The BBC:
The companies behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are merging in a deal which could shake up the global video games industry. Activision and Blizzard have said they will form “the world’s most profitable games business” in a deal worth $18.8bn (£9.15bn).
A guy played through Half Life 2: Episode Two carrying a gnome with the gravity gun so he could put it in the rocket at the end and gain the Little Rocket Man achievement.
Rumours are that Microsoft is releasing another edition of the XBOX 360 dubbed the XBOX 360 Elite which will include a 120GB hard drive, a HDMI video out port and will be in black.
I’ve been recently using my Apple MacBook a lot more than my Dell desktop, even though the MacBook only has a 13-inch monitor while I have two 19-inch monitors for the Dell. Having lots of screen real estate is nice, especially when I’m working; I can have Visual Studio open on one screen and Enterprise Manager1 on the other. It increases my productivity and makes some tasks less of a chore and more enjoyable.
I got a stonking deal on my Dell. It came with a 19-inch flat-panel monitor based on a top-of-the-range Samsung panel and a dual-core processor all for £450. I complimented it with my other 19-inch flat-pane, put in a NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT for games and stuck in two 250GB hard drives2 .
However with a big computer comes big power consumption. I don’t have a watt-meter but I estimate that my computer uses about 250W at idle and 350W when under load, this is with both monitors on. As I only use this computer after work at night and at the weekends, I’d estimate it’s turned on about two hours a day on weekdays and four hours a day at weekends. Let’s be conservative and assume it’s only idling at those times, then let’s be conservative again and say for ever watt/hour of energy 0.5g of carbon is pumped into the atmosphere. Over the course of a year, 117kg of carbon is in the atmosphere because of my computer, a huge amount.
I bought my MacBook to use while travelling, although it doesn’t really see much use as a road-warrior anymore; it mainly sits on my lap when I’m at home and want to watch TV and write at the same time. It’s tiny power adaptor has a maximum output of 55W, which means that 55W is enough for the laptop to run at full load and still have enough to charge the battery a little too. Let’s be liberal here and assume the whole 55W is used all the time, even when idle. With the same usage pattern as the desktop, the MacBook only produces 26kg of carbon in a year, a saving of 91kg a year, a saving of 81%!
My desktop is now relegated to being turned on about one to two hours a week to archive data and perform backups, and my MacBook is now being used as my main home computer. I bought a XBOX which I’m using to play games now, it has a maximum power consumption of 100W, which when connection to one of my flat panels is 170W, half that of my desktop.
[tags]enviroment, Dell, Apple, MacBook, Intel, green, technology, computers, XBOX, games[/tags]
The Star Trek game franchise has been pretty stale recently. Armada II was disappointment, and Dominion Wars was so boring and buggy that I nearly drove myself insane completing it.
If you’ve played Bridge Commander before then you will be familiar with the game play offered in Legacy. You command a space ship as one of Captains of all the Star Trek eras, including the orginal series, The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. It also includes some missions from after the last Star Trek movie: Insurrection.
Bridge Commander was a reasonable game, but let down badly by it’s poor selection of ships and below average story. Legacy includes ships from all Star Trek eras, including the USS Voyager and USS Defiant which aren’t even used in the games story1 and all other major ship classes like Excelsior and Akira related to their eras.
Unfortunately, the story in Legacy isn’t that great or original either. Although it manages to spead the arc of the story across from the Jonathan Archer Enterprise era to past the end of The Next Generation movies era, it follows an overused theme of: Borg attacks Federation, Federation joins as allies with Klingon and Romulan, Allies destroy Borg.
But the problems don’t end with the story, it’s obviously an XBOX game, and the PC port suffers from it. The controls are absolutely terrible, three or four pop-up tips offered in the first mission go to nowhere near enough depth. The targeting system is terrible, you’re given the choice of choosing the closet target or moving your cursor to your chosen target, however it also puts your ships onto auto-pilot towards that target. You also cannot put your ship into reverse and a bug prevented me from selecting all four ships in my armada at once so I had to order them all individually.
Some missions involve you to target individual systems on ships, like their engines to disable them. But the method for sub-system targetting is so complicated I didn’t bother to use it. And then there’s the collision detection, or the non-existance of it, you kind of loose the atmostphere when you see the Enterprise-D bounce off a planet.
But this all pales in comparison with the annoyances with the auto pilot and map system. Firstly I didn’t know there was a 3D map available until I browsed through some screen-shots and saw it, and I had to look. There is no way to get a good balance between cursor speed on the map and sensitivity when looking around your ship. Then, setting your ships to warp to destination is unreliable, especially when you want to warp them out of danger, it can be incredibly frustrating and lead you to fail your mission when your main ship is destroyed.
But enough of the negative, at times the game is very satisfying. Seeing the Enterprise-E with a Galaxy, Excelsior and Nebula class flanking it does bring a smile to my face, and for some reason I felt a compelling urge to complete the game, which I managed to do in three days.
Maybe the XBOX version is better, as it apparently doesn’t suffer from some of the control problems, but overall this game is a big let-down. As with almost all games in the Star Trek franchise, it had potential. A lot of potential.
Good ol’ Sid Meier’s offering the classic Railway Tycoon for free! It’s only a 14.2 MB download too.
The microphone on my Nintendo DS Lite broke a couple days ago, so I took it back to the Maidstone branch of GAME. The tills were quite busy, so instead I went to a scrawny little chav idling around. His ID tag had the title of “Sales Assistant”, which made me think he would know what he was talking about. This is an exact transcript of the conversation I had with him:
At that point, I made my excuses and joined the queue for the tills, where a helpful staffer took my DS, went into the back of the shop for five minutes, and then returned with a brand spanking new DS, no fuss.
Perhaps they should train their staff more, or just not hire complete idiot chavs as sales assistants.
I just had to quench my need for speed by getting a Logtech MOMO wheel and pre-ordering GTR 2.
I will report back with a review of both, and whether nearly £100 was good value.
Ever find yourself need that solitaire fix? If you use a Mac, or your computers have had the games locked down, then Solitaire Craving is what you need.
I’ve finally moved out of the “dark ages” of single core computing and joined the modern world of dual core owners. It’s been a great ride my single core friends, but it’s time to roll on.
Oh my God, oh my God, they’re bringing back Earthworm Jim! Princecess-What’s-Her-Name and Queen Slug-for-a-Butt, it’s been too long!
Can anyone say Salamander time!?
If you’ve ever wondered what I have in my collection of movies, music, books and games, then wonder no more, and head on over to my Media Library! Powered by Delicious Library and DeliciWeb.
GameDaily have a great interview with 3DRealm‘s Scott Miller about the absense of new intellectual property in the games market. It’s a long but interesting read about how big game producers such as EA and Activision now focus on licensing TV and Movie IP instead of creating their own original ideas, and why this is doomed for failure.