The UK's #1 Mobile Phone Recycling Comparison Site. Sell mobile phone handsets with leading phone recyclers - Envirofone, Mazuma & Fonebank

• Search for:

• Categories

  • Auto Tech
  • Consoles
  • Desktops & Laptops
  • Gadgets
  • Gaming
  • Graphics / Design
  • Hardware
  • Internet
  • Mobile
  • Multimedia
  • News
  • Operating Systems
  • Performance
  • Reviews
  • Security
  • Software
  • Technology
  • Tips & Tricks
  • Tutorials
  • Web publishing



• Affiliates

  • BlueHost Review
  • FatCow Reviews
  • Latest Mobile Phones
  • ReadersZone
  • Software Development
  • Wifi Antenna

• Recent Posts

  • Pirate Bay Being Blocked by AVG, Might Be Infected

    ---

  • Windows 7 Ultimate on the Acer Aspire One Netbook

    ---

  • Mosquitoes Getting Fried by Lasers, Literally

    ---

  • Making a Blinking LED Light

    ---

  • How to change an iPod Nano battery

    ---

• Random Posts

  • 2000 Watt Computer Power Supply

    ---

  • Apple iPhone 3G

    ---

  • 2010 Dodge Challenger Photos

    ---

  • 1927-1937 Classic Car Gallery

    ---

  • Lamborghini Photo Gallery

    ---

The first time I ever heard of Osmos was yesterday, when it was part of Steam’s Five Day Long Sale. Originally the game cost $9.99, but the sale brought it down to $2.00 – which is 80% off. After watching a trailer and looking at the great reviews and 81/100 metascore, I decided to buy it since it was only $2. I think I am done with about 70% of the game, after about two hours of gameplay. Here is the link to Osmos on Steam. Screenshots are below, followed by the review.

Osmos comes from a small developer – Hemisphere Games. The game, however, is very good. It is difficult to describe it. Basically, you are an orb. You absorb orbs smaller than you. You get absorbed by orbs larger than you. There is antimatter, which shrinks as it absorbs. There are repulsive orbs, which are pushed away from you. There are “living” orbs, which are like you, but computer controlled – they can move around and think. When you move, you give off small orbs and that causes you to shrink. This means you have to navigate the map wisely, conserving “fuel”.

This is like a puzzle game, combined with the first level of Spore. Except you have no weapons or defenses – you either eat or get eaten – and that only depends on strategy. This game has great visuals and a great atmosphere to it – considering everything is essentially an orb. The music might get repetitive, but at least it’s not generic music like you get in every other game these days. The soundtrack is nice and calming, and it perfectly complements the atmosphere of Osmos.

Osmos combines space with living organisms. There are some levels in which you orbit around a “star”, but you can still move. Some levels have other artificial intelligence. It’s a very cool concept, and it definitely makes Osmos unique. There are at least 14 main levels, and each of those has between two and four sub levels. I say “at least” because I don’t know if I have unlocked all of the levels yet, but I think I have. The levels get more difficult as you play the game, but I feel that it kind of gets tedious. For the most part, you just start off as a smaller orb, so it’s more difficult to advance – the goal of most levels is to “become huge,” which means become the biggest orb on the map. This gets boring – they should have included new types of orbs, and maybe implemented weapons and defenses like in Spore – but I guess that would make this a completely different game.

Another interesting part of the gameplay is that when you move, the orbs you expel as you shrink can be absorbed back by yourself or other orbs. This means when you are fleeing from another orb that’s about to absorb you, that orb absorbs the small orbs you give off, which makes the enemy orb bigger. So when you flee, you are giving the “enemy orb” an advantage.

This game is definitely not meant to be played in one sitting. This is for those times when you don’t feel like playing, say for example, Counter Strike, and just want some quick game to relax with. Osmos is the perfect game for that. I believe it will also have good replay value, since you won’t be able to replay a level in the same way, simply because of the number of orbs on the map that all interact with each other and with you all based on your movements.

