Ye olde geeky blog

Beyond Good and Evil. Boy, what a unique and fun little game from a few years back. I remember vaguely what it was about - you're a reporter with a camera and your best friend is a pig. It's an action adventure game, with some stealth thrown into the mix too. Oh, and you also have a boat with which to travel around. And a staff to fight with. Great fun indeed, can't wait to fire it up again - ahh nostalgia :) Well, it's now FREE on Ubisoft's Uplay - if you have an account already, simply click the U30 link at the top (this is their 30 year anniversary promotion = free games every month!). Thanks Ubisoft!

Man, Overwatch is such an awesome game - that is, when it's not driving me totally insane. As much fun as it can be, just so much turmoil can it cause in my life. But, one thing I have noticed that tends to help me enjoy the "bad" matches more, is to change my whole attitude towards the game. Usually I go in and really try to play my part - but, sadly, it doesn't always happen that my 5 team mates do the same. So what I do then is use that time to learn the other heroes I don't play as often. Such was the case this Monday - it didn't go well, so I decided to practice a bit with Pharah, someone I hardly ever play with. And hey, it was actually a lot of fun - I even got play of the game for one of the games. I also had some Reinhardt footage that I threw in for good measure, I especially liked his voice line at the end of the clip. Anyway, here they are:

I've had my LG G4 for about a year now. And here's how I feel about the phone: Overall, my experience has been great with the device. I had the misfortune of dropping it while saving my son from a nasty plunge a few months ago, and the screen cracked. While in for repairs, I used my old Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Boy oh boy was it clunky! I then realised just how smooth and seamless the user experience is on my G4. Thankfully my LG is insured, so I got it back in a few days, repaired. I would give the phone a solid 8.5 out of 10. Where it loses most of its points are with battery life and the phone getting very hot. Firstly, battery life. When I got the phone, the deal included an extra battery with a charger - and now, after using the phone for a year, I realise why. If I use the phone during the day, especially if I play a game or two and watch some videos, it doesn't last a day. Thankfully for the extra battery, but I have to swap it out every day at least. Then, ove...

At first, I had no interest in playing Overwatch ranked games, but my one friend told me he found it to be a much better experience than Quickplays. The thing is, people playing ranked generally try to do a better job at things and actually do their part in the games. According to my friend at least... The first season ends tomorrow, so I decided last week that I'll do the placement matches and get some ranked play in as well. Boy oh boy, I HATED the placements matches. I won only 3 out of the 10. The ones I won was great fun, but the ones we lost was just plain terrible. I somehow always gets placed against a far superior team, with toxic players in our team. Now, I don't mind if you have a shitty game or make a mistake, but to blatantly join the game just to disrupt it for your team? Last night, with my 3rd last placement match, we had a Mei on our team - as we were all running for the point, she all of a sudden put up an ice wall blocking us all for a few seconds. When...

My friend showed me this clip of some hilariously funny Overwatch moments. I just had to share it! Enjoy!

We had a great time playing Overwatch last night, I even managed to kill someone! :P Really helps if you've got a friend or two with you in the game! Thanks Alister and Papa for joining in on the mayhem! Check Papa's channel too here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN0W9aEF3NITUoO9gwlX7ew

When my son was born, it happened so much that I had to sit with him while he slept. He's been a bad sleeper since pretty much day one. All those hours of sitting got me to scour Youtube for things to watch on my phone while he's sleeping on my lap. Here are some awesome channels that I'm subscribed to, and can highly recommend: Unit Lost - with the whole Overwatch craze taking over the internet, this guy (his nickname is Stylosa) makes some really awesome Overwatch related videos. Mostly they are tutorial type videos, and I've found them a huge help. Plus he plays really well, my jaw always drops to the floor on how well these guys play! SciShow and SciShow Space - I don't know quite how I stumbled upon these guys' channel, but I'm so glad I did. I love learning new things, and their regular videos are great at doing just that! If you find our world and how it works interesting, then you will love these two channels! Numberphile - Sadly, I didn...

Uh, hi :) I haven't posted on this blog for quite a few months! This year started with a bang and it's been quite a ride. One of the reasons for me not blogging as much is just being so damn tired haha! You see, we have this awesome little guy we lovingly call our son. He's turning 2 in October. He doesn't like sleeping. I can literally count on my two hands the times he's slept through in his life. And it's not as if he's crying or unhappy, he's just not that fond of sleeping we've come to realise. I think he's a prodigy of sorts, because only a busy mind keeps one up to such an extent! Anyway, the last post I made was me celebrating the fact that our game, Catch a Falling Star , got Greenlit after being in the system for over 6 months. At one stage I thought it would never happen, but thanks to Dan from Back To Basics Gaming , our publisher, and some clever marketing from his side, it finally got through. It went on sale shortly after that, a...

