Happy Christmas to all who enjoy JoeIce.com. This will be the last post of 2011 and hasn’t it been fun. There’s been crazy games and web stuff, stupid rants and many a thought that should have not been made! So hope you enjoy your holidays and have a great new year!

Oh and watch out for Cthulhu!!

Time for some more ranting; Call of Duty is one of the biggest first person shooter franchises on the planet; It gives Activision the rights to print money. Since the release of the first Modern Warfare, they have not released a Call of Duty title without it topping sale charts and going to the top of the most played online titles for months if not till the next title hits shelves! I have no problem with the games, they give what you want. Mindless violence, pretty graphics and a place to finally fulfil that need to kill… I mean play with your friends…

But with multiplayer competition, comes the need to review stats! Not just scores but accuracy, weapon load outs, team layouts, locations of death on a map to map bases, there are so many things you can look at to try and improve your skills/game. But that is a lot of data to calculate and display, which costs time and data storage. To make it easy Activision came up with the Elite site and Apps to allow you to view this information. It’s really simple to use, you just sign up, link your accounts and away you go. But they couldn’t stop at that, no. They decided they could make money from this so they held back content and made premium content that only the “Elite” can get. The price, $49.99 a year! Now, I have no problem with paying for something useful but for stuff that could be free, I have a problem.

When I look at stuff like this, I look at Bungie and Halo and their way of handling this kind of data. Everyone who has a Bungie account can view their stats for their Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo Reach stats… For Free! Nothing is held back, everything is free. And what’s more, they are evolving it to integrate Halo Waypoint and 343 Industries is taking over the data for Halo 4! They are even bringing out a GPS app for your phone so you can use it as a mini-map for in game tracking. Nuts and all but still… IT’S FREE!! And what’s more, it works. I will say they have server problem on release of titles due to overload, but within days, it evens out and runs smoothly. It’s been three weeks and Call of Duty Elite could barely load the front page! And people are paying for it!!

Am I just the only one to think that making money is over taking the need to be useful and/or fun!

So it’s that time of the year again and we are headed for the road. Yes, you guessed it; we are headed for the October MCM Expo in London. Hopefully I have packed the right things such as cameras and enough batteries for the whole weekend. And hopefully unlike last time, we in fact will record some footage. May’s expo was a god awful mess, which had me suffering unbelievable toothache and spending most of my time hopped up on pain killers. But this time, will be different!

As well as myself, I am dragging most of the From the Attic Films crew; namely Tarty, Tricky and Chris and we hope to also have the guys from Atomic-Nerd join us for some tomfoolery! If you see us, we will be the ones in our branded shirts, get in the way of the camera to be caught on “film” and appear on our site! We will also be holding a few competitions so find us to find out more!

Till I return, enjoy this week’s posts! It’s been a blast!

With all this gaming and web work I’ve been doing, I have not been looking after my home very well. So I thought it be nice to do a little show and tell of my humble-abode. Due to the amount of pictures, you will have to select the title of the post or click “Read More” to view the rest of the post.

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I do not get to go too many midnight openings for… stuff. I think I have been to three now and range from crazy (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix… What, it was for my sister!!) To dull (What happened to poor Halo Reach… no love!) But I went and got myself a copy of Gears of War 3 at midnight just to say I did… and guess what? I DID!! WHERE WERE YOU HUH!!

Anyways, I have been a Gears fan for some time now. Not as crazy as my Halo addiction but still enough to say I have read all the books (waiting for the next one!) and have bought all the special editions of the games. So I was pretty pumped to play. Now, I’d like to point one thing out that has been bugging me about 360 titles for awhile. On the back of every box, its states what we need and what to expect from the game e.g. co-op. Now for 360 titles, sometimes there is no local multiplayer and you can only play on LIVE. Now, I’m over the whole “need to be on LIVE to play 2-player”, but could they please label them correctly. I was expecting 5-player co-op over LIVE for the campaign only to find that it was for horde/beast only; Single player was only 4-player. We had to leave poor Tarty out of our first run through as we already had 4-players!

Anyways, I’m not going to do a full review of the game as I cannot be spoiler free but I can say that it was an epic end to the trilogy and was worth every penny. The new multiplayer options are great, especially the upgrades to horde and the addition of Beast mode. Never know, may do a full review in the future!

Till next time, buzz those chainsaws!

