Knight Online World (USKO)

Knight Online is the largest, free to play MMORPG. This game was released world wide in 2002. At first it was called MyKO (Malaysian Knight Online), but it was later shut down due to the company's struggle with all of the excessive cheaters. But after MyKO completely went down, JPKO (Japanese KO) and KrKO (Korean Ko) quickly went up. After seeing how much of a success this game was, K2 Network (a United States gaming company) also put up a version of their own called Knight Online World or also known as USKO (United States Knight Online). Even though the USKO server is hosted in the US, the majority of the population is from Turkey. Having a lot of people play your game can be a good thing, having a lot of people that don't speak english can be a problem.

Having over 4.25 million players can lead to many problems, but can also bring you great things. Joshua Hong is the CEO of GamersFirst (the company that now owns USKO) has announced that he will be running for the governor of California. Hong says, "With the huge amount of support that my players have with all of my games, it has led me to want to run for office. If I can make people happy over a simple game, wait to see what I can do if I get even more power." Although he says he gets a great deal of support, USKO is known for its huge lack of customer support. It is raited a 1.8 / 5.0 stars with customer support.

Although the customer support is ranked very low, Knight Online has the highest raited PvP (Player vs Player) of all MMORPGs. Games like World of Warcraft and Sacred are perfect examples of how games make it to where certain skills have to be cast at certain times, rather than Knight Online has it set to where you have to be cordinated with both hands, and you have to have a great feel of rhythm. Skills in this game are more beneficiary at certain times, but the personal skill of "comboing", is what makes you stand out of the crowd. Comboing is where you use your skills, but you press R (auto-attack) and you stop the animation of your skill so you can use more skills in a shorter time period. Having a great combo seperates you from victory and death.

USKO has a dreadful system of providing the game with its gear (armor / weapon / accessories). Most games have many bosses which drop certain items, but USKO on the otherhand, any low level mob can drop low level gear, any medium level mob can drop medium and low level gear, ect... But when the gear drops, it drops at a +1 level. Each item goes though two sets of upgrading stages.
+1 - +10 normal
+1 - +31 reversed.
+7 normal = +1 Reversed
+8 normal = +5 Reversed
+9 normal = +11 Reversed
+10 normal = +21 Reversed
However, when you upgrade your items, it is simply based on luck. Each time you upgrade an item, the percentage in which the item has of successfully upgrading again goes down dramastically. You can buy an item called Trina's Piece (which is bought through the Power-Up store, that cost USD. (real money)), which doubles the percentage of success on the upgrade you choose to use it with. If you have the patience to sit and grind on a single group of mobs to farm (kill something over and over) for your gear, then you will make it far in this game.

Aliens vs. Predator

Back in 2004, when these two classic science fiction franchises first clashed on screen, it was immediately clear that hardcore fans of both series were going to be enraged by the outcome. This game is the an updated version of the 1999 classic, but that doesn't mean that there will be a drop in game design.

If there is one thing that Rebellion got right in their development of AvP, it is the trademark effects of the different series. From the groosm fatalities used by both aliens and predators, to the many sounds of each of the three species, everything sounds spot on to what you remember.

For as good as the AvP game sounds, the graphics have a hard time keeping pace. The texture work, mainly on the outdoor settings, really could have used some extra work. The detail in object's model and the frame rate has a hard time keeping up at times. The marine campaign looks better than the other two campaigns because of confined corridor spaces, but even there you won't find anything impressive. That said, no matter what kind of character you select, AvP does a solid job of pulling you into to that specific universe, something that people of the movie franchises are sure to enjoy.

Aliens vs. Predator presents you with three different single player campaigns for the three different races. The Marine Campaign is more of a first person shooter, straight forward campaign with a radar, lots of guns, and grenades; each of which has a healthy touch of the for mentioned authenticity of the movie. Now if only that authentic feel compared to some inspired FPS game design or perfected mechanics. The Alien campaign is more about using the creatures speed and hunting abilities, but the high rate of motion can be problematic in certain situations. The Alien campaign is all about the stealth abilities, and sneaking up on enemies to do fast, but very effective attacks.

The main problem with this game is the lack of different maps and abilities in the multiplayer mode. You only get to choose up to six maps and six adversarial modes, and only two campaign maps. Thankfully the campaign mode are varied enough that they will be fun for some time, providing you the time to master both species. Co-op with three others is fun for some time, but only have the option of playing two different maps grows tiresome quickly. My biggest complaint with the multiplayer is that there isn't any expandability for your characters. Even though you still rank up, you only unlock new skins, but not new abilities.

