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Initial release date: November 11, 2016 Developer: Arkin Studios Series: Diononored Platforms: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Awards: The game award for the best action / adventure Genres: Action-Adventure Game, Infiltration Game Any time I'm given a choice between stealth and action, I go stealth. I love the hold-your-breath tension of hoping a guard didn't spot you and the hard-earned triumph of executing a perfectly timed plan. Dishonored 2 delivers that sneaky satisfaction, arming you with stealth essentials like hiding bodies, peering through keyholes, and silent takedowns. But it's also an incredible engine for gleeful chaos, one so engrossing and amusing that I kind of accidentally beat the entire campaign raining hilarious, elaborate death on my enemies. I kicked people through skylights, blasted them off seaside cliffs, lured them into bottlenecks and watched as my carefully placed shrapnel mine shredded them. At one point, I got murdered badly, so I reloaded a recent quicksave, shot a guard with incendiary bolt, and blew up another four with one grenade when they ran to help. Sadistic? Yes. But also incredibly satisfying from a gameplay standpoint. Moments like that happen frequently in Dishonored 2 because it's as much a toy box as it is a game. It's meant to be experimented with. It rewards and even demands creativity. This was true of the first game, and it's true here as well, mainly because the sequel simply takes the original formula and builds on it. You'll find more ways to engage enemies without killing them, like nonlethal drop attacks and parries that stun opponents momentarily, allowing you to grab them and choke them out. There are new weapons and gadgets, including crossbow bolts that blind enemies or send them sprinting in a chemical-induced madness. Weapons can be upgraded in new ways, so your starter pistol can eventually be modded into a semi-auto hand cannon with explosive, ricocheting rounds. And most importantly, there's an entirely new protagonist with her own set of powers. You can still play as classic hero Corvo and enjoy all his original supernatural abilities like pausing time and possessing rodents, but Empress Emily Kaldwin offers some exciting new choices, most notably Domino: All marked targets suffer the same fate, so knocking one unconscious puts them all out, for example. Emily can also hypnotize enemies with Mesmerize and become a moving shadow with Shadow Walk. She can even mimic Corvo's signature teleportation ability with Far Reach. Much like the weaponry, the diverse and inventive mechanics inherent in these powers turn the gameplay in a joyful cycle of experimentation and reward. Nearly all can be used in a variety of ways--lethal and nonlethal, straightforward and unconventional--to accommodate whatever strategy you happen to hatch. Part of what makes the experimentation fun is the fact that your enemies are genuinely threatening, which makes cleverly dispatching them feel that much more empowering. They parry, dodge, flank, kick you away, even throw rocks to keep you off balance, and they never relent. Rather than telegraphing their attacks or waiting patiently for you to strike them, they just come at you, which both gets your adrenaline pumping and makes your one-hit-kill counterattacks feel earned. Even if you ignore your supernatural assassin skills and focus purely on swordplay, Dishonored gives you plenty of options, including sprinting slide tackles and combo-driven executions. And if you're a stealth player, enemies are aware enough to present a real challenge, frequently breaking from the "preset pattern" behavior observable in many stealth games. Tricks that might not draw attention in other games get noticed here. Guards remember, for example, that another guard was standing nearby a moment ago. Rather than shrug off the absence, they'll either investigate or jump straight to sounding the alarm. This definitely creates a bit of a learning curve; you can't sloppily run and fight everyone and expect to get far. I had to play for a few hours before I really started to understand and enjoy the game--though the payoff for that upfront investment proved substantial. The experience may be demanding overall, but weirdly, the campaign doesn't really grow more challenging as you progress. You'd think you'd face new, more intricate scenarios or larger numbers of tougher enemies, but that's not really the case. Unexpected new enemies types do emerge, but feel underutilized, as they're limited to certain levels and areas. By the end, I actually felt overpowered because the game never demanded more of me. Messing around with the mechanics is a lot more fun if you're presented with varied scenarios that force you to be skilled, clever, or creative enough to succeed. Removing the challenge undercuts some of the fun. Dishonored does such a stellar job of consistently adding new gameplay elements, it's a shame that never culminated in a grand, all-encompassing challenge. Much like the weaponry, the diverse and inventive mechanics inherent in these powers turn the gameplay in a joyful cycle of experimentation and reward. The story also doesn't evolve much over the course of the campaign. The original game opened with a bloody power grab that sent you on a quest for vengeance; the plot here is essentially identical, just with most cryptic occult gibberish. You're primarily still tracking down and murdering a series of people, and your motivation for the entire ordeal hinges on a single rushed scene at the very beginning of the game. Ultimately, the plotline is fine, but the delivery proves lackluster. Contrary to the gameplay, the storytelling holds your hand, bombarding you with heavy-handed exposition. You character constantly states the obvious in game, then narrates their exact thoughts and feelings over motion comics between missions. I frequently felt like I was just being told stuff rather than living and participating in an active story. Still, Dishonored's world is undeniably intriguing thanks mainly to its vaguely steampunk aesthetic and the tangible history hidden in every detail. The characters you encounter are, by and large, interesting and well developed, and the expansive areas you visit feel alive and burst with unique details. Areas are larger than those found in the previous and seem much bigger than they really are--a welcome illusion that makes the world feel more believable. There's also plenty of side content to uncover in the hub areas, from unearthing backstory to finding the one ultra clever way to break into a fortified black market shop. And of course, you'll constantly be hunting for hidden runes, a process that takes up just as much (if not more) time as the core gameplay. Some are obvious, some are cleverly hidden, some are excruciatingly frustrating, but you're forced to find them because they fuel the progression system. Most impressively, individual missions frequently distinguish themselves by offering a unique gameplay hook. There's a mission late in the game that involves time mani[CENSORED]tion and might be one of the most unforgettable standalone missions in any game ever. It is masterpiece unto itself. There's also the intricate, mind-bending clockwork mansion, which turns the entire level into a giant Rubik's cube. And just like before, you can find elaborate, story-driven ways to "eliminate" every major target without actually killing them. If you use your powers creatively and judiciously, you can be in complete control. It feels exceptionally empowering, especially since when you mess up, you realize your enemies really are smart and powerful enough to kill you quickly. Dishonored 2 might lack challenge in its later levels, but the basic tools are a joy to play with regardless. And with two characters and two basic play styles to choose from--both of which noticeably impact the story and the world as you go--there's a lot of longevity to be wrung from the campaign. It's an incredible shame you can't restart the campaign with all your powers intact once you beat the game, but you can, at least, bring up old saves, adjust the difficulty, and see what unfolds. Dishonored 2 System Requirements (Minimum): CPU: Intel Core i5-2400/AMD FX-8320 or better CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit versions) VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB or better PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 60 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3 GB (2 GB NVIDIA) Dishonored 2 Recommended Requirements: CPU: Intel Core i7-4770/AMD FX-8350 or better CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 16 GB OS: Windows 10 (64-bit versions) VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB or better PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 FREE DISK SPACE: 60 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 8 GB (6 GB NVIDIA)

Uninstalling unwanted programs is one of the most common and important tasks that all laptop and desktop users perform. However, if you're new to Windows 10, you may not know how to remove every app. The old-school Programs and Features and control panel menu that Windows 7 and XP users are used to still exists, but won't actually delete newer kinds of apps. Whether it is a desktop program, a Windows 8-style Modern app or a new-fangled Universal app, there's one simple way to remove it. Here's how to uninstall any program in Windows 10, even if you don't know what kind of app it is. 1.Open the Start menu. 2.Click Settings. 3. Click System on the Settings menu. 4. Select Apps & features from the left pane. A list of all installed apps appears in the right pane. 5. Select an app you wish to uninstall. 6. Click the Uninstall button that appears. If it is grayed out, this is a system app you cannot remove. 7.Click the Uninstall pop-up button to confirm.

