It's a cruel joke by the webmaster to give me MS Money to review again, as he knows I'm the sort of person who's broke in the third week of every month and hanging on by the fingernails in order to survive until pay day. In other words, I'm the sort of person who needs to track their finances much more closely after years of bad habits. However Microsoft has the toughest act yet to follow this year- the 2004 version of the software, which appeared to do it all.

You'll get out of any MS Money package what you put in, in terms of financial information. Every single type of transaction no matter how big or small should be entered, whether singly or rounded up into monthly figures such as the cost of your favourite magazine, newspaper, your ISP subs (a frightening figure when multiplied by 12), your travel costs- anything regular which involves you parting with your hard-earned money.

Not many may care about it if they're only paying for the basic version, but Portfolio Manager will let you manage your stocks, shares and government-sponsored savings accounts (ISAs to us Brits, for another year anyway). Money can download statements from your online bank if it's compatible but this time round, even if your online bank is signed up, you will have to pay after two years to continue with the link-up.

Credit centre returns from last year to help you manage and try and kill off your debts whether they're overdrafts, loans or from credit cards. Other information is grouped together at the comprehensive website, which gets less intimidating as you look at it more often.

The basic version of Money 2005, once again, contains its manuals on the disc rather than paper, and there's no Tax Saver Deluxe for the freelancers or small businesspeople among us to calculate their returns.

Tags: Software PC software Office software Microsoft

Microsoft Money 2005 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Nov 2004 09:45:26 +0000

Ulead is slightly better known in the UK for its PhotoImpact! Range of software and also Cool3D as bundled with early All-In-Wonder Radeon range. VideoStudio is the company’s flagship title though, now here in its eighth version.

Recognising the digital demands of the modern market, a new Movie Wizard is the guided and automated way to import, process and output your footage from presumably digital tape to either disc or tape again once reassembled. If you’re an old hand from the previous seven versions you won’t bother with this but for newcomers it may be one of the main selling points.

MPEG-4 recognition including the famed DivX video codec is another milestone, given that it’s rare to see game movie trailers and other streaming footage that fail to use this format for its space efficiency and more than acceptable quality. CD is a much more established benchmark for audio quality so in addition to the existing sampling ability, you can use Quicktrack Libraries to assemble your own soundtracks, mixing four tracks together (after you change their volumes independently).

To maximise the benefits of improved text handling - or promote another package- when you outgrow the text capabilities of VS 8 that’s when you can install Cool3DSE to go even further with animated titling and other effects.

When you’re working though, trying to use the trademark preview window at full size for every single effect on trial will severely stress out the test machine unless you go over the true 2GHz mark and have at least 1GB of fast RAM rather than the 512Mb that is claimed as satisfactory. However videocapture is one of the last of the great resource-sappers so your machine will be pushed to its limits, even if that’s the sole task of the PC at the time. 4Gb is required for samples but we’d make that 20Gb minimum and if you could dedicate a hard disk to videocapture, that would ease the resource demand- slightly.

There are also different filters to apply to the video and while Sepia tones are represented (called Duotone instead) it’s easy to see some are useful while others may be tested and discarded, never to be used again. However this resembles the free mode-changers in the hardware of any camcorder you ever bought. Picture in picture may receive more attention than most however, so you can’t write off all of the effects before seeing them all.

Distribution is high on Ulead’s priorities, so if you want lots of people to view your movies, Neptune have partnered up with Ulead for a free time-limited introduction to the MediaShare service. Then you just direct people to your space to download the movie. That time limit’s a week before they require just under £30 a year to allow you to carry on hosting but you can add still pictures to the site as well.

The program is strongly documented; no PDF mass printouts here. Instead sit down and read the 200-page manual to the program itself before digesting the 50 pages of professional hints on DV filmmaking by Douglas Spotted Eagle.

What you have here is a slick refinement of a venerable program, backed up with killer documentation (even if it is slightly sad to be praising the kind of manual that all complex software should be bundled with) and so to beginners, this is the first step to take. This is assuming that your preferred videocapture method is already installed in the machine and won’t cause a knock-on cost.

Tags: Software PC software Photo editing software Ulead DVD

Ulead VideoStudio 8 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:37:22 +0100

Ten years ago Activision raised the standards for PC Gaming to console level in terms of presentation with the sublime classic Mechwarrior 2, paying particular attention to the music as well as the action. Instead of multiple formats, there were different versions relating to your type of graphics card, since we were still five years away from the two-horse race of 3D gaming we have now.

Six-figure sales followed and so did the mission pack. Then something strange happened: The fans cried out for more and Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries was born. It wasn't Mechwarrior III- that arrived a few years later at a different publisher. However you were still playing new levels and the format was much more free-form, allowing you to take on campaigns in random order. It was one of the first non-RPG standalone mission packs blown up into a full game, with much success.

The reason for going back in time is that Hitman Contracts is the descendant of this approach to PC game development: Second game in the series exploding in sales, brilliant presentation, music, controls but when the third game arrived, it wasn't Hitman 3 but an extended mission pack.

The music is still excellent though. (You may hear this remark often throughout the review). Anyone frustrated by the first game's reliance on stealth and patience will be happy with the “reward” of being able to go into many situations with all barrels blazing if you so wish. The difficulty selection also determines how many saves you get per level, from practically none to almost normal by comparison as you go from professional to “play like Max Payne” mode. In professional mode that's when subtlety becomes a Splinter-Cell styled artform, such as strangulation as opposed to a feeding your target a Big Mac 10.

When publishers try to hype a game's gore content they're normally trying to disguise a rubbish game- thankfully not so here. Nevertheless in Contracts other than the blood you're used to from the first two games, you'll take a stroll through an abbatoir on one level. The killings then, intermingle with the blood already on the floors and walls from animal carcasses and if you're going to hype on violence, nobody's really going to be impressed with anything other than a BBFC rating- which Contracts doesn't sport.

In fact the graphics stand out not for gore but the similarity to Silent Assassin, the preceding game, even when some remade levels are given a lick of virtual paint and made more expansive. The Glacier Engine still has some great outdoor effects but expect a makeover for the fourth game unless Io Interactive takes the system-friendly Raven Software route and refines the engine until almost any machine could play it- and all without the need to pay licence fees to iD Software.

So: Splinter Cell's much better looking, but in Hitman Contracts your sole job is to work out how you neutralise the target as opposed to following a list of chess moves in Ubi Soft's classic, so you're allowed to sort out any way you like, from stealthy to ballistically saturated, offering something to every kind of third-person action gamer and not just the stealth aficionados.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Eidos

Hitman Contracts - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 26 May 2004 19:33:37 +0100

Well well, it's finally here. Technical problems scuppered a planned preview of Breed last year and we applied the patch to the review copy before proceeding, only to find that that stopped the review code from working too. Two installations later we were able to get in on the act and see how the finished product looked.

Taking an extra six months out from Halo's release at least minimizes many comparisons, which is fortunate, seeing as Bungie's title has had a two-year head start on another format. To recap the short history lesson for those not eagerly awaiting this squad-based shooter, Breed's early betas were (in our opinion, mistakenly) released, and received a savaging from the community after a year of hype. When the next demo didn't run much better that further dented anticipation for the game.

