Themer by MyColorScreen - a brief review

Hello!

So I figured I would take a time-out from my busy college schedule and write a little bit about this handy little app that I've been using on my phone for the past few days!

It's called Themer and it's currently in Beta stage of testing and it's all about customizing your Android phone.. something that an Android phone has been able to do, pretty much since it's conception. However this was something that was limited to people who knew what they were doing. Now the boffins at MyColorScreen have made it so that even I can change the way my phone looks with just a single click!

As it's in Beta I signed up with my email and got put into a queue to get sent a code.. now this was about a week ago that I signed up and I was in a queue of about 200,000.. it took roughly 3 days for them to get through that gigantic queue and for them to give me a code(which wasn't bad, I thought)!

Once I had the code and entered it into the app, it opens up with the option to browse themes, with three further options - Most popular, Staff picks and Newest. Simply select a theme that you fancy, slap that Apply option and BAM, it downloads and applies automatically.

So far, my favourite themes are below and are the LCD and the Super Mario themes!

If you are interested in taking part in the Themer beta, head over to their website and sign up, or download the app and sign up in there!

That's it from me for now, it's already way later than I hoped it would be when I finished this! :P As always if you have any thoughts you'd like to share, hit the comments button and leave me a note! Cheers!

Ciao for now!

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Induction and more..

Oh hai there!

So yesterday I had my induction at the college.. it went fine.. but as soon as I walked in I was taken aback at how young the class was! They, for the most part have just finished their leaving certificate.. now I'm not sure what age they are when they do that over here since I'm not a native! But I'm guessing 17? Maybe 16??

The day was pretty informative. The first part was mostly just the tutor telling us how to get thrown out and giving us our schedules. After that there was a tour of the college which was okay, apart from the fact that nobody in my group could hear the guide since there was another group in front of us also on the tour.

We then sat around in the canteen for about an hour, we were given a free coffee or tea if we wanted.. so this was a high point in the day for me, cause well, free coffee. We were waiting to be told we could go get our student ID pictures taken... joy. I don't know anyone who has a decent picture for their ID's, though 90% of my sample group is well, me.

My actual course starts tomorrow.. the first lesson is Software Development.. quite intimidating really! Though if you were to ask me face to face I would probably just say that I am excited about it.

Apart from this - the big news that I haven't covered here is that the new expansion was announced a little bit ago for Diablo 3 and it's called Reaper of Souls. In this expansion they will add a new class, the Crusader, they say they were going after some sort of battle-scarred Knight kinda look and tried to give him plenty of ranged options alongside his melee. New story, new monsters, new zones and of course a new level cap.

On top of that there is loot 2.0 as they are calling it.. which is a bit of a loot reset. Then there is the paragon rework that they are implementing, I personally haven't read that much about it but from what I've gathered so far, paragon is going to be account wide and you can distribute the points as you wish? I'll have to have a deeper look at it and report back! Of course the expansion has not been given a release date as of yet and Blizzard has, when questioned about this, given it's usual answer of soon™.

I suppose it would be remiss of me not to mention that Diablo 3 was released for both the X-Box and the PS3 and that it was very well received. A lot of review sites have stated something along the lines of "Blizzard's Return to Consoles is a Smashing Success", I wouldn't know.. cause I won't buy it on console. I own an X-box 360 and have around 6 games.. and I must have spent roughly 20 hours playing it since I bought it like 2 years ago.

On the other hand in less Blizzard but more console related news.. I and several million other gamers are eagerly awaiting the release of GTA V, which so far promises to be a worthy successor to San Andreas, my favorite of the franchise so far. It's release is slated for 17th September, 6 long days away!

That's it from me, Ciao for now pals!

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Back to School

Oh hey!

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic and fun filled, the last week I have barely played any games as I have been changing my life.

Well, that's pretty ambiguous isn't it? why would I want to change your life, I hear you say? I mean, you have it pretty sweet.. you know, playing games and watching people play games all day!

Since you ask, I shall tell you! I decided I wanted to better myself. Or rather, I came to the realization that unless I wanted to work in a call center for the rest of my life I needed to do something about it. So that's what I'm going to do.

As of, I think two weeks ago I signed up to go back to college.. I say go back, but I never went in the first place so I think the real phrase is that I am going back into full time education. I'm going to do networking and web design; with the option a year down the line to stay in that field or swap to game design and development. I have my induction day tomorrow, then the course starts on Thursday I think.. but I will have to double check that!

