In the second part of this set, I continue my adventure with Mickey, and discover that Clowns with either fists or Unicycles are NOT COOL!

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

In this first episode of Set 1, I get pissed off with a tree, bounce of ghosts heads and make several of many stupid, stupid mistakes.

Game-Engine was started a few years ago to be a place where, primarily, @mbraduk and myself would write and produce video about video games. We’d been doing this for a bit and had experimented, as people who are not that experienced in this kind of thing, are want to do.

After numerous incarnations, of which you can hear about by listening to our final podcast of the ‘first season’ with fellow writer and technology enthusiast Stevie Holdway, we settled upon pretty much the format you see now, a bunch of posts about stuff we find interesting.

When we all went our separate ways to university, it made sense to not commit ourselves to writing regularly on a site (as it turns out a  pretty sensible decision) and maybe blog or do stuff casually in our time. Matt and me got into ‘The Matt and Josh Experience‘, another experiment in doing something we didn’t feel really fit with Game-Engine, but on hindsight, we probably should have just kept it within this site, no doubt some of the content will get filtered back on, as we were both really happy with how we did podcasting over the summer.

So why now, why reboot and bring back the site. Well, I firstly need to state that this was driven by me, primarily being annoyed that the site we poured a lot of time and energy into was not really being utilised, we were paying for bandwidth that we didn’t make regular use of and writing on a site where you can set some sort of direction seems to be much easier than writing aimlessly in a personal blog, where posts about movies gets meshed together with chatting about what your favourite time of burger is. Though I may still end up writing about burgers and stuff.

My job of finding terrible Google Image results starts again!

I think most importantly, for me at least, it gives Matt and myself a good place to both share the stuff we do, with him hosting a regular video series and me running a Student TV station as well as add to our portfolio with somewhere nice to direct people to. By virtue of doing stuff both whilst we are at Uni that will like be cross posted here, but I will be contributing a variety of things that, basically, I think are pretty great.

You can expect to see all sorts of stuff cropping up on Game-Engine from now on in, I’ve got a few gaming orientated articles I would like to get writing, and likely will be posting asides and short videos courtesy of my phone, as a more informed Twitter feed perhaps operates. We’ll probably also cover some tech stuff on here with regards to video engineering, different projects we are doing and stuff like that. As of the moment, not sure if we’ll have anyone guest write/post on here, that’s kind of up to them.

I’m also going to be working on getting a better capture process for games and producing higher quality content than what we have done before, allowing us to expand in the direction of Xbox360 and PS3 titles, rather than just older stuff, though may take a bit of time for all that to happen. The site is also going to continue to evolve in terms of look and feel, although we’re not necessarily going to be adding community features and the like any time soon. Stuff like Facebook Opengraph and ways for it to make it easier for you to interact with the site will be rolled out, but once content is up and running.

I should note that this has been done in the break before exam season, so things may get a bit ropey in terms of updates, though short things/images I find browsing Reddit will likely pop up.

So let us see what happens, thanks for reading, give us feedback via Twitter, Facebook or commenting, it’s all much appreciated. Let the show get on the road.

Josh Dean

You would’ve thought that given the melodrama, we’re currently undergoing a some sort of apocolypse (hopefully cyborg zombies) and you’re all invited! Apart from the fact that we’re not and you wouldn’t be anyway. Instead of all that, we’re instead moving away as a team from ‘Game-Engine’ as we go our seperate ways, and thus, won’t really be putting much on this website anymore.

However, that’s not to say we’re just deleting it all. Instead we’re leaving the system running, and using it to host all our personal blogs, in which we’ll no doubt be spending a lot more time on when we realise we have something narcissistic to say to the world…Or at least I will be. I’ll be doing some last changes to the site to make these more prominant on the front page, and changing stuff to be in ‘sleep mode’.

If you haven’t already listened to our farewell podcast, first of all how dare you not, and secondly, go listen, because that is the best, if long and most tedious, run through of why it’s over, why it started and some of the madness that happened along the way (and sometimes it really was madness). Below are a few embaressing embed’s (patent pending) that really show that, despite the apparent low quality, how far we have come:

The Next Level UK, Episode 001

The first of our “The Next Level UK” episodes, and for us, one of the most memorable, although that is often for the wrong reasons. And did anyone tell us MySpace was a bad idea? I think not!

