Improve Your Game

Most casual gamers don’t realize exactly how crucial audio and their gaming surface is to their game. If you’re a hardcore PC shooter fanatic, odds are this article won’t apply to you, but if your a beginner or a casual gamer, you just might find some tips here that will vastly improve how you play.

The instant you fire up your favorite game, no longer are you equipped with a “human input keyset” and a “pointing device”, you should think of your mouse and keyboard as weapons of mass destruction! If you spend around 7 hours or more gaming a week, save up and treat yourself to a decent mouse, keyboard, and pair of headphones. Getting a good mouse, mouse surface, and headset are the most important, but if you have the cash to spare, getting a gaming keyboard is nothing short of a good investment.

When purchasing a gaming mouse, make sure that the mouse is comfortable, accurate and resistant to wear and tear from intense gaming. The exact same goes for your mousepad. I cannot stress enough that a good mousepad is just as important as a good mouse. I can personally recommend the SteelSeries QcK+, an absolutely giant fabric pad. There are similarly sized hard surfaces available. A cheaper alternative is to tape waxpaper over card stock on top of your desk. When it comes to gaming, just your desk just won’t do. When fine tuning your mouse, crank the DPI and refresh rate as high as possible, and turn off all mouse acceleration and things like “SmartMove.” Then, in-game, go to the lowest sensitivity you can possibly stand. This low sensitivity will help you be much more accurate. If you have carpal tunnel, or just don’t like flicking your arm around when gaming, you might want to look into a product like a Logitech Marble Mouse.

Audio is key to being good at the games you play, and cheaping out on a headset is not exactly a good idea. Odds are that a cheap headset will break much sooner than a nice set of earphones, and you’ll be stuck buying another. Get some nice 5.1 headphones, you can find them cheaper than you think. Even a decent set of earbuds is better than crappy stereo headphones. If you have a 5.1 sound system, great! Just make sure whatever you end up using, crank the volume up so you can hear details like people reloading, footsteps, etc.

Well, I hope some people will take this advice, and become worthy opponents! I know I did. Happy Fraggin’!

skitzo

Frets On Fire – The Free Guitar Hero

Frets on Fire

“Frets on Fire is a game of musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible.” – Source

Frets on Fire is an amazing program that allows you to play a Guitar Hero like game on your computer without spending $80-100 on the guitar and game. This game is free and guess what! You can put ANY songs you want on it! I have found a good collection of songs you can download for it and the link is below. As for the game, a Free download can be found below as well.

FoF Download

A Good Collection of Songs to use with FoF

Enjoy rocking out on your keyboard!

~Musicmasteria

TGI Friday! #1

It’s possibly the greatest moment of the week when you get home after work or school, sit down and say ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ For someone who lives as much for the weekend as myself, I know that Friday night is one of the most looked forward to points of my week. To show you just how much I love Fridays, here’s a picture I made a while back:

However, as much as it allows us to look forward to all the fun the weekend will bring, it is also a moment where we can look back on what the week has given us, and therein lies the point of these weekly posts. Every Friday from now on, I will endeavour to summarise as best I can what has happened in the Underground world of technology and perhaps bring certain other things to your attention, whether they will shock you or amuse you.

Perhaps the biggest thing this week was the CES, which stands for Consumer Electronics Show. If you’re still confused, think of E3 but for general technology. This year’s show brought to our attention the world’s largest LCD screen and also the Optimus keyboard, which has finally come out of development hell to ship in 2 months (if it’s not delayed…) with a huge price tag of $1500! However, this particular keyboard is probably worth it, considering just how awesome it is.

For a little more on CES, check out this article.

Technically this didn’t happen this week and so is quite old news, but nonetheless for those who still haven’t heard, three Texans attempted to sue Microsoft over a weekend of Xbox Live outages for $5 million. Naturally, as we all know that the Internet is serious business, this has been the source of much debate and argument. Should Microsoft face the price for a faulty service? Should these people just shut up and get a life? Read more here.

And news just in, Darth Vader and Yoda have been confirmed for Soul Calibur IV, for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 respectively! This is no hoax my friends, and is certainly a very interesting decision for a series that has already seen some major cross-overs in the form of Link, Spawn and Heihachi. See the trailer below!

And so with that, I’m off. So far you are being left with a hot picture every week, and so I will try and leave you with a humourous video every week. Seeing as CES was the main event this week, I leave you with this video of the guys at Gizmodo wreaking havoc with the monitors at CES. Enjoy!