Loading ...Crazes, frenzies and fashions in the world are constantly changing. Presently the world is currently hyped-up to pirate frenzy by a famous pirate, not Captain Black beard or Captain Hook no; he is Jack Sparrow captain of the Black Pearl. Anno 1701 by Sunflowers and Developer games for its promotion sports a beautiful old gallon on the cover yet the game is much into city building than piracy. But in spite of its misgivings, it is quite a fun game to play. In fact it is actually a historical city builder which is concerned with the 1701 Caribbean colonies. This game is the sequel to 1501 New World and 1602 A.D so they have touched numerous aspects of the game for instance combat been more stressed upon. Yet it has a great interface and is easy enough of to understand and that makes it one of the best city builders to be released this year. The game begins with an introduction movie a starring a man with dreams to find new worlds, build cities and trade asking Her Majesty to give him a boat, his wish is soon granted and he off to adventure. The game is simple and elegant. Instead of get lost in the details it is much simpler to organize the city and see to its resources. Most people think city building game means micro-management and with micro-management once thinks of different spreadsheets for taxes, expenditures etc but this game is different in that aspect, no absolutely no spread sheets (Hurrah!) nor does one have to think about calling in 911 to know why the hell aren’t the homes developing. The objective is to colonize the tropical islands gather wood, fish and raw materials produce tools, bricks, etc. The building resources are tools, wood, gold and bricks. There are 4 excellent tutorials which cover all the basics and guarantee smooth sailing. The game is mostly user-friendly which makes it very easy to spot the problem and rectify it. Excellent sounds and visual interface keeps the player’s attention from wandering. The world seems like a tropical paradise in which the players zips and zooms around to check on his residents. The mood of the people is represented by a face which appears on clicking the homes or the village centre. Easy to recognize laughing in the green background represents euphoric citizen while scowling with red background obviously says something is wrong. If that it isn’t enough one also hear’s occasional comments like “Free beer for everyone” or “What a wonderful day” etc. The game starts with the establishment of a warehouse near the coastline which in turn creates an inhabitable area around it. The further establishment of a village centre in the middle of the homes ensures the community after which the need for cloth, food, faith, and wood arises. The construction of sheep farms, fish farms, lumberjack huts and chapels soon fulfill these needs. When these needs are fulfilled the people evolve (the basic pioneers evolve into the settlers and the settlers into citizens etc). When the people evolve they bring with them more needs like alcohol, education and tobacco and open more building for the production of these items. The game isn’t as simple as making a warehouse and creating whatever is required. The islands themselves are suitable only for producing a number of resources, for others one can either trade with other AI or in multiplayer mode players or one can explore other islands which are suitable for making the specific resource and set up shop there. Example mostly the basic island does not have sugarcane or hop to create booze or tobacco needed to create smoke; this gets you in search of the other islands. Actually the player is not the only European power trying to colonize in the Caribbean, so one faces competition. Things may turn ugly when one encounters an island rich in a resource but is already conquered by a hostile player. So one must be ready to put up his dukes. Although warfare is the least enjoyable aspect of this game. Ships are simplistic like Sid Meiers pirates and land war is more like taking a bunch of pike men and throwing them at the enemy. The Queen keeps an eye over the player and keeps giving comments on his success. It is useful that the player can ask for help from Her Majesty in the form of gold or army. All in all Anno 1701 although lacks the “15 men on dead men’s chest” song it is still quite an enjoyable treat all the same.
