Some of you might be thinking “I can just ask the shop or someone else to apply it for me.” Although i don’t disagree with you there but after my experience of having someone else apply the shield (another brand of shield but similar) for me, I have concluded it is best I do the job myself.  For the record a lot of forumers recommended him for his good and fast service.

After having gone through 5 InvisibleShields, I find that these few tips are helpful in getting a real good, clean application.

Clean Hands
Give your hands a good scrub before you start to remove any dirt, dust or oil. These things will hinder your shield from setting properly.

Remove the Battery
Make sure your electronic device is switched off and the batteries removed. I always make it a habit to let my device sit for 5 minutes to remove any static. Static attracts dust and that’s a no no.

Turn Off The Fan
Air circulation brings dust around and it might get stuck on your shield / surface / hand. Best is to work in an air-conditioned room or just turn off the fan. I usually choose the latter.

Ignore the Solution, Use Soap & Water
This was the downfall during my first application. The shield came with a tinyyyyyy solution bottle and it was barely enough for the PSP. Thinking that it would be end of the world if I used up the solution, I sprayed as minimal as possible. Bad mistake.

So what can we use as a substitute? The answer is soap with water. No really, I’m not kidding. It actually works better compared to the solution provided. Just take a small pail, filled it with some water and add a drop of hand soap.

Take Your Time
I know shops can get the whole thing done within 45 minutes but seriously, don’t rush. Apply the shield one piece at a time and make sure that piece is set before moving on to the next piece. For example the face piece for the PSP is pretty big. Therefore once the shield is pasted, I will leave it on my table for a couple of hours before continuing.

Keep Things Moist
Make sure you dunk your hands in soap water (mentioned above) regularly or when you feel its getting dry. Keeping your hands moist will prevent finger prints or dirt being left on the shield.

Also dab the shield with as much soap water as you can. It makes it easier to align and any small dirt particles will flow right out when you remove the excess water.

Let Things Settle Down for At Least 24 Hours
Why the long hours you might asked. It allows any excess water left behind in the device and the shield to be completely dried up. Friction might cause the shield to peel off if isn’t set properly. Not to mention water will cause your device to short-circuit. Optimum would be 48 hours but usually 24 hours is sufficient.

Hope you find my tips useful. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

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One of the most common complains I heard bout Invisible Shield is that it tends to turn yellowish after some time. Judging by the look of my NDS, that complain stands true.

You can see that the color difference between the area marked in red with the area marked in green. Even the stylus looks brighter compared to the areas covered with Invisible Shield.

Discoloration is very apparent on bright colors, especially white.

Dust & dirt is the next mutual enemy of the Invisible Shield. Take a look at the next picture.

Notice that one nice line of dust? Yeap that’s what happen when you leave your devices out in the open. My PSP on the other hand suffered less damage as it is always inside the Capdase casing.  With that I came up with this conclusion; always keep your devices inside a pouch or a bag. It really helps to reduce significant amount of dust collected.

Apart from the two issues mentioned above, the shield still looks good with no apparent ‘peeling’ after many months of usage. As long as the shield is applied properly, chances of that happening is relatively rare.

Here are a few more pictures of the shield, a year later;

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• Great mixture of 2D and 3D Graphics.
• Awesome music.
• Combat system a bit complex, satisfying however once you manage to pull them off.
• Astral Finishes will leave your opponents devastated.

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• You are in the market for a good and decent quality headphones (not ultra high end ones)
• Most of your gaming sessions are at night
• and you have parents, sisters, brothers, neighbours that will come chasing you with a <insert scary weapon> the moment you blast your 7.1 surround sound speakers.

The key feature of X1 is that it combines both Xbox live chat and in-game sounds under one headset. Which means you can game at night without disturbing others and at the same time trash talk with your mates.

However you might be wondering “What if the in-game sound drowns out the chat and I’m too blur/busy/lazy/ to change the sound settings every time”. This is where the next key feature comes in. The X1 is equipped with separate volume controls. You can increase or decrease the in-game volume without affecting the chat volume and vice versa.

The X1 comes with everything you need out of the box. An audio splitter, A USB extension cable, the Xbox 360 Mic adapter and of course the headphone. The USB extension cable was a great welcome as I was worried the one on the headphone was too short to be connected to my Xbox. Just to let you know the X1 needs to draw power from (any) USB ports in order for it to work.

Sound quality wise, the X1 gets no complain from me. The bass is great for games like Gears of War 2 and the voice chat works really well. I have no trouble communicating with Neko during our many Street Fighter IV sessions.

