I just finished my third or fourth run through Warcraft III (Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne), and I've been keeping an eye on the upcoming release of World of Warcraft. What Blizzard has done is created a far-reaching story, one with twists, turns and more individual plot threads than you can count. The series started with a seemingly simple story of evil (orc) aggression against the forces of good (humans, elves, dwarves and their gnome friends) in a struggle for the world itself, and h...

  Doom 3 (PC) id Software , Official Release Aug. 3rd, 2004     Introduction id Software is the grandfather of the First Person Shooter genre. They're also the pioneers of PC 3D graphics, always pushing the envelope of what the home computer is capable of in terms of increasingly realistic computer graphics. The Doom games hold a very special place in the hearts of gamers...

Yes, I'm posting a "Help me fix it, I'm dumb!" article... yes, it pains me to do so, but so far I've had no luck fixing this problem. My games take forever to initialize and load... well, anything that seems to have anything to do with DirectX does. Everything eventually loads, and when it does load it works perfectly fine, but some games take 5+min to get going. This is a problem that started popping up here and there about 2 weeks ago. Here's all my machine info: WinXP Sp2 (DX 9.0c...

This is a continuation of the "discussion" started in the "Still No November Game" thread. From what I've gathered from Yarlen's post as well as the Stardock Communtiy Chat Brad held a few weeks back, the following is happening with TG.Net: 1. We missed out on a game for the 04 year based on promises of one game per month. This has been acknolwedged and has been apologized for. 2. We will soon be getting two new games: Nexagon and Hacker Elite. 3. TG.Net is undergoing a chang...

Continuing on in the only thread of entries that seems to garner any real interest... another game review! Pirates! by Firaxis Ok, this is a remake of what is considered to be one of the classics of PC gaming. Sid Meier is one of those icons of the PC game industry whose name is whispered in hushed tones of reverence and placed along side other greats such as John Carmack (iD) and Will Wright (Maxis). He brought us some of the best games of the early days of PCs... Pirates and Civ ...

So last night around 8:30pm, I finished my trek through Half-Life 2, just about two days after it was released. How was it you ask? How did I do it in two days with a full time job and a human need for sleep? Is something else you may be wondering. Well, let me share with you my complete take on Half-Life 2, the hype, the delays and the distribution… The Hype No doubt about it, this is one of the most hyped PC games ever, which is surprising given the fact that I don’t think I’ve seen a ...

ZeniMax Media Acquires id Software

Brings together two of world’s best game studios

Library of powerhouse franchises will include DOOM, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls,
QUAKE, Wolfenstein and RAGE

June 24, 2009  (Rockville, MD) – ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of noted game publisher Bethesda Softworks, today announced it has completed the acquisition of legendary game studio, id Software, creators of world-renowned games such as DOOM, QUAKE, Wolfenstein, and its upcoming title, RAGE. The acquisition by ZeniMax Media joins together two of the finest, most respected videogame developers in the world, combining the first person shooter (FPS) expertise of id Software with acclaimed role playing game (RPG) developer Bethesda Game Studios – creators of the 2008 Game of the Year, Fallout 3, and the 2006 Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bethesda Softworks will publish the titles of id Software other than upcoming releases previously committed to other publishers.

The graphics card world has long been dominated by two companies; nVidia and ATI/AMD.  The battle over the last ten years has played out like a constant tug-of-war with one side gaining brief dominance over the other.  This generation, ATI looks to have the upper hand with their HD 48xx series of cards.

If you take a winning spot in the 2008 GUI Championships, there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself with one of these bad boys in your PC very soon.  So, today I’m going to give you a bit of a preview of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card.

First, lets take a look at the card’s base specs…

Card Specs…

Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512 MB Grapics Card

Specs:

• Display Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+HDTV
• Core Clock: 625 MHz
• Memory Clock: 933 MHz, 1986 Mbps
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• 512 MB/ 256 bit GDDR3 memory interface
• Single Slot Active Cooler
• HDMI complaint via dongle
• 7.1 Audio Channel Support
• Microsoft DirectX 10 Support
• Shader Model 4.1 Support

At stock settings, it’s a solid performer that stands up to pretty much every modern game out there; Crysis, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and more.

For those of you living under a rock (or just the non-gamers here), Bethesda Softworks released the fourth installment to their outstanding Elder Scrolls series yesterday; Oblivion. Being a fan of the single-player RPG and having gone years since the last good one released for the PC, I snagged my copy as soon as it came out. I've only spent about 4hrs with the game so far so I can't post a full review, but I do have a few, short, initial impressions of the game. First, here are my syste...