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It is said that just by painting portraits one cannot become Picasso .Similarly, not every game can be expected to succeed. The Glory of Roman Empire by Haemimont Games is one of the flimsy attempts, which far from posing as a dangerous competition, merely cause a rise in eyebrow, a wicked smile followed by a cry of “Ok. Next game please!” The creators have, in a low-budget simulation game tried to create a remake of the classical Caesar III, depicting the glory and magnificence of the mighty Romans at the peak of their power, but have sadly only accomplished in making a mockery of that so-called might. The player assumes the identity of a Roman governor who travels all over the countryside using his expertise to solve the problems of various roman settlements large and small, dealing with issues that range from barbarian attacks to outbreaks of plague. The game begins with a live handy dandy tutorial, that makes the experience, cakewalk. The basic objective remains clear-cut; the player is expected to create a healthy and thriving metropolis, free of employment problems, commercially sustainable and has an ever-increasing and developing population. There are only two modes, scenario and sandbox, which is a free play mode with no end. The game starts with the establishment of the Town Hall, which is done automatically with a well for water and structure to store resources. The players unlike some other games continue with other missions from the same cities that they build earlier on hence reducing the hassle to begin each level from scratch. Surprisingly the buildings are constructed without the use of gold, instead only raw materials. There is a lack of diversity in the structures and buildings as most scenarios are content with the repeated of use of a few common structures. On a positive aspect, the buildings on clicking do give proper information to player. Resources are gathered and distributed automatically as they are received. Upon the construction of a few resource-gathering structures like the pig farm, wheat farm and woodcutter along with the business structures like butcher and bakery will ensure the governor runs his town smoothly. The people are divided into two types the normal Roman residents and slaves. Gold is used only to buy the slaves, who, in turn are used to construct buildings and to transport goods from one place to another. Hence, the player is required to balance the number of slaves with the workload because if they are over worked, they start causing riots and strikes, which may cause fires. The towns are not very difficult to plan, as there are no negative impacts on the desirability of the neighborhoods e.g. a pig farm and butchery can be placed smack between prime real estate but if there is a presence of a shrine, the houses will continue to evolve nonetheless. The houses have the capability to house only four people, the mother, father, child and old person. The game menu portrays a serene and stunning scene of a waterfall with a Roman Structure at its top, which gives the player a feeling of expectation of high quality graphics, but sadly the illusion shatters as soon as the game begins. There also no active influences of the Gods or any religions on people like storms, floods or other disasters signaling the wrath of an annoyed God or bounties and benefits of a delighted God. Although scenery is quite striking, lush green grass, blue sky, purple mountains in the horizons and golden sunlight, the overall graphics of the games are uninteresting. The flora and fauna are unimpressive and so are the people. The game uses an old and outdated graphical engine, which in its turn produces old and outdated results. The ambience of the game as compared to its brethren like Pharaoh, Caesar III is not even close. The background music is so tedious the player may forget that it is even playing also there are no sounds of the hustle and bustle of the city. In games like Pharaoh, each person clicked on gives some remark about his or her opinion of the city in clear sentences. In this game however, on clicking some people give a muffled grunt. The overall ambience is also quite boring and is better to turn off the sounds and put some background music. In conclusion, Glory of the Roman Empire looks glorious only when observing it on the racks.
Microsoft it seems in another on of its sales boosting stunts have come up with a clever idea. It has decided to launch a limited Hal0-eiditon of the Xbox360.A Spartian green and gold colored Xbox360 with a wireless controller,20GB hard drive,aheadset,a play and charge kit and Halo theme. All for the price of $399.The only thing left in the package was the game Halo3. These consoles shall be made available from September 16th while the game has yet to come out at September 25th.Even the game has its versions, 59.99 on its own, Halo 3 has not one, but 2 special versions,the $69.99 Collector’s Edition and the $129.99 Legendary Edition.
It seems that the most oddest of things happen without a warning. The 3 competing companies Sony,Microsoft and Nintendo have been in a race with their consoles right from the begining.Now with the release of the trios 3rd generation consoles, the competition has been given a boost,and it seems that Nintendo Wii has left the Xbox360 eating its dirt inspite of having a year-long head start. According to an approximate in Financial Times 9 million Wiis were purchased across the globe as of July 31, just barely overtaking the 360’s 8.9 million units sales during the same period. Both platforms were far ahead of the PlayStation 3, which sold only around an estimated 3.7 million units internationally. It seems inspite of the much anticipated PS3 its sales have been a disappointment and looks outta the league as compared to the other consoles.