Integrated graphics tested: ubiquitous and oh-so-slow! Who makes the best integrated graphics solution, AMD or Intel? The answer is simple right now if you check our GPU hierarchy: AMD wins, easily, at least on the desktop. Current Ryzen APUs with Vega 11 Graphics are about 2.5 times faster than Intel's UHD Graphics 630. Of course, even the fastest integrated solutions pale in comparison to a dedicated GPU, and they're not on our list of the best graphics cards for a good reason. However, a lot of changes are coming this year, sooner than later. Update: We've added Intel's Gen11 Graphics using an Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 processor. Thanks to Razer loaning us a Razer Blade Stealth 13, and HP chiming in with an Envy 17t, we were able to test Intel Gen11 Graphics with both a 15W (default) and 25W (Razer) TDP. We've also added GTX 1050 results running on a Ryzen 5 3400G, which limits performance a bit at 720p and minimum quality. We have not fully updated the text, as we'll have a separate article looking specifically at Gen11 Graphics performance. Judging by all the leaks, AMD’s Renoir desktop APUs should show up very soon. Meanwhile, AMD's RNDA 2 architecture is coming (and should eventually end up in an APU), and Intel's Tiger Lake with Xe Graphics should also arrive this summer. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, the more things change… To give us a clear picture of where we are and where we've come from, specifically in regards to integrated graphics solutions, we've run updated benchmarks using our standard GPU test suite—with a few modifications. We're using the same nine games (Borderlands 3, The Division 2, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XIV, Forza Horizon 4, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Strange Brigade), but we're running at 720p (no resolution scaling) and minimum fidelity settings. Some of these games are still relatively demanding, even at 720p, but all have been available for at least six months, which is plenty of time to fix any driver issues—assuming they could be fixed. We intend to see if the games work at all, and what sort of performance you can expect. The good news: Every game was able to run! Or, at least, they ran on current GPUs. Spoiler alert: Intel's HD 4600 and older integrated graphics don't have DX12 or Vulkan drivers, which eliminated several games from our list. We benchmarked Intel's current desktop GPU (UHD Graphics 630) along with an older i7-4770K (HD Graphics 4600) and compared them with AMD's current competing desktop APUs (Vega 8 and Vega 11). For this update, we also have results from Ice Lake's Gen11 Graphics, but that's only for mobile solutions, so it's in a different category. We're still working to get a Renoir processor (AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) in for comparison, along with desktop Renoir when that launches. We've also included performance from a budget dedicated GPU, the GTX 1050. The GTX 1050 is by no means one of the fastest GPUs right now, though you can try picking up a used model off eBay for around $100. (Note: don't get the 'fake' China models, as they likely aren't using an actual GTX 1050 chip!) And before you ask, no, we didn't have a previous-gen AMD A10 (or earlier) APU for comparison. "No graphics cards allowed." Test Hardware Because we're looking at multiple different integrated graphics solutions, our test hardware needed three different platforms. We've used generally high-end parts, including better-than-average memory and storage, but the systems are not (and couldn't be) identical in all respects. One particular issue is that we needed motherboards with video output support on the rear IO panel, which restricted options. Here are the testbeds and specs. We equipped the AMD Ryzen platform with 2x8GB DDR4-3200 CL14 memory because our normal 2x16GB CL16 kit proved troublesome for some reason. It shouldn't matter much, as none of the tests benefit from large amounts of RAM (preferring throughput instead), and the tighter timings may even give a very slight boost to performance. The older HD 4600 setup used the only compatible motherboard I still have around, and the only DDR3 kit as well—but both were previously high-end options. Advertisement The Razer and HP laptops for Intel's 10th Gen Core i7-1065G7 Iris Plus Graphics are better than previous GPUs, with the Razer running LPDDR4X-3733 memory, while the HP uses DDR4-3200 memory. That gives Razer (and Gen11 Graphics) a slight advantage that may account for some of the difference in performance, though the higher 25W TDP when using the performance profile appears to be the biggest factor based on our testing. The storage also varied based on what was available (and I didn't want to reuse the same drive, as that would entail wiping it between system tests). It shouldn’t be a factor for these gaming and graphics tests, though testing large games off the Razer's 256GB (minus the OS) storage was a pain in the rear. How can 256GB be the baseline on a $1,700 gaming laptop in 2020? Performance of AMD vs Intel Integrated Graphics Let's get cut straight to the heart of the matter. If you want to run modern games at modest settings like 1080p medium, none of these integrated graphics solutions will suffice—at least, not across all games. At 1080p and medium settings, AMD's Vega 11 in the 3400G averaged 27 fps across the nine games, with only two games (Forza Horizon 4 and Strange Brigade) breaking the 30 fps mark—and Metro Exodus failed to hit 20 fps. 1080p medium actually looks quite decent, not far off what you'd get from an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 (though not the newer One X or PS4 Pro). Dropping the resolution or tuning the quality should make most other games playable, but we opted to do both, running at 1280x720 and minimum quality settings. We've also tested 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy for synthetic graphics performance. Starting with the big-picture overall view of gaming performance, you might be surprised to see the GTX 1050 basically doubling the performance of the fastest integrated graphics solution. Yup, it's a pretty big gap, helped by the faster desktop CPU as well (you can see that performance drops a bit with a Ryzen 5 3400G). Interestingly, a few games like Red Dead Redemption 2 close the gap as the shared system RAM helps. GTX 1050 has over double the bandwidth (112 GBps dedicated vs. 51.2 GBps shared), but only for 2GB of memory. Still, even the slowest dedicated GPU we might consider recommending ends up being far better than integrated graphics. And that's only when we're looking at AMD's current offerings. The chasm between Vega 8 and Intel's UHD Graphics 630 is even larger than the gap between Vega 11 and the GTX 1050. AMD's Ryzen 3 3200G with Vega 8 Graphics is 2.3 times faster than Intel's Core i7-9700K and UHD Graphics 630. Other current-generation Intel chips can further reduce performance by limiting clocks or disabling some of the GPU processing clusters—we didn't test anything with UHD 610, for example. Intel's latest Iris Plus solution in the 10th Gen Ice Lake processor does better, sort of. When constrained to 15W TDP for the entire chip, it's only 15% faster than UHD 630. Boosting the TDP to 25W improves performance another 35%, however—55% faster than the desktop UHD 630, even though the desktop still has an additional 70W of TDP available. Even the fastest Iris Plus Graphics still can't catch up to a desktop Ryzen 3 3200G and Vega 7 Graphics. Part of that is the higher TDP, but a bigger factor is that AMD's GPU architecture is simply superior. Intel is hoping to fix that with Xe Graphics, and Tiger Lake-U looks reasonably promising. Intel just showed off TGL-U running Battlefield V at 1080p high settings and around 30-33 fps. I ran that same test on 15W ICL-U and got just 18-19 fps, with the caveat that we don't know what TDP of the Tiger Lake chip. Compared to its current desktop graphics solutions, Intel has a lot of ground to make up. Tripling the performance of UHD 630 would get Intel to competitive levels, which isn't actually out of the question. Ice Lake and Gen11 Graphics are already 55% faster than UHD Graphics when equipped with a 25W TDP, and Tiger Lake with Xe Graphics could potentially deliver 75% (or more) performance than Gen11. Combined, that would be 2.75X the performance of UHD 630, which would reach acceptable levels of performance in many games. We'll have to wait and conduct our own testing of Tiger Lake to see how Xe Graphics performs, but early indications are that it might not be too shabby. If you're wondering about even older Intel GPUs, the HD 4600 is roughly half as fast as UHD 630. Okay, technically it's only 42% slower, but it did fail to run four of the nine games. Three of those require either DX12 or Vulkan, while Metro Exodus supports DX11 and tried to run … but it kept locking up a few seconds into the benchmark. Below are the full suite of benchmarks. Borderlands 3 supports DX12 and DX11 rendering modes, with the latter performing better on the Intel and Nvidia GPUs. AMD meanwhile gets a modest benefit from DX12, even on its integrated graphics, so Vega 11 is 'only' 38% slower than the GTX 1050, compared to the overall 43% deficit. Meanwhile, Intel falls further behind Vega 8 than in the overall metric, trailing by 70% here compared to 57% overall. Even at minimum settings and 720p, UHD 630 can't muster a playable experience. The Division 2 performance shows the trend we'll see in a lot of the more demanding games. Even at minimum quality (other than resolution scaling), Intel's UHD 630 isn't really playable. You could struggle through the game at 20 fps, but it wouldn't be very fun and dips into the low-to-mid teens occur frequently. AMD meanwhile averages more than 60 fps on the 3400G and comes close with the 3200G. Framerates aren't consistent, however, with odd behavior on the different AMD APUs. Specifically, the 99th percentile fps decreased as average fps increased. Far Cry 5 relative performance is almost an exact repeat of The Division 2: Vega 8 is 1.8 times faster than UHD 630, and the 1050 is about 60% faster than the 3400G. Average framerates are lower, however, so even at minimum quality, you won't get 60 fps from any of the integrated graphics solutions we tested. Hopefully Renoir—and maybe Xe Graphics—will change that later this year. Final Fantasy XIV is the closest Intel comes to AMD's performance, trailing by just 28%. A lot of that has to do with the game being far less demanding, especially at lower quality settings, and even Intel manages a playable 47 fps. For that matter, even the old Intel HD 4600 is somewhat playable at 27 fps. Meanwhile, the GTX 1050 has its largest lead over Vega 11, with 187 fps and 180% higher framerates. This is one of those cases where GPU memory bandwidth likely plays a bigger role, as all three AMD APUs cluster together at the 66-67 fps mark. Shifting gears to Forza Horizon 4, we come to the first game that simply won't run on older Intel GPUs. It's a Windows 10 universal app and requires DX12, so you need at least a Broadwell (5th Gen) Intel CPU. Otherwise, performance is quite good on the AMD solutions, with the best result of the games we tested. The 3400G breaks 100 fps and even keeps minimums above 60, and the GTX 1050 is only 35% faster than the 3400G's Vega 11 Graphics. Intel's UHD 630 is back in the dumps, with the 3200G beating it by 175%, though it does manage a playable 31 fps—not silky smooth, but it should suffice in a pinch. Metro Exodus ends up being one of the better showings for Intel's UHD 630, as the 3200G is 'only' 88% faster. This is another game where GPU memory bandwidth tends to be a bigger bottleneck, and you still can't get 30 fps with Intel. The HD 4600 would also launch the game and run for maybe 10-15 seconds before locking up, but not at acceptable framerates—we've omitted it from the results because it couldn't complete the benchmark. The GTX 1050 is back to a comfortable 75% lead over the closest APU. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most demanding game we tested, with performance of just 46 fps on the 3400G Vega 11, even at 720p and minimum quality. It's still playable at least, though not on Intel's UHD 630 where framerates are in the low-to-mid teens. We tested with the Vulkan API, and like Forza, HD 4600 can't even attempt to run the game. The 3200G with Vega 8 notches up another big lead of 165% over UHD 630, while the GTX 1050 has another relatively close result with the dedicated GPU leading the 3400G and Vega 11 by only 45%. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is back to business as usual and comes closest to matching our overall average results. The GTX 1050 leads 3400G's Vega 11 by 74%, while the 3200G's Vega 8 is 150% faster than UHD 630. All of the AMD APUs manage a very playable 50 fps or more, with minimums above 30 fps. Intel, on the other hand, needs to double its UHD 630 performance to hit an acceptable level, which it theoretically does with something like the Core i7-1065G7, but I'm still working on getting one of those to run my own tests. Last, we have Strange Brigade, which, like RDR2, only supports the DX12 and Vulkan APIs. That knocks out HD 4600, but the remaining GPUs can all run it at acceptable levels—and even smooth levels of 60+ fps on the AMD APUs. This is one of only three games we tested where 60 fps on AMD's integrated graphics is possible, and not coincidentally also one of the three games where Intel's UHD 630 breaks 30 fps. We also wanted to look at synthetic graphics performance, as measured by 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy. Time Spy required DX12, so again the HD 4600 can't run it, but the rest of the GPUs could. In the past, 3DMark has been accused of being overly kind to Intel—or perhaps it's that Intel has put more effort into optimizing its drivers for 3DMark. But taking the overall gaming performance we showed earlier, the 3400G Vega 11 was 168% faster than the 9700K UHD 630. In Fire Strike, the result was almost identical: Vega 11 leads by 170%. Time Spy also matched up perfectly, showing Vega 11 with a 168% lead. Which isn't to say that 3DMark is the only testing needed. Looking at the GTX 1050 GPU shows at least one point of contention. In our overall metric, the GTX 1050 was 72% faster than the 3400G Vega 11. In Fire Strike, the 1050 is 83% faster—slightly more favorable to the dedicated GPU. Time Spy, on the other hand, drops the lead to just 57%, a massive swing, and that was only with multiple runs. One run even had a score that was lower than the 3400G. Part of that is going to be DirectX 12, but Time Spy is also a newer 'forward-looking' benchmark that taxes the 1050's limited 2GB of VRAM. The benchmark tells you as much ("Your hardware may not be compatible"), and it skews the results. It's not wrong as such, but it's important to not simply take such results at face value. No surprise: The AMD Ryzen 3400G is the current winner With this round of testing out of the way—and a big part of why we wanted to do this was to prepare for the incoming Xe Graphics and AMD Renoir launches—inevitably, people wonder why the gulf between iGPU and dGPU (integrated and discrete GPUs) remains so large. Take one look at the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X specs, and it's clearly possible to make something much faster. So why hasn't this happened? First, it's not entirely correct to say that this hasn't happened in the PC space. Intel shocked a lot of us when it announced Kaby Lake G in 2018, which combined a 4-core/8-thread Kaby Lake (7th Gen) CPU with a custom AMD Vega M GPU, and tacked on 4GB of HBM2 for good measure. We looked at how the Intel NUC with a Core i7-8809G performed at the time. In short, performance was decent, nearly matching an RX 570—which is significantly faster than anything we've included here. There were only a few problems. First, Kaby Lake G was incredibly expensive for the level of performance it delivered. Intel likes its profit margins, and the cost of the Intel CPU, AMD GPU, and HBM2 memory was not going to be cheap. AMD sells the Ryzen 5 3400G for $150, but the only way to get the Core i7-8809G was either with an expensive NUC or an expensive laptop. Second, and perhaps more critically, support was a joke. Intel initially said it would "regularly" update the graphics drivers for the Vega M GPU, but that didn't actually happen. There was a gap of nearly 12 months where no new drivers were made available. Then Intel finally passed the buck to AMD and said users should download AMD's drivers, and less than two months later, AMD removed Vega M from its list of drivers. But the biggest issue is that higher-performance integrated graphics is a limited market. It makes sense for a laptop where tighter integration can reduce the size and complexity, plus you can get better power balancing between the CPU and GPU. For the desktop, though, you're better off getting a dedicated CPU and a dedicated GPU, which you can then upgrade separately. Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Series X has a substantially faster GPU than anything shown here. That's not the way the console world works, and when Sony or Microsoft are willing to foot the bill for custom silicon, impressive things can be done. The current PS4 Pro and Xbox One X pack 36 CUs and 40 CUs, respectively. That's three to four times as many GPU clusters as the Ryzen 5 3400G's Vega 11 Graphics (the 11 comes from the number of CUs). The PS5 will stick with 36 CUs, but they'll be AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture, which potentially boosts performance per watt by over 100% compared to the older GCN architecture. Xbox Series X will kick that number up to 52 CUs, again with the RDNA 2 architecture. More importantly for consoles, they can integrate a bunch of high-performance memory—GDDR5 for the current stuff and GDDR6 for the upcoming consoles. They don't need to worry about users wanting to upgrade the RAM, which makes it possible to use higher performance GDDR5/GDDR6 memory. The Xbox Series X will include 16GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 running on a 512-bit memory interface, giving 896 GBps of total bandwidth. Even with 'overclocked' DDR4-3200 system memory running in a dual-channel configuration, traditional PC integrated graphics solutions share the resulting 51.2 GBps bandwidth with the CPU. That's a huge bottleneck. We can see this in the performance difference between AMD's Vega 8 and Vega 11 Graphics in the above charts. Vega 8 runs at 1250 MHz and has a theoretical 1280 GFLOPS of compute performance, while Vega 11 runs at 1400 MHz and has 1971 GFLOPS of compute. In theory, Vega 11 should be 54% faster than Vega 8. In our testing, the largest lead was 22% (Forza Horizon 4), the smallest was 2% (Final Fantasy XIV), and on average, the difference was 12%. The reason for that is mostly the memory bandwidth bottleneck. Another example is the GTX 1050, which has a theoretical 1,862 GFLOPS of performance. AMD and Nvidia GPUs aren't the same, however, and Nvidia usually gets about 10% more effective performance per GFLOPS. We see this, for example, with the GTX 1070 Ti with 8,186 GFLOPS, which ends up performing around the same level as a Vega 56 with 10,544 GFLOPS. Except the 1070 Ti actually runs at closer to 1.85 GHz, so basically 9,000 GFLOPS. Still, AMD needed about 15% more GFLOPS to match Nvidia with the previous architectures. So why does the GTX 1050 end up performing 72% faster? Simple: It has over twice the memory bandwidth. Behold, the shortest lived Intel CPU of all time: Kaby Lake-G. That's an AMD RX Vega M with HBM2 memory on the left. If AMD or Intel wants to create a true high-performance integrated graphics solution, it will need a lot more memory bandwidth. We already see some of this in Ice Lake, with official support for LPDDR4-3733 memory (59.7 GBps compared to just 38.4 GBps for Coffee Lake U-series with DDR4-2400 memory). But integrated graphics should benefit from memory bandwidth up to and beyond 100 GBps. DDR5-6400 will basically double the bandwidth of DDR4-3200 memory, but we won't see support for DDR5 in PCs until 2021. As a potentially interesting aside, initial leaks of Intel's future Rocket Lake CPUs, which may have Xe Graphics, surfaced recently. It's only 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy, but the numbers aren't particularly impressive. The Time Spy result is only 14% higher than UHD 630, while Fire Strike is 30% faster. And, as noted earlier, 3DMark scores can be kinder to Intel's GPUs than actual gaming tests. However, we don't know the Rocket Lake GPU configuration—as a desktop chip, Intel might once again be castrating performance. Mobile Coffee Lake for example is available with up to twice as many Execution Units (EUs) as desktop Coffee Lake, even though it generally ends up TDP limited. We'll have to wait and see what Rocket Lake actually brings to the table in late 2020 or early 2021. Another alternative, which Intel already has tried, is various forms of dedicated GPU caching or dedicated VRAM. Earlier versions of Iris Pro Graphics included up to a 128MB eDRAM cache, and Kaby Lake G included a 4GB HBM2 stack. Both helped alleviate the need for lots of system memory bandwidth, but they of course cost extra. Pairing 'cheap' integrated graphics with 'expensive' integrated VRAM sort of defeats the purpose. But that may change. Intel has 3D chip stacking technology that could reduce the cost and footprint of dedicated GPU VRAM. It's called Foveros, and that's something we're looking forward to testing in future products. AMD meanwhile didn't change much with its Renoir integrated graphics. Clock speeds are up to 350 MHz higher than the 3400G, but it's now a Vega 8 GPU. That's likely because AMD knows stuffing in more GPU cores without boosting memory bandwidth is mostly an exercise in futility. The hope is that future Zen 3 APUs will include Navi 2x GPUs and potentially address the bandwidth issue, but don't hold your breath for that. Plus, Zen 3 APUs are likely still a year or more off. In short, there are ways to make integrated graphics faster and better, but they cost money. For desktop users, it will remain far easier to just buy a decent dedicated graphics card. Meanwhile, laptop and smartphone makers are working to improve performance per watt, and some promising technologies are coming. In the meantime, PC integrated graphics solutions are going to remain a bottleneck, and even more memory bandwidth likely won't change things. After all, Intel ships more GPUs than AMD and Nvidia combined, and yet it's now planning to enter the discrete GPU market. Intel may still look at HBM2 or stacked chips to add dedicated RAM for future integrated GPUs, but we don't expect those to be desktop solutions.