This game had high expectations due to the fact that the movie had so much success. But, the creators of this game got really sloppy and simply just wanted to make their deadline to when the game was suppose to be released. If the creators had mastered the mechanics of the melee species attack, I think this would have been a better ranked game. Also, the main part of a game now is how good the graphics are. In the movie there is a lot of special effects that makes the movie appear to be great. The game however looks like it was made with graphic generators that are about three years old. Even though the expectations were high, this game is one of the most poorly put together games of all time.

Left 4 Dead 2

It has only been one year, but the squeal to Valve's hit shooter, Left 4 Dead is already available. Should you be happy, furious, or mildly confused? Well if you are a Left 4 Dead fan, the good news is that Left 4 Dead 2 is pretty much better in every way. The new game has 5 brand new and thrilling campaigns, set in the American southeast, a cast of survivors with more personality than the previous lot, and a whole bunch of game play improvements. The real question is, if these refinements are worth the purchase of a new game.

Like the first game, Left 4 Dead 2 is made for fans all things zombie related, and people who like to kill zombies. Valve has made the bloodshed even more entertaining here by making noticeable graphical improvements, from the eerily lifelike way the zombies flail around as they run and stumble after you, to the way they are effected by gunfire. The game is incredibly gory, much more so than the first game.

Each of the new campaigns take place in brighter, more detailed, and more distinct settings than the first game. The Dark Carnival campaign is a standout mostly because of its frantic roller coaster sequence and a defense on a concert stage while rock music blares in the background. But the best part of the concert stage is that you can pick up electric guitars and take a couple swings at the zombies until your anger is completely released.

The games concept at its core is simple, you play as one of four human survivors and you have to fight your way through a horde of zombies to get to the end of the level. You can play by yourself while intelligent bots control the other 3 survivors. This is a far better game because even when you are playing with the bots, it feels like you are with a team of human controlled players.

A number weapon models have been added into the squeal as well, though many of them feel very similar. Really the big added feature is the melee weapons. Chainsaws, machetes, and electric guitars are just a few of the ways to keep the blood flowing, and though these may seem like a goofy, cosmic way of upgrading, they actually have a pretty significant impact on the gameplay. This makes it way easier to clear out any zombies that crowd in on you or a partner.

Also new are three boss type zombies. The Spitter's damaging acid blobs do serious damage over time, the Charger makes life unpleasant to anyone that he may run into, and the Jockey proves to be a general pain by wrestling character control away from which ever survivor he pounces on. To toss into the mix, the original four boss type zombies, which now have new attack combination make strategies harder in versus mode which is going to make fans really love. Also, the sequel comes with two new game types for online play, Scavenge and Realism Mode. Realism Mode makes the game harder than "Impossible Mode" which will require four friends who have military level communication to get through this one alive.

Left 4 dead 2 is a far more feature complete game than the first one and is a much better game overall. If you are sick of Left 4 Dead gameplay, or you just never cared about it to begin with; well this game probably isn't going to change your mind. But if the idea of teaming up to slaughter zombies still makes you excited, pick this game up immediately.

BattleField: Bad Company 2

The Soldiers of Bad Company are back, and they are bringing with them all the action, all the humor, and all the rampant destruction that made BattleField: Bad Company such an entertaining game; but this squeal doesn't pick up where the first game left off. Bad Company 2 is bigger and better than its predecessor and it packs one heck of a punch. The campaign is more focused and more exciting this time around; and though you still can't play cooperatively with a friend your wisecracking AI companions help insure that you will have a blast as you fight your way through beautiful, exotic locations.

The Campaign is really fun, but it is the online player that makes Bad Company 2 a real standout. Huge Maps, incredible destructibility, powerful vehicles, and excellent sound design all help create explosive and dynamic battlefields. Online competition demands skill, adaptability, and battlefield awareness; and the destruction you leave in your way makes the satisfaction of victory all the sweeter. This excellent multiplayer action, coupled with the entertaining campaign, make Bad Company 2 one of the best shooters around.

The beginning of Bad Company's second tour finds Serge, Marlow, Sweetwater, Hagard stationed in a wintery valley; supposedly serving out Serge's last tour of duty. As you might expect, it doesn't take long for things to turn south, literally and figuratively. You soon leave the snow capped mountains behind for the lush teaming jungle of Bolivia. The environments in Bad Company 2 are surprisingly detailed and beautiful; and the occasionally blurry textured doesn't keep the impressive visual presentation from injecting your adventure with a great sense of scope.

The sound design is even more impressive. From the muffled crunches of your boots in the snow, to the buzz of a mosquito in your ear, the audio really helps emerge you in your location. Nearby explosions rock your ears, and after awhile you will be able to identify individual guns by sound alone. The technical presentation is great across the board, and the visual improvements definitely help Bad Company 2 stand above its predecessor.

