To some, speedball is a dangerous mix of illicit substances but to others it’s an excellent futuristic sports title developed by the Bitmap Brothers in 1991. Mix the rules of football, handball and rugby, add two teams of psycho-cyborg gladiators locked in a metal arena with a metal ball and you get speedball. The game consists of passing the ball around to reach the other team’s net and score more goals than them in a limited amount of time. However, unlike the sports we play nowadays in speedball you can joyfully mangle your opponents to get the ball back.
Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe is the second release in the series. Teams now have 9 players instead of 6 and you can hit targets on the walls to get bonuses. There’s also a number of power ups and other options strewn across the gaming field. The reason we’ve decided to cover this classic is that Kotaku announced today that Frogster Interactive would be releasing a sequel in the summer of 2007. The gaming blog is worried that it will turn out to be a bad “Unreal Tournament Mod”, however with Bitmap Brother Mike Montgomery on the team we can hope for the original spirit of Speedball to carry on.
What about improvements? Will the game environment move on from 2D to 3D? Any chances of multiplayer or online gaming? What about the tournament modes? Will new challenges be introduced? We’ll just have to wait till this summer to see.
Bandwidth speeds (or lack thereof) are often a mystery. Your provider says one thing but reality is often another. Sometimes problems will be due to the large number of people logged on at once, other times it’s your provider cramming too many people through one data line. However, if you’re suffering from some severely fluctuating bandwidth speeds that are really getting you down, it might be worth using a few bandwidth analyser tools to get to the bottom of it.
With so much downloadable audio visual material on the internet, people are getting more creative with their content. Just look at the millions of submissions to You Tube by wannabe directors and home movie aficionados. If you’re not ready to take on heavy duty editing programs such as Adobe Premiere, there are a few cut and splice programs out there to help you.
Most of us who own an MP3 player or play digital music on a computer will admit that it’s possible to get a little precious over your audio collection. There’s something very satisfying about having a hoard of music with the correct track and album names for each song. Not only does it look a lot cleaner in your player, but it makes it a darn sight easier to organize your collection and manage playlists. Ensuring that all the tags in your audio files are correct can be a daunting task, but there’s plenty of software around that will make a much quicker job of it.
Nowadays, both Firefox and Internet Explorer have pretty good inbuilt popup blockers that catch most of those annoying ads. However, there are always some sites that seem to squeeze them through, especially annoying things like Java applets which tend to be slow to load. With this in mind, we bring you a selection of the most popular pop-up blockers at Softonic to help you stop those bad boys.
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In this era where every waking moment of your life seems to be captured on a digital camera, it’s a good idea to sort yourself out with a graphics editor in order to ensure that your images are in immaculate condition. There are plenty of software tools around that allow you to tweak your pictures to make them clearer, sharper and generally more lifelike than the original shot.
Have you ever been in the position where you’ve needed to access a PC from a different location? Maybe you urgently need a file from your PC, or a friend needs your technical help or maybe your stuck behind a firewall that will only let you access certain sites. Thankfully, there are a few programs out there that can help you establish a connection with another PC and allow you to do everything from reinstalling programs to simply just snoop around their desktop.
If you think web apps are just a simple, stripped-down version of real desktop programs, you’d better change your mind – and soon! After Google’s first steps on the online software world with tools like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets, here comes another bigwig: Adobe Photoshop.
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