★Nickname: Archea ★CSBD username: @Archea ★Rank: semi-elder

In these times, getting to buy a processor or a graphics card at a normal price is almost an impossible mission, but there are times when new shipments arrive that bring the stock to the stores and, on days like today, in addition to a supply. This is the case of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor, an ideal CPU for gaming PCs that now not only has stock but you can save up to 50 euros compared to its normal sale price. AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors are succeeding - just like past generations - in the market because they provide an excellent performance / price balance, and high demand is causing in many cases to be in short supply and difficult to find. these CPUs in stock. Fortunately, the shortage of chips in CPUs is not as severe as in GPUs and there are times when large consignments restock store shelves, to the point that they can afford to put them on sale. We are facing a processor with six physical cores and twelve processing threads thanks to AMD's SMT technology; They operate at a base speed of 3.6 GHz and reach 4.6 GHz in turbo mode, delivering excellent performance for almost any task you want to run with them. These processors use TSMC's highly efficient 7nm lithography, allowing this powerful processor to have a TDP of just 65 watts, so you won't really need too powerful a heatsink, and indeed the AMD heatsink. The included Wraith Stealth will generally have enough to keep it warm. This processor continues to use the latest AMD AM4 platform, and includes support for dual-channel DDR4 RAM memory up to 3200 MHz natively (obviously you can increase this speed depending on your motherboard) and is compatible with PCI-Express 4.0, for what the latest generation graphics cards will give you their full potential, as well as the fastest NVMe SSDs of the moment that deliver and at speeds above 7,000 MB / s. Of course we are facing an unlocked processor, so it is suitable for you to overclock it if you want to squeeze even more the performance that it is capable of giving you. In this case, keep in mind that the operating temperature can skyrocket and therefore it would be recommended to purchase a third-party cooling solution to keep the CPU at an acceptable operating temperature. Offer price and availability At this moment you have the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor in stock and with an offer through which you can save 14% of its original price. GET IT FOR € 309.49 (14% DISCOUNT) The best discount that we have found in this processor is linked above, which represents a saving of 50 euros compared to its normal price; However, as it is likely that the stock "flies" at this price, we also leave you the Amazon offer that, although it is lower (it is 8%, the saving is 30 euros), they also have it in stock and at a reduced price .

Microsoft has presented this Tuesday in the framework of the Build 2021 developer conference the novelties in software, focused on improving business processes with the new Azure tools and accelerating the publication of applications in the cloud. Microsoft's annual developer conference has once again embraced a digital format to present its latest software and developer tools. In concert, the focus has been on developments in Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Windows and security aimed at accelerating the transformation of organizations. According to data provided by Microsoft, more than 95 percent of the world's largest companies use the Microsoft Cloud to run their businesses. To accelerate the modernization of their processes, developers have available Azure Metrics Advisor, a service that ingests time series data and uses machine learning technology to find anomalies in sensor-monitored processes, products or business metrics . For bots developed with Azure Bot Service, the company now allows adding voice and telephony capabilities and testing, debugging, and publishing bots across multiple channels with minimal code changes. And in Azure Cognitive Services, the Translator document translation feature is available in Azure Cognitive Services. Microsoft Graph Data Connect is now available in a pay-as-you-go model on Microsoft Azure, while the Excel-based programming language Microsoft Power Fx adds new capabilities that allow you to create natural language applications powered by GPT-3. As part of Build, Microsoft, along with Accenture, GitHub, and ThoughtWorks, has launched Green Software Foundation, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Linux Foundation that seeks to help the technology industry meet its sustainability responsibilities. Specifically, they have set a goal to reduce software emissions by 45 percent by 2030.