Get rid of Microsoft Teams for good To uninstall Microsoft Teams completely, you need to uninstall Teams as well as the Teams Machine-Wide Installer. If you cannot find the installer in the list of programs in Windows Settings, you might need to use the Powershell script provided by Microsoft to remove all traces of MS Teams. If you do not completely remove the installer, it will keep reinstalling Teams every time your computer reboots or you login to your computer. To remove via Windows Settings: 1) Type uninstall in the search box on the toolbar. 2) Select Add or remove programs. 3) In the right pane of Apps Settings, type Team in the search box .4) Right-click Teams to open the menu. 5) Click Uninstall. 6) Click Uninstall one more time to confirm the action. If you see Teams Machine-Wide Installer, remove it in the same way. If not, continue with the steps below. To remove via Powershell script: 1) In a web broswer go to Here 2) Click copy, to copy the code. 3) To open Powershell, type powershell in the search box on the toolbar. 4) Select Windows Powershell in the search options. 5) In the Powershell window, paste the code you previously copied. 6) Press Enter to run the code. All the remnants of MS Teams will now be removed.

Are you trying to find the MAC address of your PC? We can help. There are a few reasons why you'd like to know how to find your MAC address. Perhaps you're setting up your router and you'd like to filter out some devices out of your network for extra security. Maybe your router lists connected devices by their MAC address and you'd like to figure out which device is which. Or there's a chance you'll need to know your PC's MAC address to diagnose or resolve some computer network errors. Either way, we can help you find your PC's MAC address on Windows 10 by using a few different methods. What is a MAC address? A MAC address is a unique, alphanumeric hardware identifier for a device that connects to the internet. Every network device or interface, such as your laptop's Wi-Fi adapter, has a MAC (or "media access control") address. A MAC address is assigned by manufacturers and embedded into the device's network interface card -- it's permanently tied to the device, which means that a MAC address cannot be changed. The MAC address is listed as series of 12 digits across six pairs (00:1A:C2:7B:00:47, for example). A MAC address is essential in order for your device to interact with other local network devices. When your device detects a router, its sends out its MAC address to initiate a connection. This is where the IP address comes in -- your router will assign you an IP address so that you can connect to the internet. So what's the difference between a MAC address and an IP address? In part, MAC addresses are permanently burned into your device while IP addresses can change depending on your location. MAC addresses are used in the local network while IP addresses can be used to identify network devices all around the world. Method 1: How to Find Your MAC Address in Windows 10 with Command Prompt The quickest way to find the MAC address is through the command prompt. 1. Open the command prompt. Search "Command Prompt" in the taskbar, or if you have an older version of Windows, you can right-click on the Start button and select Command Prompt from the menu. 2. Type in ipconfig /all and press Enter. This will display your network configuration. 3. Find your adapter's physical address. Scroll down to your network adapter and look for the values next to "Physical Address," which is your MAC address. How to find your MAC Address in Windows 10 without using Command Prompt Perhaps you don't want to mess around with command prompt for some reason or another. Here are some ways you can snag a MAC address without accessing command prompt. Method 2: How to Find Your MAC Address in Windows 10 in the Network Connection Settings You can also find the MAC address by looking at the details of your network adapter in Windows. 1. Search "View network status and tasks" in the taskbar and click on it. (Or navigate to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center) 2. Click on your network connection. 3. Click the "Details" button. 4. Locate the Physical Address. The value for the physical address in the Network Connection Details window is your MAC address. Method 3: How to get your MAC address by accessing your taskbar Another avenue that you can use to find your device's MAC address is by clicking on an icon on your taskbar to quickly navigate to your PC's hardware identifier. 1. Click on the network icon on your Windows 10 taskbar. It should be next to the clock. 2. Click on "Properties" on your connection. This will open your network's settings window. 3. Scroll down to the Properties section. Your MAC address should be right next to the words "Physical address."

game information: Developers:TinyBuild Publishers :Games Released :June 18, 2020 Platforms: Xbox One, PC Everyone has their shortlist of their favorite food and drinks. You might like pizza, steak, red velvet cake, and chamomile tea ... but you would never want to dump all of that together onto one plate, mash it all together, and then expect it to taste as good as they all do separately . And that disgusting mess of an analogy is what waking tries to do, but for game genres; take some from Dark Souls, some from various walking simulators, a little from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, maybe a dash of Psychonauts, and definitely a healthy serving of roguelike. None of it works together, with each piece clashing with every other in the worst way possible. When you begin Waking, a screen pops up stating that it “is a very personal experience where you play a character based on yourself,” and goes on to say how it will ask about your life, family, and loved ones. This would be a fine idea except but it never truly amounts to anything. You see, your character is in a coma in a hospital bed and all wrapped in bandages, and you are traveling through your own mindscape trying to piece your brain back together so you can wake up. But there’s a twist: the God of Sleep, Somnus, tries to convince you to move on from this world instead of fighting to stay alive. So when you get to these parts of the story that ask you personal questions, it’s not really about you - it’s more just what it’s going to name things everybody encounters: an attack or summoned NPC, for example. It truly doesn’t matter what answer you give. Most of Waking felt like nothing I did mattered. In fact, most of Waking felt like nothing I did mattered. You’re given a variety of different named weapons to pick up - all named after emotions - but regardless of what they’re called they all do the same damage and all have the same appearance as a small knife. Nowhere I went mattered because every area I traveled to looked practically the same except for a different coloration and a lot of bloom. You go from red desert to green forest to white snowy mountain and a brown area, but they were all hard to look at because of how intense the bloom effect was. The only true variation I got was when I’d get to a boss or story area, which are like stone tombs and caves, respectively. But even though most areas are similar, it was hard to navigate for a variety of reasons. For one, Waking is not a looker, harkening back to that “Xbox 360 launch game” feel. It looks like it would fit right along with a game like Bullet Witch. Perhaps I’m dating myself here, but if you remember the music video for Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you can picture how these character models look. The NPCs and enemies all move in a stilted fashion and seem to snap into different animations instead of moving fluidly between actions, and the same could be said of the playable character. I often got caught on invisible level geometry, or I would do a melee attack which would also bring me to a full stop. Jumping never felt natural, with my character launching into the air like he’s got a jetpack, only to be pulled back down to the ground at a physics-defying speed. All of this ugliness just lent itself to me being unable to remember where I was or what I was supposed to be doing or going toward. Going hand in hand with the ugliness and the repetitive landscape, the combat is also a slog. Everything you do costs a currency called neurons. It costs neurons to use basic attacks, to use items, to open certain doors, to use certain things within a level, to summon allies - but you’re only allowed to carry up to 200 neurons at a time. If there’s a way to upgrade that carrying capacity, there is no clear indication of how to do that, and this limit is stifling. * Going hand in hand with the ugliness and the repetitive landscape, the combat is also a slog. Waking does grant you psychic powers to pick up clutter around the area and throw it at an enemy, but that might as well be a stiff breeze for all the damage it does - it only manages a stun on bigger enemies and does nothing at all to late-game enemies. You also get a pitiful, flailing melee attack in which your character flails around wildly, swinging the knife in every direction while doing, once again, little to no damage. That’s only made worse by the fact that it’s effectively limited by ammunition because it costs neurons - that’s not how melee attacks work! And since you only get more neurons from killing enemies, it can lead to a paradoxical situation where you can’t kill an enemy because you can’t attack and you can’t attack because you can’t kill an enemy. This is all wrapped within an incredibly repetitious mission system where you have to travel from map to map doing really only one type of mission: go to a place, find three of a thing, fight a boss, and then move on. And you do this for more than 20 hours. In keeping with this theme of mindless repetition, there are only two music tracks that play over and over again. One sounds like a post-rock band like This Will Destroy You or Caspian just noodling around, not making much noise. The other is the battle music, which sounds like a Sunny Day Real Estate demo that no one ever wanted. It’s nowhere near enough for a game of this length. But the most egregious part of this whole experience was how dragged out everything is. I’ve gone on and on about the repetitive nature of the gameplay, but the story is incredibly boring and every cutscene is unskippable. All of the dialogue is delivered in what I can only assume is a made-up language, but an echoed whisper and the subtitles reveal that it has all the weight and eye-rolling seriousness of a first-year film student trying to understand metaphors. By the time I was approaching the end, I’d given up any pretense of taking Waking seriously. I no longer answered the questions seriously, only giving joke answers. My most important friend? Sonic the Hedgehog. The place I treasure going to the most? Why, Applebee's of course! This cynicism created the most enjoyable moments of the entire campaign. Entering a level and seeing a message about “remembering Applebee’s” intended to give me an extra boost made me giggle every time. By IGN law, I am required to mention that I didn’t quite finish this game. I tried - I put in the more-than-20-hours described, and I did reach the final area. But it’s so infuriating that I flat-out refuse to go any further. It’s honestly the most poorly designed and convoluted mess I’ve seen in any game I’ve ever played. Waking never explains what you’re supposed to be doing to reach the final boss - it just plops you in the level with a five-minute time limit. After a while, I figured out that I was supposed to walk across different colored floor panels and if I chose the wrong one it instantly killed me. So I had to look along the walls for glowing squares to tell me which ones are safe and unsafe or pay a crystal ball to tell me one answer. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable except that the crystal ball - which costs neurons, because of course it does - just kept giving me the same answer over and over and over again. That’s not helpful because there are like 10 different colors and wouldn’t tell me the color I needed to know. I died three or four times and had had to start the level all over again and try to figure it out, mostly by guesswork. Oh, and did I mention that Waking randomizes its levels, so every time you die any of the information you gathered from the previous attempts goes right out the window? Yeah. Verdict Under no circumstances should you play Waking. If you want guided meditation, there are plenty of free apps for phones and videos on YouTube. If you want to play a Souls-like, there are plenty out there, including actual Souls games. If you need a game with psychic powers, Control is a lot of fun. But Waking does everything badly: its amateurish attempts at introspection, its poor combat, the tediously repetitious mission structure, the headache-inducing bloom effect, and aggravating puzzles add up to a miserable game I could bring myself to finish even though I reached the final level. Avoid it at all costs and do almost literally anything else with your time. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows 8 and up Processor: i5 and up Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Dedicated video card is required DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 5 GB available space Sound Card: Integrated

Release Date: April 25, 2017 Developer: CI Games Publisher: CI Games Engine: CryEngine Platforms: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Previous entries in the Sniper Ghost Warrior series have been justifiably criticized for their stifling linearity. Missions would regularly guide you by the hand through one cramped corridor after another, with a succession of targets ripe for elimination along the way. It wasn't a formula conducive to the type of freedom and choice one might hope to find in a game focused on the act of long-distance sniping, and Polish developer CI Games has seen the error of its ways with the latest entry in the series. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 ditches the restrictiveness of its predecessors by shifting the action to the gritty open world of a separatist-controlled Georgia. With an increase in scale and the flexibility inherent therein, it's a positive direction for the skull-splitting series--albeit one that's still frequently disrupted by myriad flaws rearing their ugly head. The jagged cliffs and dense forests of the Georgian wilderness are notable for their expansiveness, yet the muted color palette, lackluster lighting, and some muddy, low-quality textures do little to inspire awe. Conceptually, this is also an open world without a clear, defined purpose. There are a few nebulous activities dotted across its three maps--like rescuing civilians and capturing outposts--that net you XP, money, and materials that can be used for crafting. But I gradually ignored these minor distractions and still had a surplus of cash and materials on-hand to acquire the weapons, ammo, and items I desired. With little in the way of interesting locales to entice exploration, it's also a particularly barren world. Pockets of civilian life do their best to present the illusion of a living, breathing society, but their nonplussed reactions to a burly marine barging into their houses aren't exactly believable. Ghost Warrior 3's depiction of Georgia is neither a convincingly realized place, nor an emergent sandbox like the Far Cry games it shares many similarities with. This slice of Eastern European landscape is little more than a glorified path to get you from point A to B without a loading screen interrupting the flow. For as disappointing as this is, it matters little once you've reached the whereabouts of your active mission. Each one is generally contained within a single, sizable location, whether that's a decrepit block of apartments or a busy airfield. Objectives are refreshingly varied, and there are often optional tasks to complete if you're up for, say, retrieving a downed drone or completing the active mission with no alerts. Ghost Warrior 3 is at its best, however, when simulating the methodical precision of being an elite marksman. There's a rhythm to the planning and execution that goes into these missions. You usually begin by sending your pocket-sized drone up into the Georgian sky to get a lay of the land, using it to tag enemies and make note of any advantageous vantage points. Once you're comfortable with the layout, you infiltrate the perimeter, using your sniper vision to reveal a climbable surface up the side of a nearby cliff. At the top, you go prone on the cold, hard granite, and prop up your rifle on a tripod for extra stability. With the target firmly in your sights, you twist the dial on your scope to 400 meters and adjust your aim to compensate for bullet drop and a gusty wind coming in from the east. Then you take a deep breath and pull the trigger. The bullet arcs through the strong breeze before darting downward and colliding with your target's temple. Blood spatter covers the bedroom wall behind him, and a convenient zipline covers your exfiltration. While this sounds short and sweet, missions like this can take upwards of 20 minutes to complete if you're willing to take your time. Sniping is all about being cautious and taking a measured approach, and you're rewarded for your patience with some immensely satisfying killshots. For first-person shooters, it offers a unique approach that sets Ghost Warrior 3 apart from its histrionic contemporaries. Sniping is the winning card in its deck, and yet CI Games regularly plays other hands to the game's detriment. There are three binary play styles for you to adhere to: Sniper, Ghost, and Warrior. Completing actions in each group (sniping for Sniper, performing close-quarters stealth kills for Ghost, and going all guns blazing for Warrior), nets you XP that can be spent on some humdrum upgrades in each, like auto-looting bodies or increasing the effect of health items. It's not the most exciting system, but the added emphasis on different play styles makes them all viable options. The ability to react to an ever-changing situation and completely alter your approach adds a sense of variety to each mission. Sure, the stealth is incredibly simplistic, and open gunfights are ponderous, but as minute complements to the sniping, they serve a functional purpose. Where this falters, is when these styles take center stage. There are missions where your sniper rifle is taken out of your hands, and others where the tight confines of the level render your sharpshooter too unwieldy to seriously consider. These missions dilute the game's strengths and put it on a playing field with the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield, where it does not compare favorably. AI issues are more noticeable here, too, as enemies reveal their idiotic tendency to follow each other into a killzone. And in the latter half of the game, new enemy types adopt a bullet sponginess that makes the close-quarters shooting even more of a drag. Similarly irritating are the glitches and rough edges peppered throughout. In the PlayStation 4 version, I had enemies T-pose in front of me, disappear in the middle of a stealth takedown, and repo[CENSORED]te before my eyes, inside what I thought was an empty outpost. The game also crashed on four separate occasions. Whenever you boot up the game or change regions it takes almost five minutes to load, which is excruciatingly slow. And even something as simple as tagging enemies is frustratingly inconsistent. Sometimes the ability won't work when you're directly aiming at someone from a few yards away; other times you'll pull up your gun and inadvertently tag someone in another room. The framerate is also consistently shoddy, whether you're simply walking or popping in and out of your sniper scope. Sometimes sounds don't play, and pop-in is a constant eyesore. There have already been three updates pushed out before release, yet I still encountered these issues with the most recent patch installed*. CI Games is certainly working hard to iron out the kinks and address what needs fixing, but after multiple delays, it's disappointing that it's still arrived in such a buggy, unpolished state. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 feels like a B-tier, budget-priced game. Even the predictable, profanity-laden story is reminiscent of the type of gritty B-movies Steven Seagal is known for. There's certainly merit to its accomplished sniping mechanics, especially when missions hone in on the planning and precise execution that makes playing as a sharpshooter so thrilling. Yet it falters whenever it veers away from its strengths, and the plethora of nagging glitches and technical problems are a persistent nuisance that make Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 difficult to recommend. System Requirements OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 64-bit. Processor: i3 3240 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-6350 3.9 GHz. Memory: 8 GB RAM. Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB or AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB. DirectX: Version 11. Storage: 50 GB available space. Additional Notes: Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection.