Therefore it's good to be able to report that the graphics while playtesting were smooth shiny and polished, though our Radeon card had some part to play in this improvement of looks as well as the tweaking under the hood. Any gamer used to Hidden And Dangerous or Syndicate will be at home with the multiple character control and using a different squad member for a given situation. Also there was enough of a negative reaction to the godawful voiceover adorning the training mode demo that in the main game anyway, it's either a different actor or they went for another take. He now spells out the initials for Heads Up Display rather than calling it the “Heeoood” like he did in the demo. The alternative voice takes a lot longer to grate. Sounds are also suitably meaty though I turned off the music straight away to concentrate.

One piece of advice early on…play the sniper and let the others back you up. It's slightly sexist (although tactical) that this character takes damage the most quickly and easily. The “death drain” that affected your squad in the demo has been tweaked; health now has to fall below 40 before it stops auto-healing, and from 10 health you basically have just over that number of seconds to find a health pack otherwise the character dies. That gives some time to retreat when under bombardment which wasn't in those early versions. The other reason for sniping to cover your teammates is of course, your own accuracy tends to be better and you never can tell when the sniper will switch to her automatic rifle and drill the Breed close-up, letting artillery bombard everyone to death. Hill-based aliens will need similar pinpoint sniping as the range is longer than the rifles and shotgun, though if you had time you could try grenades. It makes for frenetic melee combat and while it's annoying that your teammates sometimes bump you and get in the way of your shot, you can't say that wouldn't really happen in battle. This is where Halo has the advantage though; as your fellow Marines would usually jump in a Warthog and help you fight and you're a cyborg, you're more likely to care about not catching them in a crossfire than here in Breed.

The squad commands also have to be mastered for you to get the most out of the game, I didn't mind the three squaddies running around shooting anything else while I was sniping, they needed little in the way of micromanagement except during the toughest bombardments and really the game held my interest on terra firma. Once I had to start flying around it was like playing a console-based Star Wars spin-off and forced me to re-suspend disbelief even if there were many point-and-shoot-relevant target moments. Thankfully the use of Breed and human tanks and gun emplacements on the ground made up for this.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS CDV

Breed - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 22 Apr 2004 08:43:03 +0100

Want a movie-style pitching line to sum up Painkiller? We'd called it “Serious Damned”.

In fact it's a return to the good old days of Doom I and II with another graphical makeover like Serious Sam's. The paper thin plot has you in purgatory and conscripted into slaughtering the hordes of hell before you can ascend to heaven. That means 20 levels of eradicating (purifying?) everything that moves, and you'll be lunch for the Zombies or the throwing-star board for the undead Ninjas unless you're on the move yourself all the time.

The save system is the increasingly fashionable checkpoint system reminiscent of Halo rather than saving wherever you like and another radical departure from FPS convention, you don't have to reload, you pick up and exhaust a weapon before moving on to the next one you find. In case you think it's all too easy because you've done it before, a massive boss will rear its ugly head at least four times throughout the 20 levels of action.

The ten weapons' secondary fire modes are weird and wonderful to consider that you actually possess ten guns instead, like giving a double-barrelled shotgun a freeze ray so you can re-create the “Hasta La Vista, baby” scene from Terminator 2 ad infinitum by freezing enemies and shattering them with one blast. In a totally coincidental nod to the upcoming blockbuster Van Helsing you also possess a stake gun, which will pin victims to the wall. This wouldn't be a FPS game without a rocket launcher and the Havok physics and death animations mix nicely, so that when you see the after effect of a group strike, there'll be bodies everywhere. In addition, they'll leave behind health points in the form of souls, although you literally only get one. If they're different from the normal colour then that'll cost you health, a new twist on the incremental bonus idea.

The tarot card system also allows you to build up bonuses depending on card colour once again but sometimes you have to restrict yourself a single weapon and nothing bigger/more fun. Again it's not totally essential to the mass slaughter, but sometimes it'll help- providing Bullet Time slowdown as seen in The Matrix, Max Payne, Prince Of Persia and a cat food advert on television.

There is a multiplayer mode but it revolves purely around deathmatch and that's all, but the People Can Fly mode is an eccentric new addition where everyone has a rocket launcher but only mid-air kills increase your score, so everyone will be up in the air trying to aim at everyone else.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Dreamcatcher

Painkiller - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 22 Apr 2004 08:27:18 +0100

This product is not related to the newly relaunched 1980s styling gel. Instead, it’s a digital camera editing package with the emphasis on preserving your pictures. It possesses its own interface with hallmarks of Windows XP’s photo handling, but has a working method all its own.

Immediately impressive is the fact that once imported into Studioline’s own database, your pictures are larger than average compared to XP’s and Paint Shop Pro’s smaller thumbnails, so you can take a better look at the pictures before you’ve even started. At 1024 x 768 three shots per line were fitted and I gained the fourth by increasing the system resolution to 1152 x 864 - although unlike iPhoto you can’t instantly resize the thumbnails on the fly. The project took the form of a wedding photo set, which had long since lain dormant on my digicam’s memory card. However you can also scan in developed pictures via TWAIN and your scanner.

The size isn’t to be sniffed at - I discovered several instances of red-eye and other previously unseen stock defects that I was able to reprocess and remove using the edit function. Although I’d used photo packages for other types of effects in the past on backgrounds, here, one click of the edit button, two sliders and then three to four mouse clicks removed redeye and that’s the easiest execution of this tool I’ve seen to date.

Elsewhere you can annotate your photos. However, while testing I couldn’t find a way to change the date format back to European from American month/date/year format while in the program. However this changes itself back once you’ve burned your project to CD.

There’s no “Are You Sure- OK or Cancel” dialog boxes, due to the layered changes process. You can always undo whatever changes you make if you’re not happy, so this package is really aimed at amateurs wanting streamlined picture processing and handling. Those aforementioned effects can be applied en masse to a batch of pictures to save time and the CDs produced can take the form of backups or a slide show set, or your photos rendered as a compilation on a single page or series of pages. If you want to keep it electronic there’s the Web Gallery option as well.

The change of interface wasn’t as scary as it sounded, as my sample project for the review was intuitively created without recourse to either the electronic or 115-page paper manual, and I only needed to view some of the slickly presented tutorials.

Tags: Software PC software Photo editing software StudioLine Cameras

StudioLine Photo 2 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 25 Mar 2004 23:01:44 +0000

True 3D is the major selling point to the latest in the Myst Series; you can play from the third person view (default) or switch to first person, although sometimes the game will make its mind up for you, in the style of Tomb Raider. Yeesha, the 200 year old daughter of regular Myst Character Atrus, leads you to an entrance to the underground civilisation of D'Ni. The game will have you unlocking its secrets with Yeesha's help and cryptic clues.

After creating your avatar, you control the character's moves throughout the different Ages in the game with the biggest amount of freedom in the series so far. You need it, since the exploration is the largest element of the game that will lead you to solving the puzzles, and this will be as comfortable as a pair of slippers for the game's stalwart fans who kept the first four games as the biggest of all time until the arrival of The Sims. Players are serenaded by Peter Gabriel's original song from his Hit compilation. As a fan, was good for me to hear but some people may just skip it.