Game Informations : Developer: Greg Kasavin Platforms: PS2 Initial release date: June 9, 2004 at 2:27PM PDT Blitzkrieg, a pretty good 2003 tactical real-time strategy game set during--wait for it--World War II, is spawning a pair of expansion packs in 2004. The first of these releases, a stand-alone add-on called Burning Horizon, has been cranked out quickly by developer Nival Interactive and partner La Plata Studios, and it provides more of the same gameplay with the noteworthy absence of multiplayer modes. Solo missions here are so similar to those featured in the original that they might as well be outtakes from that game. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, since Blitzkrieg's captivating blend of real-time mouseslinging and realistic handling of WWII combat tactics still holds up. http://www.gamereactor.es/media/61/blitzkrieg_46148.jpg There still isn't any economic model or resource gathering to be found in Burning Horizon, so you just take the troops and hardware provided at the beginning of a mission and try to complete objectives with what you've got. Occasionally you'll be rewarded with reinforcements, but play overall is focused on making do with the starting allotment of soldiers, tanks, artillery, support units, and aerial support. The big difference here is the subject matter. Where the original Blitzkrieg missions saw you fighting across European battlefields that have been depicted in so many strategy games that they've practically lost all impact and relevance, here the main focus is on an 18-mission single-player campaign fought by German General Erwin Rommel. You fight with the Desert Fox from the beginning of the war in Belgium to the North African campaign and then back to Europe for the D-Day aftermath. All of the key battles in Rommel's career are featured, including Ardennes, Tobruk, El Alamein, and Sicily. There are also a number of one-off missions in other regions, including some in the Pacific that pit the Americans against the Japanese. In all, there are over two-dozen big missions in the expansion. These missions can provide a good several hours of gameplay, which is impressive for an expansion pack. However, it must be weighed against the complete absence of multiplayer modes. Nival and publisher CDV have excised all multiplayer options in Burning Horizon, presumably to make buying the somewhat inferior original game still an attractive option. Along with the new theaters of war comes around 50 new units. Most are just variations on familiar themes, like the Panzer IV tank and some new German artillery types. Others, however, are brand new. The US Marines, Japanese infantry, Japanese Zero fighter planes, and troops from nations such as Australia add a lot of spice to the original complement of 300 or so units; they also expand the scope of the game to encompass more of the war. Missions follow the same lines as those in the first game. It's vital to use units efficiently and effectively. Combat is much more realistic than it is in traditional RTS games. Despite the name of the series, in Burning Horizon you can't blitz the opposition or fight battles of attrition. You have to match units and send them into engagements that they will have a good shot at winning. This means that you can't band-select a mass of infantry and throw them into battle with even a small tank column--unless you want to see your troops splattered across the landscape. To avoid this fate, you have to appreciate the complexity of the combat engine. All units have appreciable strengths and weaknesses. Tanks, for instance, are powerful, but vulnerable to individual soldiers with grenades in close combat. Artillery pieces, even the mobile ones that don't need to be towed into place, are very slow moving and take forever to rotate into firing position. So while the artillery pieces can decimate single columns of advancing soldiers and armor, pincer movements take them out quite easily. Even the effectiveness of air support is limited by the ready availability of antiaircraft guns and the vulnerability of low-flying planes. Artificial intelligence appears improved over Blitzkrieg (a good thing due to the MIA multiplayer), although enemies are also placed in more intelligent locations on the maps. Most missions play out like intricate and incredibly difficult set-piece ambushes where you have to figure out where to place your infantry, artillery, and tanks. You then have to work out a sensible order of advance so that you'll be able to stand a chance of surviving a withering enemy barrage from dug-in enemy troops, machine-gun nests, and armor. It's impossible to surprise the enemy, too. You have to come up with impressive tactical approaches to each engagement, as there are no gimmicky back doors where you can show up unannounced and demolish an unprepared column of troops (this is particularly true in the later stages of the African campaign). The British have superior numbers and positioning in nearly every battle. If the real-life battle of Tobruk contained as many British tanks as the game portrays, it would be truly amazing that Rommel was actually able to win the day there. Often, there isn't much for the computer-controlled opponents to do aside from counter your attacks. Yet even in this limited manner these opponents show a great deal of cunning; they always sit back and wait for you to expose yourself. Computer units typically go on limited forays, usually to counter whatever offensive moves you might make. Once you've been beaten back, computer forces withdraw behind the fog of war and