Last year I started making games with my good friend Jayson. Being my first ever full game that I worked on, we decided to go for something a bit more simple and casual, but to make it very nice and polished so that people looking for something in that genre find exactly what they're looking for. The game is called Catch a Falling Star. The ultimate goal in the game is to have something to play when you just want to sit back and relax. Natalie, my awesome wife (check her amazing graphic design website, which I made by the way (she designed it, I built it)) created the amazing artwork between working hard for her clients, having very little sleep and breastfeeding our son. I still can't believe how awesome the artwork for the game looks, and it's all thanks to her. I tried making the game look nice with my extremely limited design skills, but I'm so glad she stepped in and rescued us, because damn, if I were to do it, the game would have no hopes at all! We sta...

Ahhh Diablo 3! The gaming comeback of the century! Never would I have thought that Blizzard can turn around the game as much as they did after they patched it to version 2. Diablo 3 and its auction house was an absolute mess when the game launched in 2012, but now, it's one of the games I keep on going back to. With each new Season, I level one of my remaining non-level-70 character classes to level 70, and now, with Season 5 (I skipped season 2 and 3) I've done so with my Crusader. And damn, what a fun character to play with. At the moment, I'm at such a stage with the character that I can easily do Torment VI rifts without dying and relatively quickly. With that, I've discovered a really quick and painless way to farm Death's Breath (which automatically also helps with farming Blood Shards). Death's Breath is a crafting material you need for most Legendary and Set recipes, and of course, to use on Kanai's Cube (which is where I use it mostly). Wi...

I've now had my LG G4 for a good couple of months. And a good couple of months they've been! I finally got my 32gig SD card from CellC, and that's made a big difference to have some extra storage. The phone has 32gig on-board by default, but only about 22gigs of that is available to use. The only small issue I have is battery life. It isn't the best, especially when I use the phone a lot during the day. But it is something I can definitely overlook, since I got a spare battery and charger with the phone from CellC - at first I thought I won't use it, but it came in very handy when I was playing with my phone the whole day. Here is a list of some of the things I love about my G4: Smooth as silk - the interface and everything works great. Excellent camera - I love the camera, especially with the f1.8 lens it has, as well as optical image stabilization. You can even shoot in RAW! It also gives you manual controls for stuff like white balance, shutter speed and ...

I use XAMPP for my PHP web development. My wife designs the sites that I work with, and sometimes she needs to access my local web server from her PC. Usually that's as easy as typing in my PC's network name in her browser and she can access everything on my localhost. Since a few days ago, it stopped working. She even tried using my IP address directly in her browser, but that too, didn't work. Then I remembered, Windows 10 updated something a while back, and I guess it was then when this issue started. Turned out, I had to allow port 80 over my Windows Firewall again. So, if you're running Windows 10, here's how to do that: Press the Start button, and type in Firewall, then click on Windows Firewall with Advanced Security at the top: This will open up the Firewall window, which looks like this: (click on the image to see it bigger if you need to) What we want to do is set up a new Inbound Rule, so at the top left, click on Inbound Rules: The...

I stumbled across this video yesterday and just had to share it. The game is Track Mania, which is known for it's breakneck speed around the insane tracks. Now, as far as I know (I haven't played it in a long time), all the cars are exactly the same in terms of speed and handling, so if you want to put up the best time, your knowledge of the track and impeccable reflexes is what gets you to the finish line the fastest. When you play with others, you compete against their times, and cannot actually crash into one another. Anyway, in the video below, 30 guys worked to put over 20000 cars - 20386 to be exact - on the track at the same time, so watch and enjoy the ensuing chaos. It is glorious!

I did it! I survived the Steam Winter Sale (feels weird saying that, because it's definitely not winter here, last few days it's been close to 40 degrees Celsius!). I only bought two games. And both were with Steam Wallet money I made selling cards. The first one was Sol Survivor: I got it for all of R27.25 - loosely translated, at the time of purchase, to about $2, although with our Rand being so low to the Dollar these days, it's closer to about $1.80 I also bought Tomb Raider, which was also listed for under R30. Also paid with wallet money. Anyway, back to Sol Survivor. It's a TD game. Tower Defense. And this one is quite old, and came out for the Xbox 360 in September 2009, and for Windows in March 2010. Now, me and Jayson has been on the never ending search for a great Tower Defense game that we can play together. Our love for TD games started with custom maps for Warcraft 3. Our ultimate Tower Defense map is still, to this day, the classi...