PS3 Games Without A PS3?

Hey Guys SighFye here.

I just wanted to do a quick post today. I recently read, PlayStation has announced that if you own one of the select Samsung smart TV's you can stream the PlayStation Now service straight to the TV without even owning a PS3. That's hundreds of PS3 games right at your finger tips. You don't need the console and you don't need downloads. You will however, need a PS4 controller and of course one of the select Samsung Smart TV's.

The service will include online play, saves to the cloud and of course trophies, all for only $20 for a one month subscription or you can get three months for $45. You can also rent individual games if you don't want to subscribe. Read more about it on the PlayStation website.

Modded Minecraft Monday - Failure & Renewal

Hello everybody. It's time to check in on our modpack lets play.

Unfortunately there have been a few small issues with the modpack, so whilst I have been playing it for the last week, I eventually found some issues that forced me to make some changes before starting the official let's Play. 

First of all was the difficulty curve. I had intended to make the game a bit more challenging to survive in, but I may have gotten a bit carried away.

I lost count of the number of times I died when the sun went down...

It was extremely difficult to survive at night due to the large quantity of powerful hostile mobs that would spawn in darkness. Lava was also nearly impossible to get close to, as several highly powerful mobs would spawn in the lava, both underground and on the surface in lava pools. I was also notified by a user that starting a new map was impossible since the modpack would crash immediately upon the world loading. After a bit of error tracing, I found the culprit was the Lycanite's Mobs Mod, which would crash the game when trying to spawn the player for the first time. Noticing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, I simply removed Lycanite's Mobs which solved both issues. I also changed the starting health amount to the default of 10 hearts instead of 3 since most mobs were one-hit killing the player, which is no fun. It is no longer immediately suicidal to venture outside when it's dark and players can successfully start new worlds.

Next was the limitations of wooden chests and default vanilla bookshelves not actually storing books...

No house is complete without an attic library :3

I added two new mods in order to make chests that could be upgraded with iron, gold, diamond and obsidian to increase their inventory size and to make bookshelves which actually store books for visual appeal and easy retreival :3

Additionally, there was a bug where it was impossible to craft a stone button. Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue since the underground biomes mod adds buttons for each stone type, however the pokeball mod won't use those buttons. Only the default vanilla stone buttons.

I had two options. Either I could just make buttons something you had to find in dungeon loot only, making pokeballs extremely rare, or I could add another mod that allows me to fix the recipe that is broken. I opted for #2 so you can now craft buttons the way you're supposed to be able to.

Now I did get a full week of gameplay out of this modpack, however when I went to open minecraft a few minutes ago, my map's level data was corrupted. (probably as a result of me pressing the shutdown button without realising Minecraft was still running... Save worlds before shutting down kids) so this might be a good time to start a new map for the new modpack configuration.

I chose to simply provide you guys with a seed this time instead of the entire map files. That way the file size of the modpack will be reduced and you can regenerate the map if you have issues.

I allowed cheats for screenshot purposes only.

I visited a site that converts text into binary and typed in "Gettin My Geek On" but that was way too long in binary, so I simplified to "GMGO" which turned out to be "010001110100110101000111" in binary, so I used that for the new lets play map. I'll be starting that next week, but here's what I've been up to for the last week.

I spawned near the ocean and decided to create my base on top of the water to make it more difficult for enemy mobs to enter my safe areas.

Cobblestone appears to float surprisingly well!

Nearby I found several fruit trees. These are perfect for a renewable food supply, so I cut down an apple tree to get some apples and saplings. In order to make a sapling that will grow into a fruit tree, you need to combine a sapling and a peice of fruit in a crafting area.

Nope. Not ripe yet.

After setting up a base and a farm with some apple trees nearby, I decided to set out to find adventure. I headed west by boat and a short distance away from my spawn area I spotted this giant brick structure underneath the water that seemed to be made up of a lot of square rooms.

The thing under the water... I know there's a floating island there lol

I decided to investigate and discovered a massive sprawling underground Treasure dungeon from the Dungeon Pack mod. On another nearby island I also found my first lucky block. When I destroyed it, two more lucky blocks spawned with a sign in between them. The sign simply stated "one is lucky, the other is not" however one spawned a bunch of cool vanilla items like hoppers, chests, buttons, redstone torches and other useful tidbits and the other spawned a lucky villager. I got lucky. One of those blocks could have killed me instantly.

