W00t! I'm l337, I pwned j00 n00b!

One of the famous leet speak among hardcore gamers, "woot" has won the Merriam-Webster's Word of 2007 among 20 nominees. It's usually used by gamers to express happiness or cheers in games, whenever an individual or the team has achieved victorious or completed game objectives.

w00t! Full article can be found in the link below:
Associated Press

New Logitech G51 Surround Sound Speaker System

Logitech has recently extended the evil claws of G-series gaming peripherals toward the audio division. Debuted its G51 5.1 surround sound gaming speaker system tailored especially for gamers. (so, yay?)

With total RMS of 155 watts, 5 channels of satellites (20w X 4, 19w for center) and a hefty sub with 56 watts. FDD2 sound technology capable of producing whachamacallit uniform soundfield anywhere in the room (direct quote from Logi). The system sure looks promising on paper specs. I've gone through several foreign reviews and the remarks are good, if not better than its predecessor, the X-540. It is perfect in games and movies though lacking details in music (muddy bass). I admit I'm not those audio heads with sensitive ears, thus, this system should do just fine.

The SRP is kinda steep, asking for RM900+ over a mid range speaker system. Seeing they only priced around USD199 or cheaper in the States, it is obviously overpriced here.

I've been "hearing" under the rocks and have been using my faithful old Altec Lansing ACS45.1 2.1 speaker system for the past 5 years. As uncle Yoda once said, "Go surround, gamers must!". Yeah, speaking of games immersion, unless I wanna get my arse backstabbed again in Call of Duty 4 (by not hearing what's behind), and considering the G51's big bro Z5500 costs double, I'm looking forward to this system, when the price is reasonable. Less than RM800 perhaps? USD to RM conversion. Meh.

Portal Ending

Finally, finished portal. An evolutionary puzzle solving game powered by Valve's Source engine. The only non shooting game that I liked, well technically, not shooting bullets. The only device to use in the game is the portal gun. You get to open portals by creating either blue or orange portal (entrance or exit) respectively. The cleverly designed maps full of obstacles, require fast thinkings and some puzzle solving skills (yeah, time to use some brains, at last).

However, the main point today isn't about reviewing the game. The game itself is very short and story is for you to discover. The highlight, is the game's ending. It is known as one of the best ending credits in gaming history. The ending song reveals a bit about the portal history and something related to Half Life 2 universe. I wouldn't be suprised to see the portal gun in Half Life 3. Ha!

Anyways, here's the video clip from youtube. The wordings are a little blur and small. But it doesn't hurt that much. Enjoy. (remember to pause the jukebox first).

This one the sound quality a bit off. But you could see the lyrics better.

Team Fortress 2 Review

I am a stone, I do not move. I put snow in my mouth so he won't see my breath. I take my time, I let him come closer. I have only twenty-five one bullet, I aim at his nuts head; very gently my finger presses on the trigger. I have no fear, I'm a big boy now... (*cough* Enemy at the Gates *cough*).

...*BAM!* I got his head! One more point for my achievements. The Sniper is one of my favourite among the nine classes. In TF2, the war between Reds and Blues, there are 3 groups: Offensive, Defensive and support, with 3 classes in each which made up a total of 9 classes. Below might give you a clearer picture of the classes and categories.

Offensive: Scout, Soldier & Pyro

Defensive: Engineer, Heavy & Demoman

Support: Medic, Sniper & Spy

*Classes images taken from IGN

Each of the classes is unique. They are very balanced in such a way that no single class is superior over another. Scout is the fastest moving unit in the game. Where he is mostly used in maps with points capturing. He can also double jump and even change direction mid air to avoid enemy fire. To compensate for the speed, the scout also has weakest defence a.k.a. die easily if you're not careful.

Pyro taunt with a hadouken fire.

The Soldier otherwise, is an all-rounder type of unit. Armed with RPG (rocket propelled grenade), the powerful rockets could send enemies flying sky high (and soldiers themselves too, could use rocket jump techniques to access to higher, more strategic areas). Pyro is the master of fire. Any enemies (except Heavies with higher HP) caught within the pyro's flame throwing range would most likely be dead. Even if the direct damage didn't hurt them and escaped, the burning effect would get the job done. Unless the enemy gets a medipack, get healed or jumped into water. It is suggested that when the enemies flee with flames on, it is best to finish them with a couple of blasts from pyro's secondary weapon, the shotgun. Pyro is good for detecting spies too, by toasting them. Fresh.

Poor soul got burned yelling for medic before his death.