The promised massively multiplayer online world has been closed down, another casualty of an increasingly tough all-or-nothing environment, failing in spite of, or maybe even because of, being free. So there's single player in the box and when you finish it, it's trade-in fodder.

Despite the 3D, most aspects of the gameplay are comfortable and familiar and the graphics top-notch, although that's expected of modern games. It's just a shame that the platform-style action brings the headaches from a totally different genre to this adventure series.

Tags: Gaming PC games Ubisoft

Uru Ages Beyond Myst - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2004 18:00:12 +0000

UPDATED: 31st May 2004. We already looked at Unreal II's single player side at http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/review.php?reviewId=247. Thanks to the desire to make an Xbox version and internal competition with the Digital Extremes, and Epic Megagames, Legend Entertainment created an eXpanded MultiPlayer add-on for anyone with the original disc, and American and Canadian readers can buy an integrated special edition.

In order to differentiate itself from the Unreal Tournament franchise, XMP uses the Unreal II universe's weapons and physics, bringing the feel of the Tribes range to the game. Artefacts take the place of the flag, and each side starts off with a pair. Stealing all the enemy artefacts and capturing them, or taking all the generators and forcing the other side to run out of energy, wins the level. Since you need to have the maximum level of energy to deposit artefacts, it's soon apparent that capturing power stations (by hacking) is as important as the main objectives otherwise base defences, static emplacements and then vehicles will fail to regenerate.

There are three classes. The Ranger's the medic, restoring health but also packing the sniper rifle (now three shots at a time unlike the SP game), pistol and shock lance. He also runs at the fastest speed. The Tech has the fastest hacking speed and packs the Halo/Aliens-style assault rifle and shotgun. He can also erect machine gun or rocket emplacements and force fields anywhere on the map. He can revive people like the Ranger but only restore armour. Finally the Gunner packs the flamethrower, rocket launcher with homing missiles and the heaviest armour. Correspondingly, he's the slowest on the map. He can re-arm any teammate in the field without needing to visit a charging station, and his emplacement defences are static or laser-trip mines, deadly to anyone, including teammates. Everyone carries a grenade launcher and the six different types of shell are split among the three classes.

This careful balance among the classes means the best games are played with one person performing each role. Not working in a team not only results in lost matches, it means no fun either, resembling Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. This is the strength of XMP, which can support up to 32 players.

The vehicles also prove invaluable, especially to the Gunners. Still encouraging teamwork, a second player must operate the cannons just like Halo. However unlike Halo the vehicles can be destroyed. The Raptor is a desert buggy, fast, capable of stunt-jumps but not able to take much punishment. Its front mounted traction wheels can splatter anyone who fails to jump away in time and its cannon is a mobile version of the static cannons. The Juggernaut is the slow tank, with a flamethrower and powerful single cannon, which can take out force fields with the right aim. The Harbinger is faster than the tank, with the single cannon firing multiple rockets, but it's tail-mounted. This truck-like vehicle can also crash when turning too sharply. Again, a sustained attack with all three makes the best team play. Vehicles have a turbo boost for a few seconds of extra speed when under heavy fire.

Commands and requests are bound to the function keys and numbers to minimize the need for typing, like Tribes 2. Thankfully unlike Tribes 2 there aren't 30 of them to learn. The Use button lets you hack, revive, re-supply and enter/exit vehicles. Teleports take you to different locations of the map or your own base. The routes need to be memorized when either defending or escaping. Hacking a door panel locks it away from the opposing team, another invaluable tactic for escaping with an artefact, and the home team has to check for hacked doors (which from a distance, are deliberately hard to recognise as either red or blue) so that the enemy cannot simply stroll in.

Map design is as excellent as gamers have come expect from the developers of Unreal/Tournament, some let you run to the action, others need vehicles, but it's actually a different discipline to Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 arriving next February. More strategy is necessary as well as team dependency. One example would be a Tech stealing an artefact and not running quickly enough to avoid the automated cannons on his way out, or slowing down your own escape by not hacking multiple doors inside a base.

There's also a pretty merciless map set in space, suitably named Freefall. With no gravity and only two energy stations, this is the most challenging map from the original set, with Alcazar coming a close second with its broken bridge only accessible by Ranger, Teleport or precision timing on a turbo jump.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Atari

UNREAL II XMP Multiplayer - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 30 Dec 2003 02:15:02 +0000

Adaptec, major player in SCSI devices, has diversified into the USB and Firewire area with ease, bringing over its internal PCI boards with the various external connectivity methods that are now taken as common place. Thanks mainly to Apple, Firewire's firmly established but USB has reached its second version without making the 1.1 variety totally obsolete.

It's all in the title and in the picture; you can use the Xhub 2 (Adaptec part number AUH-2000) to split any USB port into a pair. As implied, the aim (and recommendation) is for the faster USB 2.0 speed. Since it will give you one additional port, it's really aimed at laptop owners who will generally only be bestowed with one slot of each type. They may have a situation where another port will be needed, like using keyring storage to back up if you've already got a printer or scanner attached, to use one example of working on the move.

Tags: Hardware USB gadgets Adaptec

Adaptec XHUB2 2-Port USB Hub originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:02:16 +0000

In the summer of 2002 you had to marvel at a game that sold almost a million at full console price, when it was a PC game- such was the loyalty commanded by Warcraft III Reign Of Chaos finally getting released. At the same time Neverwinter Nights was launched to similarly stellar sales and solid following. One year on their mission packs are doing the same. So could the only non-FPS game at Intel's Multiplayer Gaming Championships deliver something special to single players too?

The Frozen Throne (TFT) carries on where the end of Reign Of Chaos (ROC) left off, and its 26 missions take you through the three main species of the Elven Night Sentinels, the Human Alliance and then on to Arthas who's got a rather different legion of followers than in ROC. The Orcs are only seen in the Durotar levels, a separate mini-campaign where Thrall from ROC makes a cameo- but this pop-up leaves you wondering how much Orc content will go into World Of Warcraft and the inevitable part four. Fans may be disappointed but there's enough of a handful controlling three factions with the missions that are here.

A newcomer to Warcraft has to appreciate one thing; the slow-burning hardcore addiction level of the game, by the time to realise the slick presentation has drawn you in, it's simply too late and you are hooked in the same manner as other strategy stalwarts such as Age Of Empires II, Rise Of Nations and Command And Conquer. Hardcore C&C fans may actually realise how much they miss good old-fashioned fantasy-based hack and slash combat, making a change from the high-tech battlefields of now. If combat gets too much, many heroes have avatars that can be summoned to aid combat for a limited time, and other companions join along the way in the style of the original game. Several quests and subquests will intertwine throughout the course of the whole game. As ever knowing and preserving the most useful but not necessarily the most powerful units may get you out of tight spots later on- as will remembering where the healing fountains are located. An extra hero, allowing four maximum, will always be welcome along with their magic supplemental abilities. Boats can be manned but it's just a couple of units, hardly the game-deciding armada you got in C&C Red Alert or Rise of Nations. Like Rise of Nations the top-down nature of the graphics makes the game extremely system friendly too, down to a 1GHz machine from four years ago and a Geforce 2 card, although RAM can always get better than 128MB, both ROC and TFT will run on that minimum.

