For my brand new gaming system I decided against purchasing a sound card, instead opting to try out Realtek’s onboard ‘HD Audio’ solution. This was a fairly decent experience, offering sound quality mostly on-par with my former Audigy 2 sound card… until recently that is. As of late I had been experiencing a lot of crackling sound, particularly in games like Settlers VI and World in Conflict. So, in a desperate attempt to get rid of the annoying pops and creaks - I went on a leap and bought a fairly inexpensive - 69 euro - Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer card, which arrived today.

Heading into this expecting merely to solve my crackling problem and otherwise offer up largely similar audio, even though reviews indicated otherwise… I was very ill-prepared indeed for what this upgrade would truly mean to my PC. Installing was easy enough - a monkey could do it… no really! - and after altering some driver and application settings everything was working properly. Then I fired up my first video and was welcomed by an explosion of aural goodness: this went way beyond fixing some pops and creaks, or slightly improving my sound experience. It’s completely revolutionized my PC gaming/media experience and instantly became the most impressive feature on my brand new rig (including a Geforce 8800 GTX video card).

Read on for an epic tale of genuine aural bliss!

Read the rest…

Share This

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Games can be more than just a fun timesink; at times they are a thing of true beauty. This biweekly feature is dedicated purely to demonstrating the beauty of modern day gaming. So every other week another Screenshot Spotlight will appear featuring some sort of beautiful, or otherwise interesting, screenshot I recently acquired.

However, rather than simply posting some pretty picture and leaving it at that, I’ll include a bit of information about the game it was taken in - and the circumstances of the screenshot. Think of it as an optional background story for you to read. If you don’t care for any of that you can of course simply admire the picture and be done with it!

Read the rest…

Share This

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

So I blog about PC games, but I bet you’re wondering what it is that I actually play. What do I do in between blog posts? That question will be answered every other week in the “A Gamers’ Log” feature. Think of it as a quick overview of the games I played and perhaps a small prelude to some of the entries to come.

Of course there’s plenty of room to discuss your own gaming habits for the past few weeks as well. So if you’d like to respond to what I’ve written, or add in your own list of cool (or horrid) games you’ve played recently, then by all means: do so!

Read the rest…

Share This

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

It’s now been two weeks since I started my poll on Your Favorite Shooting Experience so it’s about time to wrap things up and start a new poll! As usual this new poll will last for two weeks, after which another new poll will await your votes. The question this time is: “Which game are you most looking forward to?” and includes a lot of upcoming games scheduled to release later this year. Choose whichever game gets you pumped up most - and we’ll see which ones end up being the most popular in two weeks time!

As for the results for the former poll, on your favorite shooting experience. They are as follows: Third Person Shooter, Stealth Shooter and I Don’t Like Shooters lost out with 0 votes each. Next up was the Ego Shooter - Quake/Unreal style - with 1 vote, followed by the Tactical Shooter with 2. Teambased Shooters are more popular and managed to rake in 3 votes, but the eventual winner was the Singleplayer FPS with a whopping 6 votes (or 50%). Perhaps not quite surprising after the release of BioShock, but it still came a bit unexpected. I had anticipated to see teambased shooters pull out a clear victory over the others, looks like I was wrong

Well, see you in two weeks for the results of the current poll.

And don’t forget to vote!

Share This

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

No one can deny that PC gaming has been in a bit of a slump in recent years. No longer were we receiving masses of high quality games every year, and most of the enjoyable games tended to be littered with bugs, e.g.: Neverwinter Nights 2. That combined with the release of a new generation of consoles made things look bleak on the PC gaming front.

But all that changed this year. Heading into 2007 it was already obvious we were about to experience better times, with highly anticipated games like Crysis, Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Unreal Tournament 3 on schedule for release later this year. This years’ PC gaming lineup is beyond a shadow of doubt the most impressive in many years…

Read the rest…

Share This

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!