Hey guys, so I purchased Sniper: Ghost Warrior for the PC the other day, I did try to get it for the Xbox 360, but there was none left, so I settled for the PC version. Good thing my 360 controller is USB, so i can use it instead of a mouse and keyboard. Anyway, since I have enjoyed it so much, I’ve decided to write a review about it for all of you.

Ok, so I read a review about it before I bought it, and heard some things about it from my mate who works at a local games store too, some of the things people were saying about the game were quite negative, things like; it has bad graphics, environmental glitches, bad gameplay, etc. But I’m here to tell you that these things are not as close to the truth as these people would have you believe.

Story

Ok, to be honest, there really isn’t much of a storyline, but you all saw that coming, didn’t you? I mean, come on, it’s an army/marine/special-ops game, what do you expect? There is a slight story in here, I mean, you do know who you’re killing and why you’re killing them, but aside from that, you don’t really know who you are except that you’re one hell of a shot who has to take down targets for a government establishment.

Gameplay

The gameplay is very good, I don’t care what anyone else says about it. Some people say it’s boring when you’re transitioning between sniper spots, having to infiltrate enemy buildings/camps to get there, but I say no, most of the fun happens when you’re transitioning, having to sneak around can be fun if you know how. I personally like to use my sniper in super close quarters (just as I do in Call of Duty), by no-scoping them or laying down in grass and taking them out after they just walked past you.

Graphics

Some people say the graphics are horrible, but they’re wrong, the graphics are actually quite good, the problem is; it takes a lot of processing power to run the game on it’s highest quality, there-for, slowing the game down and giving you lag. I personally have quite a high-end PC and still had to bring the quality down so it didn’t lag. Other than that, the graphics are amazing, even on the “balanced” quality setting.

Special Stuff

This game has a few cool gadgets and tricks you can do when you’re playing, for example:

Recommendation

I would recommend any avid snipers to buy this game, it is definitely the game for you. I personally use my sniper on Call of Duty: MW2 online all the time, in every situation, that is why I love this game, so if you’re like me, get it, get it right now.

Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoyed my little review and I hope I helped you make your decision. If you’ve played this game and have anything further to add to what I have wrote, put it in the comments and start a friendly discussion.

Also, if you’d like to have a few games with me sometime, I have a Steam Gamertag (which is for the PC) which is MentalGamefreak (Yep, just like my Xbox Live Gamertag). So add me if you want.

Hey guys, Tim here again. This post was started ages ago, but I had to start again because the original idea for it was to write it whilst I was still playing though it and give my thoughts as they came. But unfortunately I ended up finishing the game before I finished the post, so I had rewrite it.

I was really planning to do a long post on this game; it deserves it. But I know not many people love two page posts, and I honestly skip to the end for the conclusion, anyway.  So instead of writing a prologue, ode, episode, ode, and epilogue, let’s just cut the bullshit and dive in.

That Was a Prologue..

Yeah, I know, but it can’t be helped. This isn’t a Greek play, I’ll avoid the odes. You probably won’t like my singing anyway.

I’m going to tell you guys straight up what my thoughts are on this game. Keep in mind I’ve always enjoyed Rockstar’s open world games, even doing stupid shit like off-roading in Limousines in GTA4. But this game will destroy your time with it’s purposefully packed in time wasting crap — not the bad kind either.

Story

First, I’d like to talk about the story. It’s pretty good. Better than GTA4, as I assume it benefits from being under 20 hours long (woot?) and the voice acting is pretty damn good. Several times on missions, after some scumbag’s been getting me to do his dirtywork for a little bit just to get some detail or item out of him, John (main character; you) complains to him in a manly sort of way and dead on tells the guy he’ll kill his sorry ass if he leads him on again. It’s kind of like what I hear Uncharted 2 was like, in the player-protagonist thoughts department.

Back to story, you feel like it’s all believable, you’re a part of it, and you’re a badass. You wipe out whole gangs, rob trains without anybody noticing you, and hunt down your old gang members before they kill you.

