EXTEEL

The name of the game is Exteel(Official Site Here), it's from NC Soft, it's a massively multiplayer online third person shooter, and best of all, it's free. It's based on some kind of war between machines or something. I've never bothered to read up on the story behind it so I can't tell you what it's about. It does remind me a lot of Gundam, and that's why my call name in game is ZakuIIS.

The controls are simple, WASD to move, space to jump, double-tap a movement key to do a dash, R to change between your two weapon sets, the mouse to change the camera angles and view, and the left and right mouse buttons to shoot/slash/block depending on what kind of equipment you're using. Nice and simple controls, I wish every game would be like that. There are levels and ranks in the game. I'm guessing the military rank is just for show, and your level lets you upgrade some stats like health, speed, armor, aim, and other abilities. You start with a basic unit, or mobile suit as I like to imagine them, and can either buy new separate parts such as head, arms, legs, etc. or if you save up enough credits you can buy a full set of armor for your whole body. Then come the equipment which includes pistols, sub machine guns, rifles, long range rocket/grenade launchers, swords, shields, healing guns, under-arm blades, and these things that look like those jousting pikes. After the weapons you get the extras which are just different paint jobs, faster respawn charges, and repair kits.

After I stopped playing about a month or two ago, and coming back just yesterday, the game hasn't improved that much, but there are some new things that they've added. A few new weapons and paint jobs were added, and a lot of the equipment that you had to use NCCoins(the game's micro payment option to enhance your gaming experience) to buy has been released so you can purchase it with credit you gain in the game. A new game mode, Capture the Flag, has also been added and after a few rounds of playing it myself I think they worked it out well.

All in all, if you like Gundam and fast paced Third Person Shooters, you should definitely check out Exteel. If I had to rate this, I would give it an 8.5/10, only because I think they should have added some more armor types and weapons to the game.

Infinity Online (Gameplay)

Infinity Online is an action style Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or MMORPG for short. If you take some time to look at the video you'll get to see how badass this game looks. The minute I saw this I just wanted to download, install, and start tearing this shit up, so I did. The only problem is, common with a lot of other kick-ass MMORPG's out there, the game is not available to North America. What kind of bullshit is that? I really don't get it, why do they have to block us from playing it? If I really wanted to I could probably change my IP and use a tunneling service to play it, but I'm too lazy to do that and playing with that tends to lag up the game a lot.

The minute it hits North America, my ass in on that game so I can soon come to the realization that they totally fucked us over and gave us the first version of the game which sucks balls while everyone else gets the newest badass version to play. This happened with a game I thought was great, just like this game. It was called Cabal Online. The videos looked oh-so-awesome, but when it finally came to America, half the stuff shown in the videos was missing. It's a load of bullshit, but I guess that's what happens when a game is free and foreign. Well that's all I have to say, have fun and enjoy the video because that's probably the closest we'll ever get to playing that Infinity Online.

【デスノート】ネイティブ松田ぁああああ【ネイティブフェイス】

This is one of many examples of why Youtube is one of the greatest websites known to man, right next to Google of course. What a great song don't you think? After going through a few of these I've come to the conclusion that they are created by a person called Nico Nico, but that's all the info I have so far.

And yes, I put the video on auto-play so it can torture you as soon as you see it. One last thing before I leave you alone with this masterpiece, what is the anime series called featured in the video? Thanks and enjoy!

I just found out that the Anime that this is from is Death Note. I should have know, how silly of me... And I just turned off autoplay because it was getting too annoying.

Vista "Cancel or Allow" & HDD Issues

I've always heard about how bad Windows Vista was since it first came out. I always figured that there was no need to get Vista, and with all those complaints about all those Vista problems, who would actually buy it? Well aside from all the complaints people were raising, the cool new aero effects looked pretty nice, but then again visual effects like that do tend to slow your computer's performance down and this was probably the case for most people getting Vista on their decently old computers. I was perfectly happy with Windows XP, but now all the new computer come with Vista pre-installed and after buying a brand new kick ass machine, I figured I might as well leave Vista on it and get used to it. It's not so bad, and I heard Vista Service Pack 1 fixed most of the problems people were running into. Since this is a new machine, I can keep all the cool Vista effects running without having to worry about performance issues as well. It's a win-win game right? Not really. I have run into some problems after about a month's use of Windows Vista and I'll talk about them here and give you some solutions that I found for them.