If you've got enough currency in the game from quests, treasure or sales you can recruit mercenaries to your cause. Some units can reach more secluded sections of the map to search for bonuses. In short, everything you enjoyed from ROC is present in TFT, with new creatures to see or fight in every level. A good story in the RPG arena has been par for the course since the paper game days. It had to be-gamers simply wouldn't play otherwise. Even so, it's a surprise that TFT's story remains so gradually all-encompassing and as good as ROC's for being different. In fact it embarrasses several games in other genres where the storyline is clearly tacked on because publishers are desperate to try to challenge Hollywood. It's rounded off with the usual brace of multiplayer content as well.

Organisation is next to presentation for Battle.Net, which is where all patches are released first for download on demand. My installation was patched up to v1.12 with no hassle from the server end- once I'd sorted out my connection. There's no small link between massive sales and Blizzard's focus on customer support, not to mention fast releasing of the Macintosh version. For £20 it's an add-on that's deserving of its early praise and high sales.

Tags: Gaming PC games MMORPG Blizzard World of Warcraft

Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:16:03 +0000

This game was released in 2002 and was the sequel to the winner of the last great multiplayer FPS shootout. So why look at it now, with constant updates and improvements across the year this is still a top flight game that continues to be played but now with the 2004 version out it now naturally moves to budget brilliance instead.

Quake III Arena did well enough, but Unreal Tournament's more varied styles of gameplay in the one box ensured that it sold more, had more mods and ultimate received plenty of gameplay tweaks. The 2003 edition was released in October 2002 and removed one gameplay mode and introduced two others, but the graphics received a modern makeover.

Aside from the usual deathmatching, capture the flag and last man standing gameplay modes, Domination was doubled, so that two control points had to be held for ten seconds to score (a lot longer than it sounds), and Bombing Run was a mix of CTF in reverse where the ball had to be taken to the opponent's goal and then fired through it to score. The ball could also be passed from player to player to bring in an element of Speedball and just to spice up the entire game, sometimes the goal isn't necessarily on the ground, there may be a final jump to make which could cost you your seven points per “try” if you miss. Invasion sees you playing the DM maps but fighting 16 waves of aliens from the original singleplayer Unreal.

So why is an old game under review? As well as support for the mod community which Epic and Digital Extremes encouraged, they also gave away new maps and mods in the next two years following the game's release rather than charging for another add-on, and have stuck to this tradition for the 2003 version. Also, in a move showing extreme trust, the version 2225 patch removes CD checking. Get this patch, the two bonus packs from the two co-developers and the Ownage Compilation of hand-picked third party maps from famous mapper Cliffy B(rezniski) and you have 3GB of quintessential FPS action- and that's before you go online and test out the wealth of other mods and maps that have sprung up in a surprisingly short space of time. The game is now under £20 if you search around the internet.

The reason for the price drop and the speedy CD protection removal is due to the 2004 version out now in a FIFA-style update, but if you aren't bothered about vehicular combat then this is as good as it gets until then. Of course the price of this game will continue to drop until it's properly out on budget, but this is a display of give and take not seen since the support for Half-Life.

If you're worried that the graphics are too good for your PC, then there's also a downloadable software rendering mode as well, which also needs the latest patch to function, so as long as your other specifications are in order and your hard disk defragged, the power of your graphics card stops becoming the be-all and end all. Like Quake III Team Arena, the Unreal Engine loves power but will scale happily down to GeForce 2 standards.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Atari

Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:07:46 +0000

Let's cut to the chase: Unreal II is Max Payne set in space. Both feature groundbreaking graphics for the time of release, both will hit you with some exhilarating firefights, and both are criminally short- they can be completed in just over a week.

I nearly forgot the cliché-ridden storylines, but Max Payne uses comic book techniques and film-noir voiceover to make something new out of what could have been a weak and paper-thin background. Unreal II, does not. You can't skip the cut-scenes, which means you are forced to endure the story in all its hackneyed glory, involving the multiple pieces of an ancient artifact which will of course, be recombined at the end of the game with predictably hell-breaking-loose consequences. Using names like Severnaya brings back shades of Goldeneye, and the Drakk were a Babylon 5 villian albeit spelt with an “h”. This just underlines the unoriginality of the storyline.

The designers have taken the realistic route with the main character's heavy armour, the slow movement meaning that on most occasions you have to fight whatever attacks or run and gun as best as you can when exiting a level after getting the artifact. Alien weapons complement the set you are introduced to in training. You get one free at the start but then the rest are built (and in the case of the better handgun, donated) by one of your crewmates. The assault rifle's ammunition makes a movie-style ricochet noise when attacking armoured enemies or the Skaarj, indeed the sound effects match the graphics. Until the shotgun and sniper rifle arrive this tends to be all you need. Later on you will also be able to mount automated gun emplacements and forcefields to defend a base area, either solo or with Marines. When having to direct a team and hold a section of the map against attack, these are the rare rewarding moments in the game that don't involve sub-Serious Sam melee attacks among the amazing eye candy.

Bringing back bosses for the end of the levels involving major exploration would have been a fresher move if you weren't helped out by the landscape every time- there's always some cover to find from which point the boss is easy to bump off.

As the game progresses the levels take on an AVP2 feel, except that these levels are populated by robots that are repaired if you don't destroy them within ten seconds. These, along with the Skaarj and the final monster, provide the only real challenge in the game. Once you run to the end and reflect on the end credits, if you play it in one final long stretch maybe you'll feel satisfied. Unreal Tournament 2003 provides multiplayer, meaning unless you want to design your own levels or wait for veteran Unreal mappers to take a break from multiplayer (you'll have to wait, since the last three versions of the editor aren't compatible with each other)- Unreal 2 becomes trade-in fodder.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Atari

Unreal II - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:04:55 +0000

Tron is a classic 1982 movie about video gaming with music that could only (politely) be described as of the times. The game spawned two arcade machines of its own and countless early licensed console variants, but now it’s back in a Lithtech-engine powered First Person Shooter developed by Monolith, 21 years after the release of the film.

You’re not Flynn or Tron themselves this time however; you are Jet Bradley, son of original Tron developer Alan Bradley who like Flynn, gets sucked into the world of the computer. The story will send him around servers, getting attacked by other system dwellers including viruses and at times Bradley will find himself in the thirdperson light cycle arenas instead of wandering around in combat, all in his quest to fix the system and get out alive.

Which is where it started to go wrong for us. Despite being the pioneering movie with a 17-year head start there’s no escaping the fact that the Matrix movies have come along and done the humans-fighting-within-computer-system scenario with an unbeatable level of cool that was always missing from Tron. This is strange as this resulting game’s graphics and execution beat Enter The Matrix hands down.