In conclusion, I’ve said the word “orb” way too many times in this article. Also, in another conclusion, Osmos is a great game that is definitely worth $10. Getting it for $2 is a steal. Get it while it’s on sale through Steam. Without this sale, the world might have never found out about Osmos. Osmos is definitely up there with World of Goo on the list of great indie games. However, because of how unique it is, many people might not like it or will find it boring. Personally, the only thing I see wrong with Osmos is some of the later levels which just make you start off smaller, but don’t add any new content. I will rate Osmos an 8.5/10. Definitely worth buying.

I recently ordered a custom sticker from ArtsNow.com and here is a quick review.

For $1.99, you get a 5×3 inch “waterproof, weatherproof and fade proof” sticker “with an aggressive permanent adhesive.” I did not get a chance yet to test the ruggedness and stickiness of the sticker, but I plan to attach it to a freeride mountain bike, so it will eventually get a lot of abuse. If the sticker fails anytime soon, I will update this review. I don’t think it will though; it feels really tough.

Since this is a sticker there’s not much to review. The printing quality is bad and blurry. The blurriness is only noticed from one foot away or closer however. My home inkjet printer can make a much higher quality print. The colors are off from the original image I submitted, but that might be because I forgot to optimize it for printing when making it in Photoshop. I also was expecting it to be shiny, but it’s matte.

In conclusion, it’s cheap, but the quality is low. Shipping is straight from China, so it takes at least a week. The quality is alright for the price – most other custom sticker sites I found only let you buy in bulk. Look at the pictures below and judge for yourself. I did my best to optimize my point-and-shoot camera to show the true quality and color. The first picture is the original custom image I submitted, and the rest are of the actual sticker.

Oh and by the way, their custom mousepads also come out a bit blurry, but they’re a great value for the money.

I just bought an Acer Aspire One. I got this netbook on eBay, brand new, for $314 after Microsoft Bing Cashback. This was the cheapest netbook I could find that had a full size keyboard, which was the main selling point for me. I tried typing on netbooks with smaller keyboards before, and it was really hard.

The Acer Aspire One has an 11.6 inch screen running a resolution of 1366 x 768. That is a lot of resolution for such a small screen. My 19″ monitor runs 1440 x 900, which is just a bit higher. I got the Aspire One model with the 6 cell battery, 1.33GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive.

Here is a review after a few days of using this netbook. First off, it looks amazing. Acer designed this Aspire One really well. The cover is glossy on both sides, and the keyboard is matte. The keyboard looks great, and it looks like the keys are oversized. Come to think of it, it looks quite a lot like Apple’s new keyboards. As for the screen, as far as I know there is no matte option, but I could be wrong. I couldn’t find one. Still, when the brightness is turned up, you do not notice the reflections mostly, and it ends up looking better because of the richer colors made possible by the glossy finish. However, if it’s sunny and you’re sitting near a window, the glare is horrible. The cover is a fingerprint and dust magnet. It looks good, but if you want to keep it looking nice, you will have to clean it with a cloth every couple of days.

Going into functionality now, let’s start with the trackpad. This trackpad is a multi-gesture trackpad, letting you go back and forward between web pages, and… zooming? I turned the zoom gesture off, because I never zoom, and it got in the way of page navigation using two fingers. I don’t see any other useful features of the trackpad, although you can spend half an hour in the software setting up different things related to the touchpad, so that’s a big plus. You can customize every little thing on this trackpad. A downside, however, is the physical button – it’s too loud when you click it. As for the keyboard, there is not much to say – it’s a full sized keyboard that looks better than any laptop keyboard I’ve ever seen. It also feels great to type on, and I’m actually writing this review using the laptop.

