Call of Duty: Black Ops is out! We are all happy and sad at the same time. No more problems with who is hosting the game because servers are back and lag shouldn’t be an issue anymore, right? Wrong. This is where the sad part comes. Single player game is no problem and everything works flawlessly (more or less) on my old NVidia 8800GTS. I finished the game with almost no performance issues. Frame rate dropped down with a lot of enemies and explosions on the screen, but it was never unplayable. With multi-player this is a completely different story. I tried many different servers, and they were based all around the world. My ping times were ranging from as little as 70ms up to 300ms and to be honest, I didn’t notice much difference. Characters in front of me were warping here and there and they all appeared laggy and stuttering.
If you have a PC version you could try few things and the game will work better. Don’t worry, this won’t eliminate your problems it will help a little.
It is finally out, the new Sid Meier‘s Civilization V, time to call in sick, take a long unpaid vacation and stock yourself with caffeine, you will need it. Civilization V is everything that you expected. Still the same as Civilization I, but so much different that you want to play it anyway. My first run was few days after the North American release date (here in Europe we always get screwed, one way or the other). I have to admit, last Civilization that I played was Civilization II, I still should have the original box somewhere and the big technology tree poster that was taped to the wall while I was playing the game. Now, all I have is an email with an activation number. So sad, but in a way also thrilled, because after I received that email it too my slow internet link only four hours to get the game. So in 4am I had it in my grasp, installed on my computer. Twenty eight hours later, I am writing a review. Read on if you want to know more about the game play and the changes in this release. I won’t go easy on the bugs either. Screenshots will be provided.
NAT stands for Network Address Translation. If you are a causal Playstation 3 user then you probably don’t know anything about this until you have a problem with it. An average PS3 is usually connected to the internet through a router and that router will take care of NAT for you. NAT Type will tell what kind of connectivity your PS3 has to the Internet. Having a Type 3 NAT will result in various issues, your voice chat might not work and you might have other problems with your in-game connectivity. The best solution for this is to check your router settings. In this Howto I will talk about Linksys WRT router running DD-WRT software. Settings for other routers are similar and you can probably use the information from this post to setup your router.
It was a thing of a moment. We decided to try some live streaming of Monkey Island 2, special edition. After realizing that Xfire fails miserably with streaming games that are not listed as supported we went looking for another solution.
Livestream’s Procaster was the first thing we tried and while we had some trouble at first it picked up rather nicely and the overall quality was decent enough.
Procaster supports streaming of any Direct3D game together with sound and in the free version you can mix output of your web camera and your screencast. We also had some trouble with the sound being recorded from the camera and we needed few minutes to figure out how to turn off the extra sound input. Here is some room for improvement, an audio mixer that can be controlled while streaming.
All in all, the broadcasting was an interesting experience and we are likely to do some more screencasts in the future. We were pleasantly surprised with the recording of our video. If you missed it and you are not bored with pirate oriented adventure games you can watch our screencast below.
Prequel was awesome. A platform breaking boundaries. For boys and girls, men and women. With singleplayer, multiplayer and online play. Announcement for second installment is here. And it looks better than prequel!
For more information check out official site, Follow RRunner or BigWhale on twitter for more up to date information.