Here's how to upgrade to Windows 10 without spending a penny In November of 2017, Microsoft quietly announced it was shutting down its free Windows 10 upgrade program. If you didn’t get your free version of its best operating system to date, well, you were pretty much out of luck. Or, so we thought. Recently I learned that Windows 10 updates still work just as they always had, and I’m currently running a version on a pieced together PC after upgrading from a working version of Windows 8.1. It’s not as cut and dry, as Microsoft has deleted the tool that makes all of our lives simpler when upgrading, but with a tiny bit of work, you too can upgrade older versions of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 to a fully-functioning version of Windows 10. You'll want to do so sooner than later now that Windows 7 is set to be phased out. Read our guide to prepare for the end of Windows 7. How to Upgrade to Windows 10 for Free 1. Find a copy of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 as you’ll need the key later. If you don’t have one lying around, but it’s currently installed on your system, a free tool like NirSoft’s ProduKey can pull the product key from software currently running on your PC. 2. This is a good stop to pause and back up anything you’d like to save on your current PC before continuing. 3. From here, you’ll need to create a Windows 10 installer by going Here and then configuring the installer (Create installation media for another PC) with your desired hardware. Use ISO file if you plan to burn it to a DVD or USB flash drive if you’d rather install it from a USB device. You’ll also need to select 32 or 64 bit versions of Windows. 4. Insert the installation media, restart the computer and then press F2 to create a different boot priority. This will allow the USB flash drive (or DVD) to run before booting into the operating system. This will be slightly different on all PCs, depending on their BIOS setup, but it’s pretty cut and dry -- select the drive or the DVD to boot before the main HDD or SDD. 5. Reboot your computer one more time. 6. After the installation runs, you’ll be asked to provide your key. Enter it here and click Next.

Release Date: November 18, 2008 Series: Need For Speed Platforms: Playstation 3, Playstation 2, more Software developers: AA Black Box, AAA Vancouver, Firebrand Games, Current Entertainment, Piranha Games, IronMonkey Studios Publishers: Electronic Arts, EA Mobile Modes: Single video game, group video game For the most part, the reaction to the last few Need for Speed games was the same: "Why aren't they more like Need for Speed Most Wanted?" "Where are the cheesy cutscenes and the over-the-top cop chases?" It seems as if EA heard those cries, because for better or for worse, Need for Speed Undercover feels like Most Wanted. In Undercover you play the role of...wait for it...an undercover officer. Along with agent Chase Linh, played by the attractive Maggie Q, your job is to take down a group of street racers that have somehow become involved in an international smuggling ring. The story is told via campy cutscenes that fail to capture the charm of Most Wanted thanks to uninteresting characters and a predictable plot. Having a story provides incentive to make it through race after race, but the whole "this is cheesy so it's cool" thing feels kind of forced this time around. Like many other Need for Speed games, all of your racing will take place on the streets of a fictitious open-world city--here it's the Tri-City Bay area. You'll start with a lousy vehicle, but it won't be long before you're able to snag a pink slip to a nicer ride. As you progress you'll earn cash, which can be used to unlock (50+) new vehicles from manufacturers such as Nissan, Dodge, Cadillac, Ford, Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW, Aston Martin, Mitsubishi, and more. If you're into tuning individual aspects of your ride or purchasing individual parts you can do that, but if you're not into tinkering you can purchase an upgrade package and be on your way. Not only will you earn money for winning an event, you'll earn driving points for dominating it--basically beating it really, really bad. You can power up a number of your driving attributes, but they don't have a noticeable effect on how your car handles. As long as you drive fast you'll probably dominate, but there are occasional races where you'll totally obliterate the time needed to dominate an event, but you'll still lose to the CPU. The game also encourages you to drive with style and drift, draft, and drive really close to other cars, but other than increasing your nitrous there's little to gain from doing so. That said, the new J-Turn mechanic, which lets you bust quick 180s, is invaluable when chasing down rivals or evading the cops. You'll use it because it's useful, though, not because it gets you heroic driving points. The cops are back in full effect in Undercover, and for the most part, their return is welcome. The challenges in which you must ram and take out a certain number of police cars are great fun, as are the challenges where you must cause a certain monetary sum of damage. Of course, you don't always have to ram cars to take them down; you can also run into log trucks, electrical towers, billboards, and more to leave a little surprise for your pursuers. It's too bad that some odd quirks hamper the cop chases. The environmental hazards that you can unleash certainly look cool and are effective, but quite often you won't see any police cars get hit by the objects, yet when the cutscene ends the cars are trashed. Sometimes you won't have to do anything at all to evade police--the game says "go" and you stay still and nobody finds you. Cops are capable of laying down spikes, but you can go the entire game without them ever doing so. The biggest problem, however, is that the cops don't do much other than bang on the side of your car and yell at you, so if you last long enough they sort of fade away on their own. This makes the chases less challenging than they could have been and also makes them feel artificial, like you're just fulfilling some sort of time requirement until the game decides you've done well enough to escape. Undercover isn't just about messing with the Man. There are events where you need to maintain a lead for a specific amount of time or get a certain distance ahead of your opponent. Sometimes you'll have to shake the cops while trying to keep a stolen ride in pristine condition, and there are checkpoint races and circuit races as well. There's not a whole lot that's original here and the races are generally extremely easy--you might not see another car for an entire race once you've cleared the starting line. They're difficult on occasion, but this is usually because of the occasionally choppy frame rate, which makes the otherwise great-handling vehicles a chore to drive when it rears its head. What's odd is that there's really no obvious reason for the game's sometimes poor frame rate; the city doesn't look much different than those in Carbon and Most Wanted. That said, the game does do a few things very well. The online cops and robbers mode, where the robber tries to pick up money and take it to a drop-off point while another person plays the cop and tries to ram them, is quite a bit of fun. But mostly what the game gets right is its pacing. The races are short--sometimes as short as 20 seconds, and almost never longer than five minutes. Another cool thing the game does is it lets you instantly jump to the closest race by pressing down on the D pad. If you want to find a specific event you can press up and you're taken to a GPS map, where you can instantly go to the race of your choice. It'll save you a lot of needless backtracking, and combined with the short races, makes sure that Undercover never gets boring. If you're one of the many people who loved Need for Speed Most Wanted, flaws and all, you'll find a lot to like in Undercover. It's not very original, but there's no denying that it's just good fun to run from the cops and wreak havoc on a city in the process. Need for Speed: Undercover System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent CPU SPEED: 3.0 GHz for XP/ 3.2GHz for Vista RAM: 512 MB of RAM for XP / 1 GB of RAM for VISTA OS: Windows XP (Service Pack 2 or greater) / Windows Vista / Windows 7 VIDEO CARD: DirectX 9.0c Compatible 3D accelerated 128 MB Video card or equivalent, NVIDIA GeForce 6600+ / ATI Radeon 9500+ / Intel G45 Express Chipset TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 128 MB 3D: Yes HARDWARE T&L: Yes PIXEL SHADER: 2.0 VERTEX SHADER: 2.0 SOUND CARD: Yes DVD-ROM: Yes

game information: DevelopersCapcom Production Studio 4, Capcom Production Studio 3 PublishersACE (2), Ingram Entertainment, Capcom Franchises[object Object] Release DateMarch 29, 2000 PlatformsDreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStat Few titles have the honor of saying that they were the "first" to invoke a particular emotion from a gamer. Some, such as Atari's Asteroids, got my adrenaline flowing. Others like Duck Hunt and its snickering dog made me angry, and Castle of Illusion was one of the first games that made me smile with absolute wonder. But the first game to leave me scared $#!%less? Without question, that honor is reserved by many a gamer for none other than Capcom's Resident Evil. I can still remember the first time the dogs broke through the window. The first time I saw that fabled cut scene where the blood-hungry zombie gave me that "come hither" stare. The first time I ran off the balcony away from the crows that I could almost feel nipping at my eyes just as they had my ex-partners. Creepy. It was this mix of mortality and digitally-induced reality that has helped Chris and Co. carve out a permanent place in the hearts and worst nightmares of millions of video game enthusiasts. The series has certainly come into its own on the PlayStation, and when I first heard that it was on its way to Dreamcast, and that Sega would be handling the technical side of things, part of me was tempted to convince the world that Resident Evil was a series best kept pure to its Sony roots. But much like the idea that Rayman just "wouldn't be the same on the Nintendo 64, much less in 3-D," fate has a funny way of clocking me upside the head. I kinda felt like a geek who got a swift slap from a beautiful woman due to a bit too much ambition after reading the latest issue of Accelerator. It may have stung my pride a little bit...but eventually, I sat down, stared from across the room, and amidst a slew of dorky little giggles, muttered almost to myself: "She touched me. Awesome." Yes, my friends, Veronica is that type of game, and if you're that type of survival whore-er, then you're in for that type of experience all over again. But thanks to the power of Dreamcast, this go round is not only a whole hell of a lot more beautiful, but it almost seems a lot more spooky. Imagine that, eh? I'm sure at first, you'd think that those were just the words of system biased fool, but hear me out. I intend to put into words why this is the best entry into one of the last decade's brightest gaming stars, and if I succeed, you'll at least get a glimpse into why Resident Evil - CODE: Veronica is the type of title every gamer needs to experience. For those of you who are new to the series, Resident Evil single-handedly re-defined a genre introduced by titles like Alone in the Dark. A genre that, while a bit on the limited side, has made a name for itself via the ability to put its players smack in the middle of a cheesy horror film. With its unsettling imagery and excellent use of timed events, the PlayStation version made my skin crawl. But the Dreamcast's first original effort? Well, this game benefits from some of the most amazing visuals ever seen in a game, rivaling and in many senses surpassing even the great Shenmue. Remember how spooky the original mansion was? Imagine how creepy it is as you walk through to countless creaks and groans, holding a lighter which brilliantly casts colored light on the house's eccentric trappings, not to mention the host of bats it keeps at bay. I was admittedly scared out of my wits at the shock of many of the original's occurrences, but man, much like the difference between someone saying "boo" and a big, flesh-flapping zombie in the middle of a house that's actually haunted trying to eat you...there's a bit of a contrast. The game's outstanding visuals combine with the series' trademark music and audio to create a scene so lively, so frightening, that getting sucked into this nightmare is easier than ever before. Thankfully, the story is much longer and deeper this go 'round, with a cast of villains and vermin that are sure to add to the game's almost unstoppable attractive prowess, especially in the case of Claire's half of the game, where the story sees a bit more exposure. You'll really get a chance to play the part, and I won't risk ruining anything for you, but let's just say that there are enough twists and turns to keep you on your toes. Chris' tale is a bit less structured, and as is the case with any tale of closure, the initial scare and shock brought about by your first looks at some areas isn't quite as strong, but there is more than enough to keep you interested...especially with the battle game looming on the horizon. The thing is, this game is hardly a chore at its worst moments, and at its best ... oh my. In fact, about the only thing I would even bother to harp on with Code Veronica is a problem that has plagued the game since it's birth: the control. They say you either love it or you hate when it comes to the Resident Evil series, but personally, I think that's a load. In my mind, either you love the game enough to put up with its clunky interface, or you don't. The fact is, the control is pointlessly over done, and simplifying it would do this game a world of good in terms of dragging you in to the adventure. As it stands now, I often found myself so busy trying to accommodate the control that I have to think about it, which is kind of defeating the purpose of a game in that I don't want to know I'm playing. I just kept thinking: "but if only I could point in a direction and just go there!" It would make the experience of the game so much more prominent, which in my mind, could not be a bad thing. It's not that I hate the control, but in my mind, it could be improved upon, and I hope Capcom has the courage to move on if they can make it work, as opposed to being content with this, because it isn't exactly the zombie's moan, if ya' know what I mean. But enough harping. The fact is, the more I got pulled in to the game's amazing theatrics, the less I cared. The things that have always sucked about Resident Evil still bite the big one in Code Veronica. In addition to the wonky control, the item box is still evil. And yes, you still can only hold the load of a 5 year-old with one hand tied behind their back. But by the same token, everything, from the cameras to the incredible level of facial detail in some of the cinemas sets new standards for the genre, and this is easily the most impressive entry into the Resident Evil series to date. The game is a true testament to the hardware, and a survival horror freak's wish come true. If you think you can handle this two-disk terror, turn down the lights, crank up the volume, and prepare for a an overdose of fright. This one's a keeper. system requirements: OS Xbox One Architecture x64