The hardware in the Aspire One is slow, and that’s that. However, you cannot have a dual core that runs 10 hours on a single battery. It just has to be slow to last long. It lags just a tiny bit when playing high quality YouTube videos. It lags when dragging an empty Notepad window around the screen. The Intel GMA 500 graphics chip is weak, and the Intel Atom Z520 is slow. Having said that, you must know what you’re buying, and netbooks aren’t for gaming. It runs applications like Firefox and Microsoft Word 2007 just fine, taking a few seconds to start each one. This is a good trade of performance for battery life in my opinion. The 6 cell battery is rated for 8 hours of life, but the Windows XP power meter shows 10 hours remaining with the screen brightness on 3/10, WiFi turned on, and browsing the web. If you are going to be using this netbook for school, you most likely won’t need to bring the charger with you. And to finish off the hardware section of this review, the WiFi is great – it catches my router’s signal at a place where no other laptop, cellphone, or desktop with wifi adapter can get a signal. The Aspire One is also very quiet, and I don’t think it even runs the fan when it’s not plugged in. Weighing around 3 pounds, I can actually keep it on my lap without having to worry about getting burns on my legs – it’s the coolest-running laptop I’ve ever used. And I almost forgot about the webcam – I will never use it, but the quality is decent (but still worse than my cell phone).

Now, normally when reviewing a computer I wouldn’t even mention software, as it is installed separately and has nothing to do with the hardware itself. However, since this netbook doesn’t have an optical drive and it would be too much work to make a bootable USB drive, I didn’t reinstall Windows on it. I decided to get rid of the crapware manually. It took five hours. The amount of crap software that was bundled with this computer was astonishing. There were about 30 game trials, a bunch of Acer software, a trial of Office, Microsoft Works, DVD software, messengers, and the list can go on. Now really, they installed PowerDVD when this laptop doesn’t even have a DVD drive. It was incredible slow when I first booted it up. After five hours I managed to remove everything, and I am certain it now runs twice as fast without 15 programs running in the background. I really hope Acer got paid large amounts of money to install this much CRAP on this computer. And it’s a shame because 99% of people will never experience the full speed of their computer because they don’t know about the software that’s running in the background, and that they don’t need any of it. This preinstalled crapware is by far the worst part about the Acer Aspire One.

Now here are a few of the things I did to optimize the computer, make it a lot faster, and then a summary. I changed the Windows style to Classic. I removed all the crapware that came with the computer and ran CCleaner and msconfig to optimize startup. I replaced McAfee with AVG Free, and Adobe Reader with Foxit Reader. The only Acer software I kept was Launch Manager, which makes all the media keys work properly.

In conclusion, the Acer Aspire One A0751h looks great, is slow, lasts 8+ hours as advertised, has great WiFi reception, and comes with a lot of crapware. Buy this netbook if you do not need it for gaming or watching movies. This is the perfect note-taking laptop for school. At the $380 MSRP it’s a good deal; at the $314 price I got it for, it’s a steal. I highly recommend this netbook if you need long battery life, light weight, low heat, etc. Do not expect speed or performance though, as that is the opposite of what this computer is designed for. If you have any questions about the Acer Aspire One 11.6″ feel free to ask in the comments below.

Looks – 10/10 (looks great, shiny, great keyboard, screen, etc)
Quality – 10/10 (everything is solid, the WiFi switch wobbles, but that’s minor)
Performance – 3/10 (however, this is what enables long battery life)
Battery Life – 10/10 (Windows XP says 10 hours, but I can get it to 11 if I need to)
Software – 2/10 (the crapware is horrible, like a disease of the operating system)

image from fuel-game.com

“Surface specific handling” is named as one of the main features in the Vehicles section of FUEL’s official web site. Well I sure hope so, as every game I can remember from the past ten years has had surface specific handling. Ever driven off the track in any racing game? Slows you down, right? That’s surface specific handling.

Let’s get straight to the review. If you don’t know what FUEL is supposed to be, check the link above. FUEL is one of those games that sounds like a great concept but the final product is the opposite of what it should have been. A game where you can roam thousands of miles of land on quads, dirt bikes, race cars, buggies, trucks, etc. So where does it fail? Everywhere.

