DHR_000x's adventure through bits and bytes

At the end of the experiment, you will be baked, and then there will be cake. I feel equally sad for leaving and proud for the things created. It has been quite the long run but it's time to end it. I've entertained, helped and informed people through monthly contributions to the gaming community, and also helped myself to understand games and gamers while teaching myself some English along the way. This has been my greatest project ever and it was a blast. It all began mid February of 2014. I thought about creating my own website many times but never really went through with it, until I found out about how easy it actually was when checking out Google's Blogger. The enthusiasm was quite palpable as I was writing my first entry on this blog : Diary of gaming awesomeness? Holy shit I have so much time to waste on this!! LETS DO THIS! At first I didn't really have structure or fixed idea about what I wanted to write, so for the first few months I just posted...

Houston, we are ready for lift-off! The sun is shining, the lake is mildly warm and I feel like boiling inside every time I step into my office at 30°C because we have no air conditioning. Yes, it's summer, and this years is specially beautiful for me. That's the main reason why I spend so little time inside and in front of the PC, compared to my usual gaming habits, and thus I have absolutely no idea what to write about in this months article. I have been playing some PU Battlegrounds but there's not much to say there, it's super fun to play and watch, that's it. Rocket League on the other hand is still stimulating me since I switched over to controller, and I'm actually right about to hit Rocketeer. As mentioned, I have neither time nor ideas for this months post, so I thought I would use my blogger joker card. This goes back all the way to my first ever post on my site where I say that I would post some of the thousands of screenshots I take every year...

Switch to controller already! Okay so, I'm finally doing it. I've been playing Rocket League since its release back in summer 2015 and I've been using my keyboard and mouse for input ever since. I was Gold in Season 1, Shooting Star in S2 and All-Star in S3, but my progress in this last season really took a halt. I began to notice the limitations of the hardware I was using and after a long time thinking about it, I decided to dust off my XBONE controller, reset my muscle memory and start again from the bottom of the leaderboards. I want to share what I've learnt and, if someone wanting to transition over to controller is reading this, show you what you'll probably have to go through.

...and why I got VAC banned. Hi. My name is DHR_000x and I'm a cheater... supposedly. 1825 days ago, or exactly 5 years, I got my account branded for committing an infringement against the Valve Anti-Cheat policies. During the last half decade many people have come to me asking why I cheat, or flat out refused to play and trade with me because of this. Here I want to show how surreal the ban was and come clean of any future accusations and because it's another cool story about a brain-dead developer.

Why?! The US retailer Target can't seem to keep it together. A few days back they managed, again, to leak information about a game which wasn't supposed to become public until March 8th. Many were speculating that next week, Warner Bros and Monolith would reveal the new Batman: Arkham title, but thanks to Target we now know we were wrong. Middle Earth - Shadow of War is the sequel of 2014s Shadow of Mordor, taking place in the time period between LotR and The Hobbit, it will expand on its predecessors formula and will see the light of day in August of this year. But it comes with some ugly surprises...

Dude, where's my data? Throughout my years working in IT, from my time as a student, through all the years in technical support and all the way to IT Manager, I have seen how people have complete disregard for the safety of their data. They store all their treasured digital files on a single device, it being a laptop or their smartphones and don't invest a single second to think about what would happen to all their holiday pictures if the phone happened to be stolen or simply stops working. This is why I would like to make a little guide on how to backup your data the simplest and cheapest way possible and give you some background on this matter.

Huhu! Lets talk about hypocrites today, yes, about Stealthkilla. The guy that tries to exhibit slyness with his nickname yet is always the first one to pull the trigger and storming in guns blazing. The guy that would open the gates for the enemy only to have more than one simultaneous target. The guy that, if he could, would carry a machine-gun in each hand, plus one on the back for backup. The guy that leaves a trail of explosives wherever he goes, like in Hansel & Gretel, only because it would be funny if an old lady would step on them. The guy that has clearly more Killa in him than Stealth, that's the guy today's post is dedicated to. Cheers mate.

R.I.P. 2016 Another year comes to an end and a massive amount of screenshots have been taken throughout the last twelve months. It has been a ton of fun playing all the different games that I was able to put my hands on this year, so I've chosen a few of the screenshots at random to represent what I have been spending my free time with in 2016. A huge thanks as always to my mates Stealthkilla, Marsu75, KingB00 and Titandioxid for all the hours of awesome gaming, frustrations, tears and unlimited laughs. I wish you guys, and to everybody else reading this, a wonderful and Happy New Year!

We have captured objective butta Where do I begin? We have all been waiting the last few years for a new pure Battlefield experience, another military based BF without cops or jedis, and at the end of last October it arrived, and it shot right past my heart. I consider myself a Battlefield veteran, having played 1942, BF2, BC2, BF3 and 4, and I've never felt so let down by this series. A quote of mine from back in March of this year went like this, let's see how it turned out: Don't just build and engine with maps and then throw everything from your brain storm session in it.

