Mr Go - Dirty Pretty Things

In the words of Mr Go himself, his latest collection 'Dirty Pretty Things' released on 28 January 2017 'Draws inspiration from the mindless, consumerist society we exist in. A sugar coated world of false beliefs and un-adulterated desire'

Take that as you may, but an easy translation would be that inside Mr Go's head, he has a lot to say about the world we live in today. This is very much delivered in this collection through his incredibly surreal, delicately fun and sometimes borderline macabre creations.

Dirty Pretty Things draws inspiration from a side of our lives today that many of us have faced. One filled with uncertainty, ambiguity, temptations and self reflection. There are strong elements of street and pop art, with digital finishing and colors so bright you can almost taste them. Micro details are everywhere giving you a fresh interpretation of each piece every time you observe them. A constant ephemeral paradox. Is that even a thing?

Although there is no doubt a darker side to these pieces, the sexual element and humor cannot be missed. There is a signature 'Mr Go' feel that blends photo realism, illustrative touches and glossy finishing that link these pieces well to past collections. They wouldn't feel out of place residing next to each other on the wall.

If you have a preference to original pieces and prefer your art prints or canvases embellished with materials only forged in the heart of an exploding star, you are also catered for. A very limited number of canvases / prints are hand finished with gold leaf, spray paint, and where possible, stitches. Each hand finished piece has an individual characteristic and you can rest assured, no two hand finished pieces are exactly the same.

Dirty Pretty Things is out now - Each piece is available as a Ltd Edition and available from approved distributors. View the full collection and find out more about Mr Go.

Find out more about Mr Go

Buy Mr Go

Follow On Instagram

Follow on Twitter

Follow on Facebook

How to improve your Infinite Warfare game play

We all want to have that 3 + KDR. But that means your game needs to be good, no it needs to be more than good. You need to know the maps like second nature, you need to know where the camping areas are, where a sniper might be, the safest route getting to a location, when to attack and stay put. You need to know what perks suit you, which battle rig is best for each game, as well as become efficient with a multitude of weapons if you want to complete all the challenges. This game needs to become your life for a while, it will ruin relationships and make you a slightly angrier person. But in the end your game play will improve.

Below are some tips and techniques that will help you improve your game and get you to the top 3 in the leader board every time.

Practice makes perfect This is the most obvious one. Practice matches against bots gives you the opportunity to practice new techniques, study the characteristics of the guns, attachments, perks, kill streaks and battle rigs. All without ruining that all important KDR. Try and use weapons that you already have, as well as a class you would use in the game. There is no benefit using a weapon or class you are long way off acquiring. Set the bots to veteran and put those new wall running routes and evasion techniques into practice.

Use the outskirts of the maps Infinite Warfare has relatively small maps that allow you to rush in and out of kill-zones on a majority of them. Keeping to the outskirts and going in aggressively when a kill is on the cards should keep your deaths down. You are less likely to encounter the enemy in a small confined area where it comes down to who has the quicker reaction time.

Be more aggressive Call of Duty Infinite Warfare is a fast game. If you are not getting into the mix and blowing away the enemy. Someone else on your team will be doing it and racking up their kills and points. Knowing when to be aggressive and when to wait it out is a skill in itself that takes patience resisting the urge to rush in.

Use SMG's if you want to be a slayer If you want to be more aggressive. The Mactav and HVR are by far the best SMG's in the game. They blow away the competition, well everything except a shotgun at close range. Use the best variant of the gun for your playing style and game type. Always stack an SMG with a rifled barrel, silencer, quick-draw and a grip. Partner these alongside scavenger, dead silence and hard-line. Hard-line can be swapped out for ghost on more tactical games.

Do not rush around corners It is amazing how many people just slide or run through a door way without being ready for battle. Always always slow down, and be prepared for someone waiting for you behind a every door way. You will either have an easy kill or be an easy kill.

Change your controller settings The mechanics of the game have advanced drastically  over the years and you NEED to be incorporating sliding and boosting into your offence and defence. The default setting does not allow you to slide or boost without taking your finger away from the control pad. Anyone with a Scuff controller pad or have their button layout configured to allow them to jump or slide, as well as aim and shoot at the same time will have the advantage on you a majority of the time. 