Jokes on them. Both were lucky :3

I also found some Chocobos and brought them back to base with pokeballs :D

I ventured into the dungeon a few times and got some interesting loot, but not long afterwards I shut down my pc whilst the game was running and my world corrupted.

I updated the modpack and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this post if you want to try it out.

I have done my best to make the game fun and more diverse, but as with all modpacks you should expect bugs and crashes ocasionally. Most of the time you can just relaunch Minecraft and continue where you left off though.

Ok, well that's about it for this week. I'm writing this week off as bug-testing time and going to start fresh for the next post. See you then! :D

Modpack Download Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76107282/GettinMyMinecraftOn.zip

Predicting the Future or Early Innovation

Hey guys SighFye here.

Recently I have been reading a lot of posts about what this movie predicted about the future and what that TV show predicted about the future and I was amazed by how many things from TV and movies actually make it in real life. How could the shows of the past predict what we had in the future. Then I started thinking, what if they didn't predict the future? What if they were the earliest of innovators for these products? Maybe, just maybe, these product started production because these shows thought about it and gave the inventors the ideas. These are some I picked from The Jetsons and Back to the Future.

1) Flat Screen TV

Back To The Future

The Jetsons

Real Life

 2) Video Calling

Back to the Future

The Jetsons

Real Life

5) Flying Cars

Back to the Future

The Jetsons

Real Life

News Article for the Flying Car

4) Hoverboards

Back to the Future

The Jetsons

AND oh yes I have a real life hoverboard. After doing a prank about riding a hoverboard and getting a lot of bad attention for it, Tony Hawk rides a REAL hoverboard.

Kickstarter Page For The Real Hoverboard

So what do you think? Did the TV shows and movies predict the future? Or were they the true innovators of the most amazing products? Leave a comment below with your thoughts, share with your friends and don't forget to 1+.

You can also find me on Twitter and here is our Facebook Page.

Thanks of reading guys, don't forget to geek it up.

SighFye

Oddworld: New & Tasty - First Impressions

Hey Guys

One of my favourite games on PlayStation was Abe's Oddysee from the Oddworld series. It's a platform puzzle game where you're a Mudokon, called Abe, working at a meat processing plant. Meat supplies are running low and the CEO is forced to find a new product to increase revenue. Abe discovers the new meat is MUDOKON!! It's your task to escape Rupture Farms while saving as many of your kind as possible.

Recently I discovered they have remade the game and released it as Oddworld: New & Tasty which is a great play on the poster Abe sees in the beginning scenes of the original.

When I first heard about this game I was excited and really wanted to try it. I looked on Steam and found it was on sale at 40% off. So I jumped at the chance. Then the fear set in. What if it was just a remake in the way of graphics and not really a New & Tasty game. I settled on the thought that I could still replay the game with the new graphics. I would still enjoy it.

This morning it finally finished downloading and I jumped straight in, even before breakfast... shh don't tell Bel I skipped breakfast to play it....

So my first impression on the title screen was good. Really clean graphics and beautiful sounds. Abe even spoke a little more in the menu then before.

I wanted to play the game using a controller like I did on the PSX so I went into settings and tried to set that up. Now this was my first disappointment. My controller, even though the image on the screen was identical to mine, it would not work correctly. Now I didn't look too far into this so it could be another fault but to begin with, I can not use my controller. Keyboard will have to do.

I started the game. The cut scene didn't seem to have much improvement but once the game started I could clearly see the difference.

First scene

A few improvements I noticed is how the game played. For example in the original, the screen did not scroll. When you got to the edge of the screen the next screen would load. In New & Tasty the stages scroll into each other. The game feels a lot more fluid. I also noticed when you give commands to your friends, they respond instantly, unlike the older version. This was beginning to feel as though it was not just a graphic update, but a full recode of the game.

Bird portal in the original

Bird portal in New & Tasty

As I played further into the game I realised the game was not the same at all. There are set areas which are the same as the original, but only enough to link your memory to the original game. I now had in my hands a whole new Oddworld adventure.

Here is a comparison of a part of the game which stayed the same. It also shows the stage flowing into the next part.