It seems that Acitivsion and Red Octane have scored quite a hit with their Guitar Hero Franchise. Recently released on Xbox360, the series made tremendous sales, and then was later decided to be launched on other consoles as well such as Playstation 2,Playstation 3,Xbox,Nintendon Wii and even a Nintendo DS verison idea as seems to be fermenting deep inside.But for now,they have released to the press the news of the Guitar Hero III sequel coming to both PC and Macintosh. The associate producer had this to say”…..We’ll assume that the majority of your PC gaming readers are familiar with the Guitar Hero franchise. With Guitar Hero III, the idea was to make incremental improvements that would make the gameplay better and provide an experience that gives the closest feel to playing a real guitar, without actually playing a real guitar, ever. Hammer-on and pull-off functionality has been improved. The timing window for hitting notes has also been increased slightly so there are fewer clinks when notes are missed by the smallest fractions of a second. Of course, the one thing most people will notice is that the game looks incredible. The new engine created by Neversoft makes everything pop with tremendous detail, and this time around you’ll notice that the drummer, bassist, and singer’s lip-synching all match the song that is being performed. The new venues are stunning, crazy to watch, and all react uniquely and in real time to the song that is being performed. And of course we have to talk about the music. Guitar Hero III’s setlist features more master tracks than the previous iterations–more than 70 percent, in fact. These master tracks make a huge difference, and gamers will notice right off the bat when they are playing along with Metallica, the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, or any of the other legendary acts. The songs are a great sample of almost every era of rock and are a fantastic mix of genres. Finally, let’s not forget online play, the new boss battles, and guitar battle mode. There will be so much rocking to do, gamers won’t know what to do with themselves…….The PC version of Guitar Hero III will ship with a USB Guitar Hero guitar controller. We’ll be able to talk more about the exact model soon….” It seems that a day is not far where one shall be play to plug in an orchestra via usb and start praticing Bethehoven with the help of the PC…
Sony has been cunningly showing flexibility in the prices according to the market moods. The PS3 60GB, which was originally sold for $599, was suddenly dropped to 499$. A full 100$ price cut produced a boom in the sales. And people began buying the console with renewed frenzy. PS3 smartly stopped producing the 60GB consoles in favor of promoting the 80GB console which shall start coming out as soon as the 60GB ones disappear, in that way securing itself from the loss most companies have to go through when launching an upgraded version of the same product. This strategy enabled Sony to sell Microsoft by 2000 units in Canada only. The sales increased tenfold to 159000$ which a mere 98000$ the previous month. Karraker stated, “The 60GB is not out of stock in the US. SonyStyle.com currently has a back order notice up on their site, but they are shifting some inventory and will have it available again soon.” When asked for further clarification, Karraker said, “All we can say at this point is we have ample inventory for anyone looking to buy a PS3 in North America.”
Blizzard is fast earning the reputation of becoming the worlds famous and most playing MMORPG. With a current population of 9-million and rising Azeroth is fast becoming one of the most populated virtual cities in the world. Now in spite of dividing them into realms, there are a huge number of players online players at any given instance. In real life the mixing of such different races into non-discriminatory and congested space would produce diseases, what with the Tauren blowing down upon the necks of Dranai and what not, astonishingly it is seen that a similar event has taken place. Players have been heard suffering form a disease known as Corrupted Blood in the September of 2005. Like an epidemic outbreak of Cholera or Black Death in the old times in Europe, this plague took the WOW denizens in its sick grip. Princeton University medical epidemiologist Nina Fefferman and her former student Eric Lofgren have extrapolated real-world implications out of this in-game demitragedy in a study just published in the medical journal The Lancet. It was found out, like any epidemic this disease spread through proximity contact, so players are advised to avoid “brushing shoulders” with the fellow brethren. The disease originated from a large-group encounter of Zul-Gurub. The symptoms include the draining away of hitpoints until the disease ran its course and with lots of healing one survived or ultimately death. The disease started with a few gamers who had a little too much time on their hands and decided to play naughty. Gradually broadening out it held most of Azeroth under its reign. As indicated by the research it was largely due to a behavior named as “stupid factor”. “Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look, and it won’t affect me,’” and just like that the disease gets a lift across the countryside. So this outbreak actually provided to be a basis of test gerunds for the medicinal facility so they now know what to expect when something who shouldn’t be where it is gets out of there and how to handle it. “Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone–will they stay?” Fefferman added. “No one has ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave.” So it seems that the world has now become aware of a new benefit of having an MMPORG of such immense proportions. “With very large numbers of players, these games provide a population where controlled outbreak simulations may be done seamlessly within the player experience,” she said. So the WOW players are advised to wash hands after having a PVP and keep an eye out for suspiciously ill-looking strangers.
