-P A I N-

¤ Nickname: P A I N ¤ Grade: player ¤ New Tag: This World Shall Know ¤ Link of Hours Played GT link CLICK HERE!: https://www.gametracker.com/player/P A I N/NEWLIFEZM.CSBLACKDEVIL.COM:27015/

welcome

It's well known that id Software's Commander Keen tech was originally designed to accommodate a PC port for Super Mario Bros. 3, and in 2015, John Romero revealed footage of the proof of concept. Nintendo didn't go for it, but it was a breakthrough in terms of bringing smooth screen-scrolling to PC games. A copy of that Mario demo has turned up in a submission to the Strong National Museum of Play, seemingly at random. The museum's games curator Andrew Borman tells Ars Technica that the disc was among a larger submission from an unnamed game developer. This developer didn't work on the demo, though received it "during their work." "It wasn't something I expected to see in this donation, but it was extremely exciting, having seen the video Romero shared back in 2015," Borman said. The curator imaged the disc, booted the demo, and found it to match up with Romero's 2015 video. In addition to the footage we've seen, there's reportedly a "fairly flat" Level 1-4 in the demo. It's good to hear the demo will be preserved, but according to the Ars report there aren't plans to exhibit it to the public. Researchers "and other parties" are welcome to submit requests to access it, though. Romero's footage of the demo is below, and it's well worth reading Ars' report for more insight into the preservation plan.

Long gone are the days when you could accurately discern how powerful a PC might be just by looking at the physical size of the system. You can pack an impressive amount of computing muscle inside a small form factor PC, and a shining example of this has been Intel's modular NUC kits. Following up on the NUC 9 Extreme Kit (Ghost Canyon) released last year, Intel has now unveiled its more powerful NUC 11 Extreme Kit, codenamed Beast Canyon. The heart of the system is still a swappable Compute Element housing many of the core components, including a tiny motherboard, but it now comes jammed inside a bigger chassis. "No more playing around," Intel says. Note that I said bigger, not big. This is still a compact system, built around an 8-liter chassis measuring around 14 x 7.4 x 4.7 inches (357 x 189 x 120 mm). Inside sits that Compute Element cartridge containing the motherboard, processor, RAM, and storage. This enables both a wholesale system swap or piece-by-piece upgrades when and if the desire arises. "Packing the latest hardware components into a tiny 8-liter case, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit is loaded with features typically found in much larger gaming rigs and offers customizable design options," Intel says. There are two base models—the NUC11BTMi7 with a Core i7 11700B processor, and the NUC11BTMi9 with an unlocked Core i9 11900KB processor. Both are 8-core/16-thread CPUs based on Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake architecture, which is its newest (until Alder Lake arrives later this year). Pricing starts at $1,150 for the Core i7 model and $1,350 for the Core i9 configurations, each outfitted with a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply. In both cases, you need to add your own RAM, storage, operating system, and optionally a discrete GPU (which you'd definitely want to do if you plan to play games with this). So it's not a cheap setup by any means. It is fairly flexible, however, with the potential to be a high-end gaming PC. To that end, the Beast Canyon NUC supports up to 64GB of DDR4-3200 RAM (SO-DIMMs) and houses four M.2 slots, split evenly between supporting PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 SSDs. Then there's the GPU support. Intel says you can cram a full-size, dual-slot 350W graphics card measuring up to 12 inches long inside the NUC 11 Extreme. It can be a tight fit, as our friends at Tom's Hardware discovered, but the potential is there to install a meaty graphics card inside this thing. Obviously the major caveat here is... if you can find one. Wireless connectivity consists of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. As for the port selection, the Beast Canyon NUC serves up a 2.5G Ethernet port, a single HDMI 2.0b output, two Thunderbolt 4 ports. eight USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports (six in the rear, two up front), a 3.5mm front-mounted headset jack, an SDXC card slot (plus whatever ports are on your graphics card), and a Kesington lock slot. You'll also find two pairs of headers inside (USB 3.1 and 2.0). I've really come to appreciate SFF systems over the past few years, as they have become more powerful and capable (I hail from an era when hulking full tower desktops were a lot more common than they are now). Color me intrigued by the Beast Canyon NUC (minus the pricing premium), which Intel says will be available to purchase in the third quarter.

