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::SAM & MAX EPISODE 4: ABE LINCOLN MUST DIE!::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
Finally, a video game has come along with the courage to eliminate one of the greatest threats against society today: “Honest” Abe Lincoln . The Good: Good puzzles; funny script; great voice acting. The Bad: Recycles the same locations from the previous three episodes. Sam & Max, Telltale’s episodic adventure series, is now up to its fourth episode with Abe Lincoln Must Die! If you haven’t been keeping up, the main thing moving the story along so far has been teddy bears with the power to hypnotize, which has led to all sorts of weird happenings, from talk show hosts keeping their audiences hostage to rogue child stars wreaking havoc. The dog-and-rabbit detective duo get one layer deeper in Episode 4, which makes some light changes to the formula that make this feel a bit fresher than the previous episodes. But since this is an episodic game and we’re already more than halfway through the first “season” of six episodes, at this point you...
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::JADE EMPIRE: SPECIAL EDITION::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
The long-awaited PC version of Jade Empire retains the great story and setting of the Xbox original, but the streamlined combat and core design haven’t aged quite as gracefully. The Good: Complex story and characters rank among BioWare’s best; pretty graphics and superb voice acting bring the gameworld to life; alignment system is well designed and adds replay value. The Bad: Simplistic combat is unexceptional and unfulfilling; limited character-customization options make leveling up unexciting; only a scant few additions over the xbox version. PC gamers have been waiting patiently for almost two years for BioWare’s Asian-themed role-playing game to make it to their platform of choice. And in many ways, it was worth the delay for anyone who hasn’t already played the Xbox version. Jade Empire: Special Edit ion features a terrific story that, like most great tales, is as engaging now as it was when it was first told. It’s set in a marvelous mythological la...
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::ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 1.0::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Galen Fott  After a year-long public gestation period, Adobe Photo shop Lightroom software has attained “gold code” status and will soon be available to the world. Along with Apple’s Mac-only Aperture, the cross-platform Lightroom belongs to a new breed of digital photo software oriented around workflow: the process of getting the photos off your camera, organized, enhanced, and output to the medium of your choice. Lightroom by design works primarily (though not exclusively) with RAW-formatted images, and it certainly qualifies as an exceptionally useful and accomplished piece of software. But the real question for many digital photographers will be: “With Adobe Photos hop, Camera Raw, and Bridge already in my toolkit, why do I need this?” Many functions overlap among Lightroom and Adobe’s other three photo-editing programs, and the recent official rechristening of Lightroom, accomplished by prefacing the name with “Photoshop ,” does n...
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::MICROSOFT OFFICE LIVE::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Edward Mendelson  Office Live , Microsoft ’s suite of business-collaboration services complete with Web hosting, has finally emerged from its long beta test, in a new version that has a new, smoother, but still less-than-perfect interface. The learning curve remains steep, and some features that aren’t as user-friendly as Microsoft wants you to believe. Still, Office Live stands out against the competition by providing Web hosting with all versions of the service: the free Office Live Basics, the $19.95-per-month Office Live Essentials, and the $39.95- per-month Office Live Premium. Microsoft aims Office Live squarely at small businesses that currently have either no Web presence or only a low-impact Web site that the suite’s Web-building tools can convert into an eye-catching interactive site. Users of the paid versions get a downloadable accounting package and can place keyword-based ads on Microsoft’s Live Search. A business’s internal and collabora...
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::OPENMIND BUSINESS EDITION V2.0::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Robert P. Lipschutz  Open Mind Business Edit ion v2.0 tries to combine mind mapping?a free-flowing technique for generating ideas?with sophisticated task- and project-management features. Trying to unite two so radically different tasks presents serious conceptual and implementation challenges. Overall, I wasn’t thrilled with the result. I had difficulty moving from the fluid mind-mapping process to the more structured format of project planning. I also found disappointing shortcomings in the interface. You can export project plans to Microsoft Project, and some project managers might find a way to fit OpenMind into their daily workflow, but most users will be better served by using separate tools specifically designed for each purpose. Mind mapping helps you visually represent a thought process: You start with a central topic and branch off from there in all directions. The idea is to let your mind go where it will as each new subtopic seeds its own subtopics. Using software...
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::WORD 2007 MAP EDITOR FOR MINDJET MINDMANAGER::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Robert P. Lipschutz  I find mind-mapping software (brainstorming applications that let you visualize and build on ideas more easily) to be among the most useful and emotionally pleasing types of software?and Mind Mana ger Pro 6 ($349 direct, $280 street) is my favorite. It includes a full set of tools for creating maps with relationships, task info, and rich content, including hyperlinks, attached files, and graphics. I use it all the time for brainstorming, organizing ideas, and meeting preparation. But most of my colleagues don’t. The new Word 2007 Map Edit or for Mindjet MindManager, a free but unsupported download, provides a way to share and collaborate with coworkers who use Microsoft Word 2007.   Mind mapping helps you visually represent the thought process of brainstorming: People have drawn mind maps for many years, but until recently, it was always a pen and paper (or carcinogenic marker and whiteboard) pursuit. At its simplest, you start with a central topic and bra...
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::SUPREME COMMANDER::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Jason Ocampo  Supreme Comm ander delivers a deep and impressive strategy-gaming experience. The Good: Incredible, exhilarating scale; deep gameplay that provides countless ways to victory; intense multiplayer action unfolds like a fast-action chess match with guns. The Bad: Steep hardware requirements; large battles can bring the most powerful systems to their knees. When it comes to real-time strategy games, few developers have followed the philosophy that bigger is better. As such, the scale of RTS games has stayed mostly the same over the past decade. The battlefields never feel that large, and the focus is more on economics and tactics than it is on actual strategy. Well, Supreme Command er isn’t that kind of game. Instead, the long-awaited strategy game from Gas Powered Games is everything that was promised. This is a game that’s less concerned with the aesthetics of combat than it is with capturing a sense of awesome scale, though it does look amazing when armies ...
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::MAELSTROM::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Kevin VanOrd  Maelstrom can’t even get the basics right, and the few features that sound interesting on paper end up being completely useless. The Good: The water is pretty. The Bad: frightful pathfinding and artificial intelligence drive the gameplay straight into the ground; tacked-on third-person action mode is poorly implemented and totally unnecessary; the voice acting may be the worst you’ll hear all year. It’s a shame that the makers of 2004’s excellent and inventive real-time strategy game Perimeter couldn’t maintain their momentum. Maelstrom is a frustrating mess that showcases meaningless tacked-on features in lieu of functional RTS gameplay. It’s hard not to walk away with the feeling that KD Visions spent more of its time making pretty water graphics than it did making the game fun to play. The gist of Maelstrom’s single-player campaign is that a global catastrophe has left most of Earth underwater, and the human freedom fight...
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::POCKETSEARCH 2.1::
2007-03-06 06:45:04
By Jamie Lendino  Fast search can revolutionize the way you work, since you no longer need to know where a particular file is tucked away. This convenience, however, usually disappears once you leave your PC. Now that flash drives are reaching capacities of 4GB and higher, and people carry smartphones with gobs of available storage, you can lose files on these devices just as you can on a desktop computer. Gaviri Pocket Search aims to change all that, with what is billed as the first search program that works across all kinds of portable drives, not to mention Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.    I tested PocketSearch 2.1 on two PCs, a flash drive, and a smartphone. First, I installed PocketSearch onto a SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive, which was plugged into a Gateway MX3228 laptop PC. When I first launched the program (straight from the flash drive), it took about a minute to index 250MB worth of heavily varied content located on the Cruzer Micro. That’s not a bad...