Tag: screenshots

Guild Wars 2 Competition: The Winners!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Guild Wars 2 Swag

Remember this competition? After the craziness that has been early October, I’ve finally had a chance to chose some winners and send out some prizes! Apologies for the delay with this, but hopefully the winning entries will more than make up for it!

Foxfire_daye
First prize goes to Foxfire Daye from Gunnar’s Hold, with this fantastic Aetherblade combination!
Grizabella-tarnished_coast
Second prize goes to Grizabella, with this haunting screenshot. Despite being from the EU, Grizabella plays on Tarnished Coast for the roleplay.
Aetriess, also from Gunnar's Hold, looks fantastic as a princess, and wins third prize!
Aetriess, also from Gunnar’s Hold, looks fantastic as a princess, and wins third prize!

That said, I couldn’t wrap this up without a few honourable mentions. Unfortunately I don’t have any more prizes to hand out, but these entries are too good to keep to myself.

Chokapika from Arborstone looks pretty in pink with her Quaggan companion!
Chokapika from Arborstone looks pretty in pink with her Quaggan companion!
Neala Wiverflower from Whiteside Ridge came up with this spooky combination - ideal for the return of the Mad King!
Neala Wiverflower from Whiteside Ridge came up with this spooky combination – ideal for the return of the Mad King!
Tiny Lotus from Ring of Fire is trying to teach her pink Moa how to fly.
Tiny Lotus from Ring of Fire is trying to teach her pink Moa how to fly.

I’d like to thank everyone who entered the competition – there was some amazing creativity on display, and a lot of throughout went into so many of them. Screenshotters, I salute you!

SWTOR: Graphics, Galleries and Gifts

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s been a busy weekend, mostly consisting of digging further into the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta and avoiding The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. It’s not that I don’t want to play the game, it’s just that I have a stack of unfinished or unplayed stuff building up because I’m immersed in one MMO or another. I swear that the MMO genre has become the biggest excuse ever for not completing single-player games these days.

During the weekend I decided to dust off the old Youtube channel and start uploading some footage from the SWTOR beta. One of the most common questions I get asked is if it’ll run on x PC or y spec. Although I made a bit of an attempt to address this during my First Impressions post, I figured that it’d be great to show you what I mean.

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Taking Better Screenshots

Posted on by Gazimoff

This is a bit of a follow-on from my old-world screenshot post a few days ago. I was unhappy with the quality of many of the images I’d taken – I was getting horrible JPEG artefacts, especially in images with subtle shading such as sky, water and so on.

Back in the early days of Vanilla, Warcraft used to capture and store screenshots in the lossless TARGA (or TGA) format. Nowadays they’re stored using JPEG encoding – a lossy compression algorithm that can have a huge impact on your screenshots. I’d been wondering if there was a way of improving the quality of JPEG quality screenshots, or even getting back to the TGA format previously used.

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Last Chance To See

Posted on by Gazimoff

As is tradition, the US servers are patched a day before those in the EU. This week was no exception, as we saw our cousins across the pond upgraded to 4.0.3a before us. This patch brings with it the changes to the old world as the surface of Azeroth is remade. Many old areas that we’d grown used to over the years will be lost forever.

I often watch Twitter on patch days – it gives me an idea what to expect. Will European Wednesday be smooth and trouble free, or do problems in America tell me that we’ll have extended maintenance late into the night?

But along with the waiting and the gnashing of teeth, I also saw a lot of mourning and regret. A lot of people said they’d miss aspects of the old ‘pre-Shattering’ world and regretted not taking screenshots of particular locations.

Since we were still in the unchanged world in Europe, I thought I’d give people a second chance. I offered to go around and capture images on demand. These were the requests that came back over Twitter.

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Cataclysm Gallery Time

Posted on by Gazimoff

Cataclysm Spoiler Alert!Spoiler Alert: I’ve included some of the best screenshots from Cataclysm. I’ve weeded out all the ones that would have revealed significant lore developments, so these should be fairly safe. As always though, reader discretion is advised. Note: I’m not in Beta, so can’t tell you much about these myself!

A friend of mine has been playing in the Cataclysm Alpha. So imagine my surprise when today the NDA was lifted as Blizzard officially announced that the expansion was moving into Closed Beta. The friend of mine (who doesn’t have his own blog) has asked me if I’d be happy to share the screenshots he took with you. Just in case you’re not sure if you’d want to see them, I’ve hidden them behind the cut. Better safe than sorry, eh?

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