Occasionally, as a new wave of orcs washes in to crash against your fortifications, you'll catch a moan from a despondent greenskin on the breeze: "Feels like we're never gonna get there." It seems like a moment of realisation about their doomed role in tower defence, but invariably it's a thought they don't get to complete: they're dashed against the rocks, tarred and burned, or electrified so that their skeleton flashes through their skin. Recently freed from the shackles of Stadia, Orcs Must Die! 3 isn't usually a thoughtful fantasy game. It makes little effort to contextualise its maligned title characters, to ponder where they come from or why they do what they do. Yet it is a thinking person's game—a strategic siege simulator that rewards careful arrangement, inspired solutions, and a willingness to toss away past assumptions and approach a problem from a new angle. It's a game that makes you feel smart, even as you swing your mouse desperately to slug an imp in the eye with a bolt of magic. Imagine you're an interior designer, but in a universe where one of the tenets of feng shui is murder. Using a pre-allocated budget, you begin each level by buying, rotating and placing the traps of your choice in a small dungeon (or, less often, a large field), with the aim of causing as much damage as possible to any orcs who might pass through. Then it's open house: the doors smash inward, and enemies run down the hall and up the stairs, displaying a remarkably low aptitude for hazard perception as they do so. The traps they trigger come from the Tom & Jerry school of slapstick comedy, flipping orcs through the air or stinging them with beehives; those awaiting the upcoming Jackass reunion will find themselves well served. Afterwards, with all the orcs dead or absconded through the portal you're supposed to be protecting, you go again—building out your designs until the final wave. In a traditional tower defence game, the arrival of the action phase would be your prompt to sit back, take in the scene, and grit your teeth—hoping your walls will hold, and throwing down an extra turret or two when funds allow. In Orcs Must Die! 3, it's the moment to roll up the sleeves of your gown and jump in. There's fun to be had firing into the horde, seeking out headshots among your variously-sized opponents as if playing vertical whack-a-mole. The best secondary fire options include both freeze-bombs and a sweeping knockback that triggers a nostalgic round of ragdolling. On the whole, though, combat is best described as mash and peas - in that it offers mainly button mashing melee and peashooter projectiles. There's less complexity or opportunity for skill than you'd find in a dedicated action game—no Souls-like parry or active reload to master. That's for the best, and probably by design. Though it's possible to build a playstyle around empowered pugilistics, combat's really there so that you can dynamically plug the gaps left by your traps. Series veterans will know there's a panicked joy to personally sniping a kobold runner that somehow slipped between the blades of your pneumatic machines. If the fighting were any more involved, it would pull too much focus, upsetting the balance of this classic genre hybrid. Robot Entertainment has been making Orcs Must Die! for a long time—it'll be ten years old in October—and knows not to mess with the fundamentals. Not least because the last time the studio tried that, with 2017's Orcs Must Die! Unchained, the mixture exploded in its face. Yep, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a cautious sequel—even its large-scale War Scenarios feel familiar, if magnified. But it's getting more experimental over time, as Robot pursues a tower defence strategy for development. The game effectively soft-launched on Stadia last year—and having survived that first wave, the studio has built out from the foundations with a second story campaign and new endgame mode, Scramble. The latter is an ironman variant on the formula that puts me in mind of COD's Outbreak. The goal is to best five levels of escalating difficulty using a single set of rift points—the pool that determines how many monsters you can afford to let through the portal before failure. Between every stage, you're lumbered with a new debuff—perhaps swarms of orc archers who go after you rather than the rift—but get to pick a buff to counter it, like extra oomph for your acid bombs. The effect of this mounting metagame is to push you towards tactics outside your comfort zone, making Scramble a rewarding way to revisit some of the best maps. Frustratingly, both the second campaign and Scramble are locked until you've made significant progress in the story—a rake to the face of hardcore fans who already sunk those hours into the Stadia release. They'll be appeased, though, by the new acid geyser trap, which melts orcs down to their squishier parts, ready to be hit by a follow-up volley of darts or arrows. Ultimately, as ever with Orcs Must Die!, it's the intricate ordering of traps for maximum score combos that will hold the attention of top players for hundreds of hours. Newcomers are better off embracing the new saw blade launcher, the ricochets of which are not just entertaining but, when fired in an enclosed archway, capable of shredding a troll in seconds. With experience, you can predict and plan for the 45-degree wall bounces, filling entire corridors with bladed boomerangs. This is Orcs Must Die! at its best: a comedy scripted on graph paper. We may not know much about the orcs, and they may not know themselves. But after years in the wilderness, Robot Entertainment has shown it still knows exactly how to make Orcs Must Die!. What a pleasure it is to have those pea-green boys back.

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In a recent blog post, Microsoft encouraged everyone to "get nostalgic" with new Microsoft Teams backgrounds. The backgrounds feature highlights from Windows' legacy such as the 'splainy paperclip Clippy, Microsoft Solitaire, and that one grassy field that was everyone's wallpaper in the early noughties. Credit where it's due—they're nice looking backgrounds, certainly desktop wallpaper material if you don't like to have arty video call backgrounds. My sticking point is with part of the accompanying blurb for the Paint-inspired background: "A product of the 1980s, Paint was first introduced in November 1985 as part of the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0. And while the original Paint is still loved by many artists in the making, its successor Paint 3D was eventually released in 2017." Paint 3D was widely hated on release, and I object to the implication that Paint 3D is Paint's successor in anything other than chronology. Microsoft suggested removing original Paint in 2017 and it was so unpo[CENSORED]r a decision that they floated it back to the Windows Store after an online petition, and then right back to a built-in OS program—where it belongs, in my opinion. These backgrounds are a nice appeal to nostalgia, much like Paint itself, with its primary functions of 'crop', 'scribble' and 'draw big red arrow'—so stop trying to make Paint 3D happen. It isn't going to happen. You can find the backgrounds at Microsoft's blog, and potentially discover that you, too, have a burningly passionate opinion about some part of Windows history. Perhaps about Microsoft Solitaire? It was built-in to the OS for over twenty years, after which point they brought it back with ads you have to subscribe to to remove.

