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Wii oh my
Nintendo's latest console reviewed by a GIRL |
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Posted by Jeffrey Lee on 19:00, 1/10/2011
| Games, Retro, Reviews, RISC OS
 It's about time we had another one of these, isn't it? As you've probably guessed, this time I'm looking at Burn 'Out, an arcade-style racing game released by Oregan in 1995, and rather heavily influenced by the arcade classic Power Drift.
Continue reading "Oldschool Reviews - Burn 'Out"
| 2 comments in the forums |
Posted by Richard Goodwin on 18:00, 16/10/2007
| Hardware, Reviews, Mobile computing, Linux
A guilty secret: limited though they were, I used to love working with early Palm and Psion PDAs. Neal Stephonson wrote in his novel Cryptonomicon: Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb [...] wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. ...which stuck in my head as it described my situation at the time. Apart from the bit where Eb is an über-hacker and I was a junior Perl mangler, obviously. Screen-wise the Palm V was just low-res black on a sort of olive green, and getting data on to them usually required a precariously-balanced IR-capable mobile phone and a lot of patience (or the foresight to sync everything before leaving home), but a small, omni-present device that responded to the touch always seemed so much more satisfying than the mouse or the glidepoint. Fast forward a few years, and along comes the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet: a small device with a touchscreen, but updated for the 21 st century with wifi Internet access, a widescreen, full colour display, a proper Web browser and bluetooth connectivity. I'd looked at the proliferation of Windows-based PDAs over the years and they'd never appealed. Where the Palm and Psion devices felt like they'd been designed from the start with mobile computing in mind, WinCE always seemed like a big OS shoehorned into a little device, and wifi an afterthought if available at all. And don't get me started on small keyboards after the disaster that was the Psion Revo. Maybe this Linux-based device could put the fun back in to computing?
Continue reading "Review: Nokia N770 Internet Tablet"
| 13 comments in the forums |
Posted by Michael Drake on 22:30, 14/9/2007
| RISC OS, Software, Internet, Reviews
Parmesan is a new client for the popular MSN Messenger network, developed by Christian Ludlam. Released as freeware, the software brings new features to instant messaging on RISC OS. Chief among these are display pictures and nudges. The software also doubles as a versatile viewer for arbitrary XML files.
RISC OS has seen the release of several MSN Messenger clients over the years; two free clients (Natter and Messenger) and R-Comp's commercial product, Grapevine. A few years ago all of these clients fell foul of an upgrade to the MSN protocol which stopped RISC OS users from being able to connect to the chat network. To many users' dismay, RISC OS was left without a free MSN Messenger client, as only Grapevine was upgraded to support the new protocol. Happily, this distressing situation has, at last, been rectified with the release of Parmesan. In this article I'll take a look at Parmesan describe my experience of it. Finally, as a Grapevine owner, I will compare Parmesan with the commercial Grapevine application.
Continue reading "Freeware instant messaging client released"
| 23 comments in the forums |
Posted by Jeffrey Lee on 09:00, 9/4/2007
| Games, Retro, Reviews, RISC OS
 I figured it was about time for another oldschool review. This time I'll be talking about LASER, a game written by Mike Goldberg (and his cat) as part of his series of graphics programming articles in Acorn Computing magazine. The game was released on the subscription disc for the February 1994 issue of the magazine, along with a level editor so users could make their own puzzles.
Continue reading "Oldschool Reviews - LASER"
| 5 comments in the forums |
Posted by Andrew Poole on 17:00, 18/2/2007
| Games, Retro, Reviews, Education
 It seems such a long time ago that Acorn had their computers in most UK schools and even longer ago that I was sitting in a classroom playing games on the BBC Masters that the school had bought. Several games stand out in my memory and these include (in no particular order): Yellow Brick Road, Little Red Riding Hood and the one that I'm sure most of you who used school computers in the late 80s will remember, Granny's Garden. In this, the first of a series of articles, we'll be taking a look back at Yellow Brick Road.
Continue reading "School gaming from days gone by"
| 29 comments in the forums |
Posted by Phil Mellor on 12:00, 16/2/2007
| Nintendo, Internet, Games, Acorn, Reviews
 A couple of months have passed since the Wii was released in Europe. Even with some smashing launch games, such as Wii Sports, Twilight Princess and Rayman Raving Rabbids, the innovative 'channels' interface fell a little short of expectations beyond the Miis and Wii Shop. Nintendo's promise was of new channels designed to appeal to traditionally non-game playing family members, and to give everybody a compelling reason to regularly turn on the machine. Those channels have arrived - the most recent (and strange) appeared out of the blue earlier this week. Here's my review.
Continue reading "Nintendo's cunning Wiis"
| 4 comments in the forums |
Posted by Jeffrey Lee on 10:45, 26/1/2007
| Games, Retro, Reviews, RISC OS
 What better way to start a new series on reviews of old Acorn games than to start with one of the very first Acorn games I ever played? You are small, very small. This place is big, very big. Released in late 1993 by Virgo Software, SMALL was a 3D, texture-mapped maze exploration game. With 50 levels of increasing size, there where tens of hours of fun and frustration to be had, as you attempt to fight your way out of the hellhole that the Gods have sent you to as punishment for your arrogance. Although some people have scorned it for childish graphics, sound effects, and gameplay, it was obviously good enough to provide weeks of entertainment to a 10 year-old me and my family. But is it any good now?
Continue reading "Oldschool Reviews - SMALL"
| 9 comments in the forums |
Posted by Andrew Poole on 09:00, 7/1/2007
| Games, Retro, Reviews
The Video Games Guide, by Matt Fox (whom one assumes isn't the actor that plays Jack in Lost) is a 550 page guide to the good, the bad, the ugly and the obscure of video games from the past and present. The book itself is in a similar format to the many movie guides out there, and contains a short review for each game listed along with their year of release, the original platform they were released for and a rating out of a possible 5 stars. There are also a set of glossy pages in the centre of the book which contain screenshots of the (over 100) 5-star rated games.
Continue reading "Book: The Video Games Guide"
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