I found myself play­ing Call of Duty: Black Ops quite a bit over the last few days. I’m not that good and I usu­ally do bet­ter with Mod­ern War­fare 2. Still, there are a few gen­eral things that are nice to know. The fol­low­ing intel isn’t about strate­gies, class setups, game styles or any­thing else. Firstly, because I’m not qual­i­fied for that and sec­ondly, there are hun­dreds – if not thou­sands – of guides, arti­cle, forum/blog posts, etc. out there deal­ing with that kinda stuff.

• Dol­phin div­ing into water will pro­tect you from fall dam­age. That may prove excep­tion­ally use­ful on Jungle.
• On a side­note, jump­ing on peo­ple or RC-XDs also pre­vents fall damage.
• An indi­rect kill from a kill­streak reward  will count towards unlock­ing the next kill­streak reward.
• You can actu­ally cap­ture a flag while in Sec­ond Chance. You’ll even get a medal out of it.
• But you can’t defuse a bomb while in Sec­ond Chance.
• Valkyrie rock­ets can be destroyed by the Strela-3 (even though it’s vehi­cle lock-on only!) or by friendly fire.
• Don’t throw smoke and gas grenades into water. They’ll sim­ply dis­ap­pear with­out ever going off.
• SAM Tur­rets will kill you if they’re shoot­ing against obsta­cles and you’re nearby. In this case, they’ll also blow up them­selves. Choose a nice, open place for them.
• Jam­mers affect RC-XDs and make them an easy tar­get for nearby enemies.
• Using a zipline will dis­card your Death Machine, Grim Reaper, or Valkyrie Rockets.
• The auto-turrets on Berlin Wall can’t get a lock on you through smoke. Throw one in the mid­dle area or two smoke grenades in the outer areas to safely tra­verse the no man’s land.
• You can also use a smoke grenade to cap­ture the B flag from out­side the cen­tral way. Just make sure you pick the side your team holds, oth­er­wise you’re easy prey for enemy snipers rely­ing on IR scopes.
• If you can, make sure to have a Counter-Spy Plane ready for enemy Blackbirds.
• One par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing thing is a bug Tre­yarch will hope­fully fix ASAP: If you pull out your Care Pack­age Marker when going into Sec­ond Chance, you’ll end up in Sec­ond Chance with your pri­mary weapon. Some­body raped me this way with his Olympia the other day.

Hope that’s some use­ful intel for ya. Over and out.

I finally tried Strata40, a won­der­ful theme try­ing to give the user an inter­face as close to the Fire­fox 4 mock­ups as pos­si­ble. After set­ting it up and using this theme as an excuse to get rid of Tab Mix Plus even though it’s a very con­ve­nient exten­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, doing with­out TMP means los­ing some func­tion­al­ity I’m totally used to. To com­pen­sate for that I installed Last­Tab which allows tab nav­i­ga­tion in a most recently used man­ner. That’s the easy part.

Well, I’ve got­ten used to right-clicking on the tab bar and select­ing some tabs from the Recently Closed Tabs menu. Of course, that went over­board with TMP. So that’s where the Undo Closed Tabs But­ton comes in. I had to pull a com­pat­i­ble ver­sion from Google Code but even so the exten­sion really fucked the inter­face up. I went to my cur­rent pro­file direc­tory, opened the exten­sions folder and looked for this extension’s folder. Once found, I nav­i­gated to the chrome\skin sub­folder and opened tabbar.css in Notepad++. There I got rid of the -moz-binding:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
/* .tabbrowser-tabs {-moz-binding:url("chrome://undoclosedtabsbutton/content/tabbarOverlay.xml#tabbrowser-tabs") !important;} */

Read more…

Hooray! Almighty Caine – one of the most polar­iz­ing, ruth­less, bru­tal, single-minded pro­tag­o­nists ever con­ceived by a fel­low Earth­ling from this dimen­sion – is going on-line. If you don’t know about Hari Kha­pur Michael­son – also known as Caine, Blade of Tyshalle, Prince of Chaos, and Caine Black Knife – I’d humbly sug­gest to get your hands on Heroes Die, the first of the Acts of Caine.  Matthew Woodring Stover did very, very well when he cre­ated Caine. Def­i­nitely rec­om­mended! If you don’t like wad­ing through blood and shit or if you are aller­gic to swear­ing, you may want to stay clear. Any­way, this post isn’t about the books. If you want to know more, head over to Wikipedia or get the Heroes Die and make up your mind.