I have always said it's the little things in games that make or break the game and this game is packed full of the little things. From the Mudokon workers grumbling about the lack of pay to the giggles they do when something happens.

If you are a fan of the Oddworld series and especially Abes Oddysee then my first impressions say to get this game. Seriously you will not be disappointed.

Thanks for reading guys. Don't forget to share, comment and 1+. You can also find us on facebook and find me on twitter.

SighFye

NES-top Computer: Part 6

Hey guys SighFye here and the last parts finally came for my NES-top PC. So lets get down and get this thing completed.

This is part 6 of the NES-top build. If you have not yet read about it, you can start by clicking here.

The last parts I was waiting for was the blu-ray drive and the micro-sata to sata adapter. To connect the drive to the case I screwed a bracket to the drive and then glued it to the case using an epoxy glue. The second bracket isn't screwed into the drive its just glued into place. This should allow me to unscrew the one screw and the pull the drive out if I ever need to replace the part.

I hooked up the sata and power and also glued the fan in place. Its a little hard to see as all the wires are on top of it.

The last step was to create a switch. I took the switch cable out of an old PC I had and hooked it to the motherboard. Using the original switch bracket I forced the switch into a groove that was already there which lined up nicely with the power button. Unfortunately
there was a little gap making the button no touch the switch.

To fix this I took a part of the old switch, cut it shorter and clicked it into the button. This closed the gap nicely. But I discovered a new problem. Since I had forced the switch into the groove, it was squeezing the edges and made the switch not work. I had to remove it and think of another idea. While removing the switch I accidentally pulled one of the wires off. So now I have a broken switch. Back to the drawing board for that one.

I decided to close the case and boot the NES up. I may not have a working switch but I can get the system installed and running. I installed Windows 7 and Kodi. Windows 7 boots straight into Kodi making it the primary operation. Its a nice program that makes a home theatre system easy.

You may also notice I painted the NES too. The bottom is painted metallic charcoal and the top is silver. Personally the silver isn't shiney enough and I do plan to repaint this part.

So now I am only waiting on a new switch. I have to wait til payday for that one. I also need to add two USB ports where the old controller ports were.

Until then readers thanks for reading.

You can find me on twitter or like our facebook page. Also don't forget to comment, 1+ and share :)

SighFye

Get The Most From Steam

Recently I have found a few things that Steam can do that is really cool and I wanted to share them with you.

1) Game Sharing: I was playing on my account on Bel's computer when I noticed at the bottom of my library: "Bellistik's Games" and a list of her games. I decided to click on one I knew was installed and see what happened. A request was sent to Bel's account asking her permission for me to share her games on her computer. I logged into her account and accepted the request. I was then able to play her games, on my account. Now this was cool enough but what made it better, the game was treated as though it was my game. I didn't have to play her game. So now, I have in my library, ALL of her games and ALL of mine.

2) Game Streaming: Today I saw Bel's games again but this time on my computer. Once again I decided to try and play it but this time, play was replaced with stream, so I clicked stream. Her game then loaded on my PC. And I was able to play it. Now I want to point out that my lappy is not good enough to play some of the games but this time I was able to play. I looked at Bel's computer and steam had given me control with my keyboard and mouse.

3) Download without using bandwidth: As previous mentioned by Lloyd, you can set up steam to download your games from freezone servers only. I won't go into this as Lloyd already wrote a post about it. If interested in this you can read the original post here.

4) Remote Downloading: Damn I forgot to set that game to download and I'm out on the town. Well you can log into your account via the webpage and start a download from there. Then when you get home your game will be ready and waiting for you.

And these are the things I have found which I didn't know myself. Now you can get more out of Steam :D

Modded Minecraft Monday - The Modpack Contents

Hello again. I have been fairly quiet for a bit and this post explains most of the reason why. I have been assembling a collection of mods for a modded Minecraft playthrough and, as anyone who has explored minecraft mods can attest, it's pretty addicting to keep adding new mods when you come across them. I have finally settled on a list of mods that I'm happy with so it's time to start a Let's Play series of blogs.

To begin with, I'd like to state that I'm not particularly a fan of modpacks like Technic or FTB. I have enjoyed playing them in the past, but I feel like the extra machinery and pipes and wires overcomplicate and distract from the core minecraft experience. Thus I have tried to stick to mods that, whilst adding new content, accentuate or expand on the core minecraft experience without overcomplicating it.