For the time being, Dell is no longer shipping certain Alienware Aurora R12 and R10 gaming PC configurations to half a dozen US states because those product lines potentially fall out of bounds of newly adopted energy efficiency requirements. When attempting to configure one of those systems, a warning message appears in bold red lettering to alert buyers that their order will not be honored if the destination resides in one of the affected states. This was first spotted by Marie Oakes, an independent content creator who highlighted the disclaimer on Twitter. "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled," the message states. The Aurora R12 and R10 are built around the latest generation processors from Intel and AMD, the former featuring 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake CPUs and the latter wielding Ryzen 5000 series chips based on Zen 3. Unfortunately for both Dell and buyers who reside in affected states, the majority of Aurora R12 and R10 configurations consume more power than local regulations allow. There are exceptions, though. On the Aurora R12 page, the second cheapest configuration ($1,156) outfitted with a Core i5 11400F, GeForce GTX 1650 Super, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD "complies with CES power consumption regulations" and "ships to ALL states." The five other customizable starting points do not. Oddly enough, that includes a cheaper setup which drops the 256GB SSD from the mix, adding a thirstier hard drive, but is otherwise the same. There are seven customizable setups on the Aurora R10 product page, and once again, only the second cheapest config indicates it ships to all US states. It includes a Ryzen 5 5600X, Radeon RX 5600, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD. In a statement to The Register, Dell expanded on the shipment ban, as it relates to power requirements in California. "Yes, this was driven by the California Energy Commission (CEC) Tier 2 implementation that defined a mandatory energy efficiency standard for PCs – including desktops, AIOs and mobile gaming systems. This was put into effect on July 1, 2021. Select configurations of the Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 were the only impacted systems across Dell and Alienware," Dell said. In 2016, California became the first US state to approve energy efficiency standards for PCs and monitors. At the time, it was anticipated that the new standards would save 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and significantly reduce carbon pollution arising from fossil fuel-fired power plants. More regulations are coming, too. On December 9, 2021, Tier 2 requirements will expand to "computers with high-speed networking capability, multi-screen notebooks, notebooks with cyclical behavior, and monitors with high refresh rates." The formulas used to determine which systems pass muster are outlined in a Title 20 Appliance Regulations document (PDF). In short, various annual energy consumption metrics apply to different PCs, the least stringent being 75 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, for certain systems manufactured after July 1, 2021. Going forward, there is a whole load of calculations system builders will need to make around PCs shipping from July 1, but with various 'adders' (like the GPU, networking cards, and other hardware) that can modify the final calculation. It's quite dizzying. It remains to be seen if other PC makers will halt shipments of certain PC configs as well, and how the new rules will affect upcoming models.

