Category Archives: Guides
Need for Speed: Most Wanted Review
I smell donuts
The Fast and the Furious wasn’t an especially great film, but it did feature a scene tangentially related to Need for Speed Most Wanted. In the opening act the engine in Brian Spilner’s Eclipse self destructs when he tries to push it too hard. As the wiry mechanic assesses the damage, he looks at Brian in utter disbelief and asks, “was that fun?” Brian doesn’t answer, but destroying an expensive car by driving it too fast is probably fun.
This question also seemed to be Criterion’s design philosophy when building Most Wanted. Every aspect of their previous open-world racer, Burnout Paradise, seems to have been given the “was that fun?” treatment and adjusted accordingly. Furthermore, many new ideas, some of which are undeniably outrageous, appear to have passed that test and qualified for inclusion. Is it fun? The Fast and the Furious didn’t seem to know the answer to that question – it alternated between melodrama and popcorn amusement – but almost every aspect of Most Wanted is confident in its response; yes, everything is a lot of damn fun.
This is quickly apparent in the way Most Wanted handles its suite of vehicles. A hundred or so “jackspots” dot every side road and off-area in the fictional city of Fairhaven. Every jackspot comes with a specific car and if you find it, you can drive it. Within minutes of starting the game it’s possible to be driving everything from an Arial Atom 500 to Lamborghini Gallardo. What’s novel is how easy it is to get back into any car you find. A lesser game would plot a garage on the map or force the player to drive all the way back to where they found it, but Most Wanted skips the tedium and provides the option to hop back in the car whenever you’d like. You can still drive back across Fairhaven and find it, if that’s your thing, but this seemingly tiny decision by Criterion is a huge convenience for the player. Across almost every facet of its design, Most Wanted strives to respect your time.
Dropbox Review
Along with Microsoft’s Live Mesh, Dropbox was one of the first services to show how useful and versatile the cloud
could be, providing simple synchronisation of the contents of a single folder – the “Dropbox” – across multiple computers, OSes and users.
Dropbox provides 2GB (Can earn up to 15-20GB free)of free storage and up to 100GB for $20 (£13) per month. A client has to be installed on each device – Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS versions are available – and once installed you can sync files between them and your online Dropbox simply by dragging items into the Dropbox folder.
Other users can also share and sync with a folder. You can set this up by right-clicking a folder or through the Sharing tab on the web-based interface. Either way, it’s very simple. Once your folders are set up for syncing, you can keep track of events and change preferences through an icon in the System Tray.
In a way, Dropbox’s simplicity is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the concept of dropping files or folders into the Dropbox and knowing they’ll sync across all your devices is simple, and works brilliantly. On the other hand, there’s no way to sync specific files and folders – your Music folder, say – without moving them into the Dropbox, which doesn’t really suit the way Windows works. This limits Dropbox’s usefulness as a backup and restore program.
On the plus side, Dropbox’s excellent versioning features mean there’s no need to worry about files syncing after you’ve wrecked a key file; you can always drag it back from a previous copy.
Dropbox isn’t particularly media-savvy. It has photo-sharing and photo gallery features, but nothing outstanding. It’s also quite slow with big uploads, taking three and a half hours for our initial 500MB backup. However, it’s speedy at synchronisation. Photos added to one Dropbox appeared on another machine within 1min 44secs, while changes to a picture were synced to other systems within 1min 7secs.
For all its limitations, Dropbox is great because it makes sharing and syncing files so easy across most devices. Other services offer a more rounded package, but Dropbox is as useful now as ever.
| Sign up to Dropbox here |
A.I, camera, graphics and gameplay issues revealed for ‘Assassin’s Creed 3’
The latest edition of the Polish gaming magazine, CD-Action, includes a lengthy article featuring the upcoming multiplatform title, “Assassin’s Creed 3.” The publication today revealed some of the issues that they ran into while completing the open-world action-adventure video game, including some faults to the A.I. (artificial intelligence), graphics, camera and gameplay). You can check out some screens from the latest Assassin’s Creed video game in the slideshow at the top of this article and the details below (courtesy of “l Khasim l” from the Ubisoft forums for the translation):
A.I:
- The enemy AI is not very great, sometimes you can run away from enemies by running in circles around a hay bale, or soldiers falling to their deaths from rooftops while chasing you, friendly NPCs also don’t adjust to your speed very well and sometimes run to you only to stand still for a couple of seconds, then repeating it
- Riding horses in the Frontier is not a good idea, horses are described as “incompetent”, making free-/treerunning a faster way to travel, though riding helps in winter when the snow slows you down a lot
Graphics:
- There are visible clipping issues, for example the lockpicks sometimes don’t fit in the keyholes, enemies’ bodies and weapons sometimes float in the air, and carts sometimes ignore horses “parked” on streets, “ghosting” through them, braids and ponytails also clip through faces
Minecraft Guide (PC)
As you know I love Minecraft (Check out the review here) but there are a lot of things you can do to the game to make it better.
- Assigning more memory to Minecraft.
- Minecraft mods
- Texture packs
How to keep your pc cool
Seen as we have had a lot of hot weather here in the UK i thought it would be advisable to write a blog post on the best ways to keep your PC cool in this hot weather. This first thing to understand is why you need to keep your computer cool in the first place.
When your computer is on it heats up and some parts such as the CPU and Graphics card can get that hot you can cook something on them. If you computer is properly configured a lot of this heat is moved out of the computer case by several fans. All of you computer components have a heat threshold which it is not recommend to go over as this could reduce the life span of the component or even kill it.
Below are various options you can use to keep your pc cool permanently or temporally just on really hot days.
