Had a lot planned for my 3 week holiday, but it all ended up in me sitting on the couch in front of the fan.

Why you ask?  well...holland decided to have a 9 day heatwave, something that hadnt happened in 7 years....lucky me.
Ended up watching tv series and movies mostly for 3 weeks, and having a go at The Last of Us for the third time.

Not to bad though, catched up on Game of Thrones, found out that 'Justified' isnt all that bad and started with a rerun of all Breaking Bad seasons to prepare sort of for the final season...oeww and I watched all 4 seasons of Arrested Development, which is indeed the best comedy series out there I have to say. So a special thank you goes out to SloganYams for giving me the tip through one of his blogs :D

Now for the game and movie storage.
Need to do some work on it still, but it looks alright now to take a couple of pictures.

Still need to remove some wiring, and add a bunch of lights, but I'll do that on a later time.
The important part is done now in any case.

Time to enjoy the last few days of my holiday.

ta ta

Not much to say other then that it's a giant mess here atm.

Concrete dust everywhere, screws, bolts and other tidbits are lying around wherever I look (altough those are mostly my own) If I wear a clean pair of socks, they turn completely white on the bottom by just walking from my bedroom (what's left of it) to the kitchenless kitchen. But! it's starting to look great.  

Including today just 5 workdays left, maybe even less since it has been going very fast. Making lots of space for the construction workers helped a whole lot.

The E3 is great in the meantime. Have both new consoles pre-ordered now.
Now I have to wait for releasedates for the games. For example, there's no point in getting Watch Dogs for the old ones if it's released on the new ones within a week or 2, or even better..on the same day.

anyway...more pictures of the mess.

THE HOLES AND PIPES FOR THE NEW HEATING SYSTEM + THE OLD HEATERS

REMOVAL OF THE WINDOW-FRAMES, FRONT OF BACK OF THE FLAT

BYE BYE OLD STINKY KITCHEN, AND HELLOOO NEW KITCHEN

I'll dump the end result on here pretty soon.

ta ta

So today was the day I could finally get past that evil countdown timer showing how long I had to wait till I could get a poke at the demo for The Last Of Us. Kind of the reason I bought God of War Ascension since I havent even touched the game yet.

I wont go into impressions stuff and the blabla, but I'll just say it's looking great and I cant wait to play the whole thing.
When nosing around in the sound options section, I saw that the game supports Dolby 7.1! I think it a first for a videogame to do that. And it sure makes great use of it. Happy that it has been moved back a little, since the game wouldve been out in the middle of the week the workers are doing the most stuff. When it comes out now in europe on the 14th, all that will be behind me and I can play it in peace...surrounded by moving boxes probably :p 

Meanwhile I'm around 60% done with packing all my crap in between playing Metro: Last Light. I really enjoyed the part of rethinking my whole setup and layout here, but I really dont enjoy packing. Packing is just a tedious job. Specially if you have a lot of breakable stuff and cant cram as much in a box as normally.

Stacking things up is fun though.
The art of cramming as much stuff on one side of the room was quite fun, and might I say I am not to bad at it either.

My 2 by 1meter showcases (if that is the right word for those things) have arrived aswell this week. There was a little setback since they did not fit into the pre-historic elevator we have here. So for now they are in the storage downstairs, altough I took apart one already. I will have to bring them upstairs piece by piece in the near future.

And the window-frames and doors have arrived aswell...this morning.....at 9. Starting to get used to being rudely awakened by contruction workers now, but I'll be glad once they have left.

They are nice people though, and they seem to enjoy it in my place aswell.

2 of them kept having smoke breaks in the living room this week while sipping my coffee, meanwhile gazing at my tv and asking me about what I was playing (Metro). I was called insane when I told them a bigger tv will be coming as this one is old now and has kind of a weak response time. Back in the day 55inch was the biggest available, but a lot can change in 4 years. There are proper monsters nowadays, and most of them for the same price that I paid for my current tv.

that's it for this week.  ta ta

Next to packing, the only thing I could start to work on was a little highrise for the media/ speaker/ subwoofer area against unwanted vibrations in the room and for the neighbours under me. So Thats what I did. It makes quite a difference now. No more vibrating living room pretty much, unless there are huge explosions...the scene in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol where the Kremlin collapses just has to be experienced like that. It's only 10 seconds, it wont drive my neighbours under me crazy. If so, then I guess i'll give a little heads-up when I decide to watch Saving Private Ryan again, or skip 1,5 hour of Pearl Harbor and go straight into the attack...the directors cut version of the attack that is. Keep your friends close, but your neighbours closer ^^

Old tv thingy with the receiver still in it. He's quite the heavy fella

Adding the absorbtionfoam materials.

