Storagereview heeft een review van de Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 5120 schijf gepost. Het ding draait op 7200 rpm en heeft een capaciteit van 20,4Gb (genoeg ). Hier een stuk uit de review:

n the past year, the two top drive contenders have been Maxtor and IBM. It's become a cyclical pattern: the latest IBM drive provides the best Windows 95/98 performance while the newest Maxtor delivers top Windows NT (and Win2000?) operation. With their recent partnership, IBM's and Western Digital's latest units look quite similar. While I'm not quite prepared to agree with others speculating that the Deskstar 22GXP and WD Expert are in fact the exact same drives, such ideas do shed interesting light on results of an Expert vs. Plus 5120 comparison. The Maxtor drive, while delivering great scores in WinBench 99 under Windows 95, falls behind the Expert by margins of 7%-15%. On the other hand, however, Windows NT scores show the Maxtor besting the WD by about 15%. Again, a situation very remniscent of Maxtor vs. Big Blue- except it's actually Maxtor vs. Western Digital (gulp )!

Davo van Hothardware.com heeft een interview gepost met een mannetje van nVidia. Hier een stuk:

Davo

Early tests of your product have shown it to compete well with and even surpass

Voodoo3 in terms of raw performance/frame rate. What are your thoughts on this and

your competition?

-David

TNT2 has approximately twice the fill rate of any other product out there. TNT2 also

has the most complete DX6 and OpenGL feature set, and unsurpassed rendering quality - full 32-bit, top to bottom. Accept no substitutes. I don't want to say anything

negative about any of our competitors - I'm sure that they make fine products. But,

we have total air superiority - no one matches our 32/32/32 support (32MB frame

buffer, 32bit textures and 32bit rendering) and killer performance.

Op The Adrenaline Vault vond ik een Army Men II review, je weet wel, dat zielige spel waarbij je op de keukentafel speelgoedsoldaatjes mag vermoorden. Naja, kijk maar ff:

The original Army Men underwent a pretty dramatic change during development and ended up being more of an action game than the real-time strategy title it started as. While the game had its highlights, it was not without problems; still, it managed to secure a fairly loyal following. Army Men 2 attempts to build on the successes of its predecessor while addressing some of the shortcomings. The result is a more varied title that at times shows flashes of real creativity, but doesn't solve all the problems.

When you begin a map, you'll have access to an overview that shows key locations and gives a few pointers on how to be successful. Maps are usually broken into more than one mission. So initially, you may simply be ordered to find a location or person, but then you'll be given a secondary mission that includes going somewhere else or pursuing another objective. Occasionally, Sarge or one of his men may need to use a vehicle in order to complete an objective. PT boats, tanks, jeeps, half-tracks and cargo trucks make appearances throughout the campaign, with the PT boat being the biggest addition to the game because it introduces crossing water to the action.

One of the main problems the development team tried to address was the very awkward interface in Army Men. Sarge was a wee bit too difficult to control in the original, so they solved some of the control problems and added a point-and-click option that allows you to move around the screen by simply clicking on locations or targets rather than manually guiding Sarge and his men. This works when Sarge is in a vehicle, too. The change is welcome for certain portions of the game, such as when you need to get from point A to B and want to do it without guiding him the entire way. However, while the controls are easier than before, they still need work. Movement is frustrating at times and there's still an awkwardness in the way you move around. Still, it's much better than before.

Lees hier verder....

Ik lees net op Coolinfo dat er 3 dagen nadat de eerste demo gereleased was er alweer een upgedate versie is. Haal em hier.

Just three days after the initial release, the developers of the PC-based PlayStation emulator bleem! have released an updated demo that includes optimized code for faster performance, improved compatibility for games such as Final Fantasy 7 and Tekken 3, and color movies. It can be downloaded from their website.

Gamers' Crypt heeft een review gepost van Expendable. Nooit van gehoord, maar als ik kijk naar wat ik net gelezen heb (jaja, ik lees de reviews ook echt ) lijkt het me dus echt een vet kewl spel.

Check:

Expendable is best described as Get Medieval meets Raptor (or in turn, Gauntlet meets 1942), with a liberal dosing of Quake II thrown in for good measure. Visually superb, and heart-stoppingly frantic, Rage Software have labelled it as something of a 'shoot-em-up,' although, being so true to its arcade origins, it will doubtless be remembered as a game of nostalgia more than anything. Much like any game at all resembling the arcade classic Asteroid's, that is ultimately classed as an 'Asteroids game' rather than a 'space shooter,' Expandable bears too much in common with its arcade predecessors to escape the inevitable comparisons. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, for Expendable is very much rooted in the arcade past, and as a result, I feel it will appeal to the nostalgic gamers of the old arcade scene more than the FPS junkies of today.

The most striking feature of the game, aside from the nostalgic influence, is by far the visual eye candy, which even by today's extremely high standards is rather impressive. It may be, in essence, a top-down shooter, but Rage Software have gone all out to make a 3D environment, with all the features you would expect from any number of FPS titles currently on the market. By this I mean stunning lighting effects, complex polygon characters, reflective surfaces, mind-numbing explosions, and ambient fogging. That's just a taster of what you can expect in the final version, for the levels themselves are flung over a wide array of varying environments, whether it be the technological corridors of an far-off colony, or the snow touched peaks of a rugged mountainside.