I’ll start with the vehicles. Some of them look like they’ve been built from trash picked up in a post- apocalyptic dumpster. That’s fine, but what theme are they going for here? What’s with all the broken, rusted cars on the sides of the roads? How do they fit in? This certainly isn’t the worst part of the game, but it just doesn’t make much sense.

Next part is the gameplay. It feels like a Wii port. The gameplay is way past arcade style; it’s like arcade dumbed down for five year olds. You can make 180 degree u-turns going 110mph on a dirt bike. Every time you even touch the left or right arrow keys to turn, the screen violently turns and the vehicle you’re using makes a sharp swerve, almost as if trying to turn off the trail. Going downhill, you’ll accelerate from 80 to 90 miles an hour in one second, and then it suddenly stops accelerating and you can’t go one mile faster, even though you’re going down a 70 degree cliff. Grand Theft Auto (the first one. yes, the one that was two-dimensional.) has more realistic handling and gameplay.

How can it get worse? The sounds. Engine noises sound nothing like engines. Every time a vehicle reaches redline, it makes this dumb clicking noise which sounds nothing like a rev limiter or an engine that’s reached max RPM. It sounds like a clock ticking, but about fifty times faster. And that’s another thing, nothing actually stops at redline. All vehicles rev past redline, almost to the end of the gauge, then shift up, then the arrow shoots back to a bit past redline and it continues. It only switches gears when it’s way past redline. And there is no manual option, so you’re stuck with this. The in-game music is also horrible. You don’t expect much good music from games, but this is some of the most boring generic music I’ve heard. I’d rather listen to static from an old analog TV.

And then there is the actual racing part. You’re one minute behind the first one or two computer controlled riders, and then 500 feet before the finish line you always somehow blow past them. This happens in every race. The AI players accelerate too fast for the vehicle they’re using and you can’t catch up no matter the shortcuts you take, and then when you’re getting closer to the finish line you easily pass them. The AI is also pretty dumb, trying to climb hills on sharp turns and getting stuck, running into trees and obstacles, etc.

Bugs. At least I think they are. So far I’ve managed to go through a guard rail and through a building. I’ve also went through some trees, jumped off of others, bounced off of some, and crashed into the rest. Most crashes automatically respawn you, so the damage you get is pretty much pointless. I’ve also crashed while landing a jump onto flat land with both wheels level – as soon as I touched the ground, it respawned me. I’ve also been respawned once for no reason at all – I was going straight on a paved road and all of a sudden I get respawned. And no I’m not pressing the respawn key accidentally because I remapped all the keys. The stock key configuration was completely idiotic. Space was gas, Ctrl was brake, Zero on the number pad was handbrake, and turning was with the arrow keys. And on the menu, you have to press T and Y to switch between the menu items and you can’t remap those keys. That’s completely stupid.

Graphics are usually important to me in a game. The graphics in FUEL are good yet bad at the same time. Sitting ten feet back from your computer screen the game looks great. However, if you take a look at normal viewing distance, the textures are blurry, antialiasing just makes everything look blurry, a lot of edges aren’t antialiased at all, the vehicle tires don’t look like they make any contact with the ground, and I could go on about more minor things. To top it off, the game won’t even let you change the settings, so I don’t even know if I’m running at full settings or not. There are only four choices apart from the resolution, antialiasing, and filtering, and they are normal maps, dirt maps, occlusion, and shadow maps.

In conclusion. The vehicles look fun and there’s a big selection, but a lot of them are just weird and don’t make sense in the setting and theme. Gameplay sucks big time and it feels like this was designed for little kids to play on their Wiis. The sounds are terrible and boring. Racing makes the AI do stupid things, and the AI is stupid in general. The game is full of bugs and stupid things you can’t control but should be able to, like auto-respawn, manual or auto transmission, etc. Graphics look bad except when you’re racing, which makes them the best part of the game. And that’s not saying much because they still look worse than GRID or DIRT, Codemasters’s previous two racing games. I also didn’t mention anywhere that the open world is pointless. There’s nothing to do that’s actually fun, and 97% of the land is the same. You can’t do any tricks when getting air (yet the game automatically does tricks for you for some reason).

