I know it is kind of weird to talk about PC games twice in a row, especially since that is not normally what we have talked about, but that appears to be the most interesting gaming at the moment with Starcraft 2 out, Civilization 5 coming, and likely the one I am most excited about Elemental- War of Magic.
There are a couple of reasons why Elemental has really caught my attention. First, it is from Stardock. This has become my favorite developer over the last couple of years for me because they work to make their games accessible. You don’t have to go out and buy a new gaming computer for their games. In addition, they listen to their fan base better than any other developer. I’ve been participating in the Beta, and it is amazing how many changes they have implemented because fans have made suggestions. It is incredible the speed at which this thing has been updated. It seems like every update adds loads of features.
The second reason I’m looking forward to Elemental is the bang for the buck. The entire campaign from Elemental will be built using the same tools that will then be provided to the modding community. It appears that the modding will be extremely accessible which really just gets me excited because I am sure that in just a few months we will have enough campaigns and skins to push the replayability to hundreds of hours. Essentially they are providing resources to create a whole new platform. Other games such as Civilization 4 have had some great mods like Fall From Heaven 2, but this game will make modding commonplace.
Finally, the game is fun. It is a mix of many different genres with the ability to win the game in many different ways. It’s coming out in two weeks, and I hope to block out my entire weekend after to play. There are some pretty cool bonuses in the collector’s edition of the game which is what will be showing up on my door. Check it out on www.elementalgame.com
Recently I had the opportunity to revisit an old classic, mostly because it gets released in a few days and i want to be caught up on the the story. Being a twelve year old game I though i would have issue getting it to run on anything. so a quick visit to battle.net store and a few dollars later and a digital download I was off playing.
Quickly remembering all the stategies I spent hours learning as a kid I quickly started to plow through the missions enjoying every minute of it. Its not often you can pick up a 12 year old game and dump 10 or so hours into it. I’m still trying to crush though all the missions but I’m almost finished with Starcraft and starting onto brood wars. With an incredibly deep story you quickly forget its 12 years old and all I seem to want to do is get to the next mission so I can see what happens next.
The one drawback to this game in age is the multi-player, the people still playing it haven’t stopped playing since it came out I just on the battle net. After a few quick matches of me getting slaughtered I quickly gave up. In the end I’ve totally enjoyed it as much as I would any ten dollar game and it was totally worth it, just remember to stick to single player get the story and get out. and only 5 short days until the sequel comes out.
Categories: Mac, PC Tags:
The simple answer, YES
So Mech warrior 4 just got released absolutely free to the public, and after getting flooded with a massive amount of hits, and the server failing, the server is back up and ready to give you some awesome gaming for FREE because i know everyone loves that word.
You might ask why microsoft and mektek is doing this, they are trying to encourage support for an upcoming release that is supposedly going to happen. So we see with this that the mechwarrior universe is not dead it still has a lot of cult followers out there somewhere.
So to any of you out there that never picked this game up, because you were on the fence about it. go to http://www.mektek.net/projects/mw4/
Just follow the instructions and have a great time with this great deal of a game, and good news apparently they are releasing free updates and content with this free game. What a deal!
In a brief text message exchange my brother put it rather mildly, what is it with all the zombie games. Now not being much of a horror buff, it has kind of put me outta the loop when it comes to zombie, and I have ventured into a few more mild ones.
After burning a few hours on the game Zombieville, on my iPhone, I realize it could be a fairly addicting game, you can come at it from a few different ways, either you kill as many zombies as you can to upgrade all your weapons or you just run through trying to get to the highest level you can. My suggestion try it one way then the other, you quickly learn strategies to push them back and manage the mobs.
On a More G Rated level I recently downloaded Zombie Vs Plants for my Mac, now this game is published by the company that brings us so so addicting games as Bejeweled, PopCap, as soon as I saw the name I became slightly worried because I now what kind of time vampire PopCap games can become. Being a giant fan of tower defense games it was fairly easy to catch on, basically you have plants with all kinds of special abilities, by collecting sun you can “build” new plants to defend your house from the zombie attack. After spending a couple hours with this game, I have to say its is well worth the 20 bucks, just try it out they offer a 60 minute demo that will give you a good feel for the progression of the game.
I hope that anyone reading this blog is using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or any other web browser to surf the net. I have been a long time user of Firefox and have found it hard to switch to any other browser just because of the fact that Firefox has so many darn plug-in and third party support. Today I’d like to share a plug-in that gets much abuse on my systems.
Firebug is plug in that while is most useful in web development also comes in hand in everyday use. After the install is sits quietly in the bottom right hand corner waiting to be used. When you click the little guy it loads up a window at the bottom of the browser and basically takes apart all the different code and layers of css, and html. For web developers this is a great learning tool as it makes it easy to tear apart code and download scripts to learn from. Just recently I found a cool background effect on one of my favorite sites, Thinkgeek, and with firebug was able to pull it apart in a matter of a few seconds to figure out how the effect was created.