On top of that, I attended a good friends wedding.. so I had to get a new suit and all the trimmings as my old suit didn't quite fit anymore and not in a good way :(((( the wedding itself was great and saw a few old friends that I haven't seen for a while.

Games wise? Well, let me tell you... The Sims 3 stole at least a week of my life before I decided(well it was strongly suggested by my lovely other half) that I needed to take a break and play a more 'manly' game.. so I booted up X-com: Enemy Unknown. I had forgotten how fun it is! I started a new game and put it on ironman, which means that you can't load any older saves.. if you feck it up, you have to live with it.

Well, I think that's all from me for now.. another update will follow in a couple of days.. after I've had my induction!

Ciao for now!

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The Humble Origin Bundle

Howdy guys!

Today's post is going to touch on something that I'd heard about before, but never actually taken part in till now!

The Humble Bundle.

Now, this site offers weekly games deals, where you pay about as much as you want. For example this weeks bundle includes titles such as Botanicula, McPixel, Thomas was Alone and The Showdown effect.. and if you pay more than the average(for this bundle it's $2.50) you also get Amnesia: The Dark Decent. I believe these bundles usually stick around for a week.

However, this isn't the bundle I wanted to talk about.. they have a special one going on at the moment and they called it the Humble Origin Bundle, where you can pick up a number of EA games for as much or as little as you'd like! If you look at the picture below...

These are the games you can get.. and as the picture states, if you pay more than the average payment so far($4.81 currently), you get Battlefield 3 and the Sims 3 + Starter Pack too! I'm not usually one for actually buying games but this deal is just too good in my opinion! If you were to buy these games separately you would be paying somewhere around $215.00 - and you can pay $1.00 if you like. Though as said, you won't get BF3 and The Sims 3 then.

You get all the game keys on Origin, plus a few of them on Steam too. Though it looks like only the Sims is available on a Mac however. Sorry!

On their site, it also tells us that the deal will be available for another 11 days, so if you haven't got it already.. what are you waiting for?! A cool thing that I saw when I made the purchase, is that you divide the cash up how you want it to be divided! Like, you can say that Humble Bundle get nothing and everything that you pay goes to the charities.. oh yeah, EA stated that all of the money they would get, is going to charities. May be a massive PR stunt by EA, but hell.. it's a damn good one!

The charities they picked are the Human Rights Campaign; Watsi; the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; the American Red Cross; or the American Cancer Society.

According to the website, so far they have sold over 1,215,000 bundles of these games.. with an average purchase of $4.71.. but it also shows the total payments.. which is at $5,847,581 and steadily rising as they sell more bundles. I can only dream of the totals after the 11 days is up! How much do you think it will hit?

That's it from me,

Ciao for now!

p.s. of all the games I bought in this bundle, it pains me to say that I've played The Sims the most.. curse it and it's family, or is that my sim family?

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Well shucks

That's all she wrote. The International 3 is over and done with!

This makes me a little sad.. but on the other hand, wow.. what an amazing Grand Finals, best one I've ever seen(I know, it's the only one I've seen but still).

The Alliance and Na'Vi did not disappoint, the two best teams in the world, at this point in time!

I shouldn't spoil it for you, but I'm going to, so deal with it! If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it then come back and read this post.

So anyway, this tournament helped me find a DotA 2 caster that I really enjoyed listening to, Aaron Chambers, otherwise known as Ayesee - check him out, if you're interested in hearing his awesome voice - In my humble opinion, he should most definitely been casting the finals. It would have made it 10 times better for me.

After I did some research on the guy and looking through his Twitter feed.. I was disgusted by the abuse directed at this man purely because they didn't like his 'radio' voice, for casting a video game. Personally, as you might have guessed I love his voice.. but completely apart from the fact that I think his voice suits commentary.. if you don't like the guy casting, mute him or turn it off. I think it's pretty harsh to hate so much on a guy cause you don't like the way his voice sounds.

But anyway! The guys who cast the games, did a superb job and I don't want to take anything from them because they rocked it out(LDdota and LuminousInverse).

Now though, on to the most important thing..

Called it!

Look, I'll show you!

