Game Of The Year: BioShock, Halo 3, Mass Effect & Orange Box nominated in Spike’s VGA

Yes, The Game Of The Year (GOTY) discussion is already beginning! Spike is hosting its 5th annual Video Game Awards this December in Las Vegas, and this morning the nominees were released on Spike.com. What’s in contention for Game of the Year? Orange Box, Halo 3, BioShock, and Mass Effect.

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Need for Speed ProStreet Update

With Need for Speed ProStreet revving its engine and about to roll up to the starting line, we ran through the opening sections of an almost final build of the game to see what’s in store for us in just a few short weeks.

We’ve previously talked at length about how you can create a Race Day online for other players to jump in and play at their leisure. The single-player game works the same way, with events grouped into said Race Days and your goal being to win or even dominate each set of events. Each event in a Race Day, be it a Grip Race, Drag Race or what have you, earns you a number of points depending on your placement, how much you can beat a target time by and the damage total on your car. Once you’ve garnered enough points, even if you haven’t completed all of the events, you’ll be crowned the winner, and if you earn enough, you’ll be deemed to have dominated the event, which earns you extra goodies.

Horsepower and skill are the keys to victory.

When you’ve completed an event, you’ll earn a cash prize as well as a mystery gift. Five “cards” will appear face-down on the screen and you can choose one at random. These prizes range from more cash to a new car to a repair ticket or more.

Credits: IGN.com

Gears of War: PC Review!

Despite clunky controls, the gears keep turning.

Before a little game called Halo 3 debuted, it was Gears of War that sent Xbox 360 systems flying off store shelves. Its intense graphics, style, gritty story and unparalleled multiplayer made it a must-have game for all 360 owners. A year after its initial console release, the game makes its way to the PC, where more gamers can find out what the hype is all about.

 

 

See more screens from Gears of War …

The story takes place fourteen years after an event called Emergence Day, when a group of creatures called the Locust Horde burst from the ground and launch a full-scale invasion on an otherwise peaceful planet. After countless losses, the humans exercised a scorched earth policy and destroyed their own cities instead of letting the Horde control them. However, the aliens continue their relentless invasion, and every capable person is called to arms, including Marcus Fenix, a soldier imprisoned for dereliction of duty. Players take the role of Marcus to continue the fight.

nVidia G92, C72 and C73 – From Graphics cards to Processors!

The next generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA has, pretty much as always, been rather illusive. There haven’t been much information available and even the rumors have been rather few. Early such suggested that the G90/92 would before the end of this year and that it would be a perfected G80 architecture. VR-Zone now reports that the chip G92 will arrive in November of this year, which is just about a year from when G80 arrived, which means it’s feasible to believe they are right. Along with the new graphics circuit we will also have at least three new chipset to support them.

According to the source, there are two new Intel chipsets and one new AMD chipset coming from NVIDIA. The C72 and C73 will both be socket 775 and support the coming 45nm processors from Intel. Perhaps we dare to guess the name; nForce 7, and with an i suffix. The main differences are the FSB and memory support, where C73 is the high-end with 1600MHz FSB and DDR3-1600 support, while the C72 only sports 1333MHz FSB and DDR2-1066MHz.

NVIDIA also has a new AMD chipset coming, MCP72, and this one will have support for the new AM2+ processors along with PCI Express 2.0 and HT3.0.

All chipsets will come in several flavors, such as SLI 3×16 and 2×8. The AMD chipset is the only to sport Hybrid SLI. They should arrive about the same time as the G92 chip.

Apple or PC?

Apple might be the flavor of the moment in the consumer PC world, but hundreds of thousands of customers every year continue to choose plain vanilla “white box” PCs.Those purchases go on as Hewlett-Packard and Dell churn out millions of name-brand PCs every quarter, Acer enjoys double- and triple-digit growth rates, and Apple continues to be the darling of the hardware business.

At first glance, it would appear the white-box market hasn’t changed so dramatically in the past several years. The share of white-box computers (which includes PCs without brand names and those from smaller manufacturers) has decreased from a 44 percent share of the worldwide market in 2003 to 37 percent as of 2006, according to market researcher IDC.

But the growing popularity of notebook PCs spells big trouble for the future of white-box manufacturing. The “white-book” market has dwindled from an already-small 8.5 percent share to a 5.6 percent share between 2003 and 2006. That comes while notebooks have, over the same period of time, become the dominant PC form factor for top vendors Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer, accounting for two-thirds of consumer PC sales.

The smaller PC assemblers can’t participate as easily in the notebook market. That’s because their bread and butter–an oversupply of parts they can buy at a discount–are intended more and more for specific notebook models.

Leopard’s Time Machine – Think Back-Ups are bore? Think again

Since Apple Inc. first announced the initial 10 features of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” in August 2006, the one that has captured the most interest of Macintosh fans is Time Machine. Apple has billed Time Machine as the backup tool for people who hate the task. That’s almost everyone, according to Steve Jobs, who says only 4% of computer users regularly back up their data.The goal set for Apple’s engineers in designing Time Machine was to create a backup technology that requires little or no configuration, performs backups automatically and invisibly, and makes restoring files from those backups as simple and intuitive as humanly possible. That’s a pretty tall order, even for Apple, and yet the company has managed to deliver those results.

So simple, there’s no Step 3

One of Apple’s early iMac commercials described connecting to the Internet as being so easy that “there’s no Step 3.” As I was trying to sum up how easy Time Machine is to configure, that commercial popped into my head.

In fact, Step 1 — plugging in an external hard drive after installing Leopard — is the only step that’s truly required. Leopard will automatically detect the hard drive and ask whether you want to use it for Time Machine backups. If you say yes, that’s really all you need to do.

Time Machine’s easy setup. (Click for larger view.)

Time Machine will then perform an initial backup to the drive, which can take quite some time — a couple of hours or more for most people, depending on the contents of your internal hard drive. You may actually want to start your initial Time Machine backup before going to bed and let it run overnight.