Layer of MDF for spreading the weight equally-ish

Layer of carpet to make it look at least a bit decent

And after re-attaching a whole lot of wires, adding the new furniture, cables and whatnot, it now looks like this.

The right side is still open as im leaving space for the Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One later this year. The cable pile behind it is huge, but what I cant see cant annoy me. And yes, that is a retro 1970's couch, inherited from my grandma when she passed on. The most compfy couch I have ever sat on so far.

With the construction workers coming closer and closer to my particular section of the flat, so is the noise.

This week I have the evening shift and wont have to start till 15:15. It's nice as I can sleep a lot longer and wake up on my own terms and time. At least, normally I would. Today I was woken by the workers around 7:20, and I couldnt sleep much after.

On top of that the opening of a new store complex on the other side of the flat did'nt help either, with megaphone noise and loud music keeping me up from 9. So I gave up and just got out after 4 hours of sleep. Maybe everything will be quieter tommorrow. Or maybe I should go to bed at 2am and not 5am.

Anyway, I've started packing some of my stuff. Decided to do it room by room, so I'll have some form of a system and not get confused with stuff lying all over the place.  Side note: moving boxes are expensive!

Yesterday the first items were delivered for my home theater acoustics.

These are for keeping sounds resonating all over the walls in the room.

Right now it's all pretty full in the living room, but once eveything is done I want to keep the room as empty as possible, which means there will be a lot of echo-ing going on. And there is nothing more annoying then that when listening to music or watching movies. I will get some basstraps aswell at a later point.

The other foam arrived aswell.

These are for disconnecting my front speakers from the floor and walls. Love living in a flat, but it wont be as much fun if my neighbours living under me constantly bang on the windows because their place is shaking from explosions and other loud deep basses coming from me. I prefer being a model citizen and not annoy anyone but myself.

Still need materials to make a floor on top of the foams and some carpet or other form of material to make it all look presentable, since these things look pretty ugly.

Oh...and I just had to make a picture of this... because it is just wrong but awesome at the same time. Im sure I'll enjoy the game aswell..if not, then I will still have this though ^^

I wasnt going to buy any more stuff till after the whole ordeal, but I had forgotten I had pre-ordered this a long time ago from amazon....maybe I'll get the new Metro game aswell, since I had forgotten about the releasedate aswell...but that all depends on the financials

That's it for now.  bai bai

The entire flat im living in is getting a huge make-over.

It's going to be noisy coming months, but on the good side of that is:

- brand new central heating system, but no more sharing with 8 other floors and paying a yearly fee of 380 euro's just for the rent and whatnot of the boilers in the basement of the flat, just 5 bucks a month for my own personal one.
It's a pain to have it all installed since all the radiators will have to be replaced aswell. So everything. and I mean EVERYTHING has to be moved out of the way. Once that is done it will save me at least 500,- a year since im pretty much never cold and I probably wont need heating because of the next point.

- New window and door frames on the front a back side of the appartment...including 2 very decent and heavy new doors and new glass which is almost an inch thick. So more isolation from the world outside...and the other way around.  We dont even have half an inch at the moment.

- A new kitchen, and they will repaint the entire place for me aswell. I can even have the other rooms painted if I want, but that wont be necessary. Dont want an extra day of people in my house, and then get high of the paint smell for two weeks.

- Off course the pipes running though the floors for the heating i have now will be removed, so that means more space and I can finally build that extra wall. But more on that in a sec.

- The best point is......It wont cost me a thing. Renting has it's good sides. In september i'll be living here 3 years. So not bad at all to get a free make-over. Also the total monthly fee for living here will go down with 80 euro since that is what im paying for that bloody shared heating crap im not even using.

They have started this week, which was very noticeable since this huge crane had appeared when I got home earlier today.  He took my parking spot....the nerve!

And here a pic of the old and rotty window frames + crappy doors and windows that leak an immense amount of air.
At times my floor in the hall was frozen behind the front door. It's that bad.

After they are done in my place in week 22 (end of may), which should be about 3 or 4 days (they do 3 to 4 appartments a week at once, and there are 56 total so I have to wait my turn) I got my own plans.