When Capcom announced that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles would be coming to Steam on day one of its overseas release, the eruption of joy PC players felt was like hearing the words "not guilty" after a long, fierce trial. The original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy (released in the early 2000s) only made their way to Steam in 2019, so we're used to waiting longer. Not this time, though. The international versions of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney Adventures 2: Resolve are available right out the gate, neatly bundled together in this double feature. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles keeps up much of the melodrama and flair from previous games in the series. If you want backstabbing, tragedy, and lawyers slamming their hands on desks, aggressively pointing and shouting—it's all here. But, after playing all ten cases across both games, I never felt like the story reached the dramatic highs of its predecessors. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has all of the drama of a telenovela, but at the heart of the series are its mysteries, and in that respect both games in the bundle are lacking. The story of the two prequels follows Ryūnosuke Naruhodō, a young Japanese lawyer who has traveled from Meiji period Japan to Victorian England to learn about Britain's legal system—touting itself as one of the greatest judicial systems in the world. Together with his legal assistant Susato Mikotoba, Naruhodō helps defend those in need of legal assistance in a series of dramatic courtroom battles. Although Naruhodō is Phoenix Wright's 19th-century ancestor, there's no connection to the previous games whatsoever, and London as a setting provides a fresh slate for new players and seasoned fans alike. It's a clever choice of location, and not just because British caricatures are easy pickings. Victorian London is a city with lots of thematic threads, and an important part of the story is the way that Naruhodō has to grapple with London's seemingly flawless judicial system and the heinous crimes that are lurking in the city's underbelly. We've seen this with characters in previous games—individuals who seem to place truth and justice above all else, when they don't really believe that—but this is the first time this duality has been explored on a societal level. It's an underlying tension that plays out across both games, each case revealing more about London's superficially pristine way of handling the law, and it's completely new to the series. Cor Blimey Guv'nor With this new setting comes a wealth of flamboyant characters. Among them is Susuato, the legal assistant whose impressive knowledge of Britain's legal system has helped stop our leading lawyer floundering on the defense bench more times than I can count. She may be softly spoken, but she's got a secret martial art move she calls the Susato Toss where she'll flip Naruhodō off his feet and onto his back when she's pissed off. There's also Barok van Zieks, a ferocious prosecutor known as "The Grim Reaper of the Old Bailey" who is really just a big diva. He drinks wine throughout courtroom sessions, crushes his golden chalice in his fist with dramatic flair, and occasionally pounds his boot down on the prosecution table when he gets annoyed. I love how far Capcom has pushed London stereotypes with some of the characters to the point where it's completely farcical. Helping you investigate is Tobias Gregson, a Scotland Yard officer who is constantly noshing on fish and chips wrapped in newspaper (even when he's been summoned to court) or the loveable street urchin named Gina, whose London accent is so thick I have to slow down my reading and try to decipher what she's saying. Cases are filled with Victorian London archetypes and you'll see a fair share of cabbies, coppers, street peddlers, top-hatted gentlemen, and corseted ladies. And who can forget the addition of the great detective Herlock Sholmes? Long gone are the days when Sherlock Holmes was an up-tight, stuffy detective. If Frogware's younger and 'cooler' take on the famous character is not your cup of tea, then Capcom's 'Herlock Sholmes' will have you smashing teacups. In The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Sholmes leans heavily into the eccentric side of 'eccentric genius' and helps Naruhodō with the investigation parts in-between trials. Instead of just collecting witness statements and evidence in these sections of the game, you'll now be helping Sholmes with his less-than-astute deductions in a new mini-game that Sholmes excitedly calls his "Logic and Reasoning Spectacular". It involves looking around a scene and picking out clues that help correct Herlock's dramatic deductions into making sense, putting the detective back on the right path. This deduction mini-game does liven up the investigation sections, letting you move the camera through the 3D space instead of just clicking the flat image looking for clues, it feels like you're properly snooping through an area. But it does pull away from actually gathering evidence for the trial. Story-wise, these scenes do relate to the incoming trial in some way or another, like introducing characters who will be taking the witness stand, but it takes up more focus than actually collecting evidence. I understand Capcom's desire to shake up the investigative portion with more hands-on deductions, which also make sense when you've got a Sherlock Holmes analogue lending a hand, but I miss gathering up all the evidence—there's not nearly as much to find. There's a missed feeling of showing up to court with a bag full of evidence, wondering how each object is going to fit into the wider case. As fun as Herlock's 'Logic and Reasoning Spectacular' is, it removes a lot of this feeling, leaving no sense of build-up to the trial. The courtroom system has also had a refresh thanks to the new setting. Trials now have a lot more dimensions than just witness testimonies and presenting evidence. Instead of convincing the judge, you now have to prove your client's innocence to a six-member jury who all have their own thoughts and opinions that you'll need to cross-examine. It's a system inherited from the Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright spin-off and breaks up the mid-trial monotony, ensuring that you won't be going through the same motions that we've seen in every other Phoenix Wright. If the courtroom wasn't busy enough with six new jurors, you'll also have to deal with multiple witnesses taking the stand simultaneously, all of them able to react to each other's testimony. The focus on one witness is now split between three or even four different people, and you'll need to keep switching between characters, and if one person behaves weirdly to another's testimony you need to poke them and find out why. Together with looking over evidence for clues, dealing with prosecutor shenanigans, and pressing witnesses for more info, there's a lot goes into winning a trial. This system is much more dynamic than previous entries in a way I didn't think was possible for an Ace Attorney game. One example is how the jury launches fireballs into an enormous judicial scale to give their verdict—that's Ace Attorney for you. Trials and Tribulations This is the first time in the series that it's delved into a historical setting, exploring the relationship between Japan and Great Britain during the Meiji and Victorian eras. The British Empire is portrayed as imperialistic and arrogant, a view ballooned by the character's banging on about the country's technological advancements and pristine judicial system. As a result, there's a lot of uncomfortable racial discrimination toward Naruhodō and other Japanese characters. It's a completely fair depiction of Victorian Britain in the 19th century. The fact that the games are made by Japanese developers who want to comment on the social, racial, and class discriminations of the era is a refreshing change in tone for a series that has a whole case about a pair of magical polka-dotted bloomers. But the way that the British main cast treats the Japanese characters is beyond uncomfortable and creates jarring tonal shifts in scenes. British characters sometimes describe Japanese characters as 'sneaky' and 'shady', and there's just a general distrust of anyone who doesn't have a thick London accent or isn't shovelling fish and chips into their mouths. It makes things incredibly awkward when you're chatting to witnesses, and even main characters you're supposed to like. Both games also fall into a lot of typical mystery traps. Surprise conclusions and left-field explanations are prominent in a handful of the cases, which takes much of the fun and dramatic detective work out of the story. During some trials, I felt baffled until the very end, only to be frustrated as an important bit of info is flung into the courtroom for dramatic effect. It often feels like the game favors an outrageous twist over creating a solid, clever plot. I love the melodramatic theatre of the Ace Attorney series, and choosing to focus on the conflict between London's orderly reputation and the grim reality of this city, full of secrets and criminals underneath its floorboards, is a welcome addition to the series. But I really play these games for the mystery. There have been some cases in previous games where I've felt completely involved, making sure all the clues are meticulously analysed and putting all the pieces together for a final, satisfying revelation. I didn't get those revelations in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. With all the new systems and scandalous story twists and turns, I think it loses that important feeling. There's lots more to do and the game's presentation is gorgeous, but the core mystery of finding out 'whodunnit' can get a little lost amidst all the dramatics. review video

