Hardware wise it is identical to a normal PC with CPU, RAM, motherboard etc etc but generally put in to more stylish cases specially built to fit in most TV stands.

Case

I opted for an Antec Fusion Black HTPC case which is a fairly nice case, although it can be seen as quite costly at around £100 without a PSU. The case is steal with an aluminium front but even so it doesn’t weigh alot. There is space for 2 hard drives which are secured with rubber grommets to stop vibration and 2 5.25″ slots with one of these slots being used for the LCD display that comes built with the case, but can be taken out. The case has a few ventilation holes around to keep components cool but only has 2 120mm fans which are located on the side of the case near where the CPU will be. Both of these fans are Antec Tri-Cools and as such have the 3 way setting for fan speed, low, medium, high. I have mine set to low which gives off a little bit of noise and gives more than adequate cooling for the rest of the components.

Motherboard

After reading many good reviews I bought the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G Micro-ATX. The GA-MA78GM-S2H uses the AMD 780G chipset which has onboard audio and graphics. The onboard audio is a Realtek chip with your standard analogue in and outs but also has a digital out. The onboard graphics is called the Radeon HD 3200 which is said to be equal in performance to the Radeon HD 3450. The HD 3200 has AVIVO and allows for full hardware acceleration if the software supports it. The HD 3200 gives you VGA, DVI and HDMI which also carries sound. The motherboard also has a feature called Hybrid Graphics Technology. This allows you to put in another graphics card in to the PCI-e 2.0 slot which will be used in a crossfire like situation although AMD refuses to call it crossfire due to the performance levels not being the same. Unfortunately you can just shove any card in there and get this performance. It is obviously limited to AMD/ATi cards only and even then it will only use the power equivalent to the onboard graphics. In this case the best card to put in would be the HD 3450.

CPU

Keeping to an all AMD affair, I got the AMD Athlon X2 4850e which is a low power CPU said to consume only 45W. This also reduces heat which is a top priority in an HTPC as it means you don’t need a noisy fan on it, and this CPU is more than capable of processing any HD media or x264 rips.

RAM

RAM isn’t used that much in an HTPC compared to a gaming PC so I just got 2GB (2x 1GB sticks) of Corsair DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX. Of course you can easily change this to 4GB if you want.

PSU

As I was happy with my current Corsair PSU in my gaming PC I chose to keep my loyalty and got the Corsair CX400W which is more than capable of powering the HTPC with room to spare if I ever wanted to add a new sound card or new graphics card.

Hard drive

Being a Samsung fan due to the low noise from their Spinpoint harddrives, I bought another Samsung SpinPoint F1 500GB to join my growing collection of them. This drive isn’t particularly slow, but obviously won’t keep up with a Western Digital Raptor but is a hell of a lot quieter. This only used up 1 slot, so I still have another slot spare to add another drive in the future if I wanted to.

DVD Drive

Originally I was just going to buy a £20 DVD drive. But then I saw the LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray Reader & HD-DVD ROM. For only £45 more I now have the ability to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Although HD-DVD has been beaten by Blu-Ray there is still a lot of HD-DVD stock out there with stores trying to get rid of it. So when you have the choice of getting HD films for as little as £3 it seemed obvious to get a dual player. The only thing I forgot to check about this drive before purchasing was the noise, but I was gladly surprised with in once it was installed. Although not quiet, it wasn’t too noticeable, so when you have a film on you are unlikely to hear it.

Software

At the moment, I don’t have any dedicated software for my HTPC but I have got Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit to install, then I can test with further software to expand the HTPC to be the optimum it can be.

Closing multiple tabs

The huge flaw that is extremely irritating is no warning of closing multiple tabs.

If you have 10 tabs open and accidentally close the main window at the top right rather than the tab close button. Goodbye tabs.

You can have the sessions enabled to get it back once you open Chrome again but that isn’t very helpful if you had active downloads going when you accidentally closed the browser.

Earlier today I was download Portal: Prelude, an expansion modification for the game Portal. After download 550MB of the 775MB file, I accidentally closed Chrome forgetting that I had the download going.

IE and FF would of both stopped this from happening as they both open downloads in separate windows rather than the main browser, so if you close the main browser the downloads continue. Chrome does not.

I wasted that time and bandwidth downloading 550MB to be lost in the ether and having to download it again, because something so trivial was missed out of Chrome.

It doesn’t take a lot of common sense to know this is could be a problem, Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera all have implementations in place to stop this happening. The fact that Google took the best parts of all the other browsers in to 1 then deciding that a rather important feature wasn’t in their users best interest is worrying. How many other problems are there going to be under the surface?

Downloads

I have found that on many user initiated downloads that they just fail to start full stop on my Chrome installation at work and some downloads on my Chrome installation at home.