Features to be included (quoted from Rage Software) -

• Awesome leading-edge 3D graphics engine.
• 20 levels of hard-blasting action.
• Bump-mapping.
• DirectSound 3D and EAX support.
• Two-player co-operative mode.

Best wel kewl lijkt me....

De officiële Flight Unlimited III website is geopend. Dit is wat Coolinfo erover te zeggen heeft:

The official Flight Unlimited III website has been launched. Serving as the official information source about the simulation, the site offers the latest game news and development details about the next generation of the acclaimed series. The upcoming civilian flight simulation features 10,000 square miles of photo-realistic terrain of the Seattle area. Visitors to the website can research specifications for the simulation's aircraft, view new and archived screenshots and get information about game features, including the simulation's advanced weather and Air Traffic Control systems. Users can also submit ideas for in-game challenges and meet the development team, including Project Director Tom Sperry and Lead Designer Peter James.

Normaalgesproken ben ik niet zo into Flight Sims, en al helemaal niet in Civ's, maar deze raad ik je aan uit te checken, want FU II was echt ontzettend tof!

Games.NET heeft een Descent 3 review gepost. Even de belangrijkste dingen:

We all know that stunning graphics are best-suited for desktop wallpaper, however, and Outrage hasn't forgotten what's really made the Descent series so popular: the gameplay. Descent III will include a deeper storyline involving an alien virus infecting numerous P.T.M.C. mines and facilities, in which it becomes your duty to return to the mines, collect evidence, and exterminate all rogue bots. Cleaning up unravels a potential conspiracy within the upper ranks of the P.T.M.C., suggesting that the virus may have been introduced by a high-ranking official within the P.T.M.C. corporate empire. Missions will be more elaborate than a "find the blue key and exit through the blue door" scenario, and promise to be tightly woven into the plot, advancing the story as you battle it out across 15 levels.

Those familiar with the Descent series will feel right at home with this title, and to ease newcomers into the freedom of flying around in zero gravity, Descent III will include a training level and an extensive configuration setup for input devices. Support for 3D audio and force-feedback joysticks will also be included. From the preview version I played through, I can safely say that Outrage Entertainment has done an admirable job with this sequel, and I'm looking forward to the final version, scheduled to be in stores this May.

Lees hier verder. Voor screenshots ga je naar deze pagina.

SGN heeft een Baseball 2000 preview gepost. Hier is wat stuff:

One quick aside: Microsoft, you are the wealthiest software company in the world. Would it kill you to put a CD booklet insert into your damn jewel cases? Man, I hate looking at those exposed CD ROMs through the clear front cover.

First, the graphics. I think I was one of the few who didn't just swoon over the graphics in last year's game. I thought that all the players looked fat and out of shape (no, not just the designated hitters!) and that the facial expressions and movements of the players typically were extremely creepy. MSBB2K, however, really looks wonderful. The players have different body types and the slender, athletically-built people really looked that way. Motion is very smooth, and the stadiums (except the crowds) look wonderful.

The gameplay is enjoyable, albeit a bit simplistic. Try as I might, I couldn't throw a wild pitch. I'd line up the pitch five feet outside, throw the heat...and the catcher would still snag it. In the dirt, high, wide, didn't matter. Eli Marrero is a good catcher, but he ain't that good! Pitching in general is easy enough. I really came to enjoy the visible ball cursor inside of the strike zone box. It seemed goofy at first, but I became quite accustomed to it. My pitchers, however, always seemed to tire markedly faster than the AI hurlers. I would even steer clear of the super-speed pitches. These are a really strange, and wackily entertaining, option to artificially increase the speed of a fastball by holding down the A button until just before the pitcher releases the ball. When the ball is released, it is accompanied by what sounds to be a sonic boom. One of my staff threw a 111 mile per hour fastball! Realistic? Not unless you're the Big Unit...and even then you'd need quite the prevailing tail wind. Fun? Hell, yes!

Anand heeft een review over de Promise Utra ATA/66 Controller.

Ultra ATA/66 (you'll also hear it referred to as Ultra DMA/66 or Fast ATA-2) allows for a theoretical maximum burst transfer rate of 66.6MB/s, double the maximum of Ultra ATA/33's 33.3MB/s. Another change brought about during the introduction of the Ultra ATA/33 specification was the idea of Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC) which is something that you've all probably heard of in one form or another at sometime during your computing experience. Basically, before any burst transfers take place both the hard drive and host will calculate what should make it through the transfer and then afterwards the host sends a signal back to the hard drive telling it what actually made it over during the transfer. If the two numbers don't match up then the process is automatically repeated until it is completed successfully. Ultra ATA/66 brings the same CRC feature that Ultra ATA/33 brought to the table, couples it with its 66.6MB/s theoretical burst transfer rate, and adds yet another new feature to the growing list: improved data integrity.

Uiteindelijk maakt het voor snelheid onder windoos geen donder uit of 'ie nou met een Ultra ATA 66 of Ultra ATA 33 werkt.

Hier kan je een review vinden over deze snelle brander.

Before Comdex '98, this drive [4/12] would have received a score of 10 out of 10. Not to impress Plextor, the drive is simply the best CD-R that can be found without going to professional replicators. With all of this ranting about how great the drive is, there is still an even faster drive on the market. Boasting a 4MB buffer, faster seek times, 20x max read and an astronomical 8X write speed, the mere existence of this drive ensures that the PlexW of 10 stars. Want to guess who makes the 8/20? Give you a hint, it's called the PlexWriter 8/20max.

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