Recently I've been trying to grow my youtube channel beyond 8 subscribers, so if you'd like to subscribe, go right ahead I won't stop you!
I've figured that I need to expand my youtube presence not just by adding more videos, but varying the topic area to increase the possibility of a viewer stumbling upon my channel. Of course this can be greatly increased by commenting more on videos, and I don't mean trolling them I mean posting quality comments which is more likely to be clicked on by a casual viewer, so don't go posting on the 1,00,000+ view videos, the comments field is just too busy and you will be exposed for a few minutes at best. It's much better to comment on the smaller youtube videos say 50,000 that get the traffic but the chances of a viewer reading your comment are greatly increaed. BUT, don't just post check out my videos blatantly that is my pet hate in the comments and I just instantly skip to the next section.
Anyway, heres my most recent video about transfering files from your old computer via a direct HDD transfer.

Thanks for watching!

I recently got chance to video the results of my PC build. I thought i'd focus on the cpu cooling in this article, more specifically the Noctua NH-D14 cpu cooler. Lets get things straight, this cooler is expensive, at £60 it's in the top bracket for air coolers, verging on the mid range all in one watercooling kits, but obviously obliterating them in terms of performance. So here's my video, I will be following it up with a full written review in the next few weeks as I finalise my results. So sit back and enjoy.

Right, so as you've probably guessed my exams are over untill June. 6 exams in 2 weeks isn't fun, but hey no need to dwell on it there's people out there with way more than that! So i'm sitting here wondering what game I should play in some of the free time that I have now gained after exam season. Believe it or not I managed to hide my xbox controller from myself since christmas due to the pull of fifa and getting my team new players in the transfer window.

So, the point of this post is a question, what game should I be playing now, released or as yet unreleased which will be fun to play and not get boring after a few weeks, read skyrim, don't hate on my please!

Hopefully someone out there will have a good suggestion, all are welcome to comment and I look forward to the results, if I get enough I may even start a little poll running.

Oh, and i'm not sure if you can tell but i'm a slight fan boy of any games with frostbite or just destruction in general giving you more than one route to the objective. Today for example instead of using the doors in Battlefield 3, I just pulled out my trusty C4 and blew myself a new one in a perfectly nice wall!

Thanks,

So it's the start of a new year, and hopefully a few advances with the quality of gameplay over the year. Noteable releases I personally am looking forward too are Grand Theft Auto and a few more map packs for Battlefield 3. On that note if you haven't bought the back to karkand map pack for Battlefield 3 then you really are missing out. The gameplay flows much better and the battles are much more fierce. It's still taking time to get used to however as I end up running into a house and not knowing the way to the stairs, which I'm not going to lie, it's pretty annoying especially when theres an enemy sniper on the roof most probably equipped with a motion sensor.

So what are your hopes for 2012? Maybe a new Xbox 720 or Playstation 4, or maybe a more refined kinect which works in less space. Let me know below, and finally I hope we can all have a great year in 2012!

So we've arrived at day 4 already, doesn't time fly! For day 4 of the gaming accessory countdown, I decided to go along with the Xbox 360 dashboard update hype, so the most fitting accessory to choose will naturally be the Xbox Kinect. I've you've not logged onto xbox today then do it now, the update is amazing! if you've got time check out a video by "soldierknowsbest" on youtube which I've left imbedded below, he's a great youtuber and is really clear for whatever he does, hence why I've subscribed to him. On a seperate note he manages to show apple products but without the usual bias of an apple fan boy of which there are loads..no offence.

The Xbox 360 Kinect:

I'm not going to lie, at first I was skeptical about the kinect system. I was worried about it's accuracy and whether or not the games will be worth while. Luckily my worries never came out to be true, it's better than all my expectations and whats more is that once you get bored of gaming with it, you can just sit on your sofa and control your xbox without the controller, or if your feeling adventurous then huck it up to your computer and hack it with the many programs available online to do whatever you want it to do with windows. Microsoft at present don't condone this behaviour, privatley I think that they quite like it as it gives them ideas as to what to include in the next version and how to improve it with much more data streams than just the games and controlling an xbox which is quite linear to the possibilities that it can achieve.

So thats why I chose the Xbox 360 Kinect for my christmas gaming accessory for day 4. Come back tommorow for day 5! Don't forget to watch the video below, it's quite short (8minutes) but it's a great video that I felt must be shared with you guys.

Comment below if you'd like more videos to be linked to the blog posts.

Yes the title says day 2, I realise I missed a day don't hate me for it please.
Anyways lets get to it, todays gaming accessory is for all the PC users out there who game, or indeed don't but need high precision i.e. graphic design when not working with a tablet input.