Pssst! Hey kid, wanna play some Counter Strike? A few months ago I wrote in my Nostalgia Trip about the time I first came in contact with computers and video games and showcased what probably kick started my love for this entertainment medium. When I was seven years old we moved to Valencia, Spain, but left the computer behind so it took a while for me to get in front of a keyboard again. Curiosity, ingeniousness, luck and good friends have shaped my perception of gaming and rewarded me with amazing experiences throughout the last 15 years. And who doesn't want to know how I came up with my nickname? :D

Good evening Madam Screamer: SKREEEEEEE!! Quite so, quite so... * Starts running hysterically* We picked it up again. Back in 2013, in the middle of our DayZ craze, Stealth and I were trying out some of the different new zombie survival games that were popping up through the Steam Early Access Program, one of them was 7 Days to Die.  Also another seemingly good choice was The Dead Linger, with its 360 km 2 map (compared to the 225 km 2 of DayZ), but the pre-Alpha had nothing more to offer than flat landscape, a few buildings and some utterly retarded zombie IA. Glad we didn't invest more than 5 bucks in that game, because it got shelved in 2015 any ways. 7 Days to Die on the other hand had something appealing to me with it's sandbox base building survival thingy going on. "DayZ with Minecraft elements in it?" - I was thinking - "Gotta try that out".

The Half-Life and death of Gordon Frohman Welcome. Welcome to City 17... Today I wanted to talk a little about one of the greatest comics I've ever read and how I made hard copy of it using one of those holiday album websites. Back in the day I completely fell in love with Half-Life 2, the story, the graphics, facial animation, the PHYSICS. Everything was and still is amazing. Half-Life 2 Deathmatch was my daily bread back in the days, co-founded the E=mc ² Clan with a frenchie called Cynyx, getting together an amazing group of people from all around Europe and made many Maps on the Source Engine. This comic is one of those things that made me enjoy those times around Half-Life 2 even more.

You block-ed the path to a successful greeting. Yes, I'm funny. Today I would like to talk about this years Steam Summer Sale that, surprisingly, didn't leave me bankrupt and eating dry bread under a bridge. This year I bought exactly one game, only one, and that game was Portal Knights which was 33% off. In the past I wanted to go back to Minecraft many times, but I didn't want to play it alone and my friends never felt like going back to play it, until I showed Portal Knights to my man Marsu. He bought it too, we played it, he fucked the game up and we played some more, let me tell you more about it.

Is it me you are looking for? Once more I'd like to take a trip to nostalgia town and take a look at my days in Linage II. This is the first MMO I've ever played, and that was back in 2006, when it was two years old already. Lineage II is a Korean MMORPG which, as usual for Korean games, focused in its majority on your avatar, more than gameplay, story or basically everything else. This made it perfect for me because I had no idea what was going on.

Warning! You are now entering a contaminated zone! In about three weeks Titan, Stealth and I must have put around 250h collectively into this game. We took our time to level up, played in the Dark Zone for quite a bit before reaching level cap and spent most of the time maxing out our stats for the level we were in. It always went like this; play story quests and side missions until you level up, get excited for being able to equip that gun or armour you had put aside until you reached the necessary level, start window shopping from vendor to vendor to see if they sell any piece that has like +2 of something you're looking for and then test your equipment in the Dark Zone. But aside from bigger and bigger numbers, what else does this game have to offer? This is our experience.

Today, at 1:23AM thirty years ago, the worst accident in the history of nuclear power was about to happen. During a systems test at the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, a massive power spike occurred, the core overheated, and caused some of the fuel rods to fracture which lead to an increase in fuel temperature and massive steam buildup. This explosive steam pressure caused the detonation that destroyed the reactor casing, tearing off and blasting the 2000-ton upper plate, to which the entire reactor assembly is fastened, through the roof of the reactor building. The ejected superheated lumps of graphite and the demolished channels still in the remains of the reactor vessel caught fire on exposure to air, greatly contributing to the spread of radioactive fallout and the contamination of outlying areas. Three decades later Stealth and I decided to give it a visit.

You have a new message: Hi! I had a discussion quite a while ago with Stealthkilla about weapon damage models in Battlefield 4 and how they have been balanced in game. The discussion originated from talking about weapon and gadget bloating in the game, where I was concerned about how they balance all of those items out. Today in BF4 we have over 150 weapons and gadgets and each one of them somehow has to serve a purpose for you to use it, otherwise you will end up just using the best ones from each category. This made me think about many other things that maybe would be nice to see changed, be it to change and refresh the gameplay of the upcoming Battlefield or improve certain aspects of the formula we are running today. Let's get deeper into it.

Everybody 25 or younger raise your hand! Everybody in the office is now looking at you weirdly because you raised your hand for no reason and myself as well because may have never heard about what I am going to show today. I myself just turned 27 two weeks ago, and it made me look back on my humble beginnings in gaming. Funny thing is, it all started the same year I was born in, back in 1989...

Access Granted. Welcome. Today I want to go into a somehow foreign topic to this blog; Password Security. As everybody that read the title now knows, today is Change your Password Day and you would probably think I knew about this, well I didn't, first day I've ever heard of it. But no worries, as it looks like, the Change your Password Day is in its 4th year going and is aimed at all those lazy sons of biscuit eaters that use the same two passwords on every possible website, and I am guilty of that as well. Let us have a look into what everybody should do right now to secure their online accounts.  

Hello, is it me you're looking for? First of all, Happy New Year to everybody. Today I want to make some space to something I made back in 2010. Like back then, I started to play Company of Heroes again with Marsu, and I remembered that I had some own maps laying around. The idea of making maps for CoH came when we decided to try out some community made maps that were a little bit more fitting for our defensive play style, so we downloaded one with a huge bridge connecting the bases. Turned out the map had a completely bugged out path finding...