Your chief weapon is the disk and although you have 11 others, a lot of the time the disk (all weapons can be upgraded and the disk will become guided at top level) is all you need. Fresh from the Tomb Raider series is the hated lethal platform drop. With Lara we’ve had seven years and six games to get used to it. For anyone else to deliberately code this into a game is breathtakingly bad design disguised as a challenge- when Halo would simply halve your health - given that game’s relative difficulty, still a death sentence but you’d be left with a fighting chance. Here in the machine world, even a lower platform can kill you, never mind an open drop into space, which you’d understand.

To be absolutely fair, if you can suspend your disbelief for The Matrix series then Tron shouldn’t be a suspension too far- voices are well acted, the music kills the risible original score and it’s a good companion to the movie. The graphics are great and in multiplayer, Light Cycle duels are challenging when requiring you to control the camera as well as the bike, and the disc duels also keep you on your toes in levels with drops of any size, as you can easily kill yourself before your opponent.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Ubisoft

Tron 2.0 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:00:49 +0000

TOCA. A classic PC driving game range from yesteryear, the last true PC entry being version two eight years ago. Aside from moving into Rally games this was the series where Codemasters' reputation for demanding physics and smashable cars was showcased. Back then Voodoo 1 and 2 cards were being stretched to the limit and Toca Race Driver is exactly the same with today's video boards.

Aside from the modern visual sheen there is the all-important millennial gaming addition - the storyline. And very cinematic it is too; Ryan McKane who you'll play throughout, watches his Dad get rammed off and blown up at the end of the race as a child. Fast forward a decade and young petrolhead McKane and his brother follow in his late father's footsteps racing all the way to the top. Leaving this aside you have a great arcade racer without it, which is a good thing as it's as the story is as hackneyed as Days Of Thunder. On balance it's amusing to see a rival driver expressing dissatisfaction at being run off the road during a race.

You'll go round the world for international Tournaments such as the Lola World Championships and Supercars, but in the story the British TOCA tour is where McKane gets to cut his teeth and that's when good test drives bring the best places, good race driving brings the most points, and you get to advance and become a jobbing driver eventually, racing for whoever you want in the long term. You'll tear around 34 tracks with 42 different cars (although this includes the classics from the mid-20th century as well) and also get to tune up the vehicles in the garage before you set out as well. This translates into more subtleties with handling which varies from car to car anyway.

All of this is well and good, but there was the risk that some retro-style fun may have been lost when resurrecting a venerable series. Not so. If you want to race like it's Destruction Derby, smash other cars off the road, race the wrong way, skittle vehicles and generally muck about GTA style ignoring the career mode, you can. It's every bit as much fun as the predecessors and better looking to boot

The physics aren't realistic in the style of the McRae titles - that game will turn up later in summer 2003 but it's real enough to demand practice, certainly. Windscreens smash, spoilers and bumpers fly off with speed-blurred realism and stay wherever they fall for the duration of the race.

The game's demanding but fair in the specs department too - it'll assess your machine before you start and also runs at the highest 3D refresh rate your graphics card and monitor can handle, a welcome change from 60Hz hell.

Playing on a sub-1GHz machine with 384Mb RAM and an old GeForce2 MX, I only needed to step down to 800 x 600- still playing at 100Hz and 32Bit colour and staying at 60 frames per second- the price being the loss of rendering detail on the cars, as the sliding speed to quality scale mimics that of a graphics card driver panel in Windows. On the higher spec of an Athlon 1800+, 512MB and a GeForce 4 Ti4600, all the bells and whistles could be left high, and still attain the 60fps peak.

Tags: Gaming PC games Racing games Codemasters

Toca Race Driver - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:55:40 +0000

Like GTA, when the graphics weren't realistic due to technology, the original Postal was written off as a joke and not even the Daily Mail was as annoyed as usual. It did however, sell well enough for Running With Scissors to program a sequel in full 3D, which you see here.

This time round, the action's divided into several mundane, dull tasks given to The Postal Dude (that's you) spread over the course of a week. You can get on with completing them, and take in some of the sights along the way. Essentially, that's it. If it were that simple however, it would just be the worst Unreal Engine-powered total conversion you'd ever seen- but there's more to it.

Aside from the ability to whip out any weapon from shovel up to assault rifle for no reason, everyone in the town of Paradise, Arizona can “go postal” any time, for any reason, and it's your choice whether to reply with lethal force or not. There's no need to fire back at bank robbers for example, and there's one sub-mission where by default you'll be caught up in the violence and be on the run from the police, whether you like it or not (when playing on the Very Hard skill level), so the developer's claim that you never need to fire a single shot is economical with the truth.

What may make you go postal are the slowcoach loading times between sections, not helped by the fact that to go to church, for example, involves going through two sets of tunnels. So you're looking at four separate loads to get around the same small town and that's enough to make you interminably bored, so torching the residents with petrol or Molotov cocktails does become relief from the dullness of waiting for sections to load. It doesn't help when the computer cheats- you need three headshots from a handgun to take down anyone attacking you and armed enemies rarely miss. The poor scripting makes you stand in exactly the right place when trying to hand over cash otherwise there's no reaction and you waste a lot of time trying to complete your objective- before it randomly and magically wakes up.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Whiptail Interactive

Postal 2 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:40:37 +0000

Another success story from the mod development community, Day Of Defeat is a hardcore WWII multiplayer FPS. Crafted from the engine of the best selling Half-Life which never had bots at launch so most online deathmatching was human v human, the penultimate version to this review copy won universal praise for being the best in its two-year life. This was enough for Valve to do what it did for Counter Strike (and single player GunMan), bring the mod in-house and for Activision to repeat Vivendi's move and turn publisher. Being smart, they've released it at the top end of budget price too, so searching around, the mod won't cost you more than £15.

With a nod to Team Fortress Classic, the soldiers are grouped into classes on both the Axis and Allied sides. The creators have strived for realism, which shows in over 30 weapons, which will send bullets arcing upwards if you hold the trigger down, and similar physics affecting sniper accuracy. The largest weapons need mounting with fixed or portable stands in order to get the most out of them- but of course their operators then become easier targets without proper cover or team support among the tight streets and corridors that make up your battlefields. Whatever automatic weapon you're carrying, you can't treat it as a garden hose with your bullets as water, since your handgun will carry next to no ammunition by comparison and after that, it's knives out- against more conservative gunners, a suicidal tactic by all but the expert.

Buying the retail edition gets you two extra levels to accompany the baker's dozen in the original download, and some British troop classes who can access some of the heavier weapons like the Bren and medium-sized Stens. It's actual deathmatch that's a little restricted here; most of the maps involve assaulting an objective or capturing and holding flag positions, so the other big WWII shooters such as Battlefield 1942 have the advantage here, even if Medal Of Honor now has the same cheating problems as DOD's older brother, Counter-Strike.

Getting started on any mod you've not played before will be a steep learning experience where you've got to try all the classes and see which characters you like best. Then after dying a lot, the real tactics and strategies emerge especially in the absence of drivable vehicles; for that there's BF1942 again. There's no running around the map Quake style and no bunny-jumping while firing; aside from weapon weight and recoil, there's a stamina bar to govern your energy level and how far you can sprint which must be saved for dangerous open areas.