The last few months have seen me working some serious code! First up, I’d like to welcome Atomic-Nerd to the From the Attic Films family. They create some awesome videos filled with comedy and tomfoolery, as well as minecraft!! In addition to their videos, they bring a talented blogger (Laura) to keep us up to date with the latest games and her experience with them. Expect a mobile version of the site before the months out.

This month also saw the release of Version 2.0 of Rentapoints, that I have been working on for some time now! With this update, we bought a new ranking system, a new mobile version, feature banner, new video pages and our new social media system. Hopefully the first of the new season will be released soon and you can marvel in its greatness!

I have also been carrying out minor changes to From the Attic Films, such as breaking the video partners and bloggers into their own pages. I have also been working on the new From the Attic Network bar which now adorns all the partner sites and links in-between them. Apart from the inter-site linking, the addition of a google search has come in handy for some of those pages we have lost on the road and are now safely where they are meant to be!

I have finally got round to releasing the beta for From the Attic Studio, our design and host site. It is very bare bones at this moment but there is plenty to add and hopefully will be receiving new clients in the months to come.

Until next time, ever wondered what JoeIce.com looks like in Japanese?

This is a heads-up.

I have been neglecting my poor little site and my readers. It has been quite some time since my last post and I have to apologise but I have been busy with lots of things. BUT NO MORE!

To make up for it, I will be making a post a day for the next four days just to catch you all up on going’s on!

So hold on to your underwear! This is gonna be a Wild Ride!

It has been a busy week here at JoeIce HQ. I have been working on a ton of web design;  thou it is sad, some of it no one will ever see, some you won’t see for a few more months and some has been needed to be completed for ALONG TIME.

But in-between all this coding, I have had a chance to watch an anime I have had on my list to watch for awhile, Eden of the East.

Eden of the East is from the people who brought us Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex which made is an automatic buy for me as I love that series. I love their animation style and humour used in their writing. They also have awesome translations and voice actors for the English versions unlike some studios.

Without spoiling too much, the series is about a social network/real-world-search system, secret sociality, billionaire crazy plan, smart kids and a attractive assistant…voice! If you enjoyed Ghost in the Shell, this is a must watch!

I end this statement with – Uncle!

This week I’ve been working on some new bits for some websites, including the Sitebar which now lurks at the top of all the partner sites. I have also been playing with tons off css and learning new ways to use it to achieve some really cool effects.

Apart from work, I have been sinking my teeth into… Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is a story-driven survival horror/psychological thriller game where you play the role of bestselling thriller writer, Alan Wake (Oh my god!). Alan Wake has gone on vacation with his wife, Alice, to the small town of Bright Falls (HINT: Light Fails….). As soon as you arrive, things start to become weird. The inhabitants of Bright Falls are not all with it and those that have all their whits with them are misusing those that don’t! When you try to retrieve the keys for the cabin, a mysterious shadowy woman gives you a key and directions to a cabin on a little island in the scenic Cauldron Lake… can you guess that I shouldn’t be going here for my Holiday!

As soon as you arrive, things go bad. Power goes out, birds attack you, your see your wife drowning… and then you wake up in a car crash and a week has gone by! You must find out what happened to you, where has Alice been swept off to and why do you keep finding pages to a manuscript that you do not remember writing!

Overall the game is good, pacing and story are very good and scream with H.P Lovecraft and Stephan King influences. The “Fight with Light” is cool idea but is simply another form of “Dropping shields before killing”. The game is also broken into “Episodes” and gives the game a TV series feel, which is awesome. However it is let down by poor facial animation, some painful fight mechanics where enemies spawn behind you and there is no way to detect them, and the over indulgence of cut-scenes do let the game down. The game was also delayed by two years leading to low game sells and the question of a sequel in the dark.

I enjoyed this game and could hardly put it down for two days, and I am still not done. There are still many collectables to find and hidden things to find, and will keep me looking and guessing for awhile! Till next time, keep some batteries handy!

Pointless Q&A has returned!

Every Friday I will post six random questions and my answers to them! If you have a question you’d like to ask, send it to me via email.

What’s your favorite movie quote?
It’s a Trwap!

If you could ask God one question what would it be?
Was it just a joke?

Were you a Michael Jackson fan?
Fan of the music, didn’t care about the guy!

If you could be a star athlete in any sport, which sport would you pick?
Hockey! Bash Brother style!

If you could become any fictional character, who would you be?
Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds

What video game have you played the most?
World of Warcraft