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In
the new PCFormat
March
2010
The
Motherboard Awards – PCFormat puts
AM3, 1156 and 1366 socket motherboards through a new series of hoops for
your
general information and entertainment. Boards from Gigabyte, MSI and
ASUS go
head to head, showing you which is worthy of the Gold Award at the end
of the
day.
Finding
Laptop
Perfection – Want to buy a
laptop but are floundering about where to start with a machine that can
barely
be altered? Check out this month’s laptop feature where we detail just
what you
will have to look out for in a gaming, media or just general everyday
notebook.
The
Kings of
Gaming – PCFormat speaks
to John Carmack (that fine fellow who DOOMed us all), Sid Meier of Civ
fame,
Alexey Pajitnov who ruined offices everywhere with Tetris and Nolan
Bushnell,
who started the whole thing. See what these titans of gaming have to say
this
month.
Games!
Get
ready to get a little
dirty with DiRT 2, then a
tad messy as we look into the guts of the SAW game. A bit of virtual
life
shines through in our Sims 3 review and we also check out Torchlight,
Fatale,
Risen and a few more besides.
Wired!
Besides
our mobo roundup
there is a new Barracuda
HDD, an ASUS gaming notebook and a netbook from Sony. Mike explores the
HTC HD2
Android phone and gets a little cosy with a 250GB Verbatim pocket drive.
There
are also other notebooks, SSDs, a monitor and a computer mouse hiding
within
the pages somewhere.
The Usual Suspects
We go
up, up and away with
the Memes this month,
Luis is overly technical and as Grammar Nazi as ever and there are a
whack of
LANs courtesy of FRAG, Liberty, Mayhem and Organised Chaos. We’ve also
included
some of the very random SMS messages we’ve received lately. Is yours in
there?
On Sale Now!
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The recently released Silent Hunter 5 from publisher/developer Ubisoft,
which features their new always-online PC-phone-home DRM system has
apparently been cracked on the first day of release. If this is the
case it does rather put paid to the idea that the new and (some would
say) highly intrusive DRM will be any better at combatting piracy on
the PC platform.
We posted here yesterday that two Infinity Ward heads were possibly
fired from the studio by Activision for insubordination. The two men,
who have been fired, are now planning to sue the publisher for wrongful
dismissal; the rights to the Modern Warfare IP and for unpaid royalties
that they claim are due to them
IBM has developed a device called a nanophotonic avalanche
photodetector which is probably the coolest name since warp core. This
device allows for chips such as processors and chipset controllers to
communicate by means of light rather than electrical currents over
copper wires.
North Korea has developed its own operating system which is based on
Linux. According to a Russian student who attends Kim Il-sung
University on Pyongyang the OS, Red Star, has an interface similar to
Microsoft’s OS Windows
As mentioned yesterday, the details for AMD’s latest chipset have been
under embargo. That embargo ended this morning at 7am. Details of the
enthusiast 890FX chipset are still not available but here are the
details of the mainstream 890GX chipset.
Square
Enix and Eidos announced yesterday that the PC version of Just Cause 2
will feature advanced NVidia GPU support, with “…next-generation
lighting and water routines and full support for 3D Vision…”,
apparently making the already advanced title look even better.
Crytek, developers of the CryENGINE (Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis:
Warhead), has announced that its upcoming CryENGINE3 game engine will
feature full 3D support.
Urgent Evoke, an online game that launches today, is targeting
real-world results with their gameplay. Coming across as being closer
to a reality game show than a game, Urgent Evoke is a series of
challenges revolving around social entrepreneurship and is being backed
by the World Bank Institute
Activision may have canned Infinity Ward president Jason West and
studio head Vince Zampella. This is nothing but rumour at this point
but it is being reported that security arrived at Infinity Ward’s
offices following a meeting between Activision and the two studio heads
and that staff at IW have not seen either West or Zampella since
Reports are coming in of an error in old PS3 units which is wrecking
several sorts of functionality. Some players are unable to connect to
the Playstation Network, the Trophy system has been compromised and
other titles are unable to load at all.