Boom! This was before the Alliance and Na'Vi played in the Upper Bracket finals. I'm so super proud of myself, I'm thinking maybe a little too proud of myself. It was a guess, though one might say an educated one.

Enough about that now. On to The International 3's grand finals set of games.. just wow, the best DotA I've ever seen played. I really wish I could play as well as any of those guys. The first two games were quick and took them to 1 match a piece.. when I say quick, I mean they were over between 16-20 minutes.. they were so very quick! Most, if not all of the Alliance's games in the tournament prior to this were 45 minutes+.

The third game saw a return of the 45 minute games with the Alliance dominant for the most part, yet falling short in some team fights and the fourth game saw Na'Vi take the first blood and I bet they could actually taste that prize money.. perhaps that's what affected them and that's why at 8 minutes the Alliance team wiped Na'Vi and from then on it snowballed into the Alliance equalling the series 2-2 in a 36 minute battering.

The fifth and final match, well.. I might actually have to re-watch that a few more times and maybe even have a go at commentating it and slapping that on YouTube for y'all to laugh at.

You should just take a moment to congratulate Valve on producing an amazing and successful tournament that by all accounts had over 1 million peak concurrent viewers. That figure is made up from Twitch.tv, Gamefy in China and people who watched via Valves own devices such as the Game Client.

..and then let's congratulate the winners of The International 3: The Alliance.. though to be fair, they have 1.4 million congratulations in the shape of dollah dollah bills yo.

That's me done! Time to have a kip.

Ciao for now!

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Dota 2: The International 3 - Day 3

Well, first of all let's start with clearing something up!

The other day I mentioned that MLG Columbus would not have Starcraft 2 in it's line-up of games.. some speculated that this was due to MLG dropping it.. However it came to light that the reason that it would not be there, is because Red Bull gaming requested a date lock for that weekend from Blizzard before MLG did.

So let's move on to the thing that is dominating the world of E-sports right now.. The International 3, what an amazing load of games that happened last night?! I won't go into great detail as I didn't manage to see all of them.. cause well, I'm old, I was tired and fell asleep while it was playing away on my TV!

I will however talk about the first matches. I won't go into details about who played what heroes, unless it's requested.

First off, we had the team of the tournament so far, unbeaten in the preliminaries and still going strong, team Alliance taking on team DK.. the odds were heavily stacked in favour of the Alliance but on the other hand you have arguably the best carry in the world on the team of DK, in the shape of DK.Burning. Aside from that DK.Super! has been playing really well this tournament.

The first game saw a 1 hour 25 minute match that was as much about posturing and not losing as it was about actually winning. At times it looked like Burning could do the impossible and carry his team to victory and cause Alliance to lose their first set, but the Alliance was too much for them and took the first. Lod[A] leading the board with 12 kills, 2 deaths and 9 assists.

The second game was a 48 minute match that saw Alliance grab a first tower at just over 2 minutes but DK took the first blood and a few uncharacteristic mistakes by the so far unbeaten team Alliance. At times it seemed that the Alliance would overcome these mistakes but in the end DK seemed determined not to lose 2-0 and with that, they took game two. Burning topping the board with 11 kills, 2 deaths and 9 assists.

The third and final game in this epic set saw [A]s4 take first blood around 5 minutes.. the game was a 40 minute long thug snap.. if you're interested in finding out who won or further details of the games themselves then head on over to the Dota 2 YouTube channel, where you can find replays with many languages commentary! Or of course you can watch all of the replays in the DotA 2 game client itself.

Team Liquid after an enourmous run in the losers bracket sadly departed from the Tournament after loosing to the reigning champions Invictus Gaming in one of the last best of 1 matches at the event.

A big story from the happenings last night was a dubious move from Na'Vi - now I'm not saying which set this was or what it decided! The rules say it's allowed, so I guess it's viable. What it is, is that Pudge throws a hook as he's being ported back home by Chen. So if the hook lands, the person hooked gets ported to their opponents base with the Pudge. A lot of people are saying that they don't agree with it. What do you think?

Personally, I guess since it requires the hook to land and for it to be really well timed.. and that it's able to be done in the game and if it's known about but hasn't been fixed then it's just a game mechanic to be used..

In other news, the WCS finals are being played out today and I'll tackle that in another post.

With that though, I'll tip my hat and as always, if you enjoyed the read, subscribe, check out all my other lovely content!