Name of Game: Battlefield 3™Price: $9.99Link Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1238820/Battlefield_3/Offer Ends After : 9July 2020 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 64-bit Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core (Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or Althon X2 2.7 GHz) Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: Graphics card (AMD): DirectX 10.1 compatible with 512 MB RAM (ATI Radeon 3000, 4000, 5000 or 6000 series, with ATI Radeon 3870 or higher performance) Graphics card (NVIDIA): DirectX 10.0 compatible with 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 or 500 series with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or higher performance) DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 20 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

Release Date: June 14, 2013 Producer: Neil Druckman Series: Sony The Last of Us Series Developer: Naughty Dog Awards: Spike Award for Best Male Voice Actor, more Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 3 What makes life worth living? The Last of Us tries to answer that question by giving us a vision of a world that makes no room for people to really live their lives anymore. In this post-pandemic military-ruled society, the most anyone can hope for is merely to survive. And as many characters in the game know, in a world where the survival of anyone from one day to the next is uncertain, attachments, connections, love--these things can become liabilities. These things can destroy you. Naughty Dog's acclaimed action game has made its way to the PlayStation 4 as The Last of Us Remastered, and if you've played the game on the PlayStation 3, you'll probably notice that it runs at a higher frame rate and that the lighting is richer and moodier in this release. In side-by-side comparisons, it also becomes apparent that the textures are sharper and the draw distance has been increased. But the reality is that the game already looked so good on the PlayStation 3 that the visual enhancements can't do all that much to improve your experience. The Last of Us Remastered is still The Last of Us, and that is no bad thing. It's one of the best adventures of the last console generation, and it's fully deserving of the special-edition treatment it gets here. Perhaps nobody knows the dangers of loving others in this uncertain world better than Joel, the protagonist of The Last of Us. A hard, bitter man, Joel isn't likable, but he is at least understandable, in large part because the dialogue in The Last of Us is so human and believable. And although that humanity comes through in all of the game's major characters, it's the teenager Ellie who is the game's emotional heart. In contrast to Joel's cynicism, Ellie is still capable of wide-eyed wonder. While Joel seems dead inside, Ellie is very much alive, and over the course of the game, neither Joel, nor you, can avoid growing attached to her. Still, if you think too carefully about the importance the story places on the connection between these two characters, things start to fall apart a bit. Because The Last of Us is an action game that adheres to the established template of the genre, over the course of your journey you murder not just one or five or 12 people, but dozens and dozens of them, and it's questionable whether a man who treats the lives of so many of his fellow human beings as so disposable would really be capable of placing any meaningful importance on the life of one particular individual. You can't soil your hands with the blood of hundreds and still have room for love in your heart. The story is set in a world where every human life is in constant danger, and the harrowing combat of the game supports this feeling. Whether you're fighting ordinary humans or infected ones, you're encouraged to rely on stealth, distracting enemies and sneaking up on them to save your precious supplies. But you're always on edge, aware that you might be spotted and that all hell will break loose. There's a gut-wrenching brutality and sense of desperation to the way Joel fights, bashing his enemies' faces into the environment or stomping them into a bloody mess. The Last of Us is not a game in which you can boldly charge at your enemies with guns blazing. Instead, you rummage through every abandoned house, store, and workplace looking for things you can use to craft weapons and health kits. This emphasis on scrounging for supplies helps ground the combat in the world of the game, a world in which nothing can be taken for granted. Because every enemy poses a serious threat, there's a real fear of being spotted, or of an enemy coming at you from behind, so you try to stay aware of your surroundings. One type of infected, the clickers, see by using echolocation, and the sound of their clicking is unsettling enough to make your skin crawl. As in the PlayStation 3 version, the tension of combat is sometimes undermined when your allies behave erratically, doing things that would get you spotted and killed. But then there are moments in which your companions' behavior creates the feeling that you're not alone on this journey, such as when Ellie comes to your rescue by stabbing your assailant in the back. The nerve-racking intensity of combat is mercifully not a constant throughout The Last of Us. The pacing of the game is excellent; this is a game that's willing to take its time, letting you just inhabit a moment and take in the atmosphere rather than constantly rushing you to the next explosive action sequence. There's a melancholy beauty to the game's world that seeps into your heart in these quieter moments. On the one hand, your breath might be taken away by the sight of cities being slowly reclaimed by the lush greenery of nature, but on the other, it's hard to forget that this beauty tells the story of the decline of humankind. You explore so many places--old pizzerias and coffee shops, hotels and record stores--all of them designed with an attention to detail that makes them feel like places where people once went about their lives. Even in its quietest moments, though, The Last of Us doesn't let you get too comfortable. The calm always gives way sooner or later to another frantic chase, terrifying siege, or other uncomfortable reminder that this world isn't nearly as tranquil as it sometimes seems to be. Joel and Ellie are unlikely companions thrown together by circumstance. Joel and Ellie are unlikely companions thrown together by circumstance. The Last of Us Remastered includes the original game's multiplayer mode, along with all of the map packs that were released as downloadable content. The multiplayer successfully captures the unnerving feeling of the single-player combat, and wraps it up in an engaging metagame about trying to sustain a camp full of survivors by gathering supplies and completing specific tasks during missions. You can give the mode an extra emotional punch by linking it to your personal Facebook account, enabling you to see updates about your real-life friends dying as your camp flounders. And then there's Left Behind, the extraordinary DLC story chapter for The Last of Us, unlocked here from the beginning. While the main game's narrative concerns with the importance of interpersonal connections and the gameplay's focus on combat and violence are somewhat at odds with each other, Left Behind takes the established mechanics of The Last of Us and uses them to support its story of the bond between Ellie and her friend Riley. Playing as Ellie, you and Riley toss bricks at car windows, hunt each other with water pistols, and do other things together, and all the while, the characters say honest things to each other, laugh with each other, get angry with each other, and do other things that real people do. By giving you these glimpses of Ellie's doomed attempts to live something resembling a normal teenage life, Left Behind drives home what Ellie has lost as a person by growing up in this harsh world. The bond that forms between Ellie and Riley, supported both by the gameplay and by extraordinarily natural writing and acting, feels real. Left Behind crams more memorable moments into its short running time than you find in most full games, and it understands that some of the most important moments we share with others are the smallest: a brief glance, a fleeting smile. This remarkable DLC has real character development and real emotional payoff. In addition to the visual enhancements and the inclusion of map packs and story DLC, The Last of Us Remastered has other nice little features, like a photo mode that lets you stop the action at any time, position the camera to your liking, and share the screenshot with others, applying frames and filters if you choose. And there are commentary tracks on in-game cinematics featuring the creative director and principal actors. The Last of Us is a great action game that you should play if you haven't already. And if you have played it before, the improvements here aren't so dramatic as to make the game feel like a new experience, but it is definitely one worth revisiting. In the world of The Last of Us, as in our own world, love might destroy you, but it's also one of the only things worth fighting for.

Brazil has restored a website that lists the full data on Covid-19 in the country, just hours after it was ordered to do so by the Supreme Court. The health ministry stopped releasing cumulative totals for deaths and cases on Saturday, provoking uproar. On Tuesday a Supreme Court judge ordered the government to release the figures amid accusations of censorship. Brazil has the world's second-highest number of cases - and has now more daily deaths than any other nation. Earlier, President Jair Bolsonaro said the change in policy was a result of actions being taken to improve Covid-19 reporting. The health ministry said it would only report cases and deaths that had occurred in the past 24 hours. But critics accused the far-right president's government of data mani[CENSORED]tion, with Brazil's national council of state health secretaries describing the move as "authoritarian, insensitive, inhuman and unethical". Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes told the ministry to "fully re-establish" the publication of Covid-19 data in the interests of public health. Brazil's domestic workers cut adrift in pandemic In pictures: Indigenous nurse on frontline in virus fight 'Our biggest problem is fake news' Brazil has the world's second-highest number of cases, and has recently had more new deaths than any other nation. The Latin American country has recorded more than 700,000 infections, but because of insufficient testing, the number is believed to be much higher. More than 37,000 people have died, the third-highest toll in the world. Using data from alternative sources, Brazilian media outlets started publishing their own coronavirus figures to keep the public informed. They criticised President Bolsonaro for his handling of the pandemic, during which he has opposed lockdown measures and downplayed the virus as "a little flu". On Tuesday, the president reiterated his threat to withdraw Brazil from the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing it of not acting responsibly during the pandemic. Last week, Mr Bolsonaro branded the health agency a "partisan political organisation", echoing comments made by US President Donald Trump, an ally of his. The president has repeatedly joined supporters in protests in recent months, ignoring social-distancing advice. What did the judge say? In a statement on Tuesday, Mr Moraes said the health ministry must "fully re-establish the daily divulgation of epidemiological data on the Covid-19 pandemic", including on its website. The judge made the ruling on Monday night in response to a legal challenge from three political parties. Mr Moraes gave Mr Bolsonaro's government 48 hours to release the full figures again, O Global newspaper reported. He said the health emergency in Brazil was so serious, it required all government agencies to "put into effect public health protection". The judge "highlighted the disastrous consequences for the po[CENSORED]tion if internationally recognised measures are not adopted, such as the collection, analysis, storage and dissemination of relevant epidemiological data". What is the situation in Brazil? Only the US has more coronavirus infections than Brazil, the most populous country in Latin America. Health experts say infections are expected to rise even further, as the outbreak is still weeks away from its peak, putting more strain on hospitals. Last month, Brazil's death toll surpassed that of Italy's, placing the nation third in the world, behind only the US and the UK. Mr Bolsonaro has played down the risks of the virus, comparing it to "a bit of a cold". Two health ministers have left the post since the outbreak began in disagreement with the president's handling of the pandemic. Brazil's Bolsonaro sees second health minister quit The president has continued to call for lockdown measures imposed by local authorities to be lifted, arguing that they will wreck the economy. The president has also accused state governors and mayors of using the issue for political gain, as many who have taken stricter measures oppose his government.

Name of Game: DoomPrice: $9.99Link Store: https://www.gamersgate.com/DD-DOOM2016/Offer Ends After : 6Days System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 or better / AMD FX-8320 or better CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only) VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 (2GB) or better / AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2GB) or better PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 45 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB

Name of Game: Lords of the Fallen Game of the Year EditionPrice: $4.80Link Store: https://www.gamersgate.com/DD-LORDS-OF-THE-FALLEN-GOTY/lords-of-the-fallen-game-of-the-year-editionOffer Ends After : 1h22min System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0GHz CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 6 GB OS: Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (only 64 bit OSs) VIDEO CARD: GeForce GTX 460 or better PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 SOUND CARD: Yes FREE DISK SPACE: 25 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1 GB

Security measures in the US have been lifted as unrest over the death in police custody of African-American George Floyd eases. New York ended its nearly week-long curfew and President Donald Trump said he was ordering the National Guard to start withdrawing from Washington DC. The unrest has largely been replaced by largely peaceful worldwide protests against racism and police brutality. Black Lives Matter protests continued on Sunday in European nations. In the city of Bristol in the UK protesters tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis on 25 May. Video showed him pinned to the floor, with a white police officer kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. Officer Derek Chauvin has been dismissed and charged with murder. Three other officers who were at the scene have also been sacked and charged with aiding and abetting. Mr Floyd's funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Houston, his home city before he moved to Minneapolis. US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is due to travel to Texas on Monday to meet Mr Floyd's family ahead of the service and offer his condolences, two senior aides told Reuters news agency. He is not expected to attend the funeral. Mr Biden also took to Twitter on Sunday to hit out at Mr Trump's handling of the protests, saying he had "callously used his [words as a president] to incite violence, stoke the flames of hatred and division, and drive us further apart". Hours earlier, President Trump had tweeted that the National Guard could start withdrawing from the capital as "everything is under perfect control". "They will be going home, but can quickly return, if needed. Far fewer protesters showed up last night than anticipated!" he said. The National Guard is the reserve military force that can be called on by the US president or state governors to intervene in domestic emergencies. Mr Trump's previous threats to use military force against protesters has prompted a wave of criticism from high-ranking military officials, including his own former defence secretary, General Jim Mattis. On Sunday, Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added his voice during an interview with CNN, accusing the president of "drifting away" from the constitution. Mr Powell, who led the US military during the Gulf War, added he would be voting for Mr Biden. Responding on Twitter President Trump called Mr Powell "overrated" and pointed to his involvement in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Gen Martin Dempsey, Joint Chief of Staffs chairman under Barrack Obama, told ABC's The Week that the president's words had hurt relations between the US public and the military. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CBS News' Face the Nation that she would like Mr Trump to "put tweeting aside for a little bit" and have a conversation with the American people. Washington had seen angry protests outside the White House, particularly last Monday when demonstrators were cleared for Mr Trump to walk to a nearby church. Saturday's massive protest in the capital was peaceful. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted: "We are lifting the curfew, effective immediately. Yesterday and last night we saw the very best of our city." The end of the curfew comes a day before New York enters the first phase of its plan to reopen after more than two months of lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak. "Tomorrow we take the first big step to restart. Keep staying safe. Keep looking out for each other," Mr de Blasio said. New York has seen its fair share of violence in the past week, with looting of luxury stores in Manhattan, scores of arrests and the burning of dozens of police cars. There were also accusations against the police, including the beating of protesters. One patrol car was also driven into a crowd of protesters, sparking a row between politicians. Many major US cities that saw unrest have now lifted curfews, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, although a few protests have still led to clashes. Where are protests continuing now? Sunday has seen more demonstrations taking place across Europe under the banner of Black Lives Matter. In Madrid, thousands of people marched carrying anti-racism placards and wearing masks to observe coronavirus measures, although images showed social distancing was not being followed. Outside the US embassy in Madrid, protesters shouted "I can't breathe", echoing Mr Floyd's last words. In the Hungarian capital Budapest, protesters took on a knee for exactly the same length of time an officer knelt on Mr Floyd's neck. Similar protests were held in Rome, where protesters fell silent for roughly the same time that George Floyd was pinned down. There have also been events in Brussels, Copenhagen and in several places in the UK. Huge peaceful rallies took place across the US. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC, in the city's largest protest so far, many of them at the newly renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza outside Lafayette Park. There were also massive protests in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles. There was even a protest in the small, east Texas town of Vidor, once infamous as a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. Dozens of white and black protesters carrying Black Lives Matter banners rallied in a place previously known as a "sundown town" because black people did not venture out after dark.

