leaderboard too.

Thanks to Dave, CavScout and RunAwayPancake for all their excellent team work. I stayed on way too long! Half an hour, that’s all I was going to play. Two hours later …

I did unlock the recon motion sensor, the MP-412 and the advanced optics for the tank, received the “Squad Teamwork Ops” award though. In a brief game on the Xbox earlier in the evening I unlocked the mortar and had the good luck to join a game on the winning side!