The history of the CD is quite interesting when taken a cursory look through. The origin began with the “punch card”. Later assuming the shape of floppy disk, magnetic tape and the most recent form an optical disk more commonly known as the CD. In each stage, it began to attain the ability to store more and more data from a mere 7KB (kilobytes) to the 4GB DVD. Now its time for us to kiss DVD goodbye for not one but two heirs are standing on the doorstep waiting to replace it the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Like the traditional fight between two brothers for a throne, the struggle between these two Titans is all the rage now. HD-DVD, which stands for High-Definition DVD, is a high-density optical disc format designed for the storage of data and high-definition video. Developed by the joint collaboration between Toshiba and NEC, they aim to replace to the normal DVD with the HD-DVD. It has the ability to store 15GB per layer that is 3 times as much as the original DVD. Its comes with dual layer as well hence increasing its size limit upto 30GB. When used the dual layer on the double side it increase upto 60GB. The HD-DVD has been implemented in the Microsoft Xbox360. Its rival on the other hand, Blu-ray Disc, (also called BD) is a high-density optical disc format for the storage of digital media, including high-definition video. It has the ability to store upto 25GB per layer. Also comes with dual layer option which boosts the memory space upto 50GB. The double dual layer shoots the space upto 100GB. The funky sounding name Blu-Ray has been derived from the blue-violet laser used to read and write this type of disc. Its was developed by Sony and its implementation is done in the Sony Playstation3. Aside from baffeling the crackers, who have been desperately trying to crack the Blu-Ray technology and have failed, seems as it’s the more capable of the two brothers. Aside form the implementation in the consoles, these disks have also been used for storing movies. Adam Sandlers Click was the first ever Blu-Ray disc released in October10,2006. While the HD-DVDs were out before the 2006. The writer for HD-DVD was on 31st March 2006 in Japan at a price of $934, while the Blu-Ray wasOn December 4th 2006 Sony launched their first stand-alone player at a price of $1000. The major factor for it being superior is the extra 10 GB disk space in the basic single layer of both the new DVDs. When a raw comparision was made,it was found out that the Blu-Ray technology was beating HD-DVD at almost evey step. A recent comparision between the sales market of both these two competitors revealed that for every single HD-DVD sold, two of the Blu-Ray were sold. Hence Blu-Ray is defeating its opponent, on the ratio of 2:1. So its seems that with the beginning of a computing era soon the DVDs shall b replaced by the Blu-Ray.
Wikipedia.org has proven itself to be more successful then any encyclopedia in the world, Encarta, Britannica, and many others. Why? The single reason for its success is that it is free. Its motto is “For the people, by the people.” The online encyclopedia is open for edition to anyone in the whole world. In this way different people all over the world congregate and put together the information on Wikipedia. Now in such an open-ended information chest the chances of credibility of articles are somewhat minimized. Now recent investigations have revealed several startling news. Reputed companies like Sony and Nintendo were caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
An IP address traced back to Sony was responsible for deleting several articles related to Everquest in order to remove controversies and alleged charges against it. The deletion was a single paragraph refering to a St. Petersburg Times article about a man sentenced to 15 years in prison for fracturing his 9-month-old son’s ribs and leaving the child in a utility closet to die of a punctured heart while he played EverQuest.
Shocking news, though not entirely of the fault of the developer,, nevertheless does the reputation harm. Nintendo was caught deleting a paragraph proclaiming that the earlier and later versions of Gamecube were prone to disc errors. Another report of an IP owned by the Entertainment Software Association had “edited” the entries for modchips and Abandon Ware Site home of the Underdogs. “The modchip edit truncated a section describing the legality of modchips in the US as “ambiguous,” instead flatly stating that they are illegal because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The omitted text also mentioned the creation of mod chips, that would allow users to play legally purchased imported games, but still prevent the use of pirated, burned game discs.” And while in the Underdogs case the description of site’s “illustrious career” was simply changed to read “illegal career.” Amusing and seemingly childish, these however do have serious impacts upon the millions of people reading about the company’s seemingly “Illegal career”. These are just the external people responsible for devious schemes. The Wiki staff also isn’t saintly either. Small random and inconsequential information has been seen sifting about. Last but not the least, one edit traced back to an industry trade group who had added reference to a pornographic Web site to the entry for GameSpot’s sister site GameFAQs.”
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