wait to see what you'll try next, or they will send in reinforcements if needed. For example, if you don't quickly seize artillery pieces after killing their operators, you often find the enemy trucking in fresh troops to man the abandoned weapons. Missions evolve like chess matches where you have to probe the enemy to decide on a plan of attack. A lot of tension is developed, although some of that is lost after you get about a dozen missions into the game and discover that all objectives are pretty much the same. These are mostly historical conflicts taken from the history books, so it's hard to complain about the realistic nature of the goals; however, there just isn't enough variety. At least the designers made some attempt to liven things up. The African mission where you have to hold the line against four successive British tank assaults is a standout, as is the intense El Alamein retreat under fire. Speaking of similarities, Burning Horizon looks and sounds exactly like Blitzkrieg. The developers didn't even bother to include the "Burning Horizon" subtitle on the main menu screen. Still, this isn't really a negative thing, because the graphics engine features extremely detailed units (tanks lurch to life and belch clouds of diesel dust, for example) and fully destructible landscapes. Audio effects include a bombastic musical score and lots of great incidental sound clips. There is a tremendous amount of German dialogue in the Rommel campaign, adding to the atmosphere and giving you the impression that you really are leading troops into battle like the famed Afrika Korps. Unfortunately, the fact that Burning Horizon so closely mimics its predecessor also means that Nival hasn't addressed some shortcomings. The control interface remains far too small, with tiny buttons crammed into a cramped panel that make it too easy to click the wrong function in the heat of battle. There isn't enough notification that units are under attack. Battles often end before you realize they've taken place, especially on the larger maps where you are forced to fight on more than one front at once. And battle sound effects are disappointingly flimsy, especially when you consider the amount of carnage depicted on most maps. But that's about it for the disappointments. Save the strange decision to remove multiplayer modes, Blitzkrieg: Burning Horizon is the ideal expansion pack. It amplifies the core concepts of the original game and ramps up both the AI and the difficulty without straying from the tactics-first philosophy that allows this series to stand apart from the RTS crowd. System Requirements OS: Windows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP. Processor: Pentium II 366 MHz. Memory: 64 MB RAM. Graphics: Riva TNT, 8 Mb. DirectX: versión 8.1.

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Nowadays gaming is practically not conceived without having good headphones to be able to enjoy the audio of the games without distractions; In this area we have many options on the market, but not all headphones claim to have been "designed for comfort" like the Corsair HS50 Pro, which are currently on sale at an interesting 21% discount. With a lightweight but durable construction, the Corsair HS50 Pro has been created to offer the maximum possible comfort, so that you can forget that you are wearing them to concentrate on the game and thus take your performance to the highest level. In addition, these stereo headphones come without frills but with maximum compatibility, since you can use them on PC, Mac, consoles (including Nintendo Switch) and even on smartphones, for which you can remove the microphone so it does not bother you. Corsair HS50 Pro, a gaming headset with maximum comfort Corsair HS50 Pro Stereo Headphones To achieve that “maximum comfort”, Corsair has used memory foam with memory effect in the earpads, so that even if you use them with glasses, they will not put pressure on the temples to prevent them from hurting you. The headband is adjustable and the earmuffs themselves are mobile, so it will automatically adapt to the size and shape of your head and this added to its low weight (324 grams) will make you forget that you are wearing them within minutes of put them on your head. Concentration on the game is increased thanks to its 50 mm speakers with neodymium magnets that promise high quality stereo sound and fidelity (its frequency response is 20 Hz to 20 KHz with a sensitivity of 116 dB), with crystal clear highs and mids and powerful bass. It is worth mentioning the fact that instead of incorporating an uncomfortable control console in the cable, Corsair has arranged the volume control and microphone mute button on the earpiece itself so that it is always closer to hand. Corsair hS50 Pro They incorporate a unidirectional noise-canceling microphone that, in addition, is removable and can be removed if, for example, you want to use these headphones to listen to music with your smartphone when you are on the street. As we have said before, they are compatible with PCs, consoles and basically any audio device that supports 3.5 mm minijack output. Offer price and availability The Corsair HS50 Pro gaming headphones are now on sale in Amazon Spain with a 21% discount, so they are left with a quite interesting price. As always, we must warn you that the offer is limited until the end of stocks, at which point they will return to their usual price, which is 15 euros more expensive than the price they have now, so it is a very good opportunity to acquire some gaming headphones from quality saving money.