I have a lot of stuff and it's all going into boxes since I really dont like construction workers running around my things and get any ideas (you never know) or damage anything. Took that week off from work aswell. I want to be there to keep an eye on things.

Anyway...when they are done I'll be redecorating the place. Been planning for a few weeks now to get the right materials and whatnot. The plans are to move my 'museum' as someone on here calls it :P to the biggest room and build a floating floor and 2 walls in the living room so that I can watch movies and play my games on a higher volume then now, and the room acoustics need some work aswell once im done.

It's a costly process but I have enough saved up and wont be buying anything the coming 2 months...for a change...if i can resist.  The only thing I'm getting is my 3 different editions of ' The Last Of Us'

For now I have to be patient and look around more on the interwebz for prices and materials. Luckily I buy a lot of the stuff through work, which saves me a very large amount of money.

More updates eventually will pop up on here.  I'll be taking a lot of pictures.  just 6 more weeks.

Enjoy your weekends people!

Mentioned in my previous blog that I had done my monthly blu-ray shopping spree on Amazon. It arrived as told on tuesday. Lot of horror movies this time around, among them 'Livide' from the directors of A l'interieur. Livide!  not livid, that just the british title, hate when they do that...same with ' Switchblade Romance' which is called Haute Tension...so im putting it under H mwuhaha. In Netherland it even worse. They tend to use dutch titles for animation movies (example, Despicable Me = Ikke Ikke en de rest kan stikke -.-)  ...except Wall-E, they couldnt make anything of that.

Just now the mailguy brought me the new God of War. Statue looks very nice. I might even be more excited about the acces to the demo of 'The Last Of Us'  Looking forward to it so badly that I pre-ordered 3 collectors editions of the game. Naughty Dog is pretty much my fav developer the last few years. I'll receive both Ellie and Joel's special editions which are released in europe, and I pre-ordered the US collectors edition exclusive to gamestop (or so they say) with the statue and whatnot. I know.../facepalm....im sure im not the only one that silly :P

anyway.....

 And because I enjoyed the game so much....here's the Tomb Raider collectors edition.  My house is starting to get fuller and fuller. Going to switch the collection to another room soon. But not till after the massive make over they are going to do to the entire flat I life in. I'll come back to that. It still needs the green light from the people living here. They need a 70% vote to get things started. If not the...well then they wont do anything, which would be a shame.  Id like a new kitchen and central heating system and whatnot.

Tomb Raider is great!  I wanted to start with that. So far this year pretty much every game I played and finished has been a lot of fun and not a dissapointment. From Spec Ops: The Line, Ni No Kuni, to Crysis 2 and the episodes of The Walking dead. I had tons of fun.

I had Tomb Raider pre-ordered in holland since last year, but noticed a huge price difference when i was doing my Blu-ray shopping rounds on Amazon UK. Over there the collectors edition costs 67,99, or at least it was that price when i pre-ordered it over there and cancelled my dutch pre order. The reason why is that 67,99 in pounds is around 88 euro's depending on the valuta exchange rates. In Netherlands the collectors edition of Tomb Raider costs a whopping 119,99...yeah you read that right!  That's more then 30 euro's difference.  After I received my order only a day after the official release with no shipping costs either, I got an e-mail on top of that telling me that I had received a 2,50 refund as the price had dropped a bit more since my pre-order. So that was another 3euro cheaper.  Thank you Amazon.

Yesterday I decided to have a look around town aswell for the first time in 2 years I think. The reason I never go to town is that there is nothing to see or buy really other then clothes, food and over priced game shops. In my little stroll around I noticed that there is not a shop left to buy movies.  Nothing!  the game shops have a few disney blu-rays lying around but other then that there is absolutlety nothing to buy here movies wise. For that I have to make a 30 minute drive in my car. It's a damn shame.  I did make the 30 minute drive though after the stroll and bought me a nice bunch of films.

Next Tuesday the amazon order should arrive with a bunch more. The ones that were cheaper over there or were not available in the store I went to. Enjoy the last few hours of your weekend peeps.

And now back to Tomb Raider...

So uhmm, yeah once i'm uploading this blog, it will be exactly a year ago since my last one.
Im not dead...suprise!  Guess the lazy crawled in or I just did not have much to say. So earlier tonight I figured that it was about time I posted my awards of 2012. Why you say?...Because I can

I just couldnt agree with a top 10 for last year, so I decided to do it a little bit different for a change. Can blame the oscars for it I guess. I like the whole 5 nominee and pick one out idea. Beats a top 10 that I probably wont agree with in about a year or 2 in retrospect. 

first some stats of 2012..