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Id Software fans are speculating about what appears to be a new project in development following the discovery of an Australian Classification Board listing for something called Project 2021B. The game, which is rated M for violence and online interactivity, is a multiplatform "computer game" being developed by id and set to be published by ZeniMax Europe. If the odd title rings a bell, you may be thinking of Project 2021A, another id Software development discovered in January—also through the Classification Board website—that's being published by Bethesda. There are several differences, though. Project 2021A is rated R18+ for "high impact violence," and its media type is virtual reality, leading sites like TechRadar to predict that a Doom Eternal VR game is in development. 2021B, on the other hand, appears to be a conventional videogame, and its rating comes in a lot lower than either Doom (the 2016 version) or Doom Eternal, both of which were rated R18+ for high impact violence, and blood and gore. That's two full tiers higher than 2021B's M rating. (M and R18+ are separated by the MA15+ rating, which is given to games with "strong violence.") It's possible that there's a direct connection between the two projects: The former could be a completely standalone Doom VR game unrelated to Eternal, and the latter a non-VR version of the same thing. Some Resetera users are guessing that it's nothing to do with Doom at all, but is in fact a Quake remaster or collection for next-gen consoles. The 25th anniversary of Quake 2 is coming next year, after all. Whatever's going on, Bethesda is staying mum for now: A studio rep declined to comment on the rating. We'll let you know if we hear more.

Intel revealed some intriguing details about its 14th-gen CPUs, codenamed Meteor Lake, at its Intel Accelerated webcast yesterday. The main event covered a change to how Intel names its production processes, bringing them more in line with TSMC and Samsung, as well revealing that Amazon and Qualcomm are to be its first foundry customers. Meteor Lake turned up as an example of a client CPU that will be built using the newly named Intel 4 production process, which was previously known simply as its 7nm process. That wasn't the surprising reveal about Meteor Lake though, it's the fact that it's made up of three different tiles: a Compute Die, SOC-LP die, and a GPU die. This is comparable to the chiplet designs that AMD has been sporting with its Zen architecture, to great effect. Essentially it will allow Intel to use different manufacturing processes for different chips in the final package. It's a more efficient way of working, and one that isn't so badly affected by errors, as the individual chiplets are smaller, it means more of the wafer is usable. This is all glued together using Intel's Foveros packaging technology, which handles how these dies are attached. Not content with showing off that Meteor Lake would be its first tile-based CPU, Intel also decided to reveal just how many Execution Units (EUs) the GPU die can contain: with the render specifically showing it has between 96 and 192 EUs. For comparison, current chips packing Intel Iris Xe graphics max out at 96 EUs, so you're potentially looking at a straight doubling of the graphics silicon for the top-end Meteor Lake chips. Meteor Lake is set to be released in 2023 and is the replacement for Raptor Lake, which itself is scheduled for 2022 and is a replacement for Alder Lake. We know that Raptor Lake will use the same LGA 1700 socket as Alder Lake, but we don't know whether Meteor Lake will follow suit—there are rumours that it will use a new LGA 1800 socket. If true, that'll mean you'll need a new motherboard at the very least. Alder Lake is due for release before the end of this year, with some rumours putting it as early as October. It will use the Intel 7 process, previously known as its 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process. Alder Lake is important because it's Intel's first hybrid design destined for desktops, featuring up to eight "big" traditional cores and up to eight "little" efficient cores. Intel showed off a render of this CPU during the webcast, where the eight large Golden Cove cores (in dark blue) could be seen alongside the much smaller Gracemont cores (in light blue at the end). Obviously, this is just a render, but if the chip areas are roughly the right size, it shows just how big a difference there is between the core sizes.

