A sad fact of gaming is that the average release has a lifespan that'd make even a mayfly sympathetic. The average game hits the shelves on Monday, the bargain bin on Wednesday, and by Friday, it likely lives on as nothing more than a fond memory and a few references on the geekier online forums. Publishers rarely do more with their back catalogues than try to prevent anyone distributing them, stores don't have the space to stock games that aren't selling great guns, and gamers, well, gamers are fickle. Just a couple of years can be the [...] Continue Reading...
The very technically minded amongst us will know exactly what an API is. For the rest, a short explanation is in order. API stands for Application Programming Interface and without this little software creation that powerful graphics card sucking up everything it can from both your PSU and bank balance would be so much circuitry and scrap. APIs allow the treasured hardware inside one's machine to function correctly. It uses function calls to direct the resources available and allow, in the case of a graphics card, rendering and other more advanced functions to take place. The major point is [...] Continue Reading...
It is that time of year again, when EA hits us with the customary yearly update of their FIFA series of games. It is generally a time of a little moaning and groaning when we decide who will play it this year, but there is always that strange part of us that really wants to play it. We know what FIFA is about and often the only thing that changes the graphical quality and the player line-ups. It can be argued that it is more of the same this year but EA have also whipped something new out of [...] Continue Reading...
What if you only want to stream to a laptop or another PC? All you need is some software. A dedicated media streamer is all well and good, but most of them cost in the region of $200 to $400, which certainly doesn't make them the cheapest solution. If you want to view pictures or listen to audio on your laptop, or another PC in the house, then all you need to do is set up a shared folder, then browse to it on the network and open the files in the same way that you would do on [...] Continue Reading...
We have nothing against console games in general. Some of us actually use them to unwind after a day of hitting the PC hard in the office. However, we do expect certain standards from a PC title, one of which is that the PC version of a multi-platform release has to be better than its console brethren. This is really not negotiable. There will be more problems with a PC title, we know we can usually expect that, but it should look and play better as well as contain some extra content if we're lucky. PC hardware allows that [...] Continue Reading...