The Logitech G500 Gaming Mouse:

You may be wondering why I chose this mouse over the MX510, and in most part it's due to the price. This is currently a good £15 cheaper than the MX510 mouse and comes with all the features that you'll need making it a bargain. Yes at £30 it's not cheap but when it comes to mice up to a point it pays to pay extra, although I wouldn't recommend spending more than say £45 on a mouse unless you have bad wrists e.t.c. As always its a balance between spending too little as you run the risk of a false economy as you have to buy more cheaper ones if they brake rather than 1 good one that would have a higher chance of working longer and comes with more features. So yeah check out the link below on amazon and read the reviews for yourself!

Check back tommorow for my next pick of the day, don't forget to comment with your favourite mouse as perhaps I have missed a bargain that you've found!

From now until Christmas I will be choosing my favourite gaming accessory of the day daily up until Christmas Eve or there abouts, it's running pretty late but could be invaluable to the late night panic buying by men or for the boxing day sales to pick up a bargain!

So without further ado here's my choice for day 1 (4/12/11).

Xbox 360 Plug and Charge Kit

This really is the staple of any xbox 360 gamers arsenal, apart from the controller that is. Nothing is worse than being in the middle of a COD game and your controller disconects in the middle of the map or room leaving you open to getting shot by the enemy. What usually follows is a mad dash to push the xbox button giving you just enough juice to run to the nearest corner and go prone. What follows is the hunt for batteries to give your player life once again, assuming you've not already been dispatched by the enemy!

The xbox 360 plug and charge kit does away with these problems. It's so simple to either plug your controller in after each gaming session, or simply every once in a while when you notice the battery level dropping in the menu. I love it as it gives you the best of both worlds, wired for consistent power if your sitting closer to the tv and it won't be a problem, or further away allowing you to truly appreciate the wireless power of the controller. I actually found that I played COD better with the cable plugged in, weird!

Anyway that ends my christmas gaming accessory of the day for today, check back tomorrow for a new one!

Don't forget to comment below with your personal choices and I may include them, if I do I will mention your website or gamertag whichever you choose.

It's that time of year again when Amazon roll out the black friday deals to the masses. Growing in popularity each year as they compete for their chunk of the market. Especially popular this year due to the economic problems faced by many this year. 

Amazon's black friday deals are relatively new to the UK version of the store as they only made their way across the pond a few years ago, where they were received with optimism and huge popularity. Now this all means that it's harder to secure the deals that you want when they come available to you. This year I thought I would try to get the edge by following them on twitter where they announce the deals early or at the moment they go live giving you a better chance to snap the bargain up before it's gone. Remember that it only needs to be in your basket for it to be secured as yours, leaving you with 15 minutes to complete the transaction so don't go off celebrating before you've paid. This could be a costly mistake if a TV pops up with a huge discount and after beating everyone to it, you let it slide allowing someone else to take it.

Black Friday sales are great and that, but remember not to buy something that doesn't fit what your after as this may be good in the short run but may leave you lacking in the future. However that's not to say if you see something that looks good but you haven't thought of it before then you should still jump for it if the discount is good and you can take the hit money wise. 

Good luck on amazon tomorrow whether your in the UK, America or any other country amazon does their deals for. Finally it may be worth checking the apple store tomorrow online as they have some decent discounts on their ipads, possibly laptops and a large chunk of the peripherals. 

Enjoy.

Comment below if you've managed to secure black friday deals from amazon or any other seller for that matter.

After recieving my copy of Battlefield 3, I quickly jumped onto the multiplayer to try and close the gap on the rest of the world after their 3 day head start. What struck me instantly was the amount of sweat people were prepared to put down into this game in the first few days.  As a level 1 and 2 I was facing teams made up of level 20's 30's and above, which made it hard to even get a kill in before their superior optics shot me from across the map. Now obviously my number of deaths in the lower levels is down to a lack of player skill by me, partly from lack of time on the maps and partly due to not having even weaponry on my shoulder to hunt them down. As I always say, attack is the best form of defence you will very rarely find me camping in my base defending the objective, I find it much more fun to be on the sharp end of the action chucking lead down the map into the opponents as they rush towards your objective. This is really where BF3 comes into it's own, the destructibility is amazing and really complements the huge number of rpgs,bullets and grenades whistling over your head. One man and a well aimed rpg can really hold back the enemy untill reinforcements arrive giving your team vital extra settings to come up to the front and defend it!