Matt man­aged to get some peo­ple together and they threw up OverWorld.tv, a place for all things Caine. It’s not fin­ished yet but the team is work­ing hard on putting things together and it’s shap­ing up quite nicely. Mainly, the site was cre­ated to pro­mote the adven­tures of Caine and – can you believe it? – the upcom­ing comic. Hell, yeah! There’s also talk about some mer­chan­dis­ing good­ies and guess what: I’m gonna get some! Until everything’s ready get your­self acquainted with Caine. I think, I’ll be doing a short review of the Acts of Caine series so far.

The offi­cial trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has been released and promises a swash­buck­ling adven­ture with everyone’s favorite pirate Jack Spar­row. Sorry, Cap­tain Jack Spar­row, of course. The fourth install­ment of the pop­u­lar fran­chise will con­tinue where it left off with At World’s End: Cap­tain Jack Spar­row is out to find the fab­u­lous Foun­tain of Youth.

A mys­te­ri­ous woman from Jack’s past (Pené­lope Cruz) and the infa­mous pirate Black­beard (Ian McShane) are also look­ing for the Foun­tain of Youth, as well as Bar­bossa (Geof­frey Rush). Throw mer­maids and zom­bies into the fray and it promises lots of enter­tain­ing moments. Also, Keith Richards will reprise his role as Cap­tain Teague, Jack’s father. Oh, and did I men­tion that Cruz’ char­ac­ter is actu­ally Blackbeard’s daughter?

If you’d rather opt for glo­ri­ous quick­time, head over to Apple’s trailer site. The film will hit the­aters on May 20th, 2011. If you can’t wait until then, you may want to check out the real inspi­ra­tion behind the movie – On Stranger Tides by Tim Pow­ers. Obvi­ously, they changed a lot but in the script but that’ll be as close as you can pos­si­bly get.

Exactly ten days ago I released a Grease­mon­key user­script that makes Kon­gre­gate a nicer place to be. Dubbed NicerKon­gre­gate the script will cre­ate short page titles and it will add dif­fi­culty icons to the badges. It also removes a few ads and white­space, and re-arrange a few ele­ments. On Novem­ber 24 I added a the abil­ity to check whether a game as badges or not. When mov­ing the mouse­pointer over these game thumb­nails it checks for badges.

Cur­rently, I’m not plan­ning on adding other stuff because in its cur­rent iter­a­tion – v1.1.1 – the script does exactly what I want it to do. If you do have sug­ges­tions though, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me and I’ll see what I can do.

Today, Square Enix dropped a new game­play trailer for Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion reveal­ing a lot of the game’s game­play mechan­ics and user inter­face. You’ll see the game’s aug­men­ta­tion inter­face where every aug­men­ta­tion is upgrade­able in three lev­els. You also get to see some kind of infra-ray vision and an inter­est­ing weapon wheel to choose your gear from. Hack­ing a work­sta­tion obvi­ously allows you to tin­ker with tur­rets, robots, and cam­eras. Next, you get some weapons demon­stra­tion – you can use dif­fer­ent kinds of ammu­ni­tion – and you even get to see Jenson’s meelee skills. Oh, and don’t for­get the nice laser weapon with which you can aim and fire through walls.

All in all, I like what I saw, espe­cially the art direc­tion.  The mon­i­tors are awe­some as is the user inter­face. If the trailer isn’t enough for you, head over to ComputerAndVideoGames.com – the guys over there did a lit­tle Q&A with the devel­op­ers. The devel­op­ers promised that there will be a lot of hid­den choices in the game so that not every pos­si­ble action is thrown in your face. They also said that the inven­tory con­tains every­thing but story items and that health regen­er­a­tion isn’t as quick as in Halo or Call of Duty. Ah, I’m alredy look­ing for­ward to hack­ing con­soles in early 2011.