All right, I've managed to sing the game's praises for this long, but being based on Half Life there's no escape from the fact that it now looks old. More diplomatically, the work that's gone into streamlining landscape graphics in Counter Strike's retail version, has not happened here- and even so two more years on, Medal Of Honour's tweaked Quake III engine graphics are almost effortlessly better. Only the soldiers look truly great; but even if gameplay triumphs over graphics, it badly needs something like the high-definition pack as released with Half-Life Blue Shift as a stopgap makeover.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Activision

Day of Defeat - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:59:19 +0000

To be honest we could just leave up the headline, show you the screenshots and leave you to it. The second game was cutting edge at the time, both graphically and physically. Released when Colin was showered in gold with the seemingly magic Ford Focus. As if reacting to the change in teams, 11 other cars can also be driven in the special stages, and they are unlocked as you succeed or can be used for practice. Like TOCA, more cars are available as you get better.

If you want to just play the game, gears can be left to automatic, and once you're comfortable with that or if you're an F1 games veteran, you can then change over to manual. That's only after you've mastered control of the car and can stop it barrel rolling or jumping off into the river. We wouldn't recommend playing this way if your last game was GTA 3- or even sister title TOCA Race Driver.

With time and practice the game's as rewarding as its stock car stable mate with not a story in sight. Championship mode takes you through eight countries with varying terrain, and elements such as dust dirt or snow will end up realistically coating the car and changing the handling characteristics. Aside from 2D spectators (who are supposed to be flying past you at speeds to quick to notice) the six month delay from the release of the console version has gone into making this game exploit modern graphics card capabilities- and just like TOCA, almost everything that could fly off a car when you crash, does so- spoilers, bonnets, bumpers, smashed windows and damaged or amputated wheels (with one spare tyre if you get a puncture) and as great as it looks, it costs you vital seconds.

Mirroring Channel 4's excellent TV coverage, the practice runs where you get accustomed to the car are replicated, but three stages are then sequential with no breaks when you decide on the settings and then against another driver at the end of the second “day”- so you can't smash up the car as if it were just another practice. Better driving means better times.

As excellent as it looks and the physics model handles, the only downside is the game taking up 3.5GB of disk space and shipping on three CDs rather than a DVD. After everything else is so polished, having to waste time swapping CDs on install smacks of pandering to a decreasing majority.

There's a two player option and two more players can then take turns as long as you have USB controllers for the other three, but it'll still be divided into turns. Leaving out full-blown multiplayer is skimming a little and it depends just how quickly part 4 turns up. Hopefully this isn't the start of a trend by Codemasters.

Tags: Gaming PC games Racing games Codemasters

Colin McRae Rally 3 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:56:05 +0000

This Microsoft-Published MMORPG's developed into community all its own, drawn in by the easy learning curve of the interface and the action. Go online and you'll find maps tips and the usual wealth of fan sites.

Further episodes have kept gamers interested so there's a lot more for new players to sink their teeth into, but the backstory with three races coming back to fight legions of monsters to win back their world has an epic enough sweep to get you started, and in the box are 21 scenarios.

This makes the combat central, with no lengthy online chats to characters, and means Microsoft have added an online equivalent of Dungeon Siege.

This means plenty of resources from the paying punters to keep Asheron's Call supported, and as free flowing and rolling as the original game that you start with. It's quite relaxed in the way you're allowed to get stuck in combat wise- but you have to get quite far, three levels, before you can differentiate your weapons from those of different races.

Even though there are no NPCs there are five different natural resources to be mined, and their importance is ordered according to your race and the weapons you want to create, but once again the elements can be blended in different ways for different ordanance to result from your experiments. In an in-game equivalent of Ebay, if you're bored with a skill you can sell it by means of untraining and get back the experience and skill points spent in gaining that ability. You visit lifestones in order to save your position, and the cost in resurrecting yourself can be earned back (yes, you guessed it) in combat.

So what we have here is an RPG forunner to an epic battle game like Sony's PlanetSide-all action with selected weapons, but legions of fellow adventurers out in the world that you can fight alongside or against.

More recently servers are set to merge after downtime and in any online game there's going to be downtime and constant patching, which may have a graver effect than on a retail standalone game. If you're not into FPS but you like the idea of massed combat with a solidly human basis (in the Half-Life style non-NPC multiplayer) then give it a try- limited editions are bundled with a strategy guide to make it even easier to get into (when buying from selected websites, search around, it can go as low as under £20).

Tags: Gaming PC games RTS Microsoft

Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:43:14 +0000

The strap line reads, “a game that transports players to a time when heroes did battle with monsters of legend and the gods intervened in the affairs of mortal men”. “Taking on the role of one of nine ancient civilizations, players guide their people to greatness by commanding all aspects of their empire: gathering resources, raising massive armies, waging war against enemies, establishing profitable trade routes, building new settlements, enhancing production or military might with improvements, exploring new frontiers, and advancing through four distinct ages”. This all sounded remarkably similar to other offerings in the same genre.

Indeed, the game is basically the same as Ensemble Studios' other offerings, Age of Empires and Age of Kings. It's the usual deal; build peasants, cut down trees, build a base, build an army and then kill the enemy. Why is this different to any other RTS game then?

Well I'll tell you. It's because you can muster the powers of your chosen gods. Keep getting attacked by cavalry? Simply shoot lightening out of the palms of your hands. Instead of fighting one band of horse men with another band of horseman, why not unleash the wrath of medusa and turn them all into stone. He gets out his minator, you get out your multi headed hydra. He gets out his band of the undead, simply hurl meteors at him or build a pan dimensional passageway through which your army can march. It's great. I still don't know what half the things are, but love to see the results.

You also get a series of “heroes” which have different attributes and skills. Most of them will be adept at cutting up specific types of monsters or have softer skills such as long range fighting and the ability to rouse troops to fight harder. This adds a new dimension and sense of character, away from the faceless carnage of so many Strategy games. I actually find myself trying to save the key characters as opposed to marching them to certain death.

One problem is that hardened strategists might find this a bit too easy. I'm playing this on the medium level and haven't come even close to dying yet. Whilst I'm sure this is a lot easier at the higher settings, it may be a bit too simple for the veteran to get into. My experience is that RTS fans like things complicated rather than simple (as well as preferring tweed).

Tags: Gaming PC games RTS Microsoft

Age of Mythology - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Dec 2003 14:59:02 +0000

Age Of Wonders Shadow Magic has the pattern of Rogue Spear and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. It's not quite a full-blown sequel but it's standalone and slightly more expansive than a mission pack. The edition reviewed ships with a strategy guide in the same slipcase.

You've got to go into the shadow world where Merlin is trapped and pull him out before the Land of Shadow takes over. The Phobian Empire's also lying in wait so the epic mission is two-pronged.

The main complaints from AoW II have been addressed- in spite of some graphical recycling, missions can be generated at random for the hardcore fans to play on indefinitely after finishing the content in Shadow Magic, where three new factions of wizards can be played as you fight through 5 episodes with 16 sub-chapters. The 12 races from the previous games have been given a new unit for you to try out and their magic/combat abilities have been adjusted in the name of balance.