The only downsides I can see is, the X1 cables are very long which could get pretty messy and the headset gets uncomfortable after long hours of gaming. If you got the cash, you might to consider the X3 or X4 which uses wireless technology. For me, the X1 does it job well.

TurtleBeach headsets are rare to find in Asia countries, so if you are looking to pick one up, try finding in Amazon.

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I was getting fed-up of waiting and decided “Oh screw it, let me just grab one from E-Bay”. After two weeks of waiting, it finally arrived last Friday.

So what was my first impression? It felt cheap, in terms of its build. The best word to put it would be light or fragile. Perhaps it has been a long while since I held onto a “Saturn” controller, without the weight of batteries.

That aside, how does it perform for Street Fighter IV? Thankfully it has the best overall performance compared to Microsoft and other 3rd party controllers. Note that I said “best overall”. The FightPad is of course not without its issues. While the d-pad works great when performing special or ultra moves, it has some problems registering diagonal movements. Instead of jumping forward or backwards, your character will just jump in place. Emphasizing on the “cheap” build, the d-pad doesn’t feel that solid. With complains about the d-pad giving way after a few weeks, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Let’s see what else … buttons no complains, 6 face and 2 trigger buttons work great, turbo function and mic port could definitely use some extra work. Using my Earforce X1, I could hear Neko clearly but apparently my voice seem muffled to him. Problem solved by using the original Microsoft controller for voice chat.

Conclusion? Only get it if you wish to move on to the next level in fighting games (heck, having 6 face buttons and a working d-pad is definitely a level higher than MS controllers). I will do another post a couple of weeks from now to show how the Fightpad is holding up.

Other controllers you might want to check out : Cyborg Rumble Pad, Hori Pad EX Turbo

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I quickly hurried home, fired up the Xbox 360 and loaded the game.  My hands were actually shaking while the game starts … way too excited. Some call this ‘Joygasm’?

This is just a quick impression post. I only spend about 30 minutes on the game before going off. A full review will come as I proceed further.

Intro : The same opening as the ones posted on the internet with the opening song sang in english.  The singers sounded pretty similar to its Japanese counterpart. Overall it sounded good.

Graphics : The graphics looked better than the one I saw in arcades. Better in the sense that its sharper and less pixelated. Guess Capcom did some touch-ups before pushing them to home consoles.

Controls : I was shocked to find out that the game actually perform pretty well on the default Xbox 360 controller. I had no difficulty pulling off fireballs, dragon punches,  and super combos. My expection was to be totally flunked with the controls. Guess this will last me until I get my hands on Mad Catz Fightpad.

LIVE : If you play Street Fighter IV, you will DEFINITELY want to be on LIVE. Capcom has implemented a system where if you are connected on LIVE, you can enable a setting that allows anyone to battle with you when you are on Arcade Mode, just like in the real arcades.  I had two players engaged me in battle during my 30 minutes play-off. Overall it’s smooth and almost lag free.

Bottom line … this is the epic game of the year.

*goes back to playing Street Fighter IV*

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Can we safely conclude that this game sucks and toss it in the trash? Nope.

Despite all the technical hoo hahs about this game, I actually enjoyed playing it. It was far better than what I have expected, especially after reading online reviews. At the time of posting I nearly reached the end of 1st disc, completing about half of the sidequests.

So what aspect of this game did I find interesting / good?

Battle System / Gameplay
Huge battles consisting of 20 (or more) characters on screen. Instead of commanding one-to-one like in other JRPGs, you get to control a Union, which is literally an army up to 5 people. Each Union share one lifebar and the same commands. In other words, everyone in that union will execute the same command given and wipes out if its lifebar is depleted.

Music
The music is just spectacular and memorable. Nothing short of what I would expect from Square-Enix.

Graphics
Putting the technical flaws aside, The Last Remnant actually looked pretty good on the Unreal 3 engine. Plenty of details on both the characters and environments.

That’s about it for the good points.
Now for the low blows …

Lag and Texture Pop-Ins
This is the main problem that hinders the gameplay from the very start. Installing the game on the Xbox360 hard disk minimizes the issues but not entirely.

Customization
Only Rush’s equipment can be customized and that is also on a fairly low level; just weapons and two accessories. They could at least allow us to customize the general’s equipements. Too restricted.

Animation
Some parts of the game the animation looked good (e.g. Emma’s battle cutscene) but most of the time, the character’s animation seemed robotic and unnatural.

Lack of Hot Looking Babes

Overall I would give The Last Remnant the green light. Like everyone else, I was disgusted to see how bad the game ran when I started playing, but now it’s almost non-existence (in other words I gotten used to it). However whether or not its tolerable to others is beyond my judgement.

Your call.

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