The first major annoyance is what gives Mac users their little hard-ons every time they see it pop-up on a Windows Vista computer. Yes, you guessed it, the "Cancel or Allow" security feature that Vista comes with. It was designed to protect us from unauthorized programs from staring up and performing tasks by themselves if Vista doesn't recognize them. Every time such an action would occur, your screen goes dim and an alert window like the one above would appear and you would have to choose if you want to allow to program to go ahead and do what it has to do, or cancel it and block it from running. It's a nice security add-on, but the way it works on Vista is just a major nuisance. You get an alert window for every little thing that you try to run. You like to download music, pictures, games, or anything else right? Well guess what pops up every time you try to download something? Yea, you guessed it, "Cancel or Allow". If I had to rate this feature on an annoyance scale of 1-10, I would give it a 10 without hesitation. After a few days of putting up with this, I found a way to turn it off by mistake. I needed to find a solution to play a MMORPG and this was one of the solution, and what do you know, it actually worked. No more alert windows ever again. To get rid of this alert, you'll have to disable the User Account Control (UAC). It'll make your system less secure, but a hell lot less of a nuisance. Here is a nice simple guide on how to disable the UAC, click here.

The second thing I've noticed on my new computer ever since I got it was that every day a few gigabytes(GB) of memory would randomly disapear. After about a month of using this computer, I had about 100GB of space used up on my drive and I had no idea why the usage was that high. I have downloaded games, music, pictures, and other things, but my memory usage for all of those things would be 10GB max. I was confused as hell and tried running a tool that came with my computer that checks for Hard Disk Errors and fixes them. After running the tool and about an hour and a half of waiting, it was able to free up about 9GB of space, but I still had a lot of space missing. So I decided to just my friend Mr. Google to find out what the deal was and I came to find out Vista's System Restore feature was eating up loads of my space to create restore points. The worst part is, it creates them automatically almost every day and it doesn't even let you know that it's doing it. This is not really a bad thing because if something messes up and you need to restore to an earlier time, you'll have it up and running. I also found out that Vista's default settings are set to use up to 15% of your hard drive's space for its restore points. I have a ~500GB Hard Drive, and I found out that Vista was using up about 75GB to create restore points on my HDD. To free up that space, I simply deleted the restore points that were created and regained all of that wonderful space back.

This is how I deleted the restore points if anyone wants to know:

1. Go to "My Computer"

2. Right click on "C:" or your main Hard Drive which is "C:" by default.

3. Click on Properties

4. Under the "General" tab by the pie chart of your C: Drive click Disk Cleanup

5. Wait for it to finish scanning

6. Click on the "More Options" tab

7. Under "System Restore and Shadow Copies" click the "Clean up..." button

8. Hit delete and you're done

That's how to delete the restore points and free up all of that space, but now you have to change the amount of Disk Space that you want to allow System Restore to use to create its restore points. I changed mine from allowing the max amount of space (~75GB) to only allowing it to use up 5GB of space to create the restore points. Here is a simple tutorial on how to configure this amount, click here to view it. All in all, the less space you give it will lower the amount of restore points you have when you have to do a system restore, but if you know what you're doing on your computer and don't run around downloading everything you see, you won't have to use the System Restore option that often.

I hope this helps someone with these issues, and if it does leave a comment to say thanks.

CAPTCHA Codes

CAPTCHA codes have been implemented into various websites for security reason, the main one being to stop bots, or automated programs, from performing various tasks like creating multiple accounts, positing multiple times, or trying to login to an account multiple times. This all seems like a good reason to have CAPTCHA codes in use, but the bottom line is CAPTCHA codes are just a plain old dick to have anywhere.

Here are a few examples of how annoying these things can be. Myspace has now implemented these codes all over their site to prevent bots from doing such things as message people, edit profile and group settings, and even post comments. It's cool and all having these to block out bots that spam, but if when can't send a simple message to a friend without having to enter some random word into a box so Myspace can make sure I'm not a bot really pisses me off. Now every time I have to make a change to my layout on a group forum on Myspace, I have to enter some randomly generated text into a box. And since the way Myspace is coded, I have to code my layout through their editor and having to guess and test different positionings of my layout and having to go through the CAPTCHA code every time is just a pain in the ass. Seriously, why would you put this security measure on the editing options? If someone were to hack into my Myspace, which will never happen, and wanted to mess with my layout, they can easily enter the CAPTCHA code in once, delete my whole code, and save it. CAPTCHA is just a waste of the "human" user's time and the "robots" can easily get past them if they wanted to.