My grade: 3/10. If you’re looking for something fun, go play Twisted Metal. If you’re looking for a racing game, play NFS, GRID, DIRT, etc. If you want to roam about offroad and do stunts on ATVs, dirt bikes, cars, trucks, and the rest, go play GTA. FUEL is a waste of time, and I will be uninstalling it shortly. The concept sounds great but the game fails at everything it tries to do.

Google Chrome was released only a few days ago and it has already gained more than 1% market share. But all this means is that people downloaded it to try it out, not to make it their new browser. This also shows why Chrome took away from Firefox’s market share and not Internet Explorer’s – because only tech-savvy users downloaded it, since Chrome is just a beta, and we all know IE users aren’t as tech-savvy (no offense if you’re using IE because of personal preference).

So the point here is that Chrome was downloaded and used so much in such a short time because people wanted to try it out. It doesn’t mean it’s better than Firefox or any other browser. It’s a beta with almost no features.

Chrome has a very high potential to become a superior browser. It is fast and very lightweight. But this might be because of its lack of features. It doesn’t even have middle click scrolling yet. Chrome is no where near ready for full time use. And by the time it gets features and addons, and goes out of beta, Firefox will probably be on version 4.

Final review – Chrome has lots of potential, but it’s not ready to be your everyday browser. It has gained significant market share because mostly Firefox users wanted to give it a try, since it’s from Google, so it has to be good. I will be trying Chrome again in a few months, after it gets patched and updated more. I don’t expect it to go out of beta for at least two years.

And for most people disliking the blue theme, this is how it looks in Vista:

The Sandisk Sansa e250 is a budget MP3 player that can be had for under $30 if you know where to look. I got one from Woot.com for $34.99 shipped. I have had this MP3 player for almost eight months.

The build quality of the Sandisk Sansa e250 is good. It has a nice, sleek front cover that doesn’t scratch easily, and a matte dark silver back. Four screws are visible on the back. The scroll wheel on the front has a bright blue backlight. It looks like it’s lit in four places, and it’s not a perfectly even glow. This scroll wheel also wobbles a lot, and is the worst part of the build quality section. Everything else is solid. There is also a voice recorded and a slot for a micro SD card if you want to expand the memory. The stock headphones are terrible and belong in your trash can right away. They are worse than airline headphones.

On the software side, the e250 has a radio, and of course an MP3 player. The MP3 player displays the filenames of the songs, not the embedded artist and song name information like an iPod does. The software is also very buggy. It does not want to turn on a lot of the time, and sometimes it doesn’t turn off. When charging, it often doesn’t charge at all and flashes a low battery warning. Also when charging, the backlight on the screen stays on, which can be annoying if you want to leave it to charge overnight. And if you turn off your computer while charging, the backlight will stay on even though it’s not charging anymore – depleting the whole battery.

The software is terrible, and it makes the whole MP3 player terrible. Of course you can load up some custom firmware and software on it, but this review is for the stock MP3 player since most people won’t be changing software. The interface of the stock software is ugly, buggy, and overall crap. If it wasn’t for the software and the wobbly scroll wheel, I would say this little 2GB Sandisk Sansa e250 is a better buy than my iPod Nano 4GB was. Overall I rate the Sandisk Sansa e250 6.5/10. And this is because of the ultra low price. If you put custom software and firmware on it, along with some decent headphones, it would be 9.5/10. Read reviews, compare cheapest prices of Sandisk, Creative, Archos, Philips and Latest MP4 Players at MP4playerreviews.co.uk.

A lot of people are praising Firefox 3 and have been using it since the first beta. I recommended not to use it before. But now, the final version of Firefox 3 is only four days away, so the final version will be mostly the same as Release Candidate 3. However, RC 3 is still not ready, and made me go back to Firefox 2.

