Recently in Games Category

Here are some that the kids are asking about:

• Sid Meier's Civilization IV is the next step in a great franchise. Getting older now since it was released late 2005, but a nice game. There are two expansion packs now and it goes for about $37 at Go Gamer
• Nancy Drew The White Wolf of Icicle Creek. These are done for pre-teen and teen girls from Her Interactive. These are actually quite hard to find online, so you have to get them direct from the publisher for $20 each.
• Europa Universalis III. Seattle Times said this was a great educational game as it has real history and kind of a cool strategy game like Civilization. These are also hard to find, but Go Gamer has them for $37.

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Here are some that the kids are asking about:

• Sid Meier's Civilization IV is the next step in a great franchise. Getting older now since it was released late 2005, but a nice game.
• Nancy Drew The White Wolf of Icicle Creek. These are done for pre-teen and teen girls from Her Interactive.
• Europa Universalis III. Seattle Times said this was a great educational game as it has real history and kind of a cool strategy game like Civilization.

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We keep getting this installation error. Apparently http://www.lucasforums.com/archive/index.php/t-170302.html says that this requires a fix at Patches

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Well, finding age appropriate games is pretty hard. Most of the action is in console games or in violent ones, but Gogamer has a pretty good list of what's left out there.

Legos Star Wars II has to have my vote for the most unlikely combination, but it works. We down loaded the demo and it is so cute to see all those legos in the Star Wars world, plus there are puzzles everywhere and by definition it isn't gory, the legos just break up :-)

The original Legos Star Wars was great and the sequel is just as good, so get them both :_)

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There are lots of review sites, but I find Gamerankings.com to be the best meta site, they categorize reviews done by a host of sites and magazines are pretty accurate. Like DCViews, these metasites are just great. So, what's hot right now for kids?

* "Company of Heroes": OK, not really for kids, but it is getting amazingly high ratings as a combination squad tactical game and sort of FPS.
* LEGO Star Wars II . Who would have thought that a game like this would be fun, but the kids love it because it is so abstract.

In terms of actually buying the games, I use three soures:

*  Pricegrabber to find online stores
* "Mpire": to look at ebay, yahoo and other stores

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Anandtech reviews a physics acceleration card. This takes the physics modeling in games, (you know, shoot a bullet, hit a guy and how does he fall?) and puts a dedicated processor in to do that.

It's for the ultimate gaming geeks and requires specialized games to take advantage. The just shipping Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter does that. Unfortuantely, for that game, installing the card actually slows down performance. The quality of the explosions are higher, but the game plays slower with the added realism. The main competition as usual with these kinds of processors is multithreading and having dual core processors. So it is another case of special purpose vs. general purpose. In the case of graphics, the special purpose stuff won. Here, the jury is still out.

Also take a

Widescreen Gaming Forum Portal. With our new widescreen monitor, older games look wierd. So here's a site that is dedicated to fixing it. There is a Master List that shows you how to fix your games. A few hacks are noted here for my favorites:

Call of Duty

The original one which I still like the best I have to say because the physics model is the most honest. There is a INI file change you have to make, but basically you go to c:\program files\Call of Duty\Main\config.cfg and change the parameters which sets the field of view, play the movie normally (r_mode) and set the exact height and width of your monitor. You can use the FOVCalc to figure out the FOV.

seta cg_fov "106.6"
bq. seta r_mode "-1"
bq. seta r_customheight "1200"
bq. seta r_customwidth "1920"

Sim City 4

This is one game that can really use the extra resolution, there is something called UniWS which is a universal Widescreen patcher, it actually works on just a few games like Sim City 4 and Tiger Woods 2005, but pretty useful. You set Sim City 4 to 800×600 before patching and it hacks away at the config.cfg file.

If you have a valuable CD, you might want a way to back it up. We just paid $300 !!! for a program and there is no backup strategy. Here is what you have to do:

1. Copy Protected Games - THE DAEMONS HOME. Determine what the copy protection is exactly with A-Ray scanner. You install the program and then do a Scan Directory, it will tell you for instance if SafeDisc 4.00 is installed.
2. Backup your CD. Most folks use Alcohol 120% or CloneCD for this. Alcohol 120% handles more types of anti-backup schemes and with these programs you can either create a backup CD or an image you can mount
3. With the image made, you then mount them as virtual drives. There is an issue in that many programs won't recognize virtual drives correctly.

Every gamer wants to make their system faster, so after overclocking like mad, check out TweakGuides.com for the latest on specific tweaks to improve performance:

TweakGuides.com - Call of Duty 2 Tweak Guide. A nice review for Call of Duty

What is Antialiasing? a guide for those of who think Anisotropic is something that happens over the Pacific in light winds :-) The short form is that Antialiasing prevents jagged lines from occuring on the edges of walls. You can steup the amount of antialiasing in steps of 2x, 4x, etc. Anistropic filtering makes the surfaces of object look cleaner and crisper.