Of course, half the fun of scenery is blowing it up. Trees, barricades, and buildings of all shapes and sizes crumble and break realistically when exposed to gunfire or explosives. An enemy shooting you through a narrow window can be seriously unfair, until you use a m203 grenade to make that window a lot bigger. Snipers in tall towers can be dealt with similarly and it is remarkably satisfying to blast the building out from under roof topped enemies. Almost any building in the game can be completely leveled, killing anyone unlucky enough to be inside of it and giving you an invigorating feeling of destructive power.

The most engaging part of Bad Company 2 is the online team based multiplayer. You can have up to 24 players competing in squads in one of 3 match type (Attack / Defend headquarters, Controlling points in the map, and squad team death match). The different game types offer different flavors of combat, but the core action is incensing and engaging no matter what mode you play. The sound design continues to be a standout here, every gunshot, teammate exclamation, and engine rumble is a valuable clue.

Radeon HD 5970

Are you a computer gamer? If you are, then you can definitely relate to these following questions:
1) Which graphics card should I get?
2) How much RAM should I get?
3) What is the best operating system?
Well, with question #1, I can solve that question for you very easily. ATI has just finished releasing their 5000 series of graphics cards. With the 5000 series comes new and improved technology such as Direct-X 11 capability, better stock cooling systems, and quieter cards. The new ATI 5000 series blows the NVidia 200 and 300 series away, which was very unpredictable at the start of the making of the 5000 series cards.

Specifically the ATI 5970 HD 2gb graphics card dominates every other card made by any company that exist.What ATI has done with this card is taken two PCBs (Printed Circuit Board), mounted them on a single card to make a super fast card. It is basically having a crossfire configuration on a single card. Not only does that make it better than two cards crossfired, but it makes the card cooler (temperature), less wires to worry about, and it saves a lot of energy on your power supply and motherboard. Another great feature this card has is the PCI Express chip you can plug into your motherboard to make make the card more dominate instead of relying a little on your on-board graphics card. Also, This card has the first design with two extra heat exhaust fast at the end of the card to increase the air flow in the card. This card idols at about 35 degrees Celsius, and is at about 45 degrees Celsius with a game running. Normal cards run around 55 degrees Celsius while idoling, and about 70 degrees Celsius with a game running.



There is a couple of things that you need to take note of before you purchase the card. First of all the card is 13.5 inches long, which means if you don't have a "Full Tower Gaming Case," this card will NOT fit inside your computer. It will actually hang off the side of your motherboard by about two to three inches.



Many of the computer cases that are out on today's market are extremely small. When people who don't know much about computers look at purchasing a computer, they think that a smaller case is better; when in reality it is worse. That leads to trouble with your wires, a hotter case, and terrible air flow through the case. But, it is recommended that you either have a Coolermaster or ThermalTake gaming case when using this card. Obviously there are other cases that support this card, but those two brands are known for their huge cases. Also, with this card you need a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connector from your motherboard to your card. Even though it takes two power dfferent types of power pins, it is still more enegy efficicent because the voltage it takes is lower.

***The only downside of this card is the price. With great quality comes great pay. This card sells on www.newegg.com for $599-$699.***

But overall, this card preforms better than any combination of cards EXCEPT crossfired Radeon 5870s (which ends up costing way more money for a average of two FPS higher). If you want to look at facts for yourself, go to www.google.com and search: ATI 5970 HD 2gb benchmark. Every picture will show you the same exact thing; the ATI 5970 at top of the graph by a huge margin. On most of the graphs it shows all of the cards at their non-overclocked benchmarking, but ATI encourages everyone to overclock the 5970 because it has the power duel power supply pins, and the extreme amount of air flow on the cards to make sure that the card will never overheat when overclocking.

Main Pros:
1) Best Graphics Possible by using this card.
2) Coolest (temperature) card in the world. (the colder a card is the longer it last)
3) Direct-X 11 capable
4) Has the power to run THREE monitors at once.
5) The only 2gb graphics card on the market.
6) I-Finity feature (only accessable in few games as of now)

Portal

Try to imagine the following: You wake up in a small square room with walls are gray, no decorations, no doors, no people, and no memory of anything at all; it is simply you on the floor. After about thirty seconds of being awake, a computer-generated voice speaks to you, and welcoming you to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The voice is warning that while fun and learning are at the core of the Enrichment Center activities, serious injuries may occur due to... due to what? The voice breaks down and the lights dim, sowing the first seed of uncertainty.