The story of my first campaign in Old World, where I led my Greek civilisation to global domination, is equally the story of Rome, my greatest nemesis in this sprawling turn-based 4X. When I first encountered the Romans, they were extremely friendly, offering us gifts and hospitality, but it was a poisoned chalice—quite literally. A sickness spread, and Roman gestures of friendship were the source. I demanded justice and compensation; Rome only wanted war. It would take nearly 200 years until I got my revenge. It was not a single continuous war. The first conflict ended without much resolution, with the distance between our empires and the massive mountain chain that separated us creating some logistical difficulties. There were still battles, certainly, costing both of us more than faceless soldiers. Family members, revered generals and close friends also lost their lives. And between the wars were heated diplomatic meetings and more than a little bit of espionage, which again cost lives. I'll never forgive myself for sending my good pal Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, to infiltrate Roma, where he spent a couple of years before he was murdered. On more than one occasion, I even sacrificed my heirs to the eternal grudge. It's rather fitting that, after all that loss and rage, the fall of the Roman Empire also marked my victory over Old World itself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Despite using the language of Civilization—from workers to wonders— it should be starting to become clear that Soren Johnson and Mohawk Games' take on the historical 4X formula is quite different to Firaxis's approach. You still build cities, conquer other ones, develop the tiles around them, and along the way determine the cultural and scientific destiny of your civilisation. So there are plenty of important similarities, which should not be a surprise given that Johnson was also the lead designer of Civilization 4, but Old World feels like a meaningful evolution. And an extremely welcome one. Something old, something new The most notable advancement is undoubtedly the importance placed on people. Like Crusader Kings, you are not an immortal ruler leading your people from the birth of civilisation all the way to the space race and beyond. Instead, your famous starting ruler will eventually die. When Philip II left this mortal coil, the empire passed to his son, Alexander, who'd become known as Alexander the Noble—sadly he didn't do enough to earn the 'Great' moniker—who then left it to his daughter, 40 years later. You've got heirs and succession laws to worry about, as well as a court full of potential friends and enemies. As the name suggests, Old World sticks to antiquity, slowing down Civilization's pace to allow characters to make an impression. It would be pretty tough to do that if every turn moved things forward by decades. Your friends and enemies will be hanging around for a long time, as long as something untoward doesn't happen to them. These courtiers, generals and other important folk grow and react, increasing their attributes to become more charismatic or disciplined while also picking up traits like 'wanton' and 'schemer'. They have affairs, illegitimate children, and can plot the demise of other characters, including the ruler. In the mid-game, I found myself playing a particularly talented king, beloved by his people and the triumvirate of influential families constantly vying for power and attention. His uncle, however, was decidedly not a fan. Years before, when I was playing as his father, I encouraged certain unpleasant traits in my son, which benefited me at the time. I had no idea I was creating a nephew-killer. When it came time to reap what I'd sowed, I had some regrets. Much of this plays out through engaging event pop-ups, typically giving you multiple options that depend on your traits and resources. You get to decide how children are educated, how you react to a diplomatic insult or what to do with the possibly magical sword that was just dug up—I opted for starting a cult and charging them admission to see the fancy blade. Often, you won't see the impact for years, so there's always a surprise around the corner. This all contributes to a sense that you are truly shaping your own civilisation, and in ways that go beyond changing some stats. Slavery, for instance, crops up in both Old World and Civilization, but how it impacts both games is quite different. In Civ 4, for instance, it lets you sacrifice part of your po[CENSORED]tion to rush a construction project. In Old World, however, it becomes a topic that's up for debate. You might find that your people have come to their senses and want to abolish it, encouraging you to toss out the grotesque institution. If only the UI did a good job of keeping track of this stuff. It can be jarring to go from the flavourful event text to the abstract, soulless numbers that the UI boils them down to. It's overwhelming, and it's just not that informative. Every interaction is made a little worse because it necessitates faffing around in discrete, counterintuitive menus that drag you all over the screen. Even after winning my first campaign, I still found myself getting occasionally lost, and I still don't know how to find crucial information on things like the spread of religion. The tutorial and encyclopaedia are also little help, choosing brevity and vagueness over clear instructions. There's so much more context and clarity in the event text, so I wish Old World's writers were a bit more involved in designing the interface, which could definitely benefit from their skills. Alone, the events and characters would have been enough to grab my attention. Civilization and Crusader Kings are two of the greats, and combining their philosophies leads to a game that feels tailor made to my interests. But Old World is filled with new ideas and ways of doing things, dramatically changing how you forge a lasting empire. Every unit has a specific movement range and room for one action per turn, but without Orders they can't do anything. Orders are a resource that you spend on giving units and characters—like your ambassador or spymaster—commands. Move here. Attack this loser. Steal research from this dork. As you start expanding and fielding more troops, workers and missionaries, you'll find yourself having to prioritise where to spend Orders each turn so that you don't find your tank is empty right when you're about to make a critical move. It's a strategic complication, but sometimes it can actually take the pressure off you. The system teaches you that it's OK to not take action this turn. You don't need to do everything in one go—you've got 200 years to kill. Orders are tied to Legitimacy, with a higher Legitimacy generating more Orders per turn. It's another abstract resource, spawning yet another wrinkle. See, you improve the legitimacy of your reign by generally being insular, promoting national unity and the people of your chosen Civilization above all else. Often, this means you have to treat foreigners with suspicion and take a 'strong' stance that will make the rest of the world rightly think you're a dickhead. It reflects how real leaders sometimes fan the flames of national fervour and encourage small-minded attitudes. You can, thankfully, still be an extremely effective ruler without pandering to the worst aspects of national identity. Some buildings—which, I should add, are constructed by workers rather than from the city menu, letting you embark on several construction projects at the same time—generate small amounts of Legitimacy that, over time, can give you a significant boost. That's something Old World excels at: always giving you more ways to achieve your objectives. Resource management is another example. On top of the abstract stuff, there's also more tangible resources like stone, iron, wood and gold, which are required for trade and, more importantly, construction. It's a hungry game that demands a healthy stockpile. If you're running low, however, you can simply spend gold to buy more; if you're out of gold, you can also sell whatever resource is abundant. Friends with benefits When your larder is looking a little sparse, you can also seek help from your fellow rulers. The focus on people benefits the diplomacy system immensely, as these are personal relationships that you're developing. Friendships with foreign leaders can be completely undone by the way an event plays out, but as always there are plenty of opportunities to repair the damage. More so in the late game, however, once you've unlocked the ability to employ an ambassador. Or you can just use espionage to steal from them. Sometimes the prerequisites do feel a bit restrictive, though, like alliances only being possible if you've got a diplomatically inclined leader. If diplomacy fails, you might find yourself heading to war. Combat is one of the places that feels most evocative of modern Civilization, which is unfortunate, because frankly I'm getting a bit bored of moving all these units around one by one, surrounding cities and slowly battering enemies. That's not to say it hasn't been improved, mind. For one, there's the undo move (or even turn) ability, which is such a blessing. You can undo literally everything in a turn, from declaring war on another nation to moving a unit. You'll never find yourself making unsalvageable mistakes from a misclick or miscalculation. You can also recruit generals from your court, which may have extremely handy abilities, like being able to heal units even in neutral territory. The AI is generally pretty good, too. A bit too risk averse on the default difficulty, maybe, but also smarter and more reactive. Enemies will retreat to heal up, take advantage of your weaknesses or injured units, and are less likely to be baited into obvious traps. We're not talking tactical geniuses here, but logical, rational enemies are still a boon. Unfortunately, it's still not great at capturing cities. It's just a bit slow and sometimes underprepared, but it gets there eventually. Throughout my time with Old World I kept coming across things that made me think "Why the heck hasn't Civ done this?" It has solutions to so many 4X niggles that have been around for ages. Take research, for instance. When you choose your next research project, the game produces a few offerings from a deck made up of all the stuff you're ready to discover. So instead of picking from the same list over and over again, it's slightly randomised, and alongside new techs are bonus cards that give you free gifts, like an extra unit or a big pile of resources. If you're in the middle of a war, do you really care about unlocking the magical power of mills? Instead, you can spend a turn or two on getting a free spearman, which will be much more useful in the moment. It's a shame it peters out a bit towards the end. The victory conditions, frankly, kinda suck, and mostly go unexplained. The primary method of winning is by earning 52 points before 200 years have passed, which you do by nurturing your cities and building wonders. If nobody gets to 52, the highest wins. You can also get an early win if you double the points of the next nation, but only if you're already halfway to 52. Then there's the Ambition victory, where you win if you manage to complete ten of what are essentially personal goals. If you don't complete them in your life, they become temporary legacy goals that your heir can complete, if they are fast enough. Finally, you can just wipe everyone out. It's all a bit perfunctory, and a lot more gamey than I expected. I was lucky that my first win happened right as I finally conquered my nemesis Rome, because without that it wouldn't have been remotely memorable. Despite its understated victories, Old World is a brilliant 4X, and one that I'd actually recommend over Civilization at the moment. It feels like a genuine step forward for the genre, boasting so many inventive, smart design decisions. And I can't believe I've reached the end of the review before even mentioning the exceptional soundtrack from composer Christopher Tin. Civ 4's Baba Yetu might still be my favourite of his pieces, but Old World is full of evocative orchestral and choral compositions. There's a lot to love here, and if you've got an itch to conquer the ancient world you absolutely need to give this a shot.