I still cringe every single damn second

The Next Level UK Gran Turismo 4 Endurance Run Challenge…

One hell of a title, and probably one of the better things that came out of TNL UK…In my own rather biased opinion…

The Next Level GT4 Endurance Race Challange from The Next Level UK on Vimeo.

Our first Game-Engine video…

We didn’t exactly start with a bang, but here a video giving an overview of what the original Game Engine had in terms of features

Behind the Scenes of Ignition

As stated previously, probably the video that was the most fun to shoot vs. most stressful, and had some rather classic, if embarrassing moments.

Our affair with Rock Band 2

Whilst this is only the trailer, enjoy the full thing here (Part 1) (Part 2), and yes, we were of course, deadly serious.

Game Engine Plays!

One of our favourite things to do, mainly because editing was most of the time real simple. Here is the Indigo Prophecy playthrough, but I also started with a Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine (an MMORPG) which went for a bit.

Here is the hour+ episode. What the hell, kill some time!

And Finally..

Our final ever video starred us playing some Portal, for some reason. Oh, and a strange Chinese fish thing…

So there you have it, the quick, videoed history of Game-Engine (and it’s former title) from start to end. Again, if you wish to hear the full story, and what is happening now, please go and listen to our final, official, podcast.

It’s been, personally, a heck of a learning experience, but more than most learning experience, 90% of the time it’s been fun. Yes, there was stress, when it came to videos and building websites, but it broadened us out as a team and felt really really cool to be doing something like this, even if it wasn’t. So, I want to say a huge thank you to Matt for being part of this madness from the begining and Stevie for being really supportive through the ‘Game-Engine’ period.

If you’ve liked anything you’ve seen on these fine web pages, I can now suggest that if you want to keep following along with what we are up to, we all have personal blogs, so I’ll put a link to them here:

• The One Man Blog Machine
• The Rough Cut
• The Seal of Approval

You can also follow us on Twitter @josh9989, @mbraduk and @Stevie_Holdway. And that is that, now I’m going to go now and probably start thinking of something stupid I can do on my personal blog. You have been warned. Peace out and KEEP GAMING!

Windows 7 has essentially kicked Vista into the down, but you still have options to install XP in a lot of machines

If you are buying a machine from a store, be it in real life or online, it’s most likely for their to be a OS installed on it already, and it doesn’t really take much guessing over what it’s going to be; Windows. Whilst Dell experimented with putting Ubuntu on machines, with a few notebooks still appearing with a form of the distribution on it, it’s not very prevalent at all. There has been some weirdness in terms of the way manufacturers deal with OS’s, thanks to the rise of 64bit and of course the Windows XP issue.

First of all, the majority of machines that have been relatively recently released all have Windows 7 on them, as it’s essentially the OS that Vista should have been. For starters, it’s a lot quicker in terms of boot speed and general operation, with a far less invasive User Account Control system (the thing that asks for admin rights all the time) and generally works a lot better on a wider set of machines. As well as that, it supports the (admittedly few) multi-touch displays and some other novelty gubbins. I recommend against getting Windows Vista, purely based on using it for near enough a year, I’ll give you a pro tip- It’s not very good. Whilst it’s for reasons that have been bounced around the internet a lot, it simply doesn’t perform to well, factors in graphical niceties over responsiveness and the way it’s been abandoned probably pays to that.

Whilst it can sometimes take a little bit of work, Ubuntu is becoming a great alternative to commercial OS's

That’s not saying Windows 7 is perfect, and the old war-horse of Windows XP is still occasionally being pre-installed on machines, and being bundled with quite a lot of machines as an option install disk. For those who have fully moved on, XP is beginning to feel a bit legacy now, but if you’ve only been using that OS, then you perhaps won’t notice the difference too much. The benefits of using XP is that it is much less tough on system specs and applications can therefore use fewer resources to run, which is why games often have a “1GB RAM for XP, 2GB for Vista/7″ recommended spec, for example. Whilst Microsoft are slowly discontinuing all support for Windows XP, if you feel comfortable with it, there is no need to feel you have to change to Vista or 7.

You could choose to install another OS, such as a Linux distribution, onto your machine. Whilst there are literally hundreds of choices about this, the majority of users go with Ubuntu, which is largely thought to be most user-friendly (read: n00b friendly) and most compatible distro out there. I tend to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot, primarily because I find I can boot it very quickly and get working, compared to There are many alternatives, but rather than me, being un-informed and all, try to muddle through it, take a look at this post to see Stevie’s reasons behind it all.