Release Date: March 5, 2013 Software developer: POWER Chain: Mass Effect Series Publisher: Electronic Arts Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 Nominations: Spike Award for Best Additional Pack Commander Shepard leads a serious life. The galaxy is facing a major threat, and the disparate races that inhabit it need an attitude adjustment if they're all going to survive. Juggling these issues has afforded the commander precious little time to catch his breath. And now, here at the end, it's finally time for a break. In this final piece of single-player downloadable content for Mass Effect 3, the battle-weary Commander Shepard is plucked from the world of galactic warfare and diplomatic intrigue and dropped into a most unfamiliar setting: a fun evening with friends. For one long night, the war is put on hold, and everyone is invited to reflect on how far they've come. That's not to say this hefty, four-gigabyte update won't offer plenty of combat. In fact, you could almost draw a line down the center of this release. The first half deals with Shepard overcoming a dangerous new threat while on shore leave. Once that is resolved, the second half is strictly person-to-person (or person-to-alien) interactions. This new threat is a private military corporation that is, frankly, a less-capable version of Cerberus. It employs a few new tricks, such as shield-detonating kamikaze drones and cluster grenades, but mostly it just gets mocked--mercilessly--by you and your squadmates. After the corporation makes an assassination attempt on Shepard, friends from past and present Mass Effect games descend upon it. Soon you find yourself fighting side by side by side with your entire team in unison, all of whom are hurling insults and exchanging friendly banter among the carnage. The quest to stop these anti-Shepard militants is both challenging and humorous, with a surprise twist straight out of a cheesy sci-fi movie, but that won't be what you remember from this DLC. The combat is just a vehicle to get the band back together and reconnect atop the corpses of your enemies. The memories come when you're back at your fancy, new apartment planning for one massive party with the entire crew. That's when the tone of this story takes a dramatic shift to the comedic. In addition to being the last piece of single-player DLC for the series, Citadel is the most humorous. Every little in-joke, callback, and reference the writers could work in, they did. Remember when Garrus would always talk about calibrations, or when everyone had to ride those elevators in the Citadel, or when Traynor made that comment about her fancy toothbrush? There's a joke for each of those--and so many more! While these quips are great for a laugh, those looking for a bit more narrative substance will be left wanting. Maybe you don't care about Kaidan's cooking or EDI's taste in automobiles. If these rampant attempts at fan service don't strike a chord, you're simply out of luck. Developer BioWare's signature, grandiose storytelling takes a backseat here to simpler, one-off wisecracks. And a lot of dancing. Once the dust has settled and the party is over, there is still more to do at the Silversun Strip: a new area of the Citadel and the setting for most of this DLC. There are plenty of disposable games at the casino and arcade, but most of your time will likely be spent at the battle simulator. This virtual reality game pits Shepard against waves of enemies, similar to ME3's multiplayer mode. Difficulty modifiers, such as less-effective shields or no medi-gel, help mix up the fun, but the most exciting feature is the unlockable teammates. Even if it's just for this mode, it's nice to fight alongside Jack, Samara, Wrex, and the others again. Mass Effect 3: Citadel, swan song of the series, casts Shepard and friends off on one last comedic adventure, albeit in very shallow waters. It is an acknowledgment of all the fans out there who have fought alongside Normandy's crew across three games and six years. The old crew is brought together, but presented in a very different light. If you've helped Shepard endure from Eden Prime all the way to the Catalyst's chamber, then you'll have plenty to laugh about in Citadel. System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU) CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 1GB for XP / 2GB RAM for Vista/Win 7 OS: Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, Win 7 VIDEO CARD: 256 MB with Pixel Shader 3.0 support. (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 or better; ATI Radeon X1800 or better. Please note that NVIDIA GeForce 9300, 8500, 8400, and 8300 are below minimum system requirements, as are AMD/ATI Radeon HD 3200, HD 3300, and HD 4350.) PIXEL SHADER: 3.0 VERTEX SHADER: 3.0 SOUND CARD: Yes FREE DISK SPACE: 2.5 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 256 MB

Release date: November 9, 2018 Genre: Adventures video game Platforms: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Software developers: Digixart, Ardman Animation Publishers: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Europe, Namco Bandai Games America Inc. Nominations: BAFTA Video Games Award - Best British Game, Timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the armistice treaty signed on November 11, 1918 that ended World War I, 11-11: Memories Retold follows the stories of two men swept up in terrible events (mostly) beyond their control over the course of two years on the Western Front. A collaboration between Aardman, the animation studio best known for the Wallace & Gromit TV series and films, and DigixArt, a fledgling French game development team, it's a visually striking adventure game that foregrounds its occasionally moving, occasionally ludicrous narrative atop a layer of light puzzling and collectible gathering. The intertwining story sees you play as both Harry (voiced by Elijah Wood), a young photographer from Canada who finds himself in France shooting film--not foe--for propaganda purposes at the invitation of a British major, and Kurt (Sebastian Koch), an older German electrical engineer who enlists when he receives word that his son's unit has gone missing. Their tales are connected, of course, and at key moments in each chapter your control will switch from Harry to Kurt and back again, often multiple times. Later, there are even scenes in which you are free to switch between them, and a third character, whenever you wish. Each man's journey plays out across a France (and bits of Germany and Canada) that is rendered like an oil-on-canvas painting, the thick individual brush strokes and contrasting colours an obvious nod to the Impressionist style that was still en vogue in the early 20th century. It feels like each scene is being painted in real-time as you walk around, as the brush strokes flicker in a manner suggesting an artist constantly reapplying paint on canvas. From the crackling ember reds of a battlefield to the dappled whites and yellows of an idyllic farmstead, the unique art direction succeeds in setting the emotional tone of each scene. The overall effect is quite startling and very often beautiful. What you're actually doing inside each scene is rather more conventional. Harry and Kurt walk--and occasionally crouch or run--around a series of mostly small locations, talking to people and picking up dozens of collectibles. Helpfully, you always have a specific objective to accomplish; in Harry's case it's typically whatever task Major Barrett has ordered him to perform while Kurt's pursuit of his son's whereabouts is often derailed by the whims of his own superiors. Regardless, most objectives are easily completed by simply walking to the desired destination, interacting with a certain object or talking to the right person. Sometimes there's even a box to push out of the way or a couple of levers and dials to fiddle with, but absolutely none of it is in any way taxing. This is for the best, perhaps. At least, it means the story takes center stage and you're not in any danger of getting stuck on a puzzle and finding yourself unable to see that story to its conclusion. More than that, though, it also works because the story 11-11 tells is genuinely good. Sure, it's a romanticised version of World War I that doesn't really confront the senseless brutality of trench warfare or the sheer scale of human loss and suffering that resulted--there's but one scene where you don a gas mask, for example, and when Harry is finally called upon to go "over the top" he's more focused on getting a few good pictures than whether he'll survive the mad dash into no man's land. But the story works because Harry and Kurt are convincing characters whose flaws and motivations remain all too real no matter what the war throws at them. The plot may contrive to see the lives of the two men intersect in unlikely fashion, but they themselves are utterly believable and empathetic until the very end. Further, the story works because you are given choices to make at critical junctures. Each choice feels weighty and full of consequence. I didn't replay scenes to see how things could have played out differently--and perhaps the rippling effects are minimal--but I didn't want to. What matters is that the import of the decisions I made was felt in the moment I made them, and ultimately I was more than satisfied with how my version of the story ended. Where the story undermines itself, however, is in its pacing. Or, to be more accurate, in how certain pieces of the story are locked behind collectibles, the search for which sees you get bogged down in scouring every area for hidden documents and items rather than keeping the plot ticking over. Not to mention that it's quite silly when Kurt's ordered to quickly fix a radio during an attack while you're thinking, “Hang on, let me just check if there's anything I've missed down the other end of this trench….” You can ignore the collectibles, but you'll also be missing out on story content. When it comes together, whether in moments of high drama and urgent choices or in the quiet interludes that follow, 11-11 draws you deep into the lives of these men. When it misses the mark, whether through an implausible coincidence, a throwaway puzzle or tedious collectible, it can push you away and cause the surrounding narrative beats to fall flat. It's uneven, yes, but there's undoubtedly more good than bad, and there are poignant scenes, tense moments and breathtaking images that will resonate long after the end credits have rolled. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: OS: 64-bit Windows 7, 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1) or 64-bit Windows 10 Processor: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 / AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 6 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

Release Date: March 2, 2018 (Germany) Director: Rauer Ottoge Mailbox: $ 274.7 million The author of the story: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Evan Dougherty Production companies: Warner Bros., Square Enix, Goldwyn Mayer Metro, Initial Entertainment Group When adventurer extraordinaire Lara Croft raided her first tomb back in 1996, she brought with her an exhilarating feeling of isolation and discovery. Over the years, Lara has continued to venture into parts unknown, taking dark turns and frequently tangling with the supernatural as the series evolved alongside the burgeoning third-person action adventure genre. The gameplay of this series reboot takes a few cues from a current titan of the genre--Nathan Drake and the Uncharted series--but don't let that familiarity put you off. This origin story is a terrific adventure that balances moments of quiet exploration with plenty of rip-roaring action to keep you enthralled from start to finish. As Tomb Raider begins, Lara is more an academic than an adventurer. But when she's shipwrecked on an island full of ancient secrets and deadly cultists, she has little choice but to learn how to survive. Lara endures a great deal of punishment early in the game, and though no small amount of that anguish is physical, it's an unpleasant moment in which a man tries to force himself on her that's most harrowing. But as unpleasant as it is, it marks an important turning point in Lara's understanding of just how hard she has to fight to survive. Rather than crumbling under the weight of her physical and emotional struggles, she emerges from them a stronger person. It's empowering to witness Lara's journey from the understandably fearful individual she is when she first arrives on the island to the justifiably confident survivor she becomes. Later in the game, when she has proven to the resident cultists that she's not the easily cowed person they mistook her for, she turns the psychological tables on them, letting loose battle cries to strike fear into their hearts. Aspects of the story that fall outside of Lara's character arc aren't as strong; there's a twist of sorts that occurs late in the game that you see coming hours ahead of time, for instance, and the central villain offers little in the way of nuance. But as an introduction to the legendary Lara Croft, Tomb Raider's tale is a success; she emerges as a strong, charismatic and human figure, and you're left eager to see what the future holds for her. Lara's origin story deserves an extraordinary setting, and the island where Tomb Raider takes place does not disappoint. Centuries ago, it was home to a kingdom called Yamatai. Many shrines, temples, statues and other remnants of that history remain, and often, you just want to take in these places, slowly advancing through the darkness, eager to discover what's just outside the light of your torch. The island is a beautiful place, but not every discovery is a pleasant one; Yamatai's dark history is vividly communicated in piles of bones and far more grisly things. On the PC, the lovely sights are even lovelier and the horrifying sights are more horrifying than on consoles. The PC port was handled by Nixxes, and just as their PC release of Sleeping Dogs improved significantly on the visuals of the console versions, the sharp textures in Tomb Raider's PC release make it the definitive way to experience this game. The ancient structures of Yamatai now coexist alongside bunkers built during World War II, the wreckage of planes brought down by the storms that surround the island, and the shantytowns and makeshift machinery of the island's current inhabitants. It's a fascinating hodgepodge of the beautiful and the utilitarian; the buildings are believably nestled in their rough natural surroundings, and appear appropriately weathered, damaged, and rusty. The island really feels like a place where people have lived and where great and terrible things have happened. It's a place with many facets; it has claustrophobic caverns and breathtaking vistas, and phenomena like gentle snowfalls, torrential downpours, and fierce, howling winds make it alternately seem like a tranquil place, and a brutal one. It's immediately clear that one thing the island is not is safe, so it's a good thing that Lara soon gets her hands on a bow. You acquaint yourself with using it by hunting animals; Lara doesn't have hunger levels you need to manage or any such thing, but the deer, rabbits, crabs and other creatures that call the island home make it feel much more alive. For reasons of their own, the cult that currently occupies the island doesn't exactly welcome you with open arms, so it's not long before you need to turn that bow (and, soon, a pistol, rifle, and shotgun) on humans. Combat is varied and suspenseful; some situations give you the opportunity to take a stealthy approach, sneaking up behind enemies to perform silent kills, or firing arrows into walls to distract them and picking them off from a distance with well-aimed arrows while their comrades aren't looking. During one particularly tense battle in a fog-shrouded forest, patrolling foes hunt you with flashlights; if you can manage to stay unseen, you can shift from prey to predator, using their cones of light to pinpoint their positions and eliminating them one by one. Then, there are the all-out firefights. When your presence is known, enemies are smart and aggressive about flushing you out from cover with grenades and Molotovs, which forces you to keep moving and act boldly. Many enemies attack from a distance while others get in close, so you need to be constantly on your toes, switching between your weapons on the fly and evading foes who attack with melee weapons. Dodging and countering melee attacks is easy, but the savage animations of Lara's counters make eliminating those foes who make the mistake of getting too close to you consistently satisfying. Lara eventually finds powerful new tools like a grenade launcher and fire arrows, and uses the salvage she constantly collects to improve her weapons, so combat offers more flexibility and becomes more intense as you progress through the game. Throughout it all, great sound design drives home the impact of your actions; delivering a shotgun blast into the face of a nearby enemy is made all the more powerful by the resounding report the gun lets loose, and the conversations you overhear between cultists create a feeling that they're not just enemies who spawn into the environment to hinder you, but are people with histories on the island and tasks to accomplish. As great as the combat is, it's the quieter moments in Tomb Raider that are most affecting. The simple act of moving, of shimmying along ridges and climbing up craggy rock walls, is a pleasure, thanks to the excellent controls and the fantastic environments. Once in a while, Lara appears to get a bit of divine assistance and float through the air to successfully land a jump you botched the timing on, but with these rare exceptions aside, the controls let you experience a wonderfully physical and agile relationship with your surroundings. Lara's been making desperate leaps and grabbing on to faraway ledges since her earliest game, but it's never felt quite as good as it does here. And just as Lara acquires new weapons over the course of the game, she also gets her hands on gear that makes her more a more versatile adventurer. Particularly nifty are the rope arrows and rope ascender, the former of which enables you to create rope bridges to certain areas (among other things), and the latter of which lets you rapidly zip up ropes from a lower position. This gear gives you more freedom, and makes Lara seem like a progressively more capable and confident explorer. Naturally, the PC version lets you guide Lara around using either an Xbox 360 controller or the mouse and keyboard. Whether you prefer the more immediate sense of connection to Lara's leaping and climbing afforded by the controller or the more precise aiming the mouse provides, you can't go wrong with either option. The game is at its best when you're fully in control, when you feel directly connected to Lara as she runs and leaps and clambers. But when the game does take some of that control away from you, it usually does so with skill and assurance. A number of semi-interactive scripted moments require less from you as a player, moments when the building Lara is standing on starts to crumble in spectacular fashion, or when she's being swept down a perilous river. What these sequences lack in interactivity, they make up for in spectacle. There are a few missteps; the quick-time-event-focused final confrontation ends the game on a slightly underwhelming note, for instance. But for the most part, these moments bring Tomb Raider a lot of cinematic thrills. When it comes to jaw-dropping setpieces, Lara's adventure rivals those of Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake. Lara is still an explorer at heart, and although there aren't vast open spaces to frolic in on the island, there are plenty of reasons to look around and venture off the beaten path. There are relics to find that offer clues to the island's history and journals that lend some insight into the experiences of the island's residents, past and present. Best of all are the numerous optional tombs you might happen upon during your journey. These chambers always consist of an environmental puzzle that you must solve, and these are generally just challenging enough to make you stop and think for a moment, but never drag down the pace of your adventure. Completing tombs earns you experience and sometimes parts you can use to improve your weapons, as well as maps that reveal the locations of the collectibles scattered around that part of the island. These tombs also function as character building through gameplay; as you guide Lara through these challenges to the rewards that await, it's easy to understand how she develops a taste for the tomb raiding and treasure hunting that will shape her future. In addition to the excellent campaign, there's an enjoyable but unremarkable competitive multiplayer component. There are four modes, all of which are pretty typical: a team deathmatch and a free for all, as well as two modes in which teams score points by completing basic objectives. It feels great to land a headshot on another player with a bow from across a map, or to activate a snare trap and then see another player heedlessly walk into it. But for the most part, it's standard fare, with the sorts of unlockable weapon upgrades and perks that are now par for the course. But no matter; the single-player campaign here is the main attraction, and it is excellent. It doesn't try to rewrite the book on third-person action adventure games. But with its excellent controls, engaging heroine, thrilling combat, and fascinating setting, it doesn't need to. Lara may be covering some previously charted territory here, but Tomb Raider is so well-crafted, you won't mind at all. System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Dual core CPU (AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz (4050+)/Intel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghz (E6300) CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 1 GB (Win XP), 2 GB (Win Vista/7) OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 VIDEO CARD: DirectX 9 Graphics card with 512 MB Video RAM (Radeon HD 2600 XT/Geforce 8600) PIXEL SHADER: 3.0 VERTEX SHADER: 3.0 SOUND CARD: Yes DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 512 MB