Ciao for now!

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Dota 2: The International 3

Let's just start out by saying.. holee moley!!

G'wan, take a look.. ah you will now won't ye?

http://www.dota2.com/international/home/overview/

For me.. well, I'm impressed. The only other tournaments that I have watched have been Starcraft 2 ones and somehow they didn't seem to be so.. well, huge.

Valve has done a good job I think! The hall looks pretty darn cool and so does the booths the players sit in! The picture below was taken by someone on the DotA 2 team and looks pretty.

All this aside, I was watching the tournament at home. In the luxury of my own little space.. and by all accounts, so were around 1 million other people.

That's right, 1 million peak concurrent viewers.. I had heard quite a few numbers thrown around yesterday for peak concurrent viewers but this is the highest.. and well, I'm astounded. I was shocked by the Starcraft 2 viewer figures when I first started watching but this is on a whole other level.

It really does help that you can watch the tournament games on twitch.tv and in the game client itself!!!!

Then let's talk about the production; there was a small issue in the first match where one of the casters mic's was acting up.. and that was it.. that was the single problem I encountered during the first day of the main event.

Then, this morning while waiting for the games to start again.. the news broke that MLG have, for the moment dropped Starcraft 2 from their Columbus line-up... the current speculation is that it's being replaced.. most likely with World of Tanks.. since they already have League of Legends as their main show.. I think, anyway and I'm not so sure that Riot(who makes League) would take too kindly to DotA 2 being added in to the same show.

For the moment all we can do is sit and wonder.. after all, there still is WCS(The Blizzard run World Championship Series) running along and still pulling in around the same amount of viewer numbers.. though that is a lot smaller than that of The International. But then, the International is a annual event.

It helps that they aren't really in direct competition with each other.. unless you consider this weekend.. where all the WCS finals are on the same weekend as the International.. which I'm not even gonna go into...

Time to get some food, then watch a whole load of DotA 2!

If you've enjoyed reading this, then follow me on Bloglovin and on Twitter @McKnublet - You can also watch me playing games on Twitch.tv and even see some highlights at my YouTube - Click me and subscribe!

Ciao for now!

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Crazy days..

following the Steam Summer Sale!

Oh hello and welcome back fair traveller! Or y'know, you! Sat there in your pj's.. or you even, sat there looking at me when you should be working..

So, I've been pretty absent from Blogger.. as you can tell from the lack of updates.. I have however been quite busy playing games and attempting to produce content for my Twitch.tv and YouTube channels! Another reason that I've not been here, is that I've just got back from a lovely birthday holiday.. my lovely lady took me to Prague for 5 days and it was absolutely fantastic! So.. fingers crossed I will be keeping you updated on here in writing .. and in video on the Twitch/YouTube front about what's going on!

Anyway! Since I talked about the Steam Summer sale in my last post, I wanted to update! I think I managed to survive the rest of the Steam Sale with little to no damage to my Wallet.. I think I ended up buying .. well maybe a couple of games that I never would have without the sale being on!

I bought, or rather.. I left my other half with my steam account and some cash loaded into it... and she bought the following!

RAGE
This is a first-person shooter set in the future - pretty fun game and got a meta score of 79/100. If you've not heard of it or played it, you should give it a go! I'm not usually someone for shooters, but I found it quite good fun!

Borderlands
I don't have much to say about Borderlands really, I'm pretty darn sure you've heard of it! OH! Actually, I freaked out when I heard the title song and I played it on repeat for days for some reason! Anyway, another first-person shooter pretty cartoon-y and fun.

and an awesome little game called

DLC Quest

Whelp, I have even less to say about this.. so I'll just leave this here for you.. a little taster, so to speak!

She did pretty darned well I think! I've enjoyed playing all three of these games .. and I would never have bought them.. maybe I should leave her in charge of my steam wallet more often.. I almost just said wallet then.. but that would never happen. I may be slow, but I'm not stupid.


Anyhoo! Apart from playing those games I've been playing DotA 2 and Diablo 3 much more than I have been playing anything else! Really chomping those levels up on my Barbarian! As you might be able to tell if you had looked over and subscribed to my YouTube and Twitch channels.. when I said it earlier ... ahem..

Right.. with that, I think it's time to bid you all farewell for now!

If you like/subscribe to my channels.. I may give you a present!


Ciao for now!

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