Me as the Pyro was so happy to have a Heavy BBQ-ed.

The engineers could build ammo and health dispensers to assist allies during the battle. Engineers could also construct sentry and have it upgraded to deal more damage. It is good to catch unwary opponents around the corner, or best used for defending important key areas. Heavy is armed with a massive gattling gun which shoots hundreds of bullets and turn enemies into a beehive (a.k.a. full of holes). Demoman is best used for dealing damage around corners with their grenade launchers. Their secondary weapon, the sticky bomb is good for setting up boobytraps.

Flames of fury from a Pyro.

Medic is vital in the game. His job is to heal the team mates and enable them to fight longer on the battlefield. A team without medics will not get very far to be crushed. The sniper on the other hand, is the expert in long range shooting. Usually one shot kills especially in the head. The problem is that he has to keep the scoped view to charge the power to 100% for maximum damage. This shortcoming opens opportunity for spies to sneak behind and give snipers a good backstab. Spy is the master of disguise, and can disguise as any enemy units. The cloaking ability is nice for tight escape after a sweet backstab or used to sneak pass heavily guarded enemy territory.

Sniper and the rifle.

Scoped view. Need to have the power bar charged 100% for maximum impact.

Whew! So much for the classes! The game is powered by Source engine with a comical twist. It feels like watching a cartoon, and the experience is humorous. It will make you laugh with funny animations or voices. This is "not-that-serious" type of game, which could cater for both hardcore and casual gamers.

Six maps are included in the release. Ranging from capture-the-flag, control points and territorial control. In order to win the game, team work is the fundamental element. Unit strategies must be applied on varying map conditions. Mixture of classes is a very good start. The best part of the game is that, you could taunt your enemies with funny animations. It some sort gives you the satisfaction by owning your opponents.

Taunt from a soldier. You know what it means when it's showed to you.

This game is definitely worth every cent you pay. Priced RM175 in the local retail stores, it is considered cheap as it comes with five games in one package named The Orange Box. The "box" consists of, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Episode 1, Half Life 2, Portal and of course TF2 itself. What's more, a nice Orange Box gaming mouse mat and Team Fortress 2 poster are also included! This game is a lot of fun and addictive. Till then, hope to see you in the game!

Games, Gadget Updates & Heads up

Been a real busy week. I've finished my Bioshock, Stranglehold and even speed build my Gundam (left the IWSP unit, left leg and waist at the time of typing) because of the up coming games galore in early November! To name a few, we have: Gears of War, Crysis, Hellgate: London, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, etc. Every developer and publisher seems to be rushing for this holiday season release.

Plus, I've new weapon in my arsenal. It's the deadly Logitech G9 gaming mouse! Finally, the replacement for the haywire Copperhead is here! Prior to review for this mouse, I'm gonna have it abused in intensive gaming bombardments for a period of 'bout a month. This is to test its sturdiness and built quality.

Logitech G9 Gaming Mouse

Currently, there's a game, well, technically 5 games to keep me occupied. It's one of the most anticipated FPS, Team Fortress 2 coming in Orange Box which includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Episode 2 and Portal. For a price tag of RM175, free Orange Box mouse mat and poster. Hell...this is definitely a steal! Quoted the Best deal in gaming industry by IGN!

Orange Box, Orange Box mouse mat, G9 weight system

& partially assembled Gundam holding the G9's cord.

Well, folks. What are you waiting for? Load that TF2 and I'll backstab you in Malaysia or Singapore E-Club servers. Fire! Fire!

Call of Duty 4 Demo hands on

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Demo impressions: it is as intense as previous CODs (COD2 gets a lil boring tho) and we have blood splashes when hitting the head and other un-armored body parts. A nice touch! Just too bad no blood spills.

Nice weapon models and environment settings

The game weapons, have very light recoils, especially the sniper rifle, dragunov. This made the otherwise high sense of realism FPS into some run and gun. Guess noobs will be spamming sniper rifles on multiplayer mode. Holding down the breath (shift key) made the aiming even more accurate. If they just improve or increase the recoil in the game in aiming mode...just a lil bit more, this game would not be far from perfect.

Tons of smokes and exploded chopper (left) & aiming down the hip of the rifle (right)

Wearing the NV goggles is one of the damn cool moves. I put it on and off a couple of times just to see the animation. There's also a melee attack: stabbing your enemy with a combat knife. Even though there's only one type of move (wish they implement some more, upper slash and something like that...) it is kinda cool that the whole screen shakes as if you swing your body hard enough, trying to cut through that S.O.B..