Chuck in some demons as well as those new factions and there's a high level of action to be had, even when combat in multiplayer is turn based- as there are up to 15 factions at any one time, the simultaneous turns keep the pace at a fast level, even if it's a different game to the non-stop action of Diablo or Dungeon Siege. If you think a battle's going badly in single-player mode you've still got the option of letting the computer decide who wins, rather than taking more damage than you think you can cope with.

Like the C & C series the original game out of the box can have predictable AI at times even at the highest difficulty levels but as developers Triumph have listened to fan feedback in the making of this game, they have addressed some of these issues with the V1.10 patch and we hope the support is continuing to make the Single player game just as tough. Resolutions have been increased over the original games to 1,280 x 1,024 although it's become more and more of an irritation that RPG developers don't bother to scale their resolutions from the word go, believing it an “enhancement” to be done later. Still, it's here now.

Tags: Gaming PC games RPG Take-Two EyeToy

Age Of Wonders Shadow Magic - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Dec 2003 14:43:10 +0000

In thousands of homes across the country sit mountains of videotapes, some with programmes you just haven't got around to watching yet, others with lovingly recorded cult TV series in meticulous order. The most essential kind hold family memories and it's this market at which the Moviebox USB is aimed. In other words, the kind of places where someone is king of the Camcorder but might not be PC Experts.

Unlike many other entries in the Pinnacle range, there is no capture card to be installed. The only connection from the main unit to PC is the USB cable. The other component video or S-Video connections are looped into the capture device and TV to be used as an external monitor.

Which brings us neatly to the first of the Moviebox's problems- it's woefully under-equipped. Buy a branded ATi All-In-Wonder capture card and every necessary connection is supplied. Not so for the Moviebox. You get the USB cable and that's all. It's fair enough to expect the first set of component video cables to be supplied with your camcorder. When you need a second set, it's ridiculous not to supply it, considering they are bell wire in quality terms and cheap to supply. Not everyone is a hi-fi or PC enthusiast with these extra cables just lying around. So that's an immediate extra cost, to go with the £25 you'll have to fork out for the USB 2.0 card.

To its credit, the use of USB 2 resulted in no dropped frames whatsoever during capture. This flawless performance was helped by a cleanup and defragmentation of the hard disk before starting work. We took our project, a half-hour video of a retirement party, and processed it straight through without adding any titles. Another plus is the expansive tutorial, which explains the straightforward way the software works. It's a bonus since the Quick Start guide explains the connection method and then abandons you to the tutorial and the online forums. The only other literature is for the Pinnacle Studio 8 software manual and this is much better, at 250 pages.

It's much better but not perfect, simply because the literature assumes flawless installation. It has no advice, for example, when your five year old camcorder works flawlessly but your six year old VCR will not display video data for capturing at all- even when the phono plugs are rerouted via SCART converters. So it's assumed that your VCR is new enough to sport front mounted phono connectors or that you have an edit deck.

The software works almost flawlessly with just the catch that it defaults to MPEG after capturing and automatic chapter stops are set. From there you have to select video CD to burn to disk rather than rendering the same footage twice over. The software implies rendering must take place immediately. You can burn the Super/Video CD or DVD, or streaming video for the internet, straight after you finish the rendering process (the speed of which is specification dependent).

Tags: Cameras Video And Editing Video editing software Pinnacle CeBIT2004

Pinnacle MovieBox Studio USB originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:43:37 +0000

Netopia is best known for its Timbuktu Pro software remote control range in the UK, but has been branding ADSL modems for some time. The 3341's the basic, single- user entry level product.

USB Connection is properly and clearly detailed with diagrams in the quick start manual and we relaxed our usual cyncism when the modem connected without any issues. This is just for one person though- if you want a four-port hub built in, you'll have to trade up to the 3346. According to Netopia, more PCs can be added later, presumably through the Ethernet port when choosing to connect to the computer with USB if that wasn't your default configuration to begin with.

The modem can be passworded to prevent incoming hacks, although targeted at a single user, they'd probably double up the 3341 with a software solution as well.

All necessary connections are supplied (with our review kit, certainly). However the splitter for sharing the connection, if needed, will cost an extra £6 on top.

There's nothing wrong with the 3341 ADSL and the basic firewall is admirable. The only disadvantage is, many UK users may simply settle for the model supplied when they buy an ADSL subscription, as there will certainly be some kind of one-off charge for it, even when subsidised. That means it's hard to see who would voluntarily pay £100 for a separate single-user model when that stays in the region of dedicated routers to add to consumer broadband modems, unless it was purely a small business connection.

Tags: Hardware Networking Netopia

Netopia Cayman 3341 ADSL Modem originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 14 Nov 2003 16:49:04 +0000

(Reference board tested with Catalyst 3.7 Drivers, 24-25 Frames per second is film/video speed)

For the past two generations of Radeon card ATi has kicked Nvidia back into the underdog position, thanks to new technology which makes the best of DirectX 9's new features and dedicating greater time to more efficient drivers than in the past few years when ATi earned itself a negative reputation for reliability.

Happily this is now in the past, and the driver has been consolidated into a single file just like Nvidia's Detonators- if your Radeon isn't part of the All-In-Wonder series, the capture driver won't be installed. Core clock settings stay at 400MHz, with 128MB of 300MHz of DDR memory (2 instructions per clock making an effective 600MHz speed). To make it cheaper than a 9600 Pro, it only has half the pixel pipelines (4 not 8) and half the vertex shader units as well (2 not 4). In spite of the memory at the same speed, half the backup electronics cuts the price and performance.

We tested the technology alone. For the record I haven't played the games supplied for free with my last graphics card purchase, so although some bundles include games, unless they're less than six months old they should be disregarded for value terms. However DVD playback software is a good inclusion if you're missing a set, if you use your computer for watching movies. Lesser-known OEM distributors such as Connect 3D follow a similar line of thinking and sell the card alone.

We started the benchmarking on this card with a legacy system, a PIII/933 with 384MB RAM and a defragged 30GB 5400RPM Hard Disk with Windows XP installed. This was to test whether this new lower-midrange card, a step up from the 9200, would be worth using to prop up an old machine. We kept the resolution at 1024 x 768 to stress out this system. The other machine also mid-range but still powerful enough not to hold back the card: An AMD Athlon 1800+, 512MB PC2100 RAM, defragged 80GB 7200RPM Hard disk and Windows XP again.

3Dmark is to be taken with a pinch of salt, but the frame counters are where you get a better idea of projected performance - Wings of Fury reached 38.7fps (Frames Per Second) on average but could drop to 16 when busy, but the AMD unit pumped out an average of 55, with the trough remaining playable at 33. Doom III wannabe Battle of Procyon gave a promising (and theoretically playable) start at 26 but dropped the minute the action got heavy to 10, and in spite of 128MB extra faster memory at midrange, little changed on the Athlon.

On both systems Troll's Lair crawled along at 7-10 when the action got heavy and the glowing swordplay and close-up facial rendering began- so they jerked like the still-framing of a VCR's pause control. Similarly Mother Nature brought both systems to their knees again with 7-10fps throughout, except for the less watery scenes where the system recovered to 25fps on the Intel and 36 on the Athlon. The latter could handle water alone but not combinations of landscape and creature movement. Even arguing that 3Dmark is a synthetic benchmark doesn't disprove Direct3D performance on tomorrow's games isn't going to set the world on fire- if you had the most powerful systems on sale today, you'd pick a card much higher up the range to showcase a 3.06GHz or Athlon 3200+ setup.