Misc. Fun Cosas

The random shit, that’s entertaining. It’s all there. Hunting armadillos to grizzly bears and cougars (cougars are hard, keep an eye out), doing fun missions for strangers (er, “Stranger Missions”), getting challenged to draw-your-gun-first duels, random events, and much more. Personally, I enjoy hogtying whole towns. I loved all of this.

Looks

But is it pretty? Does it sound good? You shallow bastard, don’t be vain and only go by looks! But if you really want to know, this thing’s Megan Fox in a bikini and sounds like pure bliss. Everything’s sharp in 720p for me, runs fine, and textures are high-res. If you’re a PS3 owner, you will have slightly worse graphics than us 360 owners, but that’s because it’s a port. However, everybody I’ve heard play it on PS3 hasn’t whined much, it’s just slightly lower-res textures by a few pixels is all, I hear.

It sound’s amazing with every gunshot sounding fine and great, especially on a Turtle Beach Headset, with great voice acting and tons of unique voices. Horses sound pretty great, too. Along with the other 50 species in the game.

Presentation (Like Menus and Cutscenes)

The menus are similar to GTA4s, listing every stat in the stat panel, brightness/contrast/brightness sliders, full weapon info, challenges, mission logs, and more. Outfits panel, too. 14 outfits total. There’s an in-game weapon wheel, for access without pausing as well. Hey, there’s also dynamite!

All the cut-scenes are pretty well done with good camera angles and I have nothing to complain about, honestly.

The World Is Flat, Right?

No, it’s round. Earth is round. Go to school, and learn to do something like reading while you’re at it.

RDR’s world has open plains, rolling hills, epic vistas, tall cliffs, rugged mountains, rivers (that you can’t swim in :C, but who knew how to swim in 1911?), and just a world I can’t describe without you buying the damn game and experiencing it with me. Here, buy it! It’s great, but if this isn’t for you, I won’t judge., it’s just that you live in a desolate world with people that shake babies and haven’t experienced the joy of baby sloths, but that’s you’re fault, Jesus still loves you, but more so if you buy this game, trust me.

This is An Epilogue

Without pressuring you, I can full-heartedly say this game deserves a buy. I didn’t mention the multiplayer (full free roam, deathmatch, and gang hideout attacks and you can make a posse, or 6-man team) because everybody seems to have they’re own opinion on it. Personally, I preferred GTA’s, but this is also coming from the guy that loves racing games, owns the original Burnout, and is always the driver in any game he plays. And GTA has cars. RDR has horses. It’s that simple.

Any questions about this game, please feel free to comment below, and any tips or critiques you have on my writing you can write below, as well. I love critiques, they make me a better writer.

Hey guys, today I’m going to be showing you a video of an upcomming apple product that was just announced called the ‘iPad’. After you watch the video I will be telling you what I think of it and giving pro’s and con’s etc.

So just watch this and then read what I have to say about the product below.

First Thoughts

So when I first heard that apple were going to be making something like this, I thought “Awesome, I’ll wait a bit to upgrade from my existing laptop” But then I found out what it actually does and how much space it comes with and I thought “So.. it’s basically just a giant iPod Touch?” and yeah, it pretty much is just a larger version of an iPod Touch with a few software updates.

I do like the idea of it but it’s a very poor effort on Apple’s part, I really think they could have easily just made a tablet version of the macbook, all they would have had to do would be have a bigger HDD and used the Mac OS on it instead of a similar version of OS that the Ipod Touch has.

Pro’s

• It’s Cheap. It’s minimum HDD space version is roughly how much it costs for a iPod Touch.
• It’s got a larger screen so you can view your movies and video’s more easily.
• It has the apple stores built right into it so you don’t have to hook it up to your PC to get app’s or songs for it.
• You can buy and read full books straight from the iPad.
• There is the possibility that news paper companies could make Ipad versions of their papers and that would also reduce the ammount of tree’s we have to cut down.
• You could play games easier and you could also see the screen better whilst doing so because your fingers wont take up most of the screen as aposed to the Ipod.
• Longer Lasting Battery (about 10 hours)

Con’s

• It’s basically an iPod Touch.
• It’s not going to fit in your pocket so it’s not very portable
• It can’t run programs that a normal computer can.
• It’s virtual keyboard isn’t life size so you’ll only be able to use 4 fingers so it’s not going to be as natural as using a real keyboard.
• It has no CD/DVD drive.
• It has no Ethernet port so you can’t use a direct link up modem for internet.
• It cannot make phone calls

Final Thoughts

If you already own an iPod Touch or an iPhone, I would strongly recommend sticking with that because you’re better off since you can carry that in your pocket and you won’t be missing out on much anyway. I would only recommend buying one if you either do not already own an iPod Touch (or iPhone) or you are after a bigger screen because you watch movies and youtube alot on your iPod.