It's not just Myspace, Facebook has these shits all over the place too, but it removes them after certain amount of time. If I wanted to setup a bot to add a million users on Facebook by itself it would be pretty easy. First you'd have to add about a hundred users by hand yourself and go through all their CAPTCHA crap a hundred times. After you do that about a hundred times they'll think you're a "human" user and stop giving you the CAPTCHA code to enter so all you have to do now is setup that bot and spam away! Of course I haven't tried using any bots on Facebook yet so I wouldn't know if they have any other security measures, but from I've seen there shouldn't be a problem at getting a bot to work on their site with any big difficulties.

If there's a CAPTCHA code you have to fill in order to sign into an account, the site developers need to seriously learn how to run things differently. The main reason that that CAPTCHA was placed there was to probably stop people from setting up a bot to try to log into your account multiple times. There's a simple solution to this, ban the guy's IP or something after five failed attempts or so. If he's the real owner of the account, there should be a "I forgot my password, please email it to me" link close by that he can use to retrieve his forgotten password.

CAPTCHA codes would be less annoying if they actually give you a word in plain and legible text to type in the box, but most are nothing like that. Many will have weird lines and shapes floating over the text to make sure that you're a "human" and I've seen some on Rapidshare that have cats and dogs hiding in the letters and you have to only enter the letters with the dogs, not the cats. This is probably the most annoying CAPTCHA code I've ran into. Seriously cats and dogs? The cats look just like the fucking dogs and every time you enter it in wrong it seems like they give you a new one that is a lot more difficult to read and pick out than the last one. After a good fifteen tries I finally was able to get it right and finally download my file. Those cAsE-sEnSeTiVe CAPTCHA codes were nothing compared to this abomination.

The bottom line is CAPTCHA codes are a waste of time and space. If you see a CAPTCHA code on a website, post it up here in a comment so I can check it out and maybe write a complaint to the site's tech support center.

Logitech G5 Laser Mouse

I've been using a Logitech G5 Laser Mouse for a few months now, I would say maybe four to five if I had to put a number on it. Anyway, this mouse is a pretty nice mouse and can handle a lot of clicks. It is wired, but then again I prefer wired because this way you won't have to worry about the wireless connection cutting out or your mouse running out of battery. Now let's review some of its features.

It is a laser mouse, not a ball mouse so it is more precise when you drag it around and can be used on any surface unlike the ball mice which really need mouse pads or else they are not as effective. It has extra buttons on the side which you can customize to perform different tasks with the software that comes with the product. It also has three default modes of speed you can choose, and if you have the software installed you can create up to five custom speeds. It has a scroll wheel as well which is pretty nifty. If the speeds aren't enough, you can also slip a weight cartridge into the mouse to balance out the weight. This proves useful if you are playing a game and need to add more weight to steady your sniper's scope, or if you need less weight for faster reflexes and reactions times in a fast paced game.

The design is also pretty nice looking, but this is probably the mouse's only flaw. The design is nice, but the rugged skin around the mouse can be a plus or a minus. It can be for better grip, adding to the mouse's grip design, or the feeling of it can just annoy the hell out of you. I must say I was annoyed with the skin the first few days of use, but after a while you'll get used to it. The skin also starts to wear off after a few months of good use, but the laser pointer's performance itself is still in great shape.

NOTE: I wrote this for another site that was supposed to give me $2 for each post, little did I know they stopped doing that a long time ago, so I quit and posted it here so they can ban me for "copyrighted" content or whatever.

Axe Detailer

I really don't understand commercials like these. It looks like they are advertising the whole shower system they have installed here with all the hot chicks in latex suits. If that's what they were selling, I'd buy it, but all they have to offer is a simple two-sided shower scrubber. I haven't bought or tried the Axe Detailer, but I'm sure it not different from any other shower scrubber, except maybe this one is black and you don't see many black scrubbers, well at least I don't. It has two sides, big deal.

Anyway if all that mechanical stuff is supposed to portray the future of taking a shower, it failed. As technology grows everything tends to get easier, and taking a shower through a series of robotic powered mechanisms controlled by women doesn't seem very convenient. Don't get me wrong here, I'd love to take a shower in a place full of women, but I'm saying I'm sure they'll probably invent some kind of spray that you can use to clean yourself in the future instead of actually bathing. If some of you out there are going they already have that, it's called Axe deodorant spray, I hope I never meet you in real life. If you are just going to hide your stench with deodorant instead of taking a shower, just stay away from me.