I installed Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 yesterday, and have been using it most of yesterday and most of today. During these two days, I have found obvious and very annoying bugs that make it impossible for me to use it. Actually come to think of it, I don’t know if they are obvious, because I haven’t seen anyone else report these problems. But I don’t think they’re exclusive to my computer.

My first problem was with Google. Firefox 3 RC 3 didn’t seem to be accepting cookies from Google. How strange, because I haven’t changed absolutely anything on my computer except installing FF3. I checked on my other computer running FF2, and all was fine. The problem was that I had to log in each time I opened Firefox. It wouldn’t keep me logged in, it kept logging me out. And it was forgetting that my home page was set to iGoogle, as it wouldn’t load iGoogle unless I clicked the link from the Google classic home page. Every time I navigated away from Google and then back to it, it logged me out and took me to Google classic.

Another thing was plugins not working. I installed a beta version of FireFTP, but there was no replacement for Fasterfox. Firefox became notably slower without Fasterfox, even after tweaking the about:config settings.

Speaking of speed, it didn’t seem any faster in loading online apps like Gmail. It took the same amount of time to load Gmail, Digg, and other script-heavy sites. Add to this the lack of Fasterfox, and Firefox 3 RC3 became slower than Firefox 2, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Continuing on with the problems, when writing the previous post here on Wordplop, I noticed there was no spell check. They certainly didn’t take out the feature, which so many people praise and depend on, so it must be a bug. Once again I don’t know if it’s only happening on my computer or others’ too, but I haven’t seen any other complaints like this. I also found spell check not working on forums and basically anywhere where there is a text box. It was working in all of these places with FF2, so it’s definitely Firefox 3’s problem.

The last bug I took note of before I decided to uninstall RC3 was that pressing the “Enter” (or “Return”) key while in a text field makes the entire page scroll to the top. So when I was making that last post here, every time I hit “Enter” to make a new paragraph, the page jumped up. This was the last straw – I downloaded Firefox 2 and reinstalled it, deleting Firefox 3 RC 3.

These weren’t the only bugs or annoyances I found. There were also problems with history not being saved, toolbar clicks not registering, and toolbar submenus not opening on mouse hover.

I hope it’s not just me having these bugs, because then they will get fixed faster. These problems make it impossible to use Firefox daily. I really hope all of this gets fixed before release date, or I won’t be downloading Firefox 3.

Although not many people may know about this game, it has been around for a few years now. The first versions of Redlynx’s Trials games, back then known as Trial Bike, were available as a Java version online. They helped start the 2D flash bike games you see on every flash game site now.

The latest version of the Trials series is called Trials 2 Second Edition, and it was just released on Steam. Trials 2 SE only costs $9.99, which can make it the perfect game for those lazy evenings, or when you don’t have the time to play a whole round of CoD4 or CS:S.

Another thing regarding Trials is that it doesn’t belong into any familiar category of games. It’s a 3D game with 2D gameplay. Meaning the controls are still only the arrow keys for controlling the bike, yet the graphics are 3D. This makes the game kind of hard to judge, so it can’t be compared to any other game. The price also makes it seem like a mini-game, but it’s not.

Trials 2 Second Edition has great graphics. It incorporates 3D dynamic lighting effects, volumetric particle effects, bloom, motion blur, and shadows. It looks really good, and all of the effects give it a realistic feeling. You can take a look at the official screenshots, but the game looks better when you’re playing it. Sounds are much better than in previous versions of the game, but they’re still not the best.

The gameplay is the same as in previous versions of the game. However, this version of Trials is 3D. The gameplay just doesn’t seem to fit a 3D game. The bike doesn’t act realistically, and that is something that is expected of most good-looking 3D games. The game looks realistic, but doesn’t feel realistic. To go uphill you lean backwards. If you’re going uphill and lean forwards, you will slam your face on the ground, even though you’re going uphill. This type of gameplay is great for a game you play in your browser through flash or java, not a game you play fullscreen in 3D. It just doesn’t feel right.