I would definitly NOT recommend that you replace your Laptop or Computer with one of these, I would recommend that if you do buy one that you have a computer or laptop to use as your day-to-day workings and use the iPad as a tool to keep you in touch with what’s going on when you’re on the go or if you need to quickly check something online without having to wait for the computer to load.

I hope you enjoyed reading what I think of the Ipad, if you have any of your own thoughts of the Ipad you can put them in the comments section bellow, I’d love to hear what you have to say. Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone. As some of you may know (Most likely if you follow me on twitter), I bought Forza Motorsport 3 for the Xbox 360 a few days ago. So I decided to write a review on it.

I have played and own all three of the Forza games in the series and have found this one to be the most enjoyable, it also has “off-the-wall” graphics and the physics system that is being used now is extreamly advanced, which makes racing all the more realistic and all the more fun!

When playing the game, even begginers are encouraged to take some of the assists off by giving them the ability to rewind at 5 second intervals with no-limit as to how much you rewind it and no penalties for rewinding. It may seem like a big cheat, but it allows begginers to get a feel for the car without assists on and not worrying about destroying it after the first corner.

Some assists are a little annoying and seem alot more like a cheat however, such as the auto-braking system, it allows you to hold the throtle down all the way around the track while it does all the breaking for you at the recommended spots. This (for me) became extreamly annoying because I wanted to be able to feel like I was driving, not the computer. So I turned it off, after a while I turned more and more assists off untill I was down to only using ABS (Anti-lock braking system) but I plan to turn that one off soon too.

A new feature I’d like to also mention is the “Storefront” feature. It is essentialy an online shop, each online user (I.E Xbox Live or the Playstation Network) will get one of these automatically. The following things can be done within the storefront:

• Store Pictures
• Store Video Clips
• Sell Custom Decals (I.E Vinal Groups)
• Sell Vehicle Designs
• Sell Custom Tuning Setups for Specific Cars

My favorite part about the storefront is the ability to sell vehicle designs, because before this, the only way to get nice custom paint jobs was through the auction house (Still in Forza 3 by the way), but that ment you had to buy the whole car with it and that was really expensive. Now all you have to do is own a specific car and buy a nice paint job for it (or buy the paint job first and then get the car later). One other thing I should mention is that you can get or give free paint jobs in the vehicle design section, most of them aren’t very good but some people do get lucky and pick up a great design that someone was nice enough to give away.

Well there you have it!, my take on Forza Motorsport 3. I really hope you enjoyed reading this and I hope you learned a thing or two. Stay tuned for more ;D (Hope you got the pun)

Hello and welcome to the first post made on this website!. I’ve decided to kick off the opening of this site with a giant review of some of the best known animation programs out there (and some not-so known).

Each animation program is different. While some may have similarities, they each offer different things – such as: more features, better usability, great support, etc.

Note: Click each title to be taken to a page were you can download it and/or find more information about it.

Adobe Flash CS4

This is the most popular and most used animating program of all-time and is used by countless individuals who want to express their creative side in a lively manner.

It was formerly called ‘Macromedia Flash’ before Adobe purchased ‘Macromedia’ for 3.4 Billion US Dollars in 2005. Once they had the rights to flash they added features and jacked up the price. It now costs about 700 dollars for one copy of adobe’s newest product (I.E Flash CS4) but it’s preaty understandable since they paid so much to get the rights to it – They do have to make their money back aswell as profit to keep their bussiness going.

