Archive for the ‘Cool’ Category
Soup up your Prius, the easy way!
Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 10:09 Written by Enki Wednesday, 11 April 2012 10:09
Ever feel slight jealously after buying your Prius and pulling up next to a supercar? Well feel that way no more! A simple app can fix the issue; take a look at the test drive!
Countdown to Mass Effect 3
Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 03:35 Written by servbot_kill Monday, 5 March 2012 05:53
So there’s been a crapload of stuff going around about the upcoming release of Mass Effect 3, but none as crazy as the apparent War of the Worlds-type shit going on at @AllianceNewsNet on Twitter. It just started updating regularly since this morning (a little before noon on the east coast of the USA) with messages ostensibly from reporter Emily Wong, who you might remember helping out on a couple of investigative journalism quests from ME1. Apparently, shit’s gone south in Los Angeles as the Reaper invasion has *just* hit there, and the FTL communications buoy blackout a week before (on Twitter, literally about a week) results in her having to communicate via a consumer-grade (I guess) quantum entanglement communicator that, being crappy and not at all like the Illusive Man’s resources, limits her to Twitter.
This is a social networking campaign in action, folks. Save this for a case study.
Anyways, the latest tweets (as of 5:54 pm EST) detail the intrepid Ms. Wong and a UCLA researcher testing out a Reaper weapon recovered from a corpse. What it is, I don’t know, but are we perhaps talking hints of DLC weaponry already?
Tags: Mass Effect 3, oh god not my face, release day, Twitter, War of the Worlds | Posted under Cool, Games, News | No Comments
DICE 2012: Skyrim Mod/DLC Teaser
Last Updated on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 11:50 Written by servbot_kill Tuesday, 14 February 2012 11:50
If you thought Skyrim was a wonderful game, you’re in good company. If you thought Skyrim was a bit of a hollow experience, you’re also in good company with many of Skyrim’s detractors. You could be a part of both camps, in which case it probably means you’re playing, but wish there was more in it. Like it didn’t feel quite… complete.
This teaser, taken from Todd Howard’s DICE 2012 keynote, generally proves you right.
Here’s a good summary of the video at Skyrim Nexus, though you should allow for the servers being crushed under the weight of new Skyrim mods coming out of the CK.
Skyrim mod streamlines gameplay, wears out nerd vocal cords
Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 08:47 Written by servbot_kill Thursday, 19 January 2012 02:55
I don’t know about you, but playing Skyrim, I hardly ever used the Dragon Shouts given that they were a third layer of powers after inherent racial powers and magic– the menus to sort through, even with mods installed, broke action far too long and often for me to use them enough, not to mention the hard-coded global shout cooldown timer which, depending on which Shout you used beforehand, took your Voice out for the length of the entire fight. It was nice, but ultimately a story-related contrivance that had little impact on gameplay.
Enter DeadlyAzuril and PsychoHampster on Skyrimnexus.com.
Their mod: Thu’umic, Real-Life Dragon Shouts, relies on your PC microphone and a neat bit of voice-recognition tech to pick through your utterances, normally guttural, but in the case of the Thu’um cleanly enunciated and with vigor, to find the Words of Power necessary to set someone’s face on fire or toss thousands of goats off of a mountaintop. The result is quite striking. After you train the voice recognition software and to an extent your own voice for a while, the process gets surprisingly intuitive and responsive, allowing you to trigger a Shout effect in the middle of combat and keep moving, where at least on the PC version this gets difficult to do given the demand for your fingers on WASD and then mashing Z.
Now, actually learning the syllables involved in the Dragon tongue is a necessity (not unremedied by a cheatsheet, mind you, but still faster memorized), and the satisfaction of actually screaming FUS RO DAH to knock someone off of a cliff is pretty hard to beat.
Suggested modifications: removing the hard-coded Shout cooldown by fiddling with the console. This ensures that the only realistic limits on the poewr of the Thu’um are your aim, the endurance of your vocal cords and the electricity surging into your machine.
The mod is also tagged as “100% FREE,” which, as a mod by a third-party author, would make sense since they’re not legally allowed to sell it without express authorization by Bethsoft. Whatever the case, you’d be crazy not to at least try this mod once… just make sure it’s a private environment you have to make a fool of yourself in. Or a very public one. No such thing as too public.
UPDATE: One funny side effect of having tried this mod; if you sneeze while playing, you will knock someone off of a cliff. It’s hilarious.
Tags: Microphone, mods, shouts, Skyrim, voice recognition | Posted under Cool, Games | No Comments
Steve Jobs Collectible
Last Updated on Friday, 6 January 2012 10:19 Written by Enki Friday, 6 January 2012 10:19
Yet another tribute to the late Steve Jobs, a collectible figurine!
That’s a photo of the collectible itself, from inicons.com,
Tags: collectible, Steve Jobs | Posted under Cool, Deals | No Comments