However OpenGL performance was much better by comparison and slightly more scalable as the specs increased. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (SS2) was our game of choice as the engine had been refined for the sequel for better midrange performance. (We chose Quality settings, no sound and 32-bit colour). Average performance on standard settings was just 37fps, with the only trough being 23fps when the Valley Of The Jaguar demo played its busiest moments. For an old machine this is a good shot in the arm, and of course we were deliberately stressing the P933 with a 1024x768 setting; sticking to three figure resolutions the speed would be more than satisfactory.

The Athlon raised the game to 55 fps with the same settings. It only fell to 44 when adding 4 x AntiAliasing and 6 x Anisotropic Filtering to 1024 x 768 or raising the resolution to 1280 x 1024. At the raised OpenGL menu settings and the higher resolution the Athlon soldiered on at 33fps.

We weren't satisfied with how easily SS2 was handling the increase in demand so we pushed it to full maximum- 6x Antialiasing, 16x Anisotropic filtering, and made sure that every option in texture rendering options was large, 32-Bit, high quality and/or using the High Enhanced rendering option. It was still playable at 27fps. We finally brought the card down with the same maximised settings in the driver tab and the game- and a 1600 x 1200 resolution. It could only manage 16fps, visibly struggling (although with a crisper image) and this is where a 9600 XT or higher would be a better choice.

Tags: Hardware Graphics cards ATI

ATI Radeon 9600 Pro originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 14 Nov 2003 11:59:26 +0000

November 11 2003
Dell is the direct PC king whose latest PDA range has been eagerly awaited by PDA enthusiasts. Like the X5 range Dell has ramped up a single range of three models built around similar chassis and a mix and match of specifications.

The X3 is the first of the newest breed, aiming for a more squared off design than the X5 series. The Wireless variant sits at the top of the range, costing £279 including VAT and Delivery. Once again Intel's X-Scale technology is powering the guts of the PDA, but it's the newer PXA263 model rather than the PXA255s in the HP iPAQs. This move to the latest chip is bolstered by 32Mb of Intel StarFlash! ROM for file storage out of the total 64, although the processor speed remains the same at 400MHz.

Battery power on the machine's most aggressive settings was as impressive as the HPs- One whole night and morning detached from its cradle after full charging- a 12 hour period- powering up from standby reported a 2% power drain on the X3s's 950mAH battery. However the Wireless LAN connectivity and any wish for music or gaming means getting another battery (the 1800mAH extra battery is only £46 inc vat).

One feature retained by Dell but dropped by HP is the Sony Minidisc-style jog shuttle wheel with push button selection, which makes navigation a breeze once windows are open. Some people will of course just stick to the stylus and it's a matter of taste, but it's a good move to let people make up their own minds.

The supplied cradle is solidly built and in a nod to the modding and Imac crowds, topped in Silver and displays the Dell logo in neon blue when charging. There's also a rear-mounted slot for charging that second battery independently of the PDA. This slot sports its own LED.

Being a PocketPC machine the ubiquitous Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7 was bundled for Synching, along with Outlook 2002. Operationally there were no problems although just like when Microsoft desktop OS change over, drivers will need to be updated to Windows Mobile/PPC 2003 if you have any existing devices to use with this PDA. The full range of accessories are at the Dell website including an extension to the one- year, next-business-day replacement warranty.

Tags: Phones PDAs Windows Mobile Dell

Dell Axim X3 Wireless PDA originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 12 Nov 2003 17:27:37 +0000

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the classic from Xmas 2001, darker and gorier than EA's bloodless Medal Of Honour Allied Assault, though both were derived from Quake III's Engine code. RTCW's AI was also better. A separate developer was called in to deliver the kind of class-based multiplayer gaming in the Team Fortress mold, but with much better looking graphics. When players could be bothered to work together it was great.

Fast forward 18 months and Id, once again, contracted out the development of a mission pack, Enemy Territory. However, when it didn't make the grade it was canned. The completed multiplayer side, from developers Splash Damage, was given away, and the map editor a month later. So kudos to Id for staying close to their shareware giveaway roots (no need to own either edition of RTCW)- and as long as you have broadband from 128K upwards it's gold dust. If you're on 56K, locking your server to high pings only, or just LAN play, will allow a fair game.

Lack of teamwork would arise in RTCW because the grunt workers- the medics and engineers- were woefully under-equipped in the weapons department. Now the medic starts with two clips for his rifle and neither the Thompson nor the M40 on the Axis side, are the jackhammer drills they were in the original game- not when many of the weapons from the later stages of the RTCW single-player can be bought and used by soldiers. Handguns are doubled, so aside from unique skills everyone has a fighting chance. Lying prone with emplacement weapons gives more accuracy but the gunner's a sitting duck, requiring cover or support. Only the newest character- the Covert Ops Spy, who steals uniforms from dead enemies to sneak in behind enemy lines, has any chance of succeeding alone at any of the sabotage objectives, and that's even if the player manages to avoid the mines that can be planted. Your gunsight will change to a no smoking symbol, but you can still team-kill him. You rack up experience points unlocking other abilities as the level progresses- most helpfully the medic gets a green syringe to not only get a soldier up on his feet, but also give him back full health. On some levels you can have a spawn point for ammunition and health, taking the pressure off the medic. There are other nuances to the other classes, but keeping yourself alive and always being in demand gives the medic a useful role and hardly any flames- as long as you're fast.

ET's one of the few recent games where failure to play as a team means it's no fun for anybody. But the objective-based games remain the most popular out of the handful of maps there are at the moment, involving escorting multiple vehicles which can get shot to bits by the Axis then repaired by you, leading to a tug of war exercise which what's supposed to be mobile cover.

You can win yourself instant kudos by doing some donkey work and being a medic. Keeping people alive is always appreciated. Engineers are needed to build/repair/bomb objectives, so those players will always be on the front line. The Covert spy's there for the fans of those World War 2 films with Hollywood stars playing secret agents. That just leaves the Field Operative and soldier for the wannabe Rambos who just want to rush in and die fast- well the engine is Quake III after all.

If pocket-lint.co.uk had been around say, two years ago, we'd have written a similar sort of review- but about Counter-Strike. Frankly even if you're only on dialup, get into it now. The game's finished- they just want new maps after you tire of the six you start with, so you can make your own if you're into that side of things, practice, check out all the classes and not get blown to smithereens all the time- the new variety of weapons as well as the classes mean that you can't just move from RTCW and 0wn the server- though you'd have a fair head start, players of other FPS games could catch up with a little practice.

Which brings me to my sole criticism- you'd better start playing this game in the morning on a weekend, because once you're into it, it's the FPS equivalent of Championship Manager 4 with some sessions lasting 20 minutes at a time you only play three games per hour. This side of Half-Life 2, it's the godsend needed for a quiet summer's multiplayer gaming- but it'll eat your free time for breakfast.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS id Software

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 11 Nov 2003 21:22:21 +0000