Author: Cyril Roger

The Christmas season is over but you’re probably still grinding through those new games. While some exciting consoles have been launched recently, the PC still plays host to countless reputable titles. Softonic has some real classics in store for you this week, among which are two of the greatest strategy games ever launched: Civilizations and Age of Empire. Let’s take you through them.

Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War, the latest in the series, gives you the chance to command some of the greatest empires in history: Rome, Greece, Persia and Egypt. You’ll have to organize your troops and set out your plans to become the dominant civilization on the planet. We really like the graphics, particularly the third-person perspectives, and the level of freedom the game gives you in developing your armies. Few feelings compare to that special rush you get from launching a massive attack on your enemies while you just sit back and watch events unfold.

Age of Empires III takes you to a different era and a different continent. Carry out various missions through Latin and North America, defending the Aztecs against the Spanish conquistadors or assisting Simon Bolivar with his South American revolution. The game is scenario-oriented and you’ll only be able to choose one side, that of Morgan Black and his family, but you’ll participate in many historic events that shaped the American continent.

Both of these games are thrilling historical military strategy games. Choosing the right one for you will depend on the era you’re interested in and whether you like to follow a scenario, or plan everything yourself. Or you just play them both.

When protecting your PC from online threats, any weapon you come across is welcome, especially if they can take care of what other security applications don’t. McAfee AVERT Stinger is a small virus extractor specialized in hunting the viruses listed by McAfee.

Because it is lightweight, the program saves you the hassle of big and cumbersome antivirus applications and you can easily run it in the background while you carry out another task. Just launch McAfee AVERT Stinger, select your directory, press the scan now button, and wait for the results to come. The application runs relatively quickly depending on the size of the directory you have chosen to scan and if McAfee AVERT Stinger finds any malware it will pop up on the screen. The application is very basic but it can scan self-extracting executables and compressed files and will automatically remove viruses it comes across. To find out which viruses McAfee AVERT Stinger recognizes just click on the list button and scroll the names of all malware recognized by the antivirus manufacturer.

Continue reading “McAfee AVERT Stinger hunts down viruses”

It was bound to happen, it just did. Four families have sued News Corp and the MySpace social networking site after their daughters were sexually assaulted by offenders they had met on the site.

In response, MySpace will release Zephyr, an application for parents to closely monitor the description their children use on the social networking site. The program should in principle help ensure that children or teenagers do not give away sensible information or enter a false profile (ie older age). Monkey Bites, however, sees through the monitoring app, claiming:

For all practical purposes Zephyr seems to do little more than possibly give MySpace some wiggle room in its many pending lawsuits.

And that’s not forgetting the skepticism Zephyr has received from other Web companies. According to MSNBC, both Facebook, the social network site and Xanga , a weblog community, declined to take part in Zephyr. Other bigger companies like Google or Yahoo have yet to say whether they will join.

While parents who install Zephyr on their PCs won’t be able to view the content posted on MySpace, they’ll be kept informed every time a profile is updated. The program will also let monitored users know that it’s keeping an eye on them. For this reason, you start to wonder if Zephyr might not instead lead teenage users of MySpace to move on to other social networking sites where they know their parents can’t monitor them. We’ll have to wait till June to test out Zephyr’s effectiveness and see the consequences of it on MySpace’s popularity.

If you’re on this blog there’s a good chance you know about alternative browsers like Firefox or Opera and that you probably even use them. You might know what tabs, extensions, session restore or pop-up blocking are but your web experience might not go farther than this. Here are some programs to improve your overall browsing experience:

1. ToolbarCop : Quickly uninstall all those unnecessary extensions
2. Ghostzilla : Browse undercover
3. Tor : Protect your privacy whenever you connect to the web
4. AI Roboform : Memorize passwords and form entries
5. DU Meter : Measure your bandwidth
6. Windows Live Writer : Desktop blogging
7. Bookmark Base : Export and carry your bookmarks
8. WikiReader : Open Wikipedia from anywhere
9. Quintura Search : A search query based on tag clouds
10. ted : Create your own schedule of TV series torrents

We tried to list all sorts of apps, from security to bookmarking, searching or blogging. If there’s a program you use while browsing and that you really like, let us know!

To coincide with the release of Sid Meier’s Railroads, the original Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (SMRT), straight from 1990, has now been made freely available in full. The game takes you back to the 19th century where you create your own transportation empire by building railroads, buying new trains and setting up connections between cities.

Those of you who are worried about compatibility: fear not. You won’t have to access DOS to play the game because it features its very own DOS Box. Original gamers of SMRT, will fondly appreciate the minimalistic graphics, midi country music, pixelized area maps, but most of all, the crux of the whole series, managing your money and assets. You start off with a million dollars (of which you’ll have to pay back $500,000) and must first choose a good location, build a station and then start laying tracks. You’ll soon become familiar with all the varieties of locomotives, like the Norris, Crocodile or Ten-Wheeler. The game really starts to get addictive when you see your network of railroads reach more and more cities and your income start to rise. Depending on the level of difficulty you choose, you’ll also come across rough competition and you’ll have to protect your assets from truly aggressive entrepreneurs.

Even though the graphics don’t compare to what you’ll find in the latest release, Sid Meier’s Railroads, the simulation aspect of Railroad Tycoon is as much thrilling now as it was 10 year ago. All aboard!