Finished games:  24 (Xbox360:23,  PC:1)...Don't worry, the PS3 has gotten some attention this year, 60hours to be precise with Ni No Kuni. And God of War 3, Killzone 2 & 3 The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls are on the list. And a replay of Heavy Rain (I was robbed of my thropies thanks to some kind of synching problem back in the day) since it was a great game.

Watched Movies/tv series episodes :  510

Ill just dump all my favourite movies and tv series in another blog.

Right....
As Always, I play what I play and no matter what year of release, I count them for my awards in the year I played the games. Old pimped HD re-releases don't count. Same as games I already finished in another year of course.
Far Cry 3 fell short as I was barely 3 hours in when 2013 hit. So that one goes for 2013. Which is probably a bad thing considering the upcoming releases this year.

In the end It was a year of tiny dissapointments and a rather big one (Assassins Creed III)
Maybe i'm just hyping them too much in my head, but maybe im just getting a bit pickier...or maybe it's just because im getting old, bald and grey.

I have 9 categories, each having 5 nominees. Given it a lot of thought,  maybe too much since I changed it about 4 times. But it's here now finally...2 months late.

SOUNDTRACK
- Mass Effect 3
- Dear Esther
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Assassins Creed III
- Skyrim

WINNER:  Dear Esther
Overall, this one just had the best music, not a bad song to find on the entire tracklist.

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SONG/INSTRUMENTAL
- Dear Esther Always, long version
- Max Payne 3, The Girl
- Mass Effect 3, An End, Once And For All (extended)
- Alice: Madness Returns, Castle In The Sky
- Assassins Creed: Revelations, Theme

WINNER: Alice: Madness Returns, Castle In The Sky
It's only a 1:14 instumental, but for me it has everything, it's a haunting, dreamy and beautiful piece of music

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STORY /WRITING
- Mass Effect 3
- Dear Esther
- Catherine
- Assassins Creed II
- Portal

WINNER: Dear Esther
A great story, beautifully narrated and which can be interpreted in different ways. Played through it twice and got a different version of it the second time.
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SOUND MIXING
- Halo 4
- Mass Effect 3
- Skyrim
- Rage
- Max Payne 3

WINNER: Max Payne 3
it did everything right with the overall package, it seemed like my own living room was constantly shot full of bullet holes, together with a thumping bassy soundtrack, crisp clear, well done voice acting and explosions that made my apartment shake. It just did it all perfectly balanced and reminded me why I bought all the speakers and crap that I have

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SOUND EDITING
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Rage
- Halo 4
- Mass Effect 3
- Max Payne 3

WINNER: Rage
Every sound in Rage just had quality written on it. From the different types of guns, reloading sounds and whatnot made my home cinema do it's thing. It just lacked an overall balance to also win mixing 

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DESIGN/VISUAL
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Mass Effect 3
- Dear Esther
- Skyrim
- Catherine

WINNER: Alice: Madness Returns
This was the easiest to pick. The whole game just looked stellar filled with great visuals and ideas. Just a look at the card level alone made it an easy choice

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VOICE ACTING
- Mass Effect 3
- Dear Esther
- Hitman: Absolution
- Halo 4
- Max Payne 3

WINNER: Max Payne 3
With Rockstar you always know one thing.... they know where to dig/find up great voice talent and push them to a certain level of excellence, and this time it wasn't any different

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GAME OF THE YEAR

- Dear Esther
- Mass Effect 3
- Portal
- Hitman: Absolution
- Alice: Madness Returns

WINNER: Mass Effect 3
 Yup, In the end, looking back, Mass Effect 3 stuck with me the most and gave me a satisfying end to a great, great trilogy.

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DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
- Bioware
- Ubisoft Montreal
- TheChineseRoom
- Rockstar
- Spicy Horse

WINNER: Ubisoft Montreal
This might be suprising looking at the game of the year winner, but Ubisoft Montreal were the ones behind the four Assassins Creed games I played and finished last year (ACII, Brotherhood, Revelations and ACIII)  Assassins Creed III was a dissapointment, but I did have a whole lot of fun with the other 3 titles which makes them my favourite developer for 2012.


See you all around.  Wont make it a year again this time...i think :p
 

Remember these two?