welcome to csblackdevil hope you stay here with us read rules & have fun

i will go for v2 has nice base and it sounds really good base bosted

¤ Nickname: Darkness ¤ Grade: player ¤ New Tag: You Can't Run From The ¤ Link of Hours Played GT link CLICK HERE!: https://www.gametracker.com/player/DarKneSS/NEWLIFEZM.CSBLACKDEVIL.COM:27015/

Microsoft is warning customers that the apps and services which make up Microsoft 365 will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 beginning next month. Microsoft 365 will drop support for the legacy browser beginning on August 17 and from that point on, users may experience connection failures or even a degraded user experience. We've put together a list of the best browsers around These are the best Microsoft Office alternatives on the market Also check out our roundup of the best anonymous browsers The software giant provided further details in a new post on the Microsoft 365 blog, saying: “Beginning August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) and users may have a degraded experience, or be unable to connect to, those apps and services. These apps and services will phase out over weeks and months to ensure a smooth end of support, with each app and service phasing out on independent schedules.” It's also worth noting that users that try to access Microsoft 365 apps or services using Internet Explorer 11 after August 17 will not be offered support from Microsoft to fix any of the issues they may encounter. End of IE11 support: Once Microsoft 365 ditches support for IE11 next month, no new features will be released and the user experience of its apps and services will become steadily worse over time which means that more users will finally switch to using Microsoft Edge instead. At the same time, using Microsoft Edge's new Internet Explorer mode will not extend IE11 access to Microsoft 365's apps and services once support for the browser is ended. Beginning on August 17, users logging in with Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts on IE11 will still be able to use the full Outlook Web App (OWA) experience but it will no longer receive new features. Users logging in with Microsoft Accounts though will be redirected to the Outlook Web App Light experience. Users that rely on the Open with Explorer and View In File Explorer features in SharePoint to access document libraries will still be able to use them when they go to a document library in IE11. However, these features will remain in maintenance mode and won't be receiving further development. Instead, Microsoft recommends that users switch to a modern browser and OneDrive sync for a better user experience and easier access to the their files. In order to ensure a smooth end of support for IE11, Microsoft has said that other Microsoft 365 apps and services will phase out over weeks and months. We've also featured the best business VPN