The Dark Knight: My Review

***This article may contain spoilers.***

I went to see this movie just like any other movie, but not like how everyone else went to see it. There was a huge hype over this movie months before it even opened. There were those Harvey Dent logos and "movements" if you will, around the city advertising the Dark Knight. When the trailers came out people were going crazy over them, especially the Joker. It was unfortunate that the star behind the Joker, Heath Ledger, passed away, but with his last performance as the Joker, I'm sure no one will ever forget how great of an actor he was.

My take on the movie was just like any other movie, I really don't care about it much until I actually go and see it. The heaps of advertising behind it were a waste in my opinion. If the movie is good, and there are fans behind it, they will see it, no need to over do it. I had a friend who was in love with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, and was driving me crazy trying to get me to watch the trailers. I watched the trailers, and to me the performance was nothing special, even if the actor behind it was alive or dead. After actually seeing the movie, my mind has changed. I do forget, trailers only have some of the good scenes in them, not all. I absolutely loved the Joker's character and performance in that movie His performance was enough to drive Batman out of the movie, if anything the main character of the movie was the Joker himself, with his stellar performance and also probably some hype behind the fact that this was Heath Ledger's last movie.

The opening scene of the movie was one of the best scenes there was. It opened up as a bank job led by the Joker and the enviornment made me think to myself, "Hey, this movie looks badass already. It doesn't look like another shitty comic book superhero movie." His strategy of taking out each of the men he hired one by one so he can take all of the shares was genius. The part with the bus bus killing the last of the men was a great addition/ In my opinion that was one of the best openings I've seen in a movie and I felt bad when I saw a family come in the theater right after the opening scene was over knowing that they've missed possibly one of the best scenes of the movie just because they came in a little bit late.

Despite the characters in the movie, the use of gadgets really got to my liking. The Bat-Mobile looked like it was completely redesigned and the motor-bike detachment feature on it was a nice addition. Just the design itself of the vehicle was enough to get to me, but the extra add-ons really blew my mind on how far you can go. That thing looked like a semi-tank, built strong to last long, but sadly that wasn't the case around the end of the movie. As for Batman's armor itself, well I really can't say it was the best I've seen, but decent nonetheless. The timed bombs and grapples were nice too, but I can't say they haven't been overused in a lot of similar movies.

All in all, if you haven't seen this movie yet, go see it and don't ask questions. It was well worth my money, and it was a decently long movie as well. So get out there and see the Dark Knight, and if you've already seen it please take some time to comment on my review. Thanks.

ABC's Wipeout Review

A clip from ABC's Wipeout


The Background:

Wipeout is a recently new reality TV show on ABC. Every episode starts out with two dozen contestants who are all looking to win the grand prize of $50,000, but they must first conquer a set number of obstacles and only a handful will be able to compete for the money at the very end.

My Thoughts:

Although I enjoy watching out-of-shape Americans desperately trying to make a quick buck on reality gameshows, this show just doesn't beat some of its other competitors out there. I gotta say the two hosts and their side comments can be pretty funny at times and some of the contestants act like clowns and little girls, but I would much rather enjoy one of the other challenge based shows that are out there.

For starters, you can take a look at Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, MXC, that usually airs on SpikeTV. This show is very similar to Wipeout, but I do not believe the players are playing for any cash prizes, but I could be wrong. Anyway this show can have anywhere up to hundreds of contestants and the way the show lays it out has them split into two teams. The challengers and hosts are all Asian, and I'm sure MXC is just the American version with its own voice-overs and scoring. The show will stage something like the Computer Programming Team vs the Construction Worker Team, or anything random to that extent and the hosts will make funny side comments about the contestant's actions and "wipeouts" during the show just like in ABC's Wipeout. I find this show's obstacle course much more challenging and funnier than that of Wipeout's. If I had to sum it up any simpler, I would say Wipeout makes up all of their obstacles up last minute. If you look at the courses in Wipeout since the first episode that aired, not much has changed, maybe they put some foam on that slide in the last level or changed a jump in the first level, but all in all it's pretty much the same everytime and it gets relatively boring.

Another example of a show similar to these is Ninja Warrior that is shown on G4. This show unlike the two previous ones is not all about laughs and people getting dirty, but about physical fitness and glory. Although there is no cash prize at the end, the select winners, or those that successfully complete all three obstacle courses within the alloted time, will get their names published on a trophy or something of the like for being the only few that ever defeated the course. This show starts with over 100 contestants who will all go through the first obstacle course, but only a select few will actually complete it and move on. At the start of the second course there are usually five or six competitors who would have actually made it, and usually one or two get eliminated by the start of the third course. All in all, it's a great show to watch and see what people are truly capable of.

To sum it up, I would watch these other two shows over Wipeout any day. What do you guys think?