The Booth Blog

Winamp for illustro - Rainmeter

2011-10-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

I have been using the open-source desktop ricer Rainmeter for some amount of time now.

Typically I have been using the Gnometer skin, although I found with some wallpapers that some of the colours involved in the skin did not match up very well, and we can't have aesthetic mismatching on a desktop now.

I started using the illustro skin that, from memory, also came with Rainmeter. One thing that always bothered me was the lack of a widget that displayed what Winamp had playing.

A quick search around the internet only returned to me an iTunes plugin that a member on the forums created. Having no interest in using iTunes I took to making my own.

Looked easy enough, and here's the final result: Version 0.1 2011-10-19 DOWNLOAD

Constructed it mostly using the illustro base and some script elements from the Gnometer Winamp display.

To remove the number at the start of the song title open Winamp Preferences and under General Preferences untick "Show the playlist number in the Windows taskbar". If you would like the song title to scroll then tick "Scroll title in the Windows taskbar".

Duty Calls - Corridor shooters are far from dead

2011-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

Games that feature open world travelling, multiple quests and story lines to take and physics puzzles are so dull. You are often left totally directionless, they have too many bugs, the puzzles are too hard to solve, make you bored and often run slow on the almighty 360 and PS3. These titles just are not fair and should be pulled from the shelves. Somebody, somewhere, has taken notice of this problem and finally released our wanted solution!

Review of Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm

Released earlier this week was the latest war game that will redefine the genre like never before. The Calm Before the Storm is the first title in the Duty Calls series and sets a uniquely compelling and very heart touching story line that is also open to many more sequels to follow in the franchise.

Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm is set in modern Russia, in the unchanging war scenario where a terrorist who possesses a nuclear missile bomb has horrifically taken the United States hostage. The unsung hero, the player, is the only man on Earth with the shooter abilities in his thumbs to take down, on his own, this terrorist group and save the world from complete nuclear annihilation. When duty calls, he responds, with a vengeance.

First up, we would expect a game in a series like this to cost all of those who keenly follow the series around $120 for the standard edition and upwards of $250 for the packages that come with the game in a tin and a few pieces of cheap junk you won’t actually find any use with, as well as a paper back book with the same concept art printed in it as what you had seen online for months before the game was released. Much to our surprise, the PC version of Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm has been released for free. Actions by the developers such as this shows that they still remain loyal and dedicated to PC gamers because if it were not free then there would be a community outcry and it would be pirated anyway.

The visuals of the game are mind-blowingly realistic. In fact we must say that this is the most realistic any game could possibly get. Accurately captured at FULL HD 1080P and complete 60FPS are all the jagged edges on objects, motion blur when you slowly turn your head around, the field of view that would normally only be seen if you were using binoculars to look around, depth of field and bloom effects that take place so often in photography that they must be real, linear paths to follow through the world, and realistic portrayal of modern day Russia. Duty Calls is not going to be subject to racial or overly general stereotypes that are too often presented in other war shooters, such as the Call of Duty franchise. Much like high class journalism, all that is presented in Duty Calls is fact and taken very seriously.

Thankfully this game supports Xbox 360 controllers, because playing shooters with a mouse and keyboard is incredibly backwards, too complicated, and so very 1990s. In fact, this game convinced us to show the Razer Mamba to the bin and play everything with the Xbox controller from now on. Every armchair gamer these days knows that aiming awkwardly with a thumbstick is where it is at and there is no parallel to compare this experience with.

With an orchestral epic as a soundtrack playing through the game there is not a moment where the action ever feels like it dies down. The opposing force is always jumping out from behind crates with nerves of steel or paratrooping down at the player from the cloudy sky.

For those who care so much about ranks and stats, you have not been left out in the cold with this amazing game. Duty Calls not only offers a revolutionary rank, class, and stat tracking system in their Call of Duty killer multiplayer, but this system is included in offline single player as well. Now there is a no need for you to worry about not having your ranks and kill streaks go unnoticed when you are not killing your buddies on PSN or Live.

Voice acting in the game is amazing. The talent really drives the story along so emotively. Enemies ferociously introduce themselves while they pop out from cover, are very adaptive to the combat situation and behave just like real people.

Been shot? Not to worry, just stay to the side of the action for a moment while the bullets fall out and wounds heal up instantly. Much like realistic combat once again. From the first mission of Duty Calls we were mesmerised by how intense getting shot is, and an in-game announcer hypes up the action to be even more worthwhile and satisfyingly fun.

For bonus gamer score there are rewards for gamers with the super keen eye or a really good 100inch TV screen compatible with their system. Carefully hidden in the levels are parts of enemy intelligence, disguised as every day objects. Without spoiling the surprise, we will say that finding all of them in the first level gives a credible award.