By clicking a download button the file will appear at the bottom of the browser and have ’starting…’ next to it but never progress past this stage. Right clicking the file and selecting Save as… works for all anchor links, but any downloads that are done through a form button are impossible to download which results in my opening up Firefox to download files.

Dictionary

You don’t seem to have the ability to add new words to the dictionary in Chrome which is rather strange. In Firefox you can and it is helpful when you type in something quite a lot and it isn’t in the dictionary, that little red line becomes annoying.

While writing this post, there are 2 words with red lines underneath them. The first is Firefox. Fair enough, it isn’t an actual word in the dictionary but still, Google do give a lot of money to the Mozilla foundation (which is in the dictionary). But the 2nd underlined word is an odd one indeed. It is Google. The company who have made the browser haven’t even put their name in the dictionary, instead suggesting that I meant to type goggle.

Why do all the old games seem to be more fun years and years on when the graphics have been improved so much?

Will I be wanting to play Crysis again as a classic game in 10 years time because it was a classic game of the time (well Crysis may not be the best example, but you get the idea).

I have also found myself playing SWOS (Sensible World of Soccer) 96-97.  Not the absolute rubbish remake that came out a couple of years ago.  The original was so good because it was simple and fun not because it was 3D.

My favourite Final Fantasy of all time was Final Fantasy VI which was 2D sprites.

So is the fact that games are becoming 3D that makes most games dull and boring with no fun factor (well a little fun maybe when you are killing aliens while trying to run down an icy hill in a suit with lots of fancy features) or is the fact that developers are trying to make the games look more realistic without thinking too much about the actual gameplay?

Who knows, but what we do know, is the banana bomb can be extremely deadly…

Escapist Magazine

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

You can download the new updated version from the ePSXe website and clicking Downloads on the left.

It has been long time since the previous ePSXe status update. During this time the ePSXe development has been on hold and our lives have changed a lot, probably just like yours. In summer 2007 we decided to continue working in ePSXe encouraged by the users support even after 4 years without updates. ePSXe is currently in final testing and we hope to release a new version very soon. We wanted to thank you for your support and show you some screenshots from games that should work better in the next release.

I have played it on PC and Xbox 360 and I would personally say PC is better.

Gameplay

The style of game is arcade, which surprised me as I was expecting a game to compete a bit more against GT5.  But that wasn’t too much of a problem as I prefer arcade driving games such as Need for Speed, although ProStreet was rather annoying.

I find the game is similar to Project Gotham Racing but only better looking.

A very nice feature of the game is something called flashback.  If you crash and write off your car you can use the flashback feature to rewind through the race and pick up from a certain point in which you can avoid the accident.  Not only is it a useful feature for when you crash but it is actually pretty good to use, it acts like replays do in any other game then you press the designated flashback button (F12 for PC, X for 360) and the game will carry on from that point.

Damage is also a very good feature which is a lot better than I thought it was going to be, which by itself puts it ahead of NFS:PS.

Another positive about the game which I haven’t seen used in any other game is in the profile system you can chose your firstname from a list so the computer can actually speak out your name rather than you having a set name like in NFS:PS or having name spoken out like in PGR.  All you do is type your firstname and surname in to the create profile screen and you are then given a list of names to chose from which will automatically select your firstname ready for confirmation if it is in the list.  The game contains male and female names as well as a list of nicknames.

Controls

I played both using the Xbox 360 controller and the controls just seemed a bit more responsive with the PC.  The plus side on the 360 is the fact that all the controls are on the controller.  Even if you use a controller on the PC you have to use the keyboard for some functions such as the flashbacks.

Graphics

Running on an E6750, 3GB ram, 8800GTS 320MB at 1920×1200 with AA set to MSAAx2 the fps stayed above 35fps at all times, staying around 40fps most of the time and graphically at this settings was better than the 360.  The 360 did look a lot better on the loading screens and menus though, I can only assume the PC version had a slightly degraded graphics for the menus and loading screens to make the game work on lower spec PCs.

The smoke from the tyres is very good though, a lot more impressive than NFS.

Conclusion

All in all I think GRID is a very good game.  Not a great game, but a good game. If you are tired of GTA IV or you don’t like GTA IV and no new good games come out then it is worth a purchase.

If you have a good PC with a wired 360 controller I would get the PC version, otherwise get the 360 version or if you don’t have a 360 and a shit PC, but have a PS3, get it for PS3. If you have none, don’t buy it…..

EDIT: I have found out that GameTrailers have done a side by side HD video of the GRID; PS3 vs Xbox 360.  From the video the graphics are almost identical, the only visible difference is that the PS3 colours seem to be a bit washed out in comparison to the 360 version.  You can watch the video here.