Not as glamorous as their desktop counterparts, but these mobile cards can pack a punch

The big thing that really messed up the way graphics are seen in laptops are the integrated graphics and they have since become notorious for convoluting the market and misleading consumers. It’s become a little better, with more variation in terms of mobility graphics cards in laptops, however, there are some weird naming conventions which seem there to deliberately mislead. There are a few common things I noticed when researching this topic as an ordinary consumer.

First of all, if you are thinking at all about running any terms of graphically heavy applications, or games with the last few years, then the Intel GMA integrated graphics, regardless of the numbers or the ‘RAM’ they attach to it, which is simply reassigned system RAM as opposed to graphics RAM…anyway, let’s move on to some cold hard facts about the quality of some of the possible options you have with graphics cards and laptops.

As well as GMA chips, the next line of popular integrated chips some of the ATI Mobility Radeon’s, with the 3000 series being regularly used by some manufacturers as a way to provide moderately better graphics than most of the GMA chips. There are other examples, such as NVIDIA’s 9000 series, which appeared in quite a few laptops, including the Macbook Air. Don’t think that just because that the number on the card is comparable to that of the desktop equivalent, as we’ll soon learn, there is a lot of weird naming conventions that go on with graphics, some of them pretty shady.

You would’ve thought that the higher the numbers, the better. It would make sense to be able to gauge how powerful a card is, determined of course my manufacturers, by how high the number is. Well, what tends to happen is as production technically moves on to a new generation, for example, from the NVIDIA 200 to 300 mobility series and the ATI (soon to be AMD) 4000 to 5000 series is that the older cards often get repurposed as lower versions of the new line of cards. Confused? Let me give you an example: The NVIDIA 310M is actually a 240M, and will give almost identical performance. This kind of thing is common practice, so it pays to be careful.

There is a temptation by a lot of manufacturers to go over the top with gaming laptops design

There are also a few other things in terms of minor details that need to be checked with regards to graphics cards. First all, it may be worth paying attention to the amount of RAM that dedicated cards are getting, which at the moment is peaking at around 1GB. There are also some weird things in terms of DirectX, especially at medium level cards. The prime example is that, on the spec sheet, the NVIDIA 330M and the ATI Radeon Mobility 5650 both look very similar, but the 330M is only a DirectX 10 card compared to the 5650 being a DX 11, which will give greater performance and be utilised better by more modern games. Don’t be confused by cards that say “565v”, they are not simply a mis-type of the 5650, they are different cards, more comparable to the 4000 series.

It’s clearly a very confusing world, but if you are planning on doing anything more than light (very light) gaming, then a dedicated card is a good choice. Whilst you may not necessarily need a gaming dedicated machine, a decent dedicated card will give you far more options what you can do with your laptop. Many laptops, starting at around £600, come with dedicated cards, even a lower end model will help keep your machine more up to date than any integrated chip.

However, there is a problem when we start talking about graphics, that is battery life. Running a component such as that really sucks away battery life, and whilst most desktop replacements that have these cards are plugged into the mains most of the time, some of you will want to have a bit more portability. This is where “switch-able graphics” come into play. Sometimes this is automatic, the laptop automatically switching to the integrated chip when you are not doing much demanding, which will help battery life. There are some newer machines that have a button that allows you to choose which of the two graphics cards, one that favours battery, the other that has a bit more of a kick. These are very expensive, purely because of the battery life they can provide, which is a bonus to those people on the move. Of course, screen size and other components can contribute to a short battery life, don’t just blame the graphics!

The humble workhorse

This is another relatively easy section to get through, though again comes with small nuances which are deserving of a closer look. First of all, the most common form of  storage device is, of course, the faithful Hard Disk Drive. Every increasing in capacity and reliability, they are found in practically every laptop that this guide is focused upon. Whilst there may be a few problems in terms of fragmentation and degradation, not to mention they don’t like being dropped, technology has evolved to make them the mainstay.

The most common sizes of HDD in laptops go up in 250GB, starting at, 250GB and moving up to 500GB and 750GB, though occasionally leading up to a 1 Terrabyte. It often depends on what you are going to be doing on your laptop, and this often reflects the specifications (and thus the price) of the entire thing. Only thinking of installing some basic productivity applications and writing a lot? 250GB will do you fine, but if you’re going to be handling a lot of media or games, again, the more space the better. Of course, you can nearly always upgrade the hard drive in a laptop, with some laptops even coming with two HDD bays. Bear in mind, they are 2.5″ HDD, so don’t be buying a cheap and huge 3.5″ drive and trying to squeeze it in. But you wouldn’t do that would you?