There are a lot of new hostile mobs added which does make the game rather difficult at night time, but hopefully I've balanced it out with enough extra ore and loot mods to make your arsenal much easier to upgrade quickly. The Extra Health Enchanted mod also starts you off with only three hearts and allows you to expand your maximum health by leveling or adventuring in dungeons, thereby allowing for a much better difficulty curve. It should be really hard at first, but as you level and progress through the game it should get significantly easier to survive.

Modpack Contents:

• ExtrabiomesXL - Adds 28 new biome types to the game for added landscape variety.
• Pam's Mods - Adds tons of new  plants and a few minor tweaks. 
• Harvestcraft - New farmable crops, fruit trees, bushes and food.
• Desertcraft - New desert flora
• Random Plants - New Venus Fly-Trap plants.
• Mob Drop Crops - New rare plants that drop hostile mob items like bones and ender pearls.
• Wheee Flowers! - More flowers!
• Bonecraft - Adds fossils to terrain generation which drop bones when mined.
• Clay Spawn - Clay will now also spawn underground with the same rarity as iron ore.
• Get All The Seeds - Adds all of the available seed types to the list of drops when breaking tall grass. New seed types will drop extremely rarely. 
• Plant Megapack - Adds tons of new plants!
• Underground Biomes - Adds different types of rock that have their own biome types underground. Lots of new stone types to play with!
• Dungeon Pack - New randomly generated structures, including large underground dungeons and ships on the water!
• Mystcraft - Based on the game and book series. Allows the crafting of books that contain entire worlds based on the runes you use to define that world.
• ChickenShed - Chickens will now randomly drop feathers like they do with eggs.
• WAILA - "What Am I Looking At?" is a mod that provides a HUD at the top of the screen that describes what what you are looking at and what mod it comes from. (Needed this to keep track of all the ores and underground biomes rock types)
• Mr Crayfish's Construction Mod - Adds a block that will build a building for you. You still need to gather all the materials required and spend time punching the block to build it, so this is more a way of creating templates to rebuild a certain building than a cheat. It balances out with the recipe requirements anyway.
• Easy Crafting - Adds a new crafting table with a more expensive recipe that shows you everything you can make with the items in your inventory. You click the object you want to make and it creates it for you using the items in your inventory. Works much like the console crafting menu does.
• Fast Leaf Decay - Because I hate floating leaf blocks when I cut down a tree...
• Minecraft Graves - Instead of dropping everything, the game will spawn a gravestone containing all of your items where you died. Saves your items, but you do have to get back to where you died to retrieve them.
• Harder Peaceful - Removes the automatic player health regeneration feature from Peaceful mode and enables hunger in Peaceful mode. Food now has a purpose in Peaceful mode! :D
• Infernal Mobs - Adds rare variants of regular mobs with randomised Diablo-stlye buffs. Kind of like mini-bosses.
• Item Physics - Items will drop to the ground properly without sitting there and spinning in place.
• More health Enchanted - Start with only 3 hearts of health maximum. Leveling will add more hearts. Hearts can also be added using items crafted from heart containers, found in dungeon chests. There is no maximum quantity for hearts so it makes you more resilient as you get further into the game.
• Dual Hotbars - Adds another 8 slot hotbar that uses the top row of your inventory. I often find myself short on slots, so having 16 instead of 8 really helps :3
• Lucky Blocks - Mining this block is like pulling a slot machine. You might get killed by an unlucky Lucky Block and you might get some awesome loot from a really lucky Lucky Block.
• Roxa's Tall Doors - Adds doors that are much larger than the default doors. (2x3 and 3x4 etc)
• Carpenter's Blocks - Adds slopes to minecraft! :D
• ComputerCraft - Adds programmable computers and robotic blocks called turtles that can build, mine and farm for you if programmed correctly.
• DecoCraft - Decorative blocks and furniture.
• Greg's Lighting - Redstone floodlights that can project light down a hole or corridor.
• Horizontal glass - Glass panes that can be placed horizontally as a floor or roof.
• Luppi's Ladders - rope ladders that can hang from a ledge, strong ladders that can stand unsupported and blocks that will retract both when powered with redstone. (good for treehouses)
• Deconstruction Table - Found some loot but have no use for it? Break it down to its core components and recycle! :D
• Mr Crayfish's Furniture Mod - More decorative furniture :3
• Malisis's doors - Adds a smooth swinging animation for doors, makes double doors act together and adds new customisable door types.
• Mowzies Mobs - Currently only adds a larger, animated and far more nasty version of a Venus Fly Trap to the jungle biomes.
• Butterfly Mania - Having 202 new types of butterflies fluttering around just gives the game an extra feeling of life.
• Choco Craft - Adds tamable, breedable and ridable Chocobos!
• Mo'Creatures - Adds a large number of Animals and Peaceful mobs as well as some enemies.
• Backpacks - Adds backpacks in two sizes and multiple colors. They take up one inventory slot and when right clicked, open a chest-like inventory to store things in.
• Loot bags - Enemies have a chance to drop a bag full of loot on death. The common bags could have some seeds and a scrap of leather and legendary loot bags might have enchanted diamond armour and a rare weapon. Its all random. Added this one to balance out the difficulty of all the new hostile mobs.
• Lost books - Mostly just adds any books the player dropped and lost to a list and enemies have a chance of dropping them. Can also customise with your own unique book sets.
• Pokeball Mod - Adds a ball that a single entity can be stored in. Store enemies or friendlies by right clicking to throw it at them. Good for relocating animals and villagers.
• Xeno's Reliquary - Adds a bunch of craftable relics that have special effects.
• Tinker's Construct - A smelting and tool crafting mod.
• Balkon's Weapons - Adds a bunch of new weapon types, including a firearm.
• More Bows - Adds new craftable bow types.
• Not Enough Items - A searchable list of all items in the game. It shows the recipes and uses for each item and can be narrowed by item type or mod. Very useful.
• Bibliocraft - Usable bookcases, shelves that display their contents and more.
• Iron Chests - Upgradeable chests.
• Better Foliage - Leaves blocks now have additional leaves to break up the blockiness and grass blocks now have short grass sticking out the top.