The lossless audio rollout for subscribers to the Apple Music streaming service will take place in June, finally coming to HomePod and HomePod mini devices with a future update. Apple Music lossless audio support on HomePod and HomePod mini will arrive with a future update The company had developed and implemented AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), which offers users "audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original studio recording." This codec will be present in the Apple Music catalog along with the new ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) which, according to the company, "preserves every bit of the original audio file." Following the announcement of lossless audio in mid-May, Apple confirmed that it will not be available for all of its devices. For example, the AirPods, because they use the AAC standard via Bluetooth instead of the new ALAC, while in the case of the AirPod Max it is not possible because they do not have support for digital audio formats like Apple's new lossless, nor when they are used plugged in. Apple Music's lossless audio would also not initially be supported from HomePod-brand smart speakers, although they would incorporate the other announced technology: spatial audio with Dolby Atmos. Both spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos and lossless audio will be available to subscribers of the latest version of Apple Music starting in June, at no additional cost.

Game Informations : Developer: Greg Kasavin Platforms: PS2 Initial release date: April 14, 2006 at 5:47PM PDT The Commandos series dates back to 1998, and it was always a whole lot easier to like than it was to describe. While the Commandos trilogy looked and played like real-time strategy games, they combined tactical action and puzzlelike situations from an isometric perspective. The result was some tense, open-ended, and highly challenging scenarios. Now Commandos is back in--wait for it--a World War II-themed first-person shooter. This latest entry in the series attempts to integrate some of the distinguishing features of the previous Commandos into a fast-paced WWII action game, but it just doesn't execute on its ideas as well as a lot of other similar games do. The transition from strategy game to shooter has also served to limit the scope of Commandos Strike Force. In the previous games, you'd get to control a squad of specialized soldiers who could spread out to assault and sabotage huge Nazi compounds. In Strike Force, there are just three characters forming the squad (and they're nobody Commandos fans will recognize): a Green Beret, a sniper, and a spy. These guys combine some of the abilities of the other Commandos characters. For example, the sniper is also an expert with deadly throwing knives and happens to be a great swimmer, so he's like a cross between a sniper and a Marine. However, the game loses its predecessors' sense of you having to coordinate a complex invasion. Here you just tend to control one or two of these soldiers in a given mission, sneaking your way past Nazis or killing them in droves. The missions themselves still sometimes have an open-ended feel, such that you may have multiple objectives you can tackle in any order. But larger missions are divided up into multiple smaller zones, which diminishes the sense that you're deep behind enemy lines. The presentation isn't particularly compelling either, especially on the console versions, which look really bland. These missions feel like your average first-person shooter levels. Commandos Strike Force isn't particularly successful at telling you a compelling story, either, though it seems to try. The three soldiers have their own distinct personalities, from the wisecracking Lieutenant Hawkins (the sniper) to the slightly aloof Colonel Brown (the spy). But their interactions during between-mission cutscenes often seem disjointed and awkward (not to mention surprisingly filled with profanity for a T-rated game), and the missions themselves aren't always clearly related, so you really aren't drawn in from any of these respects. At least the characters play fairly distinctly. The Green Beret is a pretty generic gunner, the sniper's long-range rifle and throwing knives make him quite different, and the spy is able to take uniforms from dead enemies and infiltrate their ranks--he just needs to watch out for the piercing gaze of high-ranking enemy officers. This stuff may be conceptually interesting, but the quality of the underlying action isn't particularly impressive. The game's modeling of stealth is fairly simplistic, as you can just walk right up to an unsuspecting enemy as long as he's not looking your way. Keep a low profile by crouching, and even enemies looking straight at you will have a hard time seeing you. Enemies may be alarmed to find the dead bodies of their comrades, but since bodies simply disappear after a little while, this isn't much of a concern--just another knock against its sense of realism. Meanwhile, a highly convenient radar reveals all foes in the vicinity and often the direction they're looking in. This is useful while sneaking, but it feels almost like cheating when you're running and gunning, since you'll always know when there's an enemy around the next corner. Combine that with lousy, slow-on-the-draw enemy artificial intelligence, and you'll find that brute force rather than tactical prowess tends to be the path of least resistance through Commandos Strike Force. However, some missions force you to avoid detection, requiring you to slowly inch your way through a level you know you could probably just blast your way through if only the game let you. You can save anywhere, which will compel you to take a trial-and-error approach in each new situation. In addition to the single-player campaign, Commandos Strike Force offers an online multiplayer mode that's roughly the same on the PC, Xbox, and