The online part of Trials 2 Second Edition is stats and achievements. You can show your stats to your friends, and the top scores are listed on the game’s website.

Overall I have to say this game is great. This is one of the best arcade games I’ve played in a while. And with a $9.99 price tag, it is definitely worth the money. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the demo.

Yesterday the Race Driver GRID PC demo was released. You can download it at GamersHell. So I played it today and here is my review. Remember it is just a demo and doesn’t represent the quality of the final game, and so neither does this review.

GRID has almost the same gameplay as DIRT. You can probably say that GRID is the same thing as DIRT except it’s not off road and has different cars. However, compared to the other ToCA Race Driver games, GRID has the same type of handling. GRID is an arcade type of game, and I don’t think it is supposed to be a simulator. There are physics, but they’re not realistic.

Racing is fun but can also be annoying. Using a keyboard, it is hard to turn at high speed because if you let go of the gas and then press it again your car will beg to spin out. This can be solved with tiny taps on the gas key. I haven’t tried to play GRID with my Logitech MOMO wheel yet, but if it’s going to be anything like playing with a wheel in DIRT, I won’t even try.

The sounds are good. The crowd cheers you on when you’re driving, goes “ooohhhhhhh” when you crash, and boos you when you’re messing around and doing things like going the wrong way, spinning donuts, or burning out. The tire screeching is good, and the engine noise is decent. Gear shifting though sounds completely unrealistic, almost like crumpling a water bottle. And backfires are too quiet and also soft sounding.

The graphics are great but have some flaws. The edges of everything look blurred. The antialiasing seems flawed. It runs great at 4X MSAA, but anything above that and the menu goes at 1fps, making you ALT-F4 and restart the game in safe mode, and change back the settings. But at 4x AA, the edges look jagged yet blurry. Almost as if you’re using no AA at a very low resolution. But I was running it at my monitor’s native 1440×900. The cars look great though, and so does the track. And now that I think about it, DIRT had the same problem with looking blurry.

I ran this demo on Ultra settings at 1440×900 resolution with 4x antialiasing. I ran it on Vista Ultimate x64, E6600 CPU @ 3GHz, 4GB (2×2) RAM @ 830MHz, and an 8800GTS 320MB GPU @ stock speeds. It ran at about 50FPS, dropping into the 20’s when surrounded by lots of smoke (from burning out, drifting, etc).

In conclusion: the gameplay is very arcade, so if you like arcade type racers, this is great. Controls are decent on the keyboard. Sounds are mostly good. Graphics are great except for being blurry. And no it’s not the blur that’s making them like this, because it’s blurry even if you’re not moving. Blur isn’t supposed to be active when standing still. Since it’s a demo, you should just go download it here and see for yourself if you like it.

Check out a few screenshots I took below. Check out exclusive Nintendo Wii Game Console Review, Sony PlayStation 2, PS3 reviews at game-consoles.org.

Now, you can buy a Chinese made BMW for $5,000! Simple as that? No. As China continues to expand its market, selling things like appliances, shoes, and shirts, Chinese cars are also beginning to appear in the world market. Chinese cars aren’t much better than fake iPods and cell phones that are also made in China. Chinese brands like Chery Automobile, BYD, and Great Wall Motor Company (GWM) are copying major car manufacturers like Toyota, BMW, and General Motors (GM). Chinese engineers can now reverse-engineer established car manufacturers’ cars so well that an average consumer couldn’t really even tell the difference between a knock-off Chinese car, and its original counterpart.

Knock-off Chinese cars are built below the world standard. They fail crash tests miserably; many Chinese cars get a score of one star. Mechanically, they don’t last very long because they are “reverse-engineered;” they are not designed the same way that the engineers of the original non-knock-off cars designed their cars. It is also hard to find specific parts for Chinese automobiles since they are not widely used in the USA yet. For the price of a summer job’s pay, who wouldn’t want drive around in a brand new Chinese car with leather seats made to look like a BMW? I know I wouldn’t.