Initial release date: November 6, 2018 Genre: Adventures video game Designer: Hiditaka Miyazaki Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Platform: Playstation 4 Software developers: From Software, Japan Studio Dark Souls creator FromSoftware is renowned for its vague, interpretative stories and captivating gameplay--two strengths of the studio that have been successfully applied to similarly styled games for nearly over a decade. Deracine is a departure from what the studio is primarily known for. It's a narrative adventure that makes good use of PlayStation VR and the immersive nature of the hardware but fails to consolidate a poorly structured story and mundane gameplay to create something truly special. Deracine puts you in control of an invisible Faerie who manifests in a mysteriously secluded boarding school that serves as a home to five children. You're summoned by one of the children, Yuliya, who believes in a Faeries' duty to guide and protect those in need with their ability to alter and traverse time, tasking you with looking over the other children at the school. Deracine's tale begins with innocent chores around the school, where you play simple pranks on the children in a bid to prove your existence. But its overarching narrative quickly starts exploring greater themes concerning life and its sacrifices, obsessions with the past and the morality surrounding the ability to change past events. It's a story that presents its ideas without much hand-holding, which combined with the frequent time jumps can create a difficult thread to follow. It can often feel like you have a grasp of where the narrative is heading before it completely flips itself again, introducing more characters and supernatural elements that undermine the overall story. The final two chapters are most guilty of this, tossing aside previously established themes and instead focusing on numerous jumps between two days in an attempt to explain these sudden additions. The repetitive nature of these chapters wear thin quickly and only confuse the narrative further, sadly undercutting the harrowing conclusion that desperately tries to tie everything together. As a Faerie, Deracine gives you two abilities to command with disappointing limitations. The first lets you glance at current objectives though a magical pocket watch, while also giving you the power to travel through time when the narrative allows it. The second is a glowing red ring that can absorb time from objects and beings around you. The earliest example of this has you transferring the limited time left on a ripe pair of grapes over to a wilted and dead flower, instantly rejuvenating and reviving it. This initially seems like a clever mechanic, but you rarely get to use it. You're only able to use it freely in two puzzles, and even then, the choices presented to you are too straightforward. It's a shame that more of Deracine's puzzle-solving couldn't be designed around this single intriguing mechanic, especially when you ponder how captivating it might have been to be given the chance to experiment with its power in smart settings. Each chapter takes place within a frozen moment in time, letting you explore the school at will and interact with both past and present versions of the children residing there. Translucent echoes of characters give you insight into past events and create a breadcrumb trail for you to follow back to their current locations for more context into their current actions. Past conversations play out after you mani[CENSORED]te certain objects around the house and on the children's persons, while larger changes to their surroundings culminate in short showings of how they react to your meddling. Deracine makes your impact on its world and characters felt with each action, even if it gives you little to no room for experimentation. Exploration is the gateway to Deracine's point-and-click-like puzzles, which have you hunting for items you'll need to advance stories during each chapter. This can be as simple as hunting down a key for a locked chest or as involved as figuring out a way to move a stubborn black cat from your path (since Faeries seem to fear the cute pets). Puzzles are all similar to one another and expect you to pay close attention to each of the conversations you stumble upon for vague clues to their solutions. Sometimes, these clues don't offer meaningful information, leading to infrequent but frustrating instances where you're stuck trying to use every item in your possession to elicit a response. But most of the time they delicately point you in the correct direction--not outright explaining what to do, but giving you enough to make your eventual solutions feel satisfying to orchestrate. Moving around Deracine's surprisingly large boarding school and accompanying grounds makes good use of existing VR systems of control. You're forced to use a pair of PlayStation Move controllers (since you'll be handling items frequently with your hands) but an intelligent combination of segmental rotation and teleportation makes getting around a breeze. You use two face buttons to rotate the camera through fixed angles and then use a third button on the right Move controller to teleport to any highlighted area within view. In instances where you need to take a closer look, you can get right up and close with the item in question, orbiting the camera around to give you whatever desired angle you might need. It doesn't take long to become comfortable with the control scheme, making its frequent exploration easy to engage with and comfortable during long sessions of play. Deracine does contain an impressive level of detail to its world, enrapturing you in a space that is primed for you to pick apart. Finely detailed objects give you insight into its lore, with the benefit of VR and motion controls letting you mani[CENSORED]te each item carefully to inspect its every detail. The ability to move around freely and engage without numerous objects within Deracine's world with your own hands is effective in making you feel exactly like the Faerie the children describe, which just wouldn't be the same with a traditional controller. Deracine has the buildings blocks of a good VR debut from Dark Souls creator FromSoftware, but it lacks the engrossing gameplay and mystique that has made the studio's previous titles so successful. Expressive animation also plays a big role in enriching the many character moments with a strong sense of emotion and personality. The boarding school and its surrounding forests are also beautiful, bathed in warm lighting and rich seasonal colors. It's contrasted by a delicate and somber score, which loops and changes with each scene to provide a serene backdrop to your adventuring. Silence is also used to great effect, creating an ominous atmosphere at key, powerful moments. With the immersive properties offered by virtual reality, Deracine is a technical treat on both eyes and ears. Deracine has the buildings blocks of a good VR debut from Dark Souls creator FromSoftware, but it lacks the engrossing gameplay and mystique that has made the studio's previous titles so successful. It is a good example of a PSVR-exclusive title that uses the medium effectively, giving you ample control over your movement and an enticing space to explore fully with the flexibility of using your own two hands to pick it apart. Its narrative ambitions fail to meet the same bar, though, with intriguing themes that get lost within a poorly constructed narrative that's difficult to follow. Its puzzles fall prey to the same inadequacies, failing to leverage the more exciting mechanics presented from the start and instead relying on trivial scavenger hunts though frozen time. Deracine is a disappointingly flawed adventure that won't likely stick with you long after its conclusion.