the PlayStation 2. You can theoretically get up to 16 players going on the PC or in a system link match on the Xbox, though the console versions are normally limited to an eight-player limit. But good luck finding people to play with. During a week's worth of attempts, we found only small handfuls of players on any of the given versions of the game. The matches we did get into felt laggy, meandering, and unfocused, lending themselves to lots of sniping. Playable modes include the typical deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as a mode called sabotage, in which spies may attempt to interrogate fallen foes for a code to sabotage the enemy base. Of the small numbers of people that were playing Commandos Strike Force online, next to no one seemed to be bothering to try to get a grip on this team-based mode. Commandos Strike Force isn't a bad game...it's just similar to but worse than a large number of other World War II shooters. Its main distinguishing features--the ability to control a couple of soldiers through open-ended levels--aren't all that remarkable, and the core action doesn't cut it either. Consider this one a casualty. System Requirements CPU: Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. CPU SPEED: 1.8 GHz. RAM: 512 MB. OS: Windows 2000/XP. VIDEO CARD: 100% DirectX 9.0c -compatible 64 Mb 3D Accelerated Card (GeForce 4Ti / Radeon 9 series) TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 64 MB. 3D: Yes. HARDWARE T&L: Yes.

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★Nickname: Saker ★CSBD username: @Saker ★Rank: Helper

v2, text and blur!

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The first out-of-order processor was the IBM POWER 1, which would be the basis for the RISC processors of the same name and the PowerPCs. Intel adopted this technology for the x86 in its Pentium Pro. Since then all PC CPUs make use of the out-of-order technology as one of the bases to get the maximum possible performance. The main concern in the design of processors is often not to get the most power, but the best performance when executing the instructions. We understand performance as the fact of approaching the theoretical ideal of a processor's operation. It is useless to have the most powerful CPU if, due to limitations, the only thing it has is the potential to be and is not. Two ways of dealing with parallelism TLP ILP IPC limit There are two ways to treat parallelism in the code of a program, these are thread-level parallelism or ILP and instructional parallelism or TLP. In the TLP, the code is divided into several subprograms, which are independent of the others and work asynchronously, that means that each of them does not depend on the code of the rest. When we are in a TLP processor, the key is that if an execution stop occurs for some reason then the TLP processor takes another of the execution threads and places the idle one on hold. ILP processors are different, their parallelism is instruction level and therefore in the same thread of execution, so they cannot cheat by putting the main thread on hold. Today in CPUs the two types of execution are combined, but the ILP is still exclusive to CPUs and it is where they get a great advantage in terms of serial code over fully parallelizable code. Amdahl Law We cannot forget that according to Amdahl's Law, a code is made up of parts in series, which can only be executed by one processor, and in parallel, which can be executed by several processors. However, not everything can be parallelized and there are serial parts of the code that require serial operation. In the last 15 years the concept has been developed in which parallel algorithms are executed in GPUs, whose cores are of the TLP type, while serial code is executed in CPUs that are of the ILP type. The greatest difficulty of in-order execution is in the conditional and jump instructions, since this will be executed when the condition occurs, greatly slowing down the speed of code execution. This is a huge problem when the number of stages in a processor is extremely high, which is what happens when a CPU runs at high clock speeds. The trap to achieve high clock speeds is to segment the resolution of instructions to the maximum with a large number of sub-stages of the instruction cycle. When a jump or erroneous condition occurs then a considerable number of instruction cycles are lost. Out-of-order, accelerating the ILP GELID-holder-retention-cpu-AM4 Out-of-order or execution out of order is the way in which the most advanced CPUs execute the code and it is thought to avoid the execution stops. As its name indicates, it consists of executing the instructions of a processor in a different order than those indicated in the code. The reason this is done is because each type of instruction has a type of execution unit assigned to it. Depending on the type of instruction, the CPU uses one type of execution unit or another, but these are limited. This can cause a stop in the execution, so what is done is to advance the next instruction in its execution, pointing in a memory or internal register which is the real order of the instructions, once they have been executed they are sent in back in the original order that they were in the code. Using the out-of-order allows you to expand the average number of instructions resolved per cycle and bring it closer to the ideal of performance. For example, the first Intel Pentium had in-order execution and was a CPU capable of working with two instructions against the 486 that could only work with one, but despite this, its performance due to stops was only 40% additional. Additional stages for out-of-order Out-of-order The implementation of out-of-order execution adds additional stages to the instruction cycle, which we already talked about in the article titled This is how your CPU executes the instructions given by the software, which you can find in HardZone.