NVG (Night Vision Goggle) in action

The knife melee move (left) and shooting in the corridor (right)

With the modest system requirement to run this game, I believe people with last 1~2 years computer should have no problem with it. Here's the system requirements for the demo.

Recommended Specs:
CPU: 2.4 GHz dual core or better is recommended RAM: 1GB for XP; 2GB for Vista is recommended Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space Video card: 3.0 Shader Support recommended. Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better

Minimum Specs:
CPU: Intel® Pentium® 4 2.4 GHz or AMD® Athlon™ 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista) Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space Video card (generic): NVIDIA® Geforce™ 6600 or better or ATI® Radeon® 9800Pro or better

However, I wouldn't recommend running this game in minimum settings as it would kill off the nice eye candies. If you have less than the min specs, it is time to upgrade.

Neck shot and nice blood splash

Playing with max settings 1680x1050 resolution with my gaming rig shown in the signature (at the bottom of the page), the game performance was smooth as butter. Seeing the COD2 outdated smokes, even in full details. It seems Infinity Wards (the game developer) is using the heavily modified COD2 engine in this installment.

Got the Dragunov and aiming for a headshot

This game lives up to its hype and expectations so far. Can't wait for the full version.
COD4 will be released in early November this year. Keep your eyes peeled!

New stuff arrived

Weeee...lookie what I've got past few weeks.

The Silverstone FM123 120mm fan! As you can see, there're a bunch but not all were mine. I only took one and the rest for my friends. Will do a quick review next time.


And the following week, a 1/100 MG Strike IWSP Gundam model set. I'm not really into this but the details given to this toy are superb. Made in Japan! I suck at modelings and have made some painful mistakes in the progress. More pics soon.

Razer Copperhead - Gaming Mouse Review

Quoted from Razerzone:
"Equipped with speed, precision and sensitivity,
the Razer Copperhead™ brings gaming to new heights with
its revolutionary 2000dpi laser sensor technology.
Add 32KB of onboard memory,
this intelligent mouse is a genre-defining weapon that makes for
penetrating, explosive gameplay."

Razer Copperhead on Razer Mantis Speed

Still using the typical mouse for gaming? I used to, too. I was using a cheapo A4Tech optical mouse, then switched to Creative Optical 3000 800DPI mouse. But it still wasn't fast enough for my daily Counter Strike: Source dosage. Plus, often, the opponents seemed to be able to trigger or zoom faster than I did. I've tried to master the extreme lightning clicking speeds from the village of lightspeed, but to no avail. I was puzzled, so I prayed. So I prayed...to God? Ha! You bet. Yeah right, my almighty god, the gaming device manufacturers!

Creative Optical 3000

At last, my prayers were answered (not all, though) when I came across this fast laser mouse with ultimate precision, the Copperhead. Named after a poisonous snake from Razer, a company known for producing gaming peripherals. The design is ambidextrous, therefore, it is friendly to both lefties and righties.

The mouse design is in such a way that encourages finger control over the traditional "palm-style" control. Meaning you hold and control the mouse with your fingers only instead of laying your whole palm on top of the hull. The perfect curve for finger control will prevent RSI for prolonged usage. I've gamed for more than average of 5 hours per day without feeling any discomfort, as contrary to my Creative 3000, traditional Logitech and other humpback kidney designed mouse.

Razer Copperhead Chaos Green on Razer Mantis Speed mouse mat.

Do we actually need 2000DPI (dots per inch)? The answer is Yes, if you are a high sensitivity gamer (even low sens gamers could reduce the on-the-fly sensitivity and DPI to desired settings) and have a large monitor. A single swipe of your palm will have the mouse pointer reaches left or right easily, as opposed to lower DPI mice where you need to swing left/right, lift up, left/right a couple of times. This is very important in games, especially FPSs (First Person Shooter). Meaning, you are able to look around the environment faster than your enemies, given that they aren't using the same or higher DPI mice (this excludes those low sens swiping freaks, pro or noobs of the like).

Razer Copperhead Front

The Copperhead has 7 buttons altogether. The main left/right buttons, the scroll button, and 2 side buttons on each left and right of the mouse. All the buttons could be set as Macro or assign to other functions. For me, I've only used one of the buttons as on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment. There're a lot of options you could customize in the Razer's advanced driver control which also known as the Razer Synapse Configurator. From polling rates, DPI, windows sensitivity, acceleration to button macros and flashing your firmware.