These little devils are a growing market, offering fast speeds and growing storage space

The other thing to consider with Hard Disk Drives is the drive speed. Whilst the majority are 5,400 RPM drives, some faster drives, at 7,200 RPM, are beginning to appear at a far greater frequency, which offer a performance boost on read speed, but often are more expensive and thus, are compensated for on size. If you are concerned that a 5,400 RPM drive won’t be streaming you por…HD movies fast enough, you always have the option of a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if speed is your prime concern…

Solid state drives are the newer generation of internal storage that has gained some momentum in the enthusiast desktop market, and also now the laptop market slightly. Basically, these are flash drives, just designed to be more ‘HDD’ in appearance, which come in a variety of sizes, the largest feasible drive in terms of cost being 256GB, but many pluck for smaller drives and install just the operating system and a few regularly used programs. This can hugely improve the load speed of the operating system, but is not really suitable for storing documents and files, or games really. You also don’t want to be constantly writing to a SSD, as they have limitations on that, though not as severe as the early models.

Some people say that there are benefits to having a windows system partition of only 10-15GB’s on your hard disk drive, just so you can limit de fragmentation and perhaps gain a few seconds in load times. It’s a bit of a weird science that may not pay off, but if you’re lucky enough to find a machine with two drive slots (one of the few I found were the 17″ Sony Vaio E series), then a SSD and HDD solution could be pretty awesome. You can opt with some manufacturers to just have the SSD in the laptop, though it would be considerably more expensive.

Man in a funny hat shows us some processors

I’m going to make no bones about it, Intel are the current leaders in the mobile CPU market. Their i3, 5, and 7 processors are the best performing and most power friendly CPU’s on the market, though there are some subtle differences between the crop. Whilst you could previous get away with comparing AMD Turion’s with the Intel Core 2 Duo’s, if you are buying a laptop, try to find one with at least an i3 in it, unless you are on a very tight budget, in which some of the T900′s and Core 2 Duo’s are pretty cheap. At the moment, AMD are yet to release anything in the mobile market that beats the i3 processor, which even at the lowest version, is ranking high on aggregated CPU ranking.

So, if we are going to be looking mainly at  the intel processors, what’s the deal with them. Well, first of all, we’re not really talking in terms of GHZ and MHZ any more, product numbers, especially when we are on about basics. Firstly, they are pretty much all multi-core processors, so that’s one point we can pretty much end at. The i5 and i7 both have a feature called “turbo boost” which essentially over-clocks the processor to work a little harder when times are tough. For example, the i5 450M, a mid-range i5 clocked at around 2.4GHZ, can push itself to around 2.66. But enough of the numbers, in terms of performance, if you plan on running games reasonably recently, the mid range i5′s I just mentioned will more than adequately perform the job.

i3′s are appearing now as the standard of most entry grade consumer laptops, for good reason. Not too power hungry, nor too under-powered, they offer a balance which the Core 2 Duo couldn’t really achieve. Again, as with the entire series, don’t get too concerned about CPU clock speed, it’s often some of the more complex numbers underneath GHZ that give the full story, such as different levels of cache.

Finally, it comes to the i7′s. Whilst this are at the upper end of most people’s budgets, you may find yourself saying “why are the clock speeds lower?”, such as the i7 720QM that operates at 1.6GHZ. Again, it’s all down to the way that the CPU can actually use and utilise that power, which is where the money goes, on a better chipset and all that guff. However, if you are looking at a i7, there is one main reason, as explained to me by Stevie where they come into their own, Virtualisation.

If you want to run a few virtual machines on a regular basis of full OS’s, then the i7 is the place to be, especially if you are busy in the world of development, with the main downsides being huge power consumption in comparison to the rest of the range (Intel themselves have acknowledged this) and they generate a lot more heat as a result. Well, I say a lot more, it’s going to be pretty noticeable when the system gets running near enough 70% for you to perhaps move the laptop off your lap, but as with all things and cooling and laptops, it honestly does depend purely on the build quality…and a bit of luck.

In our 40th and, sadly, final episode of the Ignition podcast we take a look at the history of Game Engine; share some of the things we have learnt along the way and discuss our favourite (and least favourite) moments.

Duration: 144 mins

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