September 28, 2007
Media, Impressions, Technology
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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!
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September 18, 2007
Free Games, Impressions
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During the past couple of weeks I’ve got in some time with the Settlers VI: Rise of an Empire demo. It might not be the most highly anticipated RTS, nor very well known, but Settlers 3 was my first ever online game - so I just had to give this one a go, even though parts 4 and 5 sucked ass. Interestingly, The Settlers has always been the only slow RTS series that could keep me entertained… I suppose I was hoping the same would be true for number 6.
In all honesty I hadn’t actually heard anything about this game before playing the demo, other than that it was going to be released this month. I had no idea whether to expect something along the lines of Settlers 5 (horrible) or whether it’d be a return to the Settlers 1-3 roots (great). Turns out it wasn’t much of a disappointment after all! Read on for the details…
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September 11, 2007
Free Games, Impressions, Recurring
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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.
Regular readers of the old Game Drone might recognize this as a return of the Game of the Week feature, in biweekly format. Unfortunately the last such entry on the old blog dates back to early August, so I’ll just take the last two weeks as my guideline instead. Comments and suggestions are of course welcome, it’d also be nice to see what you played during the last two weeks.
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September 8, 2007
Free Games, Impressions, Recurring
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Every month we’re treated to a wealth of new games to play, but which ones are worth buying? That’s what I’ll try to find out, in the monthly recurring series of Most Impressive PC Games. So in the beginning of every month you can come visit this website, for a quick rundown of the latest and greatest titles, including links to official websites and game demos!
This time I’ll be covering the month of August, 2007 - the first truly impressive month in a long time. Where June and July were filled with mostly mediocre games, August has brought an influx of great games - and it looks like this will only be the beginning. We’ve got some great times ahead of ourselves, but for now - let’s look at what we already have, shall we?
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