Release Date: September 15, 2009 Series: Need For Speed Designer: Andy Tudor Platforms: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation Portable, Android, iOS, Xbox 360, Java Platform Micro Edition Developers: Slightly Mad Studios, Electronic Arts Nominations: Spike Award for Best Racing Game Need for Speed: Shift is a racing game that tries to do a lot of things, and the good news is that it does most of them well. The bad news is that Shift does very little that other racers haven't done before it, and it excels at nothing. The racing, the car and track selections, the vehicle customization and damage modeling, the career mode, the online play, the opponent AI--all of these things are good, but none of them are great. Depending on what kind of racing game you usually play, being thrust into the driver's seat for a flying lap at the start of Shift's Career mode might go well, or very badly. Your performance on this lap determines your default difficulty level and handling model, and it's appropriately named the "Trial of Fire." There are no opponents to worry about, but getting a handle on Shift's controls can be a challenge on their own. Like a simulation game, Shift encourages you to brake early for corners, punishes you for straying too far from the racing line, and, at least by default, presents you with a steering setup that's extremely sensitive. But, like an arcade racer, Shift rewards you for sliding around corners, for "trading paint" with opponents, and even for forcing those same opponents into a spin or off the track. It's an awkward middle ground that you might never feel comfortable with. When playing solo, your only options are Quick Race and Career mode. Quick Race lets you set up races, time attack contests, and drifting events on any of 36 different courses with variables that include car class restrictions, the number of opponents and laps, and the time of day. The Career mode amounts to little more than 150-plus of these events, set up as themed competitions between cars of certain classes or from certain countries and then arranged into a tier system that matches the one used for cars. You start out as a tier 1 driver with a tier 1 car, and as you progress you move into tiers 2 through 4 before unlocking the anticlimactic 10-race World Tour, which marks the pinnacle of your career. Oddly, you need to complete only a fraction of the events available to you in order to unlock the World Tour. In fact, if you're winning races and completing bonus objectives along the way, you can unlock both tier 4 and the World Tour before you've even finished everything in tier 2. That's because you progress through Career mode by earning stars, and because the number of stars you're awarded at the end of each race isn't just based on where you finish. You earn one to three stars for a finish on the podium, and typically there are two extra stars available for reaching experience point milestones (earned through acts of "precision" or "aggression"), plus one for completing a bonus objective. The bonus objectives are varied and include stuff like mastering every corner, performing a clean lap, reaching a certain speed, or spinning out a number of opponents. These objectives are a neat feature because they encourage you to focus on different aspects of your race craft, and it's great that you can return to events to try for any stars that you missed. Unfortunately, adding more stars to your tally isn't the only reason you're going to be repeating events in Career mode. Even on the easiest AI setting, your opponents are a competitive bunch, which can make for some thrilling starts to races, but the flip side is that they're not bashful about trying to find a way past you--even if that means forcing you off the track. There's no second-chance flashback option like that in Dirt 2, so if you end up in a gravel trap, you've just got to deal with it and almost certainly watch a number of opponents race past as you do so. It's entirely appropriate that straying off the course slows you down considerably, but when you combine that penalty with aggressive opposition and controls that make it tough to recover quickly, it can make for some extremely frustrating incidents. Adding insult to injury is that AI drivers seem able to drive on gravel and grass almost as quickly as they can on asphalt, which isn't consistent at all with the way your cars handle. Getting involved in a big crash or straying too far from the track toward the end of an event can be disastrous, and feeling the need to restart a 10-lap endurance race because an overzealous opponent forced you into a tire wall is no fun. However, if the race still has plenty of laps left to run, you shouldn't be too quick to give up. Your opponents, it seems, while clearly eager to compete with one another and get to the front of the pack, also like to keep things interesting for you, so if you lag too far behind them, they'll invariably start driving at a more sedate pace until you can catch up. Clearly it's a good thing that one early mistake doesn't have to mean the end of your race, but at the same time it's not particularly satisfying to beat opponents who slam on the brakes if you get in trouble. For a more authentic racing experience, your best bet is to head online, where your opponents will afford you no such courtesy. Online options include a Driver Duel tournament mode, in which a series of head-to-head races pit you and an opponent against each other in randomly selected identical cars, and ranked and unranked races for up to eight players. The variables that you can play around with when setting up an online race are the same as those that you get in the single-player Quick Race mode. Once you're with a group of players in a lobby, you have plenty of time to see what the next race is going to be and to choose a car either from your own Career mode garage or from a selection of stock vehicles. Online play is lag-free for the most part, and if you approach it with the right mentality, it can be a lot of fun. If you go into an online event hoping for a clean race, though, you're probably going to be disappointed. Like Career mode, online play awards you experience points for both precision and aggression, so when you race alongside people with very different ideas about how the game should be played, things can get ugly. Furthermore, cutting a corner while playing online results in being slowed down to a crawl by way of punishment for a few seconds that feel like an eternity, regardless of whether or not you gained any advantage as a result of your actions. It doesn't sound like a terrible system on paper, but it's frustrating for drivers coming up behind you because you effectively become a slow-moving chicane that they have to navigate. In addition to races, this jack-of-all-trades game incorporates drift events into both its Career and online modes. Only 11 of the cars that appear in the game can be used for drifting, and finding one that you feel comfortable with is even more difficult than finding one for racing. These cars are automatically tuned to slide so easily that pressing down on the accelerator even a fraction more than you absolutely need to can send your car straight into a donut. With practice it's certainly possible to perform some satisfying drifts around corners, and because the events aren't timed, you can win them by employing some cheap tactics and just swinging from side to side on the straights. Sadly, no matter how good you get at it, drifting isn't one of Shift's strong points, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that it's easy to avoid entirely without feeling like you're missing out on much or hindering your Career mode progression. Another of Shift's features that doesn't realize its full potential is car customization. There are around 55 cars to collect in Shift, though you never have enough spots in your garage for even half of that number. These cars can be painted, you can apply a handful of different racing liveries to them, and some of the performance upgrades you can purchase for them include cool-looking bodykits, but the custom livery designer is awful. Vinyls at your disposal include the usual assortment of primitive shapes, logos, flames, and tribal designs, as well as plenty of creative groups that you unlock as your career progresses--including badges that show off some of your accomplishments. The problem is that applying these vinyls and working with the tools that you can use to rotate, resize, and reposition them is a real effort. There's no option to constrain a vinyl's proportions when you resize it, there's no way to mirror a design from one side of your car to the other, and, worsening that problem, there's no Forza-style coordinates system in place to make transferring your design manually anything but a painful process. Fortunately the preset racing liveries, like just about everything in Shift, look pretty good. This isn't a game that's going to wow you with incredibly detailed car models or photo-realistic environments that stretch as far as the eye can see, but it's not a bad-looking game by any means, and the sense of speed when you get on a long straight in a fast car is so good that impending turns become daunting prospects. On some tracks, those same corners can be made even trickier by opponents who make a mess of them in front of you, because they kick up great-looking clouds of sand and dust in the process that partially obscure your vision. Outside of races, Shift's presentation is functional but lacks any sense of refinement. Dark backgrounds work reasonably well when the white text of menus is popping off them, but when you're shopping for cars with paintjobs that are reflecting the dark environment all around them, the lack of light really doesn't do the vehicles justice. The Lamborghini Reventon that appears in this dimly lit showroom is dark gray, and you might need to adjust the contrast on your TV to make it out. The dark-blue-and-black Bugatti Veyron doesn't fare much better. Shopping for cars should be fun in a game like Shift, but it's actually a bit of a chore because the models take a second or two to appear as you scroll through the list, and for some reason you don't get to move the camera around them yourself. You also don't get control of the camera when you come to put new bodykits on your cars, so you have to wait for them to do a full rotation before you can check out both the new front and rear wings. Like the visuals, Shift's audio fares better on the track than it does off it. Some of the cars' engine noises are a real treat, and they change as you upgrade your cars with new exhausts, turbo systems, and the like. The sequences of sound effects and radio chatter that play while you're navigating menus are bizarre, though, and anytime you think they're going to transition into something resembling a tune, you're wrong. The short, looping track that plays during loading screens is less offensive, but the frequent load times can be so long on occasion that even that will start to grate after a while. Need for Speed: Shift has a good selection of cars and plenty of varied tracks (ranging from small ovals and a figure-eight track to lengthy street and grand prix circuits) to race them on. Other than a somewhat interesting experience system, though, it offers nothing that hasn't already been done better elsewhere. Shift is neither an arcade racer nor a simulation; it's stuck somewhere between the two, and while there's plenty of good racing to be had here, it's unlikely to completely satisfy fans of either. System Requirements: OS: Windows XP (Service Pack 3) / Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) / Windows 7 Processor: 1.6GHz Intel Core2 or faster/AMD X2 3800+ or faster Memory: (Windows XP) 1 GB RAM; (Windows Vista/Windows 7) 1.5 GB RAM Graphics: 256 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 3.0* DirectX®: DirectX 9.0c compatible Hard Drive: 6 GB Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible Controller Support: USB Steering Wheel/Dual Analog Gamepad Online Multiplayer: 512 Kbps or faster; 2-8 players

Release date: February 20, 2018 Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Platform: Microsoft Windows The announcement of the Discovery Tour was a source of much rejoicing. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games have for many years built these extraordinarily detailed cities, that are swiftly disposed of as the series’ annual development cycle demands fresh urban grist for the mill. The recreation of Ptolemaic Egypt was by far Ubisoft’s most remarkable, and the idea of using it as an educational tool, a living museum of sorts, was well received. In practice, Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt (to give it its given name) is a peculiar thing, made with much ambition, but seemingly little understanding of how education actually works. As I’d struggled with Ubisoft’s servers to let me load the game in the first place, while they repeatedly refused me access to the product I’d downloaded from Steam because their own internet wasn’t working, I thought to myself, “I hope the voiceover is pleasingly academic, a sort of NPR-y voice that’s at once relaxing and authoritative.” This only made it more jarring when I was greeted by a voice more suited to booming, “In movie theatres, Friday!” For the introduction, I figured, sure, this is fine. But he persists, his daft tones narrating the first and about half of the game’s tours, making it incredibly hard to concentrate on the dry and dull morsels of information about Alexander’s planning of the site for Alexandria. The tour itself rapidly unravels. The third piece of information you’re given talks about how Alexander’s architects were forced to use flour to mark out the foundations, because they didn’t have access to chalk. And then, wouldn’t you know it, birds got involved. “Clouds of migrating birds swept down and ate the flour, erasing the plans. This prompted Alexander to seek guidance from the oracles, who reassured him that his future city was destined to feed a large po[CENSORED]tion.” So my first thought here was, “How do you know?” Which means my second thought was, “Where are the links to referencing text?” And there aren’t any. We’re just asked to take this rather twee fairy tale as fact, because the gravelly voiced man said it. Which in turn meant my third thought was, “So Ubisoft believes in oracles?” To do this properly, you can’t just be reporting myths as facts! You say, “According to myth…” It’s pretty basic stuff. I suppose reactions to this aspect will be down to one’s expectations going in. I had been hoping for what had been promised – a delivery of the information gathered from academics, learned over the four years of making the game. Like they said it would be. What I’ve got is something akin to a haphazard audio tour to distract tourists from how much they spent on the entry fee. Of course, if someone were expecting some afternoon filler on the History Channel, then this would be far more in line with that. Narrator voice included And the more I persist, the less I can fathom who this is actually for. Alongside Mr Trailers is Mrs Pharmaceutical Commercial (uncannily similar to the glorious spoofs from Better Off Ted), both intoning a confusing mix of information that doesn’t seem like it could be useful to anyone. For instance, to whom is the following helpful? “The earliest known and most complete armillary sphere of antiquity was the Meteoroskopion of Alexandria, with an imposing nine rings, compared to the three or four of most other astrolabes. Known as the Zodiac Krikotoi amongst the Greeks, the Meteoroskopion was used to determine the location of celestial bodies around the Earth. Every self-respecting astronomer of antiquity would have sought to use this tool to better understand the celestial movements.” This is so very typical of the type of information given by Discovery Tour. Needlessly over-complex language that fails to explain its terms, yet is somehow at the same time devoid of anything useful for people who already understood them. If this is intended to be used in schools, teachers would need a discovery primer for the Discovery Tour and would be translating on the fly. What’s an “armillary sphere”? What’s an “astrolabe”? If you’re trying to teach, using such obscure terms in the opening line is guaranteed to fail. Heck, if you’re aiming at younger students, then even terms like “celestial movements” are needlessly complicated. A phrase like “the movement of the stars and planets” would have far more sensibly communicated the meaning.. It’s pretty ubiquitous, these little snippets announcing facts, but not explaining them. To pick one at random: “Reed boats, feluccas, triremes and kerkouros were the most commonly found craft within the land-locked waters of Egypt.” Er, great. And those are? They look like? The differences between them are? If this were handed in as homework, a teacher would be scrawling all over it, “You’ve copied these facts off the internet, but don’t appear to understand them!” The more I play, the more regions I visit and the more tours I follow, the more I think I understand what’s really happening here. Perhaps this is an exercise in frustration from a development team who worked extraordinarily hard to provide one of gaming’s most extraordinarily detailed places, that was then used as the backdrop for a very silly game. As I wander through the Library Of Alexandria, or the Islands of Pharos, or the backwaters of Haueris Nome, what I sense from the nature of the tours is a desperation for people to know just how bloody hard the team worked to build this, and how incredibly accurate the depictions are. See that Library?! There are no descriptions of it anywhere! We had to make one up, and to do that, we used images of a contemporary library in Ephesus! We went to so much trouble to create something authentic and did so much research, and all you did was see if you could get a horse to climb a statue. You bastards. See that statue? The one you just ran past and didn’t give a second glance, because you were trying to stab some made up man to death? That was Hypatia! And she was bloody brilliant! She was one of the greatest scientists of the day, and we made that statue based on the worn remains that still exist today, but meticulously restored it and put it in the Library exactly where we believe it would have stood! AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN LOOK AT IT! I suspect much of my negative reaction is due to the version of this I’d imagined on its announcement last year, and the enormous distance between that and what has been made. I’d imagined recorded interviews with the experts, or at least the experts themselves enthusing on topics. I’d hoped for developers explaining how they’d made decisions, talking about their research. I’d also imagined something that could be useful in schools, to provide a really splendid way to improve history lessons. Instead I’ve got super-slick narrators saying sentences like, “How do you calculate the circumference of the Earth? With a camel, two sticks, and shadows cast by the sun.” and then literally no further explanation of what that means. Good gravy. For those who were approaching this with the idea that it might be rather splendid to just have complete access to the whole of the game, with the combat switched off, just letting you explore the cities and surrounding deserts, then yes, it does that. But, well, the original game pretty much let you do that too. Sure, you had to sneak around inside some areas, but the world was already pretty open, and with the game surrounding it, a lot more interesting to explore. Here, with combat switched off (although you can still bash into upset NPCs, and charge horses toward children to your heart’s content), you can climb, swim, take photos while standing on statues and so on, and go absolutely anywhere you want. But for me, doing so really reveals just how detached from the world you really are. You can’t interact with anything, other than the tour. It’s like you’re a ghost, unable to be seen or heard by the world you’re in. Well, a poltergeist, since you can shove into everyone. Admittedly the only way you touched the game proper was to punch and stab it, but it’s revealing how separating it is to remove that veneer of contact. And yet it does work. You absolutely can scramble over the whole game within limitations, and poke around in the vividly precisely recreated cities. Although, once again I’d argue, the only way to really appreciate this properly is to have those passive-aggressive audio tours point it out to you. And I’m not being entirely fair. In between the very, very many poor explanations and narrations, there are some occasional good ones. A tour of the Faiyum, taken both on foot and by boat, gives a perfectly decent surface explanation of the Faiyum pyramid, the reasons it was separate from the bulk of other pyramids, and the reason for the situating of the wonderfully named metropolis, Krokodilopolis. And I’ve certainly not minded being able to fast travel to the pyramids to poke around them. This is by no means a disaster at all. It’s just that I’d argue it fails at its primary intent: to teach. It just blurts detached, unexplained facts in glossy voices. There are some other silly issues. The two narrators constantly interject with the same three nonsensical “jokes”. At any point while you’re exploring you might hear a, “My kingdom for a glass of water!” – the shortest of its uninterruptible gags. “Don’t mind me!” Mr Trailers wackily interrupts, “It’s not like Ancient Egypt is going anywhere!!!” Or the tour might think it’s useful to tell you that you can use a mount to travel faster along long distances, for the nineteenth time, after you’ve just gotten off a horse. Or are halfway up a pyramid, as happened to me one time. Then there’s the movable camera during the narration when you’re fixed to the spot, which for no sensible reason insists on returning to the same view if you leave it for literally a second. Silly, niggly things that don’t make a lick of sense in the context of the Tour mode. I don’t know. Honestly, I think Ubisoft deserves this peculiar little vanity project, a mode of the game that’s most useful function is to pointedly yell at you just how much work went into the backgrounds you ran past last year. But beyond this, and the novelty of ghosting around its busy world, it doesn’t really have much purpose. As an educational tool (which we can only assume it’s intended to be, what with the bizarre censoring of naked bits), I’d venture it’s a colossal dud, but godspeed to any kids lucky enough to be allowed to muck around in it during school – it’s not likely to teach them anything useful, but it’ll be better than writing down banal notes about the Spinning Jenny or whatever the hell history lessons were supposed to have been about. I love that it exists. I don’t begrudge it for any of its ridiculous failings, really. It’d have been amazing if it could have been this gently entertaining and interesting exploration of Egyptian history, perhaps something like an in-situ podcast. But it isn’t. It’s a museum audio tour, along with all their obvious shortcomings, that takes no advantages of its medium, ignoring all the vast possibilities of linking out to relevant Wikipedia articles and papers, Minimum: OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only) Processor: Intel Core i5-2400s @ 2.5 GHz or AMD FX-6350 @ 3.9 GHz or equivalent Memory: 6 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD R9 270 (2048 MB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0 or better) DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 42 GB available space Additional Notes: Video Preset: Lowest (720p)