Apple has added air quality measurement functionality to devices with the first beta of the next iOS 14.7 update in Spain, a tool that collects information on existing pollution in an area, which was introduced last year. The news has been picked up by 9to5Mac, where many Reddit users have reported the appearance of this feature in the Weather app pre-installed on iOS, on their iPhone phones. The manifestations of the appearance of the tool indicate that the function of the air quality index is present in the beta version of the update 14.7 of iOS, and 9to5Mac ensures that it is available in cities of Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Apple states on its official app page that the service uses the AQI air quality index, which assesses air quality concern levels from 0 to 500 from "good" to "dangerous", according to the Agency. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States.

Game Informations : Developer: Jordan Ramée Platforms: PS2 Initial release date: May 17, 2006 at 3:08PM PDT As far as egregious use of the word "remix" goes, Outlaw Volleyball Remixed is definitely guilty of abusing it, possibly even more so than the shudder-worthy Sprite Remix Aruba Jam. Going by the Hypnotix definition, a remix is when you take something that's old enough to walk (Outlaw Volleyball for the Xbox came out in 2003), add some inconsequential features (two new courts; dozens of new costume colors), and turn the graphics ugly. Remember when Russell Simmons had to have a fake funeral for "def?" Consider this the death knell for "remix." But, really, the most frustrating thing about Outlaw Volleyball Remixed is that, were it not for the stupid posturing and the fact that it's a clunky port of a 2-year-old title, it's not inherently that bad of a game. Like every other Outlaw game before it, Outlaw Volleyball Remixed operates under the misguided assumption that if you match an ESPN2-caliber sport with double entendres, overblown stereotypes, and boobies, boobies, boobies, you'll get a winning formula. Such a crass, juvenile attitude isn't inherently a bad thing, but the way it's presented here comes across as coldly calculated to capture a specific demographic. All the energy expended on edginess and irony seems like a waste, and it would've been better spent polishing the parts of the game that actually matter. The core mechanics of the volleyball game are pretty cut-and-dried, using an oscillating power meter to gauge your serves, using targets on the court surface to show where the ball is heading, and giving your spikes more power the longer you hold the button. In all, the gameplay is responsive, if a touch forgiving. Hard spikes are too easy to bump, and it's rare that you'll be unable to recover from a shot that ends up beyond the back line of the court, which can make for some lengthy volleys. There are a decent number of gameplay options available from the start, and there's a fair amount of unlockable content, too. For a quick, straightforward game of volleyball, there's the exhibition mode, which lets one to four players set a variety of play variables, including scoring conditions and the number of points needed to win. For an even quicker game, there's the random play mode, which is identical, except that your characters are randomly selected for you. The selection of characters available at the start is limited to just four, though you can unlock many more by playing through the lengthy single-player tour mode, which puts you through a series of competitions on each of the game's 12 courts. The unlockable characters have better stats than the starting four, though you can build up anyone's skills by going through the drill mode. This mode is essentially a series of minigames designed to test specific skills, such as serving, spiking, bumping, and blocking. It may sound like a boring tutorial mode, but the minigames can be both challenging and entertaining. If you'd prefer, though, there is also a dedicated boring tutorial mode, which gives you a noninteractive overview of the game's basic mechanics. It's fairly informative, although it would've been nice to test out the mechanics before jumping into an actual game. Plus, you'll likely get what you need faster by just opening up the manual or by simple trial and error. There's also online competitive support for Outlaw Volleyball Remixed, complete with an online leaderboard. There aren't an incredible number of people playing the game, and it also seems unfortunate that there's only support for one-on-one competition. Overall, the online support here is functional, if a bit spartan. The default camera angle in the game is clumsy, and it does a poor job of keeping the action in the