Now not everyone is as interested in code as I am and maybe they are just interested in finding out network performance on a specific page, Firebug also comes with a handy set of tools and keeps track of network ping information and other stats to help you optimize your internet experience, and breaks download speeds up file by file.
Firebug is basically a swiss army knife of tools for Firefox and is a great combination with most any web development software. And best of all its free, so try it out if you don’t like it your not out any cash and can quickly uninstall it from your Firefox browser.
Well looks like Microsoft is getting ready to roll out their much anticipated software, as of tonight you will no longer be able to download the RC from their website. I’m excited to see the speed of this rolling on because with Vista it was in Release Candidate phase for just over a year. So grab it tonight if you want to check it out, if not wait with the rest of the world until it goes on the shelf.
As many people already know since Apple switched to the intel hardware the hardware inside of an Apple computer has become more closely akin to standard PC hardware. The major difference is a piece of software written to replace the standard BIOS of a Machine with a more modern boot loader called EFI. A company has recently found out a way to spoof the EFI and allow OS X to be run on Apple compatible hardware. EFI-X plugs directly into a USB header of a motherboard and allows your computer to boot directly into Mac OS or any other operating system. This device does run a little steep in price and with version 2.0 ready to come out you may want to wait a bit to get the upgrade or scoop up the version 1.1 at a discounted price.
With the release of Windows 7 pending, I’ve been playing with the release canadites and the beta’s for a while now and I think Windows release is what Vista should have been. I have a few tips I’ve stumbled on and some I found on the web to show off some of 7′s new features.
In previous versions of Windows you always had to find some third party app be it freeware, shareware, or just software that came from the computer manufacturer. More often then not people looked at .iso files and scratched their heads usually calling me to ask how to burn it. Well now windows has included an applet that takes care of it. Just download the .iso file and double click it, and the applet will launch allowing you to insert either a DVD or CD into your optical drive.
For just under a month I have been forcing myself to try yet another new search engine, Bing is Microsoft’s next attempt at taking over Googles search dominance. At first glance Bing feels very much like Google search but with a pretty background. As you search you start to realize maybe, just maybe Microsoft is trying to beat Google by trying to do something they have never tried in their previous 2 attempts at a search engine, by giving you more.
One of my favorite features in Google is the image search and Bing adds a few more options like the ability to filter by size from the left hand side. And when you searching for an item it gives you related searches in the left side.
Will it take market share from Google? Well only time will tell, but I think Microsoft has finally come up with a major contender for your searching needs. For myself even though the layout is very appealing I still feel like my search results are more refined in Google generally finding what I’m looking for in the first couple of links.
Yes I know I have been promising a full review on Demigod for a while now and its sad that it’s taken so long. But I haven’t had the game working completely right till just lately. But since I have I have jumped on the opportunity and played it quite a bit and was entirely satisfied with the experience. The game really did get off to a rough start but things have almost entirely smoothed out due to the publisher Stardock and the developer Gas Powered Games spending lots of hours fixing what was wrong with the game. There is a lot of rumors running around that Stardock released an unfinished game and whatnot but I tend to just think that it was an honest mistake on both Stardock and Gas Powered Games that they truly didn’t know that game would come out as a flop so much. Especially with how hard it seemed they worked to fix the game and get it back on it’s feet. Whatever the case the game has turned out to be an awesome game that hasn’t dissapointed me in the least besides the ups and downs with the game releasing practically broken and having to fix my computer to be well above the system requirement specs.
I started the game with just playing a few rounds in single player with each different character and getting myself acqauinted with the mechanics but everything seemed very smooth and natural and relatively simple. GPG succeeded also in making this game short and fun they said they set out to make a game that you could sit down and play on a lunch break with a couple friends, and I think that its definately possible with most games going a half hour and the longest one I have played being just over an hour. The graphics on the game really are beautiful and the sound is pretty good but not stellar a lot of the music consists of the sounds of the battle you are fighting. Everything included in the game is great. With the promise of a lot of support for at least the next year from stardock including new characters and maps I’m truely anxious for all the downloadable updates as well. After tinkering with plain old single player for a while I went to the online multiplayer and I’m happy to say it really was an enjoyable experience and I had a lot of fun playing this game with other people.
My only complaint with the game would be that no campaign is included at all though there is a little bit of an intro story to the game makes me want a little bit more it’s not so extremely needed as say a game like Sins Of A Solar Empire but it would be a nice add on.
Who should buy: Most any player looking for a great blend of genres that makes you want to come back for more. Those that like Diablo or WOW style games as far as leveling.
Who shouldn’t buy: The very young gamer might not enjoy this as much it is a little bit more in depth game. The only other who should pass is maybe the player looking for a massively complex story and plot.
Overall score: 9.5/10
