Technology Galaxy: March 2008

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Crysis

Release Date: Jun 3, 2008

Genre: Horror Action Adventure

Crysis is visually stunning, packed with intelligent, thrilling gameplay, and easily one of the greatest shooters ever made.

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a "sandbox" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

Good:

Dynamic, emergent shooter gameplay
Unparalleled visuals with destructible environments
High level of replay ability
Power struggle makes for huge multiplayer battles
An amazing accomplishment overall

Bad:

The single-player story ends
Will laugh at every CPU and GPU thrown at it
No team deathmatch

System Requirements:

System: Dual-core CPU (Athlon X2/Pentium D) or equivalent
RAM:2048 MB
Graphics: Nvidia 7800GTX/ATI X1800XT (SM 3.0) or DX10 equivalent
Hard Drive Space: 6000 MB

Friday, March 21, 2008

Nero 8

THE IDEAL DIGITAL MEDIA SOLUTION

More multimedia creation and editing tools
Optimized for Windows Vista
Enhanced conversion,Burning and sharing features
And much more.....

YOUR OWN VIDEOS, MUSIC, SLIDE SHOWS, AND MORE

Edit audio, video, and music with professional tools
Create your own music mixes
Create video for your iPod and PSP

CONVERT AND SHARE YOUR FILES ONLINE, ON TV,AND ON THE GO

Import and share digital content
One-click upload to YouTube, MySpace, and My Nero
Play video on your iPod and PSP
Stream online TV and radio

Sins of a Solar Empire

Release Date: Feb 4, 2008
Genre: Sci-Fi Real-Time Strategy

This isn't just the first great strategy game of 2008. It's also an absolute must-have if you love space strategy.

Let's get this clear: Sins isn't anything like a typical turn-based space strategy game such as Galactic Civilizations or the granddaddy of the genre, Master of Orion. Instead, this is a real-time game--but don't let that make you think that it's Command & Conquer in space. Though it's in real time, Sins unfolds at such a leisurely pace and can happen on such a gigantic scale that you'll easily manage five or six gigantic fleets at a time as you battle across multiple star systems that contain dozens of worlds.

Like many space strategy games, the action begins with you in control of a single planet, and from there you must explore the rest of the system worlds, locating planets to colonize, as well as resources that you can exploit to fuel your research and ship-building needs. Sins isn't as ambitious as other space strategy games that task you with taking over a galaxy; instead, the action is limited to a maximum of five local stars, each with a network of planets around it. Travel among planets is limited via strict space lanes, so some planets are natural choke points. Planets themselves come in four varieties. Terran and desert planets can be colonized easily, but to settle ice and volcano planets you must research the appropriate technology first. Asteroids can also be colonized, but they're so small that they can support only tiny populations, making them ideal for outposts.

To support your expansion, you'll have to build a plethora of vessels. Scouts explore the planetary systems, locating ideal worlds to colonize with colony ships, as well as providing advance warning on incoming enemy fleets. Warships come in three classes. The smallest are frigates, and they include frontline combatants, siege vessels that can pummel planets with nuclear weapons, and missile platforms. Then there are larger cruiser-class vessels, such as escort carriers that can deploy squadrons of fighters and bombers to heavier warships. The crème de la crème, though, are the capital ships, which you can build only a handful of. Capital ships are huge, expensive, and powerful, but they're also like the characters in a role-playing game in that they can level up as they gain experience, making them more powerful and unlocking unique and potent abilities. The ability to gain experience creates a powerful dynamic, as you want to get your capital ships into fights so they can level up, but you also want to protect them from danger, because the loss of them can be devastating. However, if you get a task force of high-level capital ships and smaller vessels together, you'll have a force to be reckoned with.

Good: