Xbox 360 owners get the first of this seasons's blockbusters on September 14th with the launch of Microsoft and Bungie's epic sci-fi shooter Halo: Reach.
PC, Mac and Phone Halo Fans can grab high definition wallpapers here on developer Bungie's website. The images available illustrate the grand scale of the game really well, and anyone who likes big space opera type art will enjoy these dramatic wallpapers.
Read more »
The original Halo game turned the world of FPS games upside down. This humble 2D version is clearly not the same, but it offers all the weapons and enemies of the original title and it's great fun to play. Halo: Hell on Earth Trilogy features many levels to complete and although its side-scrolling style doesn't feel as real as a 3D first person shooter, it's still pretty amusing!
Here’s a round-up of the best mobile apps we tested on Softonic this week. Check them out now!
The latest version in the N.O.V.A series of games proves to be one of the best first-person-shooters on the iOS platform to date. It boasts shiny 3D graphics, smart controls, surprisingly good voice acting, and, most of all, lots and lots of alien scum to blast. If you’ve got the latest iPad this will blow you away and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were playing Halo on an Xbox.
Since the original came out three years ago, Crysis has come to be a defining PC gaming experience, with incredible graphics and almost unreasonable hardware requirements!
Today saw the release of the Crysis 2 Multiplayer demo, which you can download here. Sadly, developer Crytek's servers appeared to be struggling under the weight of all the excited PC gamers this morning. Login problems seem to have been solved now, and while it's certainly busy, it is possible to join games again.
From March 1st to 13th you can play multiplayer games over two maps and two game modes. Team Instant Action is basically a team death match, while Crash Site is a kind of capture the flag match, although the location of the 'flags' changes throughout the game.
You can level up in the demo, gaining XP through kills, protecting crash sites and so on. This will allow you access to more classes of soldier and more varied weaponry.
Whichever mode you choose, the action is fast-paced, intense and more in line with Halo than Modern Combat, thanks to your Nanosuit's exaggerated jump ability. Any newbie will find their first few games dispiriting, as they get torn to pieces by experienced players, but this helps you learn how to not get killed, and you'll soon be racking up kills yourself!
The menu system and method for joining multiplayer games still lags behind console titles like Battlefield 1943. Instead of letting players try and fail to join full servers, it would be much better if server choice was made by the game and you could just jump in. Nevertheless, this demo shows that Crytek have created a formidable multiplayer experience, which will help build up hype for the full game, coming on March 19th (25th in Europe).
Read more »
What happens when geeks gets bored of playing their computer games? Well, they take their consoles and turn them into fashion accessories,of course. I'm always amazed to hear about the crazy DIY projects that console fanboys dream up, and the new Nintendo purse is probably favorite of all time. Devised by uber-modder Jeri Ellsworth, the bag houses an NES chip with an integrated LCD screen (ripped out from a portable DVD player) and two stick-on velcro controllers. All this, and there's still room for a woman's customary treasure trove of 'essential' items.
The Nintendo purse got be thinking about history's other mad and marvelous mods. Here are some of the most memorable:
Xbox 360 arcade controller: Super nerd Akira Kuramoto decided the standard Xbox control pad just wasn't big enough for him. So he set about building an arcade controller made out of a whole Xbox. For a closer look at his creation check out the gallery on TechEBlog.
Super Nintoaster: If you're hungry for a new way to play those retro 16-bit classics then the Nintoaster will have you drooling. The device, dreamed up by Stupidfingers, wonderfully incorporates the SNES into a toaster, and you can even address the screen brightness using the temperature knob.
Read more »Do you need help getting the most out of your favourite program? Has your system locked you out and gone all HAL 9000? Want to find a simple way to fix that annoying little software issue? Well, you've come to the right place.
Whatever question you have, we want to hear it. Whether it's about Windows, Linux, Mac, phones, games, whatever. All you have to do is send an email to this address:
Make sure you explain your problem or query as clearly as possible. Obviously we won't help you out with any illegal stuff or do your homework for you... but apart from that, the sky's the limit. (Though questions that aren't related to software at all may also get short thrift: this is a software blog, after all).
Each week, we'll read through your mails (and the ones sent to OnSoftware Spain), we'll select the most interesting questions, and answer them here on the blog. We think it's a pretty good way of sharing knowledge with our readers, as well as a good way to find actual solutions to real problems.
So what are you waiting for? Ask OnSoftware now!
Read more »
If you're bored this weekend and the weather is wet and wild why not sit down and have a blast at a classic video game? Forget going out and buying a game for your console though, because some of the greatest titles new and old are available to download for free on your PC. Some are available as officially-licenced abandonware, while others are out-and-out copies, but I've put together a collection of top games that will keep you amused for the whole weekend. In fact, you'll probably end up calling in sick the whole of next week too.
If you want to be like Van Halen, you'll need a decent guitar tuner. Normally, I use an external electronic tuner but the problem is the batteries keep dying so I sometimes use my PC to tune it instead. You can download tuners that work simply by providing the right key for which you can match your guitar strings or those that go one step further and analyse how out of tune your guitar is. Whether you use the former or the latter depends on how tone deaf you are. Here are 5 top tuners to keep you rockin' all over the world.
Playing videogames is not just for kids any more. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 36.7% of game console owners in the United States are adults. Plus, more than half of them live with their family (spouse and at least one child). It seems then that game consoles should no longer be considered as children's toys. As these devices evolve into highly sophisticated entertainment systems, "families have incorporated them into their centralized home media centers, which include television, digital recording device, digital music player and the PC" said Carolyn Creekmore of Nielsen/NetRatings.
Microsoft seems to be well aware of this convergence towards a centralized home entertainment system, or at least this is what you can infer from the announcement that the Redmond guys released yesterday: the Live online gaming network, which so far was exclusive to Xbox players, will soon be opened for PC players too. Microsoft plans to launch Live for PC in May 8th, exactly the same day when Halo 2, the Xbox blockbuster, will be released for Windows Vista. In this way, the Live Xbox community will expand to another platform and enable PC gamers to play, compete and interact with the over six million Xbox gamers who already belong to it.
There will be two levels of PC Live membership: 'silver' is free and offers basic multiplayer functionalities, some social network tools and a single gamertag, while 'gold' features cross-platform gaming and other advanced multiplayer possibilities for a $49.95 monthly fee.
A month after the launch date, Microsoft will release the first game in which PC players will actually be able to join Live community: Shadowrun, a first-person shooter set in the near future where PC and Xbox gamers will enrol in cross-platform online battles of up to 16 players. Later on during 2007, Microsoft will also launch the Vista version of Uno, one of the most popular arcade games in Xbox Live, as one more step towards uniting videogamers across different gaming systems and platforms.
Read more »For those of us whose sights are trained on a computer screen all day long, reading in-depth articles on our favourite blogs or sifting through long emails is the last thing we want to do at the end of a day at the office. Imagine our delight then when we came across a program that promised to read all this text for us as we give our eyes a well-earned rest.
The beauty of TextAloud is that it not only reads out anything you copy and paste into the voice window but also allows you to save the resulting speech as an audio file. Effectively this means you can transform any web page, email or text document into a podcast to download to your MP3 player and listen to at your leisure. File sizes are kept to a minimum so it's possible to save entire novels as an audio file of less than 1Mb.
Read more »
Farewell to Android
Klout is FarmVille for grown-ups
Does Flash matter on mobile?
What is Twitter?