Month: August 2007

I recently bought Tiger Woods PGA Tour for the PlayStation 2 and have become hooked on the gameplay and the challenge of capturing prize money and beating other pro golfers. I’ve realized that golf games in general have really improved on course rendering, ball and swing movement and even the feel of the different areas of courses. Tiger Woods still has a bit of an arcade feel, with the top spin effect and a few wacky playing fields, but on the whole it almost compensates not being on an actual golf course.

If you’ve left your clubs at home or forgotten your score card, you can turn to other fun alternatives on your PC. CustomPlay Golf will suit hardcore golfers looking for the peace and tranquility of their own course. Similarly, the excellent SimGolf lets you create and manage your own golf course, and become rich in the process.

If fantasy golf is what you’re into, the Albatross18 series offers two cartoon-like games you should like. Realms of Pangya takes place in an imaginary world where magic can influence your swing. The other Albatross18 version, Season Two, also takes places in Pangya, but has more of a classic feel to it. Make money, buy more items and customize your current character.

Minigolf might be shunned by serious golfers but is a fun alternative to the classic golf game. Mini Golf Mayhem provides a crazy park full of loops, pinball rings and other hazards to surpass as you try to sink your ball. 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures has some smoothly designed 3D characters and ludicrous environments like the Far West or Outer Space.

Whatever your handicap, if you’re fond of the little white ball, you should find something in your range among the games I’ve covered here.

Adobe have announced that the next official release of Flash Player (version 9 – codenamed ‘Moviestar’) will support the H.264 video codec, meaning high definition Flash movies are finally a possibility. Adobe have confirmed that the next Flash Player, currently in beta, will support 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264.

The bad news is you might have to upgrade your machine to enjoy it. Performance will vary from machine to machine but Adobe estimate that a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC with one or more processors will be needed to deliver the best quality. Another nice little touch is that Flash Player will go beyond FLV files supporting MPEG-4 files too meaning you’ll be able to watch Quicktime videos within Flash. Adobe have also announced that version 9 will support vector rendering, full screen mode with hardware scaling and support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA).

This is great news from Adobe although many people may be excluded if their machines are not high-spec enough. It offers some exciting possibilities though – maybe one day we’ll all be watching YouTube clips in high definition.

You’re the pilot of a helicopter with many missions to fly. You’re going to have to avoid enemy fire, fly under the radar and shoot as many bad guys as possible. There are over 100 missions so it’s a challenging game and the controls are great, it does feel like you’re flying a helicopter. Of course the shooting action is controlled through lock-ons plus you can use artillery strikes to wipe out as many enemies as possible.

We computer users can be a very trusting bunch, and many of us put our complete faith in the software we use, the web sites we visit and anything that comes out of Steve Jobs’s mouth. However, it’s important to stay paranoid, as Cyril found out when he investigated the disturbing phenomenon of software awards scams. He also blew the lid on online identity theft, revealing how you can protect yourself from having your very being cloned.

Meanwhile, our resident tipster, Elena has been busy imparting some truly reliable advice for using Google in new ways, making cool text effects in Photoshop and opening up more tabs in Firefox. She even found time to give the slick new download manager in Firefox 3 the once over.

If you’re at a loose end this weekend then check out some of the weird and wonderful ways we’ve been using software over the last week. Armed with nothing more than our PCs, I became a masterchef and wrote my own cookbook, Tom discovered the secrets of the Universe using the new Sky feature in Google Earth, and Tony pondered his imminent death after installing some health checking apps. Trust insideTonic to brighten up your weekend.

There’s a good joke I heard once about how people were worried about computer games affecting kids’ behaviour but, says the punchline, if that was the case teenagers would all be running round dark rooms, listening to techno and munching pills. It may be overstating the case to say Pac-Man has defined a generation, but the little yellow man keeps popping up time and time again. And now he’s back completely revolutionising science.

A new study using a rather nasty version of the classic arcade game has discovered the way the human brain reacts to imminent danger. By plugging the hungry fellow into the mains, scientists gave players an electric shock whenever they were captured by a blue ghost. The scientists found that when the threat was far away players used the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain developed for complex planning tasks, and when the predator was about to kill them their brains switched to the periaqueductal gray, the survival zone. It all seems fairly obvious stuff. I guess when the scientists were analysing the results the ‘thinking’ part of their brain was working. Then they probably switched to the ‘talking’ bit and after that perhaps the ‘writing’ and ‘colouring’ zones. However, if anyone knows how to get hold of this version of Pac-Man, please let me know.

Imagine if you could monitor a PC’s stats and automatically publish the status readings to a webpage. This is invaluable if you have to monitor a network remotely or just keep an eye on your PC whilst it’s downloading at home. CoolMon allows you to do exactly this displaying a whole host of information such as CPU, RAM, mother-board temperature and fan speeds. The tiny app can monitor up to 4 CPU’s at one time and can even display the total RAM remaining, IP addresses and laptop battery status for any PC at any time.

Of course, if you just want this information displayed for your own PC, it can do so discreetly in the corner of your desktop. What’s even cooler about Coolmon though is that there are loads of add-ons that extend it’s capabilities to such things as monitoring the weather, news and even your favourite TV schedules. This is a great all-in-one monitoring app which can help you keep track of your PC and beyond.

Have you ever wondered how you’d sound if you were a different gender? A robot maybe? Or even a cuckoo? Probably not although you’ll have a lot of fun finding out with MorphVOX Junior. The program is basically a free voice changing software that the developers claim is supposed to modify your voice to ‘match your personality’. I’m not sure about that but it’s certainly a great laugh – you can choose from hundreds of variations although the most interesting are the gender changes.

MorphVOX Junior is optimized for online games and is particularly useful if you’re playing role playing games and don’t want to reveal your true gender via the chat function. Other than that though, there’s not much point to it other than making prank calls and winding-up your friends. The program can also send out some rather annoying high pitch screams and bizarrely, drum rolls. If only this had been integrated with a music making program or other editing software, it would have been much more useful but you can still save your voice modulations and use the file in an external program.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a complete pack of utilities always at hand? This is what you get with WinInizio PenSuite, a nice collection of software tools that you can use from a USB memory device, so that you can carry it anywhere with you. The PenSuite can thus be used on any computer, without installing anything nor leaving any trace behind you.