Before Chell, the protagonist of Portal, can dwell on this, the first portal opens, allowing her to exit the warm, quite comfortable relaxation vault and step out into the cold, concrete corridors of Aperture Science. From her first step, she is watched only by cameras, reminiscent of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Oddysey. They are the only spectators of the happenings in Aperture Science. There aren't any humans inside the complex other than your character, and the observation rooms she finds are empty, and any signs of human activity are old and are non-existent.

Chell later finds out that she was nothing more than just a lab rat of sorts, a test subject. Each "test chamber" she enters, is reminiscent of mazes rats in when they try to find cheese, except these mazes are scaled up to the proportions of a human, and it is Chell who is apparently being watched. With nothing else to do, she participates in the tests, guided by the computer voice. In the second test chamber she acquires the item that will prove essential to her survival in the tests and beyond: the Aperture Science hand held Portal Device, a "weapon" that can generate portals on any flat surface, that she can walk through.
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This game is the new "futuristic" puzzle game. In this game that are about 50 different puzzles that you have to go through by simply only using a pistol (hand gun) and the portal device. The portal device works by simply putting two portals on the wall/floor. If you jump through the orange portal you come through the blue portal. If you jump through the blue portal you come through the orange portal.
Video to explain it:

The game was made with the half life 2 graphics generator and the controls are the same. Also, since it was made with the same generator, it will feel like Half Life 2 as well. Like most games that have came out in the past 2 years, you can buy it electronically from Steam or you can buy a physical copy of it in stores (electronically is still better because there is no possible way of losing the game).

System Requirements:
Minimum:
1.7 GHz Processor, 256MB RAM, DirectX 8 graphics card, Windows Vista/XP/2000, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
Recommended:
3.0 GHz Processor, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9 graphics card, Windows Vista/XP/2000, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the newest game out by Infinity Ward® and the squeal to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The game is taking place about five years after the end of Modern Warfare 1, where despite the efforts of Marine Force Recon and the SAS (Special Air Service), the Ultranationalists ultimately seize control of Russia and declare Imran Zakhaev a hero and martyr. Imran Zakhaev begins to preach consistently about how they are the world power and can take over any country, which leads to numerous attacks in Europe, and where terrorist strike, America will be there to control the situation.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 starts off in Afghanistan where you instantly meet the main character, the first character you play, U.S. Army Ranger Private First Class Joseph Allen. P.F.C. Allen is helping prevent the city being taken over by the insurgents, where he impresses Lieutenant General Shepherd with his combat skills and it gets him recruited into Task Force 141, an elite, multi-national counter-terrorism unit under Shepherd's command. Meanwhile, two other members of Task Force 141, Captain John "Soap" MacTavish and Sergeant Gary "Roach" Sanderson, scale a mountain of the Tian Shan to infiltrate an airbase in Kazakhstan to recover a lost ACS (Aerial Common Sensor, a reconnaissance aircraft airframe for the United States Army and Navy) module from a downed satellite.

Allen is later sent on an undercover mission in Russia for the CIA under the alias of "Alexei Borodin." Allen joins Makarov in a massacre of civilians at the Zakhaev International Airport in Moscow. It is soon revealed at the conclusion of the attack that Makarov is aware of Allen's true identity and before leaving, kills him to expose his identity as an American, leading the Russian police to believe that America was responsible for the attack. the Americans get highly offended by the whole situation, and they take their anger to the public which pretty much puts a bulls eye on the back of Americans. The Russians begin attacks close to Washington D.C. which leads to all hell breaking loose.

Pros:
1) 9.9/10 graphics (for PC)
2) Video Graphics DirectX 10 capable
3) Sound DirectX 10 capable
4) Amazing game play

Cons:
1) ***NO DEDICATED SERVERS - Online Play***
2) Poor host quality
3) Average 300 ms ping (99% of the time about 200-400)
4) There is no "picking best host" script

System Requirements:
· OS: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista (Windows 95/98/ME/2000 are unsupported)
· Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor or better supported
· Memory: 1 GB RAM
· Graphics: 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT or better or ATI Radeon 1600XT or better
· DirectX®: Microsoft DirectX(R) 9.0c
· Hard Drive: 12GB of free hard drive space
· Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
· Internet: Broadband connection and service required for Multiplayer Connectivity. Internet Connection required for activation.
· Co-op/Multiplayer Hosting: To host Co-op or MP matches, a 2Ghz dual-core or better processor is recommended.

*** Multiplayer Hosting requirements are VERY important, if somebody gets host with a terrible computer, everyone in that game suffers (high lag, FPS freezes, and you typically get disconnected).