center of the screen. Thankfully, there are a half-dozen options for the camera placement, though we found that the following camera, which rests behind the team that currently has possession of the ball and rotates dynamically from side to side, gave the best overall vantage point (despite the fact that it occasionally lags behind the action, creating a nauseating effect as it plays catch-up). Though the default is for one player on your team to always be controlled by the CPU, you can choose to alternate control between the two characters depending on who has possession of the ball. And under either setting you can change the character you're controlling while on defense with a quick shoulder-button tap. In keeping with the game's "extreme" presentation, there are a few specific mechanics in Outlaw Volleyball that set it apart from the other volleyball games on the market. Holding R1 will give your character a short burst of speed, which is a helpful crutch early on, and downright necessary when you start playing against some of your tougher opponents. Your players have momentum meters that increase as you score points and can be tapped to perform high-powered spikes and serves. Although the visual flourish given to these special attacks far outweighs their actual usefulness on the court. As you play, you'll regularly be given fight tokens, which can be activated just before a serve to put you and an opponent of your choice in a 2D fighting-game-style match. The player who wins the fight is given all of the other player's momentum. The fighting system is simple and clunky, consisting of a simple punch, a simple kick, and a simple block. Ultimately, all the gameplay mechanics that are used to set Outlaw Volleyball apart from other volleyball games, from the special attacks to the fighting system, feel like afterthoughts and don't really make the proceedings any more fun. If anything, they disrupt the pacing of the game and detract somewhat from the overall experience. At least you can toggle the fighting portion on or off. The original Outlaw Volleyball looked pretty good on the Xbox for its time, but thanks to a lengthy delay between releases and a ham-fisted port job, Outlaw Volleyball Remixed retains almost none of the luster of the original. The environments are distractingly blocky, full of too many right angles, and they're covered with dull, blurry textures with a tendency to shimmer. The two new courts introduced in Remixed look especially simplistic. The characters still retain their near-toxic levels of naughty, men's magazine-style sex appeal, but the character models feel more mechanical now, especially since everyone shares the exact same canned animations out on the court. The female characters are voluptuous to an idealized extreme and clad in the minimum amount of skintight Lycra that the law will allow. This may be enough to distract the pubescent frat boy demographic, but everyone else will be left with a kind of dirty-looking volleyball game. The sound design doesn't fair much better, as it is mostly dominated by lame, sophomoric comedy read by the game's announcer, the usually hysterical Steve Carell (The Office, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy). Though Carell brings more than enough enthusiasm to the job, the lines he's forced to read are riddled with weak, immature jokes that fall flat more often than not, and, by virtue of the constant repetition, become annoying quickly. The sharp wit and great comedic timing that Carell has displayed in virtually everything else he's done make the humorless jokes that much more disappointing. The game's characters also contribute their fair share of lame one-liners--usually having something to do with the broad stereotype upon which that particular character is based--though the game mercifully gives you the option to kill the commentary and skip the characters' speaking parts. Aside from all the chitchat, Outlaw Volleyball Remixed sounds OK, with good ambient sound from the crowd and a serviceable soundtrack predictably made up of licensed pop-punk, techno, and hip-hop. Despite the threadbare graphical presentation and the suffocating attitude of Outlaw Volleyball Remixed, it's a game that's difficult to dismiss entirely, partially because the core mechanics and gameplay systems are quite sound, but also because it's being sold at bargain-basement prices. Consider that the options for PlayStation 2 owners looking for a volleyball game are few and far between right now, and you could see how one might be able to either ignore or embrace the pronounced flaws of Outlaw Volleyball Remixed, and manage to have a good time with it.

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