Pro’s:

• Has a great layout
• Feature rich
• Able to make games and applications
• Web design and creation
• Easy to navigate
• Action Script is easy to master
• Animations can turn out great if you know what you’re doing

Con’s:

• Hard to get used to animating with it
• Some features are hard to find
• Costs a heck of a lot
• Usabillity isn’t as good as it could be
• Costs alot (Yes, I’m saying it again)

Pivot Stickfigure Animator

‘Pivot Stickfigure Animator’ or ‘Pivot’ for short is a stickfigure animation program that enables users to quickly and easily create decent animations. The way you animate with it is you use what are called ‘nodes’ to pivot each segment of a stickfigure to bring your 2-D characters to life.

Pivot is a great way for a begginer to ease into animating because it has a very little learning curve and is so simple even a 9 year old could pick it up and make a basic animation. However, getting good is another story, to get really good you must practice quite frequently for a long period of time. It was created by Peter Bone but unfortunately he has discontinued making the program after making Pivot 3.1 Beta.

There is a lot of places that you can go to to get help with animating in this program such as Droidz.org & Darkdemon.org. Droidz has a large variety of free stickfigures you can download and use for Pivot and a great forum community able and willing to help you get better at animating.

Pro’s:

• 100% free!
• Easy to learn
• Simple interface
• Easy to navigate
• Good for begginers
• Quickly create animations

Con’s:

• Not as many features as there could be
• Hard to master
• Discontinued product
• Only avalible for Windows
• It will crash if you put too much detail into a frame or a stickfigure

Stykz

Stykz was first thought of in late 2008 by ‘stykzman’ (Ken Ray). His goal is to create a program similar to pivot so that he can give the pivot community’s more features and a better animating experience. So-far it is still in a pre-release stage called “Release Candidate”. As of right now it is in it’s ‘Release Candidate 3′ stage but stykzman has said he should be releasing ‘Candidate 4′ soon and the Official 1.0 Release soon after that.

Although Stykz is quite similar to Pivot, they function in different ways and have a different layout and means of accessing each function. Pivot is structured in one single window where-as Stykz uses multiple windows. Stykz has a library function similar to Adobe Flash where you can easily access your stickfigures from within stykz instead of having to import each figure each time you want to use it. Stykzman has a list on his forum that show’s an features that he will impliment and when he will impliment it as-well as some he is considering, by the lookes of it, if all the features in the list make it onto a version of Stykz that isn’t buggy, I predict everyone moving from Pivot to Stykz and maybe even some Flash users.

Stykz has it’s own forum where users can go to give ideas, feature requests and get support for the program if they have any problems. They can also post their animations and/or stickfigures in the specified sections to get feedback and help with animation techniques and/or stickmaking techniques. One other great thing about Stykz is that you can import .stk’s (the type of stickfigure that pivot uses) which means you can still get stickfigures off Droidz.org just like pivot.

Pro’s:

• 100% free!
• Multi-platform
• More features added every release
• Easy to use
• Great support
• Pollyfill tool gives you the ability to fill in blank space
• Ability to have multicolored stickfigures without needing seperate sticks
• Easy access library of all sticks made
• Able to import Pivot sticks into Stykz
• All editing and creating of Stykz figures can be done right on the stage

Con’s:

• Navigation can be tricky if you’re used to pivot
• Like Pivot it will crash if you put too much detail into a frame or a stickfigure
• Still in pre-release form
• It’s a bit buggy (as of right now)
• Unable to import pivot 3 sticks (But it will be added soon)

Easytoon

Easytoon is a drawing animation program which means it’s basically like a poor man’s Flash. It has drawing tool’s that are much like ms paint but with the ability to make each frame and it can’t have an colour.

It uses a frame-by-frame animation system like Pivot or Stykz except instead of using pre-made stickfigures, you draw each character and object individually. Luckly there is what’s called an “Onion Skin” which showes where your last drawings were on frames before that.

Pro’s:

• 100% free
• Easy to create particles
• The “Onion Skin” goes quite deep
• Able to draw your own figure
• Able to use different shading
• Copy and paste certain frames
• Animations can turn out great even with only basic knowledge of animation

Con’s:

• You have to be good at drawing
• Layout lookes pre-historic
• No colour
• It’s like paint but more to do with animation
• The creator has discontinued making it

There you have it!, the first article of this website. I hope you enjoyed reading it!