You know the ones? They bounce around, shoot you down and you can do nothing about it. You too can also do this, or in some cases, do this easier by changing your button layout.

Changing your layout to the configuration below will allow you to boost, slide, aim and shoot at the same time without removing your fingers from the controller. Swapping your Fire and shoot buttons to R1 and R2 by adding a tactical layout brings your most used buttons closer together. Now all you have to do to slide and shoot is to click down R3 while running. Boost is now L2 and melee is the circle button. This will take a few hours to get used to. Once second nature, your ability to keep up with the Scuff players will be drastically improved. 

Something you can now do very easy is drop while shooting and evade enemy fire. When rising again keep firing and you will pepper your enemy with bullets while they take a split second to adjust their aim. You will see me do this a lot in my game play videos.

Get a gaming headset This is an important piece of any gamers arsenal. They do not need to be super expensive and a good reliable pair can be acquired from between £40 - £60. As well as immersing you into the game further, gaming headsets allow you to hear sounds you probably didn't know existed in anything up to 7.1 surround sound. All of a sudden you can now clearly tell if someone is boosting, shooting, running or reloading near you and give you that edge in the game. It takes some time to learn to tune into the sounds properly. But once you do, playing without a headset will be impossible.

Use a wired internet connection It might be convenient to just connect your console to the Wifi. Although doing this could immediately be putting you at a disadvantage. Try a simple test by going to the connection settings in the PlayStation and running a connection test with a wired connection and another with Wifi. There is often a drastic difference in speed, on a 100mb connection this could be as much as 30mb upload and download. Whether this affects your in game performance isn't always clear. Why tempt fate though, go wired 100% of the time. Some people will even use their controllers plugged in to minimise the amount of wireless activity.

Get a gaming screen If you are a serious player you may have previously thought of getting a gaming screen. If not then start thinking about it, you will not regret the expense. A television no matter how big and sexy, is made for the purpose of being a television. The response times can range from anything between 12ms - 32ms depending on the manufacturer. 

This is a lifetime in a game where fractions of seconds count for everything. Most computer monitors have lower pixel response time, but the ideal range you should be looking for is between 1 - 5ms on a 24-27 inch screen. Manufacturers such as BenQ, AOC and Acer all produce budget friendly gaming screens. Using a smaller screen allows you to see more of the action without having to turn your head to look at a corner. Big TV's look cool, but for FPS games you need to be the quickest. Sony, Panasonic and Samsung all have gaming modes on their modern televisions, though even this is not a vast improvement and will reduce your image quality.

Hope these tips help you improve your game play. If you have any questions lease leave them below and I will be happy to answer them.

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare Review

Not so long ago if you said to me 'come and play some Call of Duty' The chances are I would have laughed. As far as I was concerned I was in retirement - permanently. Black Ops 2 was the last Call of Duty game to slide into my PlayStation up until the release of Infinite Warfare (IF) and Modern Warfare Remastered (MWR) in November 2016.

I was hyped for the release of Modern Warfare Remastered and not for a while had the though of playing Call of Duty been festering in my mind. As was the case with many other players, I bought Infinite Warfare because I had no other choice if I wanted the remastered version. I had no intention of playing Infinite Warfare. Boosting! Power sliding, Wall running, is that even real war?! I considered myself more of a purist having played more war realistic Call of Duty games going back to World at War in almost an addicted fashion.

The Modern Warfare series along with every Call of Duty predating those back to World at War were in my opinion the best FPS games ever released. They were consistently good and that's what matters in a good business model. Satisfying your customers. How best to satisfy them than releasing a game that is just slightly better each time. But is essentially the same game.

Call of Duty know that customers have shelf lives. At some point many people for one reason or another will quit a game or a console all together. They had to start appealing to a new audience and not just the old faithful renowned for queuing at midnight outside their local Game on November release day. The only way to do that was to evolve the game play with new Kill streaks, new weapons and most importantly, new movements.

I didn't really touch Infinite Warfare properly until December 2016 and before writing any real review I wanted to give the game at least one prestige. I had seen some very negative reviews and didn't want this to influence my overall experience. The thought of being murdered repeatedly by a 9 year old child double jumping like a deflating balloon was just too much to even begin comprehending. Modern Warfare on the other hand was exactly what it was 10 years ago. Aesthetically it was brighter, but it was the same old game I had accumulated around 40 days worth of game time on.