In addition to trying to find a 64 pixel texture pack for the majority of these mods, there are also a few core mods installed, that these mods rely on, that I didn't name as well, for brevity's sake.

Example of folder structure

If you want to play along, I have packaged up the lot and stuck it on my dropbox so you guys can grab it HERE if you like. It's ready to go with all the mods already set up and a copy of the same map I'll be playing in. You will need your own Minecraft account in order to play it though, if you so choose.

Please keep in mind that the custom minecraft launcher I made, to run it in the downloaded folder instead of in the user folder, is sensitive to spaces in folder names and long file paths. 

Best to put the lot in "C:/Minecraft/" to avoid issues. You will need the two files "Minecraft.exe" and "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" in there as well as the "GettinMyGeekOn" folder (which contains the game + mods + the map).

Once it's set up like this, it won't affect any other modpacks you have installed. It will just run isolated in that one folder. You will have to launch "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" (by double clicking) instead of "Minecraft.exe" though, in order to make it run locally.

Ok, well that's about it for the contents of the modpack so I should probably go start playing now. Since the spawn area for this map is relatively close to the ocean on the beach, I might build my base on the water :3

I really hope there are no sharks around here...

See you next time! :D

*Edited Monday 1/6/15 - Added two new mods (Iron Chests & Bibliocraft) & included another mod that was not mentioned in the list (Better Foliage). Modpack on dropbox has also been updated to include the two new mods.

*Edited 5:55pm Tuesday 2/6/15 - Bugfix - Player spawn crippled, so new worlds would crash immediately. - Removed Lycanites Mobs Mod and it works just fine now. If you don't want to redownload, just go to C:/Minecraft/GettinMyGeekOn/.minecraft/mods/ and delete "LycanitesMobsComplete 1.10.13.2 [1.7.10].jar". That should fix the problem. Otherwise, the dropbox link should update within about an hour and then you can download that instead.

*Edited 6/6/15 - I have been made aware that this modpack breaks your ability to create buttons from stone and thus some specific mods (pokeball for example) will not work with the underground biomes buttons. I have added a new mod that adds in a new recipe that does the same thing. I will update the downloadable copy when I make my first Let's Play post on monday.