Apart from the graphics, what really blew me away was the depth in the sound as your playing. From the moment I test fired my gun when I spawned I knew my ears were in for a treat! The guns have an added depth to them which call of duty has never been able to capture. They have just the amount of bass but still manage to retain the richness of the sound. Now I've never fired a full calibre gun so I can't comment on the likeness to reality, but take my word for it, they sound amazing!

So we've established the sound is amazing, what else is?

Lets start with the campaign, a lot of people new to the Battlefield franchise have been criticisng the multiplayer experience unfairly comparing it to COD's polished mulitplayer. Battlefield 3 has never been about the multiplayer, I'm just glad they've managed to throw in 6-8 hours by all accounts of singleplayer action to go on when you don't feel like rushing around in multiplayer or for the new players to get their eye in with the aim and the controls. Yes the multiplayer isn't as good as COD's, I wasn't expecting it to be, but it does throw up a few surprises along the way and I'm only about half way through! The first demo mission which has already been previewed around the internet and which featured in the gadget shows simulator shows off the games frostbite 2 engine to the max.

So lets talk multiplayer, the bread and butter of a Battlefield series game.  Battlefield 3 has based their user interface for PC within your computers default website browser so in my case it's firefox that loads up once I've clicked on battlefield 3 in Origin. At first I was aprehensive about the switch from a game based interface to an untried web browser based one. So far I have been pleasantly surprised by the features it includes and the ease of use it provides. Along the top you can select various options such as viewing your profile or joining a multiplayer game. This is where the real improvement has been made, before the quick match button was poor and it was really a lottery to which game you joined. Now it is much more refined, you select the options you want from the tickboxes menu at the top of the page, and after you've chosen simply click quick match and it finds you a match corresponding to your search with no input from you and proceeds to drop you straight into the game. However I have been placed into emtpy servers on more than one occassion but hopefully this will be fixed with the first patch of the game, along with car horns!
My favourite map so far has got to be Caspian Border. The jet play on it is insane with dog fights a must as both teams jets (2 for each) go at each other in the skies above, there really is nowhere to hide in the sky as the map is so open and flat with only the antena sticking up in the middle which is surprising easy to find yourself in the middle of the support wires which came to my saviour in a dogfight when I couldn't get them off my tail! The map is perfect for getting your first kills in a jet but do it quickly as the amount of AA on this map is incredible coming both from shoulder mounted and the planes up in the sky with you, there is nowhere to hide from the lock and flares only seem to delay the inevitable. Heat seaking air to air missiles also seem to have lost their punch, possibly to give new players a chance but really annoying if your stuck on a planes tail madly trying to get a lock, on more than one occassion I've been forced to switch to the chain gun to take them down, which usually dissables them and you don't get as many points as a kill.

So I hope you've enjoyed my initial thoughts on Battlefield 3 and I will be publishing a new review between now and the release of the back to karkand map pack which I get free from buying the limited edition version of Battlefield 3.

Comment below with your best and worst parts of BF3!

This isn't going to apply to the american viewers, mainly to the people from the UK. What I don't get with the Battlefield 3 release date is the huge time gap between the american release date and the time it arrives in britain. Yes i'm used to waiting a day or so for it to come out, but not 3 whole days! America get it in phase 1 including a whole host of other countries including the falkland islands and uzbekistan, I doubt their demand for bf3 is even a tenth of that in the UK and europe, whilst the UK has to wait untill FRIDAY for it to be released along with India, Ireland, Spain and South Africa to name a few. 

France and Germany get it a day before us, how hard is it to just let it flow accross the channel too, it's not like the servers are hosted by EA in Sweden. Speaking of Sweden I feel sorry for them as the country who's design team built it have to wait untill thursday for it too.

Without loosing perspective of what I cannot comprehend as to why the delay is so huge and to why the UK is so far down the pecking order in the eyes of EA compared to other countries, Japan are the ones I most feel sorry for as they have to wait up untill next wednesday for it to come out, why may I ask?

At the time of writing I have tweeted Battlefield 3 to ask "why the delay" and I have so far recieved nothing presumably hoping it will go away. I intend to delve deeper into this and find out why the UK and other european countries, Portugal for example have to wait whilst our neighbours get it the day before.

By the time we manage to log onto the servers we're already 1-3 days behind the enemy adding up to a huge one sided destruction of us mere mortals who had to wait longer than them through no fault of our own. Add your comments if you too feel dissatisfied with the current state of release times.

On second thoughts, maybe the UK has to wait untill Friday because most people in the world love to hate on our Island nation for reasons unbeknown to me.