The cutscenes are incredible. This is movie direction quality stuff. Duty Calls is entertaining enough in the cutscenes for those who are not playing the game to feel like they are just watching a really good war movie. They appear frequently in levels to give your thumbs a break from all that intense action they were previously doshing out on the enemies of the United States. Kindly, during scenes in the game where a quick action is required to take an enemy out who is moving too quickly, the game will change into slow motion. Watching your bullets move in a style unlike that we all saw in The Matrix in 1999 is another reason why this game will be the Call of Duty killer. Quick time events in games are the future of gaming. You have the power to control a win or loss in a cinematic part of the game, and that has to count for something.

At the end of Duty Calls it really brought a tears to our eyes. This was not just because the somewhat short, but amazing single player had come to an end, but because of the spectacular twist the player will get caught up in. It is a much more positive ending then the one put in Call of Duty 4, because bombs going off in your face and the United States failing at the invasions of another country is simply not possible.

The multiplayer is so great that it is yet to be implemented in the game. This should not actually be a disappointment because we all know that buying a game on launch day means you have to expect a few bugs. A patch is due out some time this month with the promise to put the multiplayer into that game that was accidently left out of the final published version. No multiplayer is better than laggy multiplayer in Black Ops, right? When multiplayer arrives this will make Duty Calls the game of the year.

All over this represents the perfect 10/10 game that the hardcore gamers have wanted since they were born, or even before they were born. Duty Calls has been a game well worth waiting for and should be bought, not pirated. $0 is not much to pay for a game these days compared to the $120 launch price of everything else. The breathtaking visuals, the professional voice acting, the realistic setting and heart touching story makes it our game of the year, and the year has only just begun. War never changes, but game representations of them can only get better.

Buried

2010-10-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

I got called up to go see this with a couple of friends I went to school with a few nights ago. I never check reviews before I see a movie. I like a surprise and determining how good or bad something is for myself because I always get a mixed response from people with every movie; some people saying a movie is worth seeing and others saying the opposite.

I paid $12 at my local Event Cinema - students rate.

I'll keep this as spoiler free as I can.

Throughout the movie I was in amazement at what was going on, keeping on the edge of my seat the whole time wonder how a film could be so horribly boring. I knew there wouldn't be much to expect from seeing an American stuck in a box underground but this was boring on a whole new level. When I enter a movie session and see around only 5 other people sitting down after entering a little late you know what to expect. It may not be all bad. If you have a strange fetish for seeing a man surrounded by wood, staring blankly at a Blackberry (wonderfully advertised I might add), breathing sounds, flickering lights but mostly darkness or sand then this film and you could just be a match made in heaven.

Finding it uninteresting could be due to myself not being an from the USA, not really caring about whatever it is they are trying to do in Iraq. The only two moments in the film where I felt briefly entertained was when Paul Conroy, our protagonist, nap a short nap and then woke to find a snake in his trousers and the other was his reaction to one of the calls to what I believe might have been a friend of his wife.

I felt constantly frustrated with the outcomes of all of Paul's behaviour. This might have been due to the sensation I was trapped in the cinema with him. Every person he had dealings with over the phone trying to negotiate a way out of this box was an arsehole. There was no way around this, it was annoying to tolerate.

Now to the topic of lighting. This cinema always turns off the lights while a movie is playing. Most of the film was complete darkness. After your eyes become adjusted to the dark the problem always dawned on me of being hit in the eyes by a white screen after Paul has turned on a torch or pulled out a lighter. I had to look away from the screen at some points as a result of how unpleasant this was.

There wasn't much to the story. I could summarise it with "Help, insurgents threw me in a box". Just to make it hit home rather hard with the yanks they threw in some social context issues like "DERP DEE DOOP IRAQ IS BAD". I have already seen Green Zone, this movie frankly came too late to attempt to make this point.

The ending was somewhat unsurprising and rather typical of the crap I had to sit through during 2007 and 2008. Can't remember what happened in those years? A lot of films came out with bad endings that made you feel like you had wasted your money. 30 Days of Night, 1408 (bad ending version), I am Legend; the list goes on. You get another punch in the face for watching the movie with the most inappropriate music to be bundled with the movie running during the end credits. I shouted out "That was awful", picked up my things and left. The rest of the group agreed with my opinion. Some people might cry and I know I would... for the $12 I just wasted away. A different ending might have been able to pick up opinion but the terrible ending really sealed the deal on a terrible movie.

On my way out of the cinema I saw the cashier who sold me my ticket. He understood what I had just gone through and said "I probably should have warned you" and suggested I watch Resident Evil next time.

On a scale with no integer values I give it a "not worth watching".