I eventually picked up Infinite Warfare properly when I joined the Dark Apocalypse Gaming Community (DaG) and started playing in a clan again. It was a steep learning curve, I was rusty anyway having not played any FPS games for a while. I hated the boosting, the wall running, the over complex array of perks. There were times I just wanted to grab the PlayStation and smash it into pieces. The frustration of being killed by someone floating 20ft in the air was just annoying.

If you want to be good at Infinite Warfare, you have to embrace the boosting and wall running. It's part of the mechanics of the game now and here to stay unless another Modern Warfare is made or remastered. Ignoring this aspect in your playing strategy will no doubt set most people up for receiving a low KDR (kill death ratio) That alone is enough to make the proudest of players quit a COD release. Now I have gone through the teething period I can say that I honestly and genuinely like the game. It is not the same Call of Duty from years back. It is quicker because of the more advanced movements and it seems that there are not as many sniping areas, this really makes the game feel more fluid. 

Being able to bypass danger by not having to take specific routes really changes the environment you have to utilise when attacking. I would certainly recommend changing your control pad set up. Unless you have a Scuff controller, the Bumper jumper setting is our new best friend. It takes a while to get used to the small changes, but being able to boost and slide without entirely removing your hand from the controller will gain you valuable micro seconds in a one on one showdown. Call of Duty is about reaction time in certain situations, the more milliseconds you can save, the more duels you will win. Using SMG's will definitely give you the edge on smaller maps with the right class set up.

I initially thought I suffered from the dreaded lag that every COD player will swear by at some point. In reality I was just not reacting quick enough. The more I practised the more the 'Lag' went away. The game is not perfect in that sense, but any bad game play cannot always be blamed on lag.

I am enjoying the game for now on my first prestige heading towards the second. If you are a purist and only believe MW3 was the last great Call of Duty. Then this game probably isn't for you. If you are willing to learn new techniques and strategies to your game style, you will inevitably become a much better player all round. 

Please leave any questions or comments and I'll be sure to answer them.

What you need to record console game play

So you are a Call of Duty pro that wants to show the world how many noobs you can waste in a PUB stomping massacre. Maybe you regularly score goals playing FIFA 17 and no one else is there to witness your glory. Whatever your reasons, we could all agree that recording game play directly from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is not ideal for image quality or convenience. Not if you want to take your gaming and kudos up a notch.

If you are serious about console gaming, especially FPS, and have another computer available, the chances are you already have the foundations of a basic set up to record your game play. During this series I'll be taking you through what equipment you will need and how to set it all up. So what will you need as the bare minimum?

Elgato HD60 £139 This is a necessity and the industry standard game capture device used by pretty much every YouTuber. Sure there are other devices available, but these are not as connected as the Elgato. You can record and edit your game play, as well as stream directly to Twitch and YouTube. You will also need a computer with a USB port to connect the device, as well as a chat link cable if you want to record any party chat.

External Hard drive £50 - £100 If you are recording in the best quality available (and you should be) you are going to use a lot of hard disk space. Your computer will hate you and eventually die a slow, hot, noisy death. It's better to administer the pill before the problem and store all your media on a separate hard drive. Then back up those special clips again.

Gaming Headset £25 - ??? Chances are you have this already. If not you need to invest in some before going any further. Whether you buy a budget pair of Turtle Beach, or a pair of Astros. The idea is to communicate in game, when streaming to an audience and also act as your sound output. Most budget headsets will be adequate for this purpose if you are dabbling in recording and streaming for the first time.

Video Editing Software Editing in YouTube or the Elgato software will not give you more advanced editing features. Windows Movie Maker or imovie would be a good start and is software you probably already have. Editing software is expensive and be prepared to pay £250 upwards for Sony Vegas, or a £17 monthly subscription to Adobe for Premiere.

There are additional pieces of equipment you could acquire. I cover these in my video where I go through my entire set up that I use for editing, streaming and game capture. I'll be covering how to set up the Elgato in my next video for game and audio capture.

Please leave any comments or questions and I will be happy to answer them.