By Kelmon , 2nd November 4:50 am
It’s generally accepted that anyone who owns a Mac must, by definition, also own an iPod. If the halo-effect for the iPod is also accepted then it’s also possible that the iPod owner started with a PC and then switched to a Mac. Either way if you have a Mac then you must also have an iPod because if you don’t then you can’t be a real Mac person. Or something like that. Regardless I’ve gone through over 3-years of PowerBook ownership without owning an MP3 player of any variety (my wife has a 1GB iPod Shuffle but that doesn’t count) but a couple of weeks ago following the “It’s Showtime” announcement I caved and bought the new 80GB iPod, much to the annoyance of my accountant (read: my wife).
» Read all of “My First iPod - 80GB iPod With Video Review“…
By Vermouth , 22nd October 4:31 pm
I feel like real-time strategy games have been in something of a rut for a while now. Sure, plenty of big names have came out and received great scores like Empire at War and Battle for Middle Earth 2, but they just haven’t been able to capture that old Black Magic. Well, very surprisingly to me, Relic’s Company of Heroes takes the genre out of it’s rut and really shows that there is plenty of life in real-time strategy games. Not only that, but this is an excellent game in just about every category and a really nice WWII game as well.
Let’s start with a quick disclaimer: I wrote a column a month ago complaining about this game’s demo, and how it had all sorts of elements that were conventional for the genre but really didn’t fit in a WWII game. And while those elements still don’t fit in to WWII, they’re almost trivial in this game. Once you get into the game you’ll understand that while resources and base building are still here, they occupy such a fractional proportion of your time that they’re barely worth mentioning.
» Read all of “In the Company of Heroes“…
By Vermouth , 10th September 4:29 pm
Real time strategy games have been around for a while now and most people are familiar with the conventions of them. The player gathers resources, constructs a base and then recruits an army. They’ve certainly seen their fair share of evolution; for instance a single unit rush isn’t an unstoppable tactic. Gone are the days of Red Alert where a Soviet player could just keep pumping out 100 heavy tanks and expect to win in a quick first round K.O. Despite that, most of the genres conventions have stuck around even in games where they have no business being there. These conventions work, there isn’t any doubt about it, and they make sense in some games. Especially in the case of a game set in far off foreign worlds. When you’re off on the frontier, living in a semi-medieval or actual medieval world it’s entirely reasonable that a commander might have to actually develop the infrastructure to support his army. However I recently picked up the demo for Company of Heroes, and in this game these conventions are just strange.
» Read all of “Convention Center“…
By Cyrris , 24th August 12:26 am
Cinematic effects are cool. No two ways about it. Things like motion blur and depth of field can make a game look pretty darn good. That said, there is a time and place for everything, and with all these new graphical toys that developers have to play with these days, I think they need to make sure certain effects aren’t used just for the sake of using them. Bloom was overused in Age of Empires 3. It looked great but I found myself squinting sometimes because of the lack of contrast it caused in certain areas of the map. Realistic? Yes. Helpful? No.
What’s not realistic or helpful though, is the following use of the Depth of Field effect.
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By Vermouth , 31st July 1:49 pm
About freaking time! I was actually really surprised to see how many people were freaking out over the announcement that E3 was going to be cancelled and replaced with something of a great deal smaller scope. I know I don’t speak for everyone on this note, but it’s about time that this bloated show went away and didn’t come back. E3 had developed a gigantic cost both from the standpoint of putting on a show and from a standpoint of everything getting lost in the shuffle as the show had just gotten to be too big. If this report can be believed the announcement is set for Monday July 31st, the day the party stopped for business reasons.
» Read all of “End of E3“…
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