It's not been an easy year for graphics cards. While there have been some truly great GPUs released since the end of last year, very few of us have actually been able to buy them. Well, there's one last push coming up, with AMD's Navi 23 chips making it into the Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 cards due to be announced on August 11. That's been the rumour for a while, and we don't see any reason why that's about to change. What we haven't had much visibility on until now is the pricing, but an unnamed source over on Neowin has an update on that front. A couple of weeks ago, there were rumours from serial AMD leaker, "Kepler," saying the Radeon RTX 6600 XT would retail for $399. Which we thought was a little on the high side. There was also no word about the non-XT version at the time. Just before that, PowerColor briefly listed RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 on its site, but these pages were quickly pulled. AMD Navi 23 GPUs Radeon RX 6600 XT Radeon RX 6600 GPU Navi 23 XT Navi 23 XL Stream processors 2048 1792 CUs 32 28 Ray Accelerators 32 28 Memory 8 GB GDDR6 8 GB GDDR6 Memory Interface 128-bit 128-bit Infinity Cache 32 MB 32 MB Total Board Power 130 W 130 W MSRP $349 $299 The Navi 23 on the RX 6600 XT is expected to have 32 CUs, which equates to 2048 stream processors and comes with 8GB of GDDR6 using a 128-bit bus. An important consideration for AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs is the local Infinity Cache that significantly impacts the performance on offer. Both GPUs will apparently lay claim to 32MB of Infinity Cache. This card is expected to offer performance somewhere between the $329 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and the $399 RTX 3060 Ti, albeit not in raytracing titles, as Nvidia still has a definite lead there. This is going to make the pricing of the RX 6600 XT absolutely vital. This explains why AMD is apparently suggesting an MSRP of $349—far more palatable than the previous rumour of $399 at any rate. The Radeon RX 6600 meanwhile has 28 CUs or 1,792 stream processors but otherwise matches the specs of its beefier sibling. The same rumours have this card's MSRP at $299, making it the most affordable option of this generation. The word on the tech street is that this card won't be launched simultaneously as the Radeon RX 6600 XT, though, but appearing later in the year. As long as there is plenty of these GPUs, it could make for a late but crucial win for AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. Toss in the fact that AMD's RDNA 2 can be found in the Xbox Series S/X, the Playstation 5, and the Steam Deck when that's released, and AMD could end the year in a very healthy place. It simply needs to get the silicon onto cards and into buyers' hands at those prices.

Six years on from its successful Kickstarter campaign, Crowfall has landed. The MMO built up a lot of promise during its lengthy development. It was to be part-strategy game, part ‘Game of Thrones’ style throne war simulator. Just last year, its designer J Todd Coleman (of Shadowbane fame) claimed that on launch it would be the “most strategic virtual universe," even "surpassing EVE Online." So let’s just reset expectations by saying that Crowfall doesn’t hit those galactic goals. It's a guild-based PvP game with a heavy focus on economy. You’ll be creating multiple characters that share your account name, then levelling them quickly so that they can become cogs in a machine, helping your guild gain ground in a perpetual throne war. The campaign system is novel and the guild dynamics can be compelling, but Crowfall's world design and combat weren't good enough to glue me to it. Without joining a guild, you'll soon find yourself roaming low-reward and largely empty starter zones. Crowfall isn't an MMO designed for doing your own thing. It forces you to merge into something much bigger than yourself—adapt to it and you can have a good time. Fail, and you'll die by way of roaming player mobs and listless boredom. Within a guild, you'll be expected to fit a certain role—specialised craftsman, resource gatherer, or esteemed escorter of pigs loaded with boulders to bolster keeps in preparation for scheduled siege events. You’ll still be a Warrior, Cleric, Frostweaver, and any number of original and extant fantasy classes, but Crowfall is a game where finding your preferred form of artisanship or manual labour is just as important. Crowfall's flumpy cartoon aesthetic is immediately evident once you begin making a new character. Here you have your classic elven variations, mythological minotaurs and centaurs, as well as more outlandish races like the statuesque Stoneborn and Elken—who, you guessed it, are humanoid deer. Though some of the races get marks for originality, the flat-textured character models lack the the little details and exaggerated expressions that make, say, World of Warcraft’s avatars so personable. They end up looking a bit plain-faced and dim, like that drooling Clash of Clans mascot you see in unwanted mobile ads. The exception are the charming Guineceans, a race of stout guinea pig-folk who puff their chests out and rest their hands on their hips to give off a real 'let me at 'em' aura. I opted for the Duelist class, making him a specialist in dual-wielding pistols. Long before you ever engage in Crowfall's enormous PvP battles, you have to cut your teeth in the God's Reach starting world until level 25 (in