Living with two roommates who don’t share my movie, music, and gaming enthusiasm means I have to use headphones at all times. You could say I have a mild headphone fetish, and over the years, I’ve tried a dozen of them. From the humble beginnings of generic Wal-mart Sony earphones, then the Shure E2C earphones, the venerable Grado SD60’s, and the Audio Technica ATH-A500. Audio quality, comfort, and build quality are all top criterias I look into when checking out headphones/earphones.
Now I am trying out the Icemat Siberia Headset, which retails for $80. Icemat has the luxury of creating gamer-approved mousepads in an industry where there aren’t many competitors. With headphones, however, it’s a saturated market. Aiming them at gamers means you not only have to have features that gamers crave (like being affordable, durable, and have a great soundstage — more on this later), but it must also exhibit superb sound quality.
Due to popular demand, I’ve made available torrents for each volume of mashups on the Tunes page. I am uploading this from my own connection, and I can upload up to 245kB/sec, so it may take a little while for more seeders other than me to happen and the speed to increase. Enjoy!
Update: Already there’s been a few people who completed a volume and disappeared, instead of helping to seed. I can’t do all the uploading by myself, it’d take me forever to get it to everyone that wants these volumes. So if you decide to download a volume, please help seed so others can enjoy these tunes as well.
Sorry if the title is a little confusing; this is a review of a new advertising service available online called ReviewMe. As a note, I am being paid to write up this review, but I can assure you, in my years of reviewing products, services, and software, I’m always up-front and comprehensive with my assessments.
The Black Keys came out around the time The White Stripes did, but since The Black Keys are more low-fi and less mainstream but pure bluesy rock, they didn’t get as much exposure as The White Stripes. This isn’t a knock against The White Stripes, as I think they are excellent too, but when I want the raw blues rock, The Black Keys is just the ticket for me.
This song is Your Touch, and is based off their newest album, Magic Potion. I can’t recommend The Black Keys enough, as I always find myself gravitating towards their music when I’m very picky, when no other music fits my mood.
A decade ago, before I really got into PC gaming, I had your generic ball mouse and mousepad that you’d find at any Walmart. It wasn’t until I started to heavily game online (on a 56k modem, no less) in Quake 2, that I started tweaking my computer, upgrading to the latest and greatest, and learning that I need a better mouse and mousepad. The first specialized mousepad I got was a 3M pad that was sleek, thin, and tiny. So tiny and thin, in fact, that it would curl easily. It didn’t last long.
I’m one of those gamers who has the severe stuttering problem with Dark Messiah. It’s been a week and a patch still hasn’t come out. This stuttering situation is the same problem that occurred in Half-Life 2, and was a problem for me in The Ship and the first SiN Episodes game. Other games using the Source engine has given the stuttering problem to other gamers. Which is why I am not confident it will get fixed by Arkane or any other developer who likely realized that sales of their games will be hurt by this stuttering problem inherent with the Source engine powered games.
With a non-existent refund policy on Steam, it’s “shame on me” for purchasing The Ship and SiN Episodes without trying them out. My mistake? Wanting to support the developers. However, when I can’t enjoy those games, it makes it a moot point when supporting the developers, because I had basically donated the money to them, which isn’t what I wanted.
So what is a gamer to do? Piracy is certainly not an option, that’s a road of ingratitude I don’t want to traverse, so I figure I only buy games in which I played the demo and enjoyed it. Then I can dip into my pockets, and fork over my hard-earned money to the developers to support them, and also enjoy their game.
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