As promised, this is the first installment of What I'm Playing Now. I've been playing both the original Freedom Force and its sequel (Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich). As I'm trying to get together the first massive review, I've also been doing a decent amount of video capture and re-encoding of game footage. FRAPS does a magnificent job of capturing video without causing any lag, but it's video's take up massive amounts of space. I've been playing the original Freedom Force at 800x600 to limit the size, but even at that low resolution they take up about a gig a minute (which is why I'm re-encoding into high bitrate mpeg-2 for the time being). To give you an idea on the scary bitrates FRAPS puts out, a typical x264 1080p movie is encoded at around 10,000kbps. The captures I've been taking (at 800x600) are right around 320,000kbps (yes, 32 times as large as a 1080p video)...in fact, while taking video captures of Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich with FRAPS (at full 1080p resolution of 1920x1080 because I just bought a new 24" ViewSonic Monitor, and because it looks pretty), each 1:40 capture (that's 100 seconds of video) is taking up 4 gigs of space...the bitrate is usually upwards of 720,000kbps. To put that in perspective, 3 minutes of video is taking up what 2 hours of 1080p x264 video would. My Barracuda's and Caviar's tremble in anticipation of more video...

In addition to the Freedom Force games, I've also managed to play a few hours of Left 4 Dead online. I'd like to think I'm pretty decent at it (I am admittedly terrible at playing as the Infected, so forgot about Versus), so if anyone wants to give campaign a go I am certainly up for it. One thing I will say about the game (as it'll never get reviewed on here...it's not an older "retro" game, and it had no possibility of being overlooked as a Valve game) is that few games offer so much replayability. Even with only 4 campaigns, the challenge is never the same. If there's one thing Valve can never be questioned for (and in efforts of full disclosure, I think they are better at making computer games than anyone else) it's the AI in their games. The AI Director in Left 4 Dead always makes the experience different, and always makes it fun and challenging (except when all 4 people get pounced on by Hunters simultaneously in Expert difficulty...but I digress). The point is, if you haven't played it yet you are seriously missing out.

Other than playing games, I've been doing far too much photoshopping for my own good lately. The family wants cool posters on the walls in the game room, and since we can't find the perfect poster to buy, I have been making one (which happens to be a combination of multiple animated cartoon characters). I'm no expert on photoshop, but I think I've done about as well as I could. ITGeek recently put me on to watching some photoshop podcasts, and it's made me want to start using Photoshop more to figure out some of the more complicated stuff (but as my mind wanders frequently, we'll see if I ever do anything to fulfill the want to learn more).

As alway, contact us with any questions or concerns.