I’ve been going through a few different games lately, most of them are older games! However, all of them are pretty damn fun.

• KOTOR 2
  I’m super excited to get my hands on this one, because I’ve been wanting to try out the Restoration Mod for ages. Now I get to! I’m installing it right now, actually. Woo!
• Mercenaries 2
  The first Mercenaries was one of my favorite console games of all time. The destructible environments, the ability to hijack anything, the warzone environment, a huge arsenal of airstrikes, artillery, and bombing runs. the ability to drop vehicles anyway. There was simply a massive amount of carnage and a very cool sandbox approach to it that just worked. Sadly, that was the first one. While the second one promised all the same things, and more, it got crummy reviews, so I did not get it. However, on sale I picked it up for really cheap. and it’s turned out to be not so bad! I’ve made it a bit over half way through, and it’s pretty damn intense. However, it’s a bit buggy, the graphics are so/so, and the storyline is horrid. But, coming into this game with very low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised!
  Score: 7/10
  
• Company of Heroes
  I’ve been replaying this classic with a friend. Mainly, we’ve been digging into the LAN skirmishes and battles. Whether it’s a 2v2 versus computers, 1v1 matches, or any other sort of arrangement – we’ve been having a blast. I only had really focused on the single player when I played a couple years ago, and replaying with a focus on the multiplayer aspects has been fun. What a classic RTS! It’s really made me want to pick up World in Conflict, though. The macro-heavy, tactical RTS games have really gotten so much better, thanks to games like CoH and WiC!
  Score: 9/10

View some cool trailers of upcoming games by reading more.

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View “The Dawn of Battle,” a Battlefield 2 graphic novel on my website.

This is an artistic vision of the popular Battlefield 2 modification, Project Reality. I went in and recorded all the action, in a single-player battle against bots. I then went in with the Battle Recorder, and took a ton of screenshots from a variety of angles.

The next step was utilizing Adobe Photoshop to construct a unique theme to the images. I went in, constructed an HDR profile of each image, then applied various lighting and coloring techniques to try to tie everything together.

Then I applied the images to the graphic novel pages, using a variety of overlays and lighting styles to blend everything together. The goal was to sharpen certain elements – like facial features and the weaponry, whilst blurring out the background. I then applied various artistic filters and blended them into the images.

The final step was adding text. I had constructed the plot before hand, so I knew exactly what was happening throughout the graphic novel. Then, I applied an action that darkened the edges and added a slight film grain throughout the page.

Whilst not the perfect graphic novel (in fact, it’s “to be continued”), I felt it had a very unique, interesting visual style. Especially since the base material was, in fact, a video game. It’s fun to read, even more fun to look at, despite the rather bland plot.

Well, I’ve been having trouble with my headset, the famous SteelSeries 5H v2, for awhile. It’s a great piece of equipment, mind you, but it broke about three months ago. I’ve kept soldering and gluing it back together (I really love this headset!). But it’s broke again (for the fourth time!) and I don’t have any soldering here at school. So I’ve got no means to fix it anymore… which means I’m without my favorite headset.

I’ve considered buying a replacement for it. As I mentioned, it’s a fantastic headset. It featured superb sound quality, amazing comfort, good voice quality, and it just rocked for gaming. It was pretty much the perfect headset. So why didn’t I just spring and buy another one? Well: the price tag of $100 was a bit of a turn off. Plus, I wanted to try something new. And thus my adventure began.

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FPS Gaming Community launched earlier this month, and I’m very proud of how it’s turned out. It runs off a Wordpress installation, but it’s very non-blog-like in functionality. It’s got a nice Web 2.0 feel to it, while having this great dark, blue glowing vibrancy to it.

I got the theme from Elegant Themes (I’m now a huge fan), and edited it quite extensively. I’m very happy with how it turned out, design-wise.

So what is FPS Gaming Community, anyway? Well, to put it plainly, it’s a community for gamers. Like the name didn’t give that part away! But what sort of things does said community do?

• Maintains a collection of fast, updated game servers with friendly admins and consistent rules.
  We’re sponsored kindly by the folks at FPS Gaming Solutions.
• Has a Ventrilo voice chat that anyone from the community may use to stay coordinated.
  We’re sponsored kindly by the folks at MainVoice.
• Events and activities that all members can get involved with! From “Late Night” sessions to pub events to tournaments and more, we plan on making gaming more fun and social.
• Clubs that any member can start up that focuses in on their particular interest – whether it’s a specific game, collection of games, a certain niche, or even a competitive team!
• A website and forums that offer even more cool content as well as a place to come together as a community and mobilize (hopefully for world domination, if everything goes to plan).

So, basically, check it out. The domain is www.fpsgamingcommunity.com. I’m very proud of how it’s turning out, and can’t wait to see it expand even further.

QuakeCon is over, but there’s a ton of great photos, videos, and articles on our exclusive QuakeCon website!

I’m really proud of what our team was able to accomplish and pull together, and despite a hectic schedule and a lot of last minute pulling together, we had some great content.

I wish I was there so badly! QuakeCon is such an amazing event, and QLTV did its best to capture it’s amazing atmosphere.

So without further ado, head over to QLTV’s QuakeCon website!

Also, check out the snazzy blue logo (a redesign by me!)