Gametrailers HD

Gametrailers SD

Source of image: Far Cry 2 Headquaters

Far Cry 2 is set in the savannah of Africa.  The Far Cry team has moved away from the jungle environment which we basically saw again in Crysis.  The weather is humid and green vegetation is rare in this vast openness.

At the demo we were told that the whole games playable area was 50×50km.  We supposingly only saw less than 1×1km in the demo.

The demo started off showing off some of the basics.  You are in the savannah, you carry 4 weapons, a primary weapon which is a shotgun/rifle or submachine gun, a secondary weapon such as a pistol, the 3rd weapon is a grenade launcher type weapon but we didn’t really see much of that.  The 4th weapon is a trusty machete.

Next we were shown how the wind affects a lot of the game.  You can pick up flame throwers and use them to burn vegetation and buildings, which will spread along vegetation in the direction of the wind.  You can see the direction of the wind by looking at the trees and vegetation and your compass that you have also shows you the wind direction.

At this point the game got in to a bit of action.  AI seemed a bit like the Crysis AI.  We were told they weren’t scripted and would do whatever they want, and that they did.  They didn’t really seem to care that the enemy was around until you started shooting them.

Another interesting point of this game was the way you get health.  You can pick up morphene from around villages etc which you need to inject yourself with when you get low on health.  If you die, you don’t really die.

In the game there are NPC that you can become friends with.  Once you befriend them, all you have to do is talk to them, they will come and assist you in a fight if you die.  Well you don’t really die.  The NPC will drag you away from the firing line and heal you.  You are now in a reasonably safe situation with no weapons apart from a machete and I think you get a pistol too.  If these friends die though, they don’t come back.  So it is best not to use them for fighting as they can be used to get equipment from them.

It was at this point that the guy playing actually did die.  So they had to restart the demo.  On the restart the game was flickering so they had to stop the demo there.

We went on to a short Q&A which revealed a few things.

The game will be released around August/September 2008.  The release will be on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC at the same time.

The level is designed to be seamless and should have no loading screens at all once in game.  Unlike Oblivion on the consoles which had loading screens.

At this point we were asked to leave while they reset all their equipment and to let the 200 waiting people in to view the demo to.

…those 200 people were actually around 30 or 40 max.

The first of many lie’s from the developers I am sure.

Far Cry 2 homepage

This tutorial will show you how to add a game in to the Games panel in Windows Vista.

For this tutorial I will be adding Call of Duty 4 to the Games panel which is not put on automatically.

Adding a new game

1. Go to your start menu and right click on the game you want to add to the list. For this I went to the Activision folder on the start menu and copied the multiplayer shortcut to my desktop.
2. With the shortcut selected, press F2. Now rename the shortcut to fit the game, I chose Call of Duty 4.
3. Once you have given it the name you want to give it, right click the shortcut and chose Copy.
4. Now in the Games panel, right click an empty area and select Paste.
5. You will now have a shortcut to Call of Duty 4 or the game you chose in your Games panel.
   
6. Right click the new game and select Customize.
   
7. You will have a new window with the option of adding new options to the shortcut. You can have a maximum of 6 options on each game. By default you will have a simple Play option.
8. Select Play and press Edit.
9. Go to the General tab and type in Multiplayer. This is where the default points to for my shortcut. If I double click the shortcut it will open Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer.
10. Select Play Command 1. Press Add.
11. Now browse to the location of the game, this time I chose the Singleplayer exe. Press Next.
12. I typed in Singleplayer. But you can type what you want.
13. Now if you want to play Mulitplayer you can double click the icon, or if you want to play Singleplayer just right click and select Singleplayer. If you want to make Singleplayer the default, select Singleplayer and press Move Up. The top most command is the default double click command.

32 Bit DX10 Windows Vista x64

64 Bit DX10 Windows Vista x64

As you can see from the figures look very similar between the 2 and no correlation seems to appear from any of the results. I could look further in to this and come up with some shitty reason why which no one would care to read or understand, but I would say that they just run around the same as each other and they both have standard variance that you will get everytime you play it.

A Direct Comparison

The following graph shows the performance of 32 bit Crysis over the 64 bit Crysis. 64 bit Crysis is set to 100% on each setting. The resuts take in to account the average FPS throughout the whole of the benchmark, not the min or max.

Conclusion

Well there isn’t one. They look identical in game, performance is roughly the same. The game isn’t made any more playable at any setting with either modes so use which ever one you want.

If you have problems with 64 bit Crysis running, you shouldn’t find any performance problems dropping to the 32 bit client. If anything you may see a slight increase in performance, but nothing to write home about.

I won’t do a comparison of DX9 vs DX10, because I think virtually every other website already has.