Copperhead Driver Control (Synapse Configurator)

What's the polling rate anyway? It is the rate at which the mouse sends signals to computer every second. The higher the polling rate, the faster the computer responses to your clicks and movements. The Copperhead is capable of 1000Hz which means 1ms polling rate, as opposed to typical mouse of 125Hz over the USB port. Be warned however, setting the polling rate to 1000Hz requires a little bit of processing power from the CPU. So those with slower CPU cores should consider setting on 500Hz instead. Users reported that they could spot the difference between 125Hz (8ms) to 500Hz (2ms), but there's not much difference between 500hz to 1kHz.

The "On-the_Fly" sensitivity adjustment is a lovely addition, where you could virtually adjust the sensitivity in real time, eg. in games by just pressing a button which you assigned as "on-the-fly" and scroll the wheel up/down to set the sensitivity up/down and vice versa.

On the fly sensitivity status bar will appear on the bottom right of your screen.

A sensitivity level status bar would appear on screen once you triggered the on-the-fly function, showing your current sens level, even in games (if users checked the option in the synapse software). This feature enables me to adjust to the nature of weapons used in games. For example, if I'm sniping off fast moving opponents with a scoped view, I would set my sens higher. Whereas I would lower the sens for high recoil rifles like the AK-47 to compensate for the gun back-kick, which could seriously screw your aim and emptied your clips into the walls and birds (if there're any) instead of your enemies.

Users could adjust the DPI on the fly too, but I prefer to fix it at 2000DPI, as the tracking would be more accurate with higher DPI values. Altering the on-the-fly sensitivity, simply means changing the sens by software/driver offset without nerfing the tracking sensor itself.

Okay, Enough for the DPI tech talks. Accuracy and speed are crucial in games like Counter Strike, the same goes with all FPS games. With the mentioned high sensitivity tracking, I could target/aim opponents faster with minimal finger/palm movements. Granted with the Hyperesponse buttons trademarked from Razer, I find myself able to trigger or zoom faster than before. The results is, of course, higher frag rates. No kidding. The precision from the Class 1 Eye Safe laser sensor is amazing and dead accurate. Even it was noted "eyes-safe" I wouldn't recommend staring at the laser when the mouse is powered on.

Tiny mouse feet, the laser sensor and profile button.

The 32k on board memory can store up to 5 profiles where users could switch between by pressing the profile button at the bottom of the mouse. This is handy when gamers using their own mouse in tournaments where there's no driver installed. All the polling rate, sensitivity and button mappings are stored in the memory.

There're also cosmetic features on this Coppherhead, which includes the blinking razer 3 snakes logo on the back of the shell, which imitates the breathing of a living snake. The Razer Glowpipe non slip side rails which enhances the grip and also illuminates the surroundings, thus gamers could find their mouse in the dark. The scroll wheel has a bright glow too. The copperhead has 3 colors to choose from: Chaos Green, Anarchy Red and Tempest Blue. I chose Green because it is cooler with that acidic look and to match my Razer Mantis mouse mat.

Three colors to choose from: Chaos Green, Anarchy Red & Tempest Blue.

Final Thoughts:

Is this mouse worth your money? Definitely, the copperhead has every aspects an avid gamer would wish to be imbued in a mouse. BUT, yes a big BUT, the Copperhead is not without its problems. Do a quick google and you may discover that a lot of end users complained about the double clicking issues: the button double clicks when you actually did a single click.

Sadly, my Copperhead is inherited with the problem too, even before a year of use. Now both the left and right button double clicks! This is a nightmare for us, FPS gamers, where it made our single shot became double shot and wasted the ammunition (this might be good for run and gun games without recoil). Or worse, became un-scoped where we usually zoom with a single click (double click made the zoom mode became un-zoomed). In windows, it could lead to frustrations since single clicking/highlighting a folder actually opens it or open the item inside, because windows thought you are double clicking!

For the hefty price tag of sub RM200+ in the market, I expected the mouse to be able to withstand my button bashings and longer lasting. It is dissapointing for a great mouse. Apart from a bunch of useful functions, some are just pure marketing gimmicks, where we won't use daily or never will.

Hope Razer could at least improve their QC, maybe just replace the microswitches which powered the mouse buttons. A precise, fast and egornomic mouse hampered by a huge double clicking problem is not worth it.

I'm looking forward to send the Copperhead for RMA. During this period, I might just get myself another gaming mouse...err...from Razer? Hell NO! I have the phobia already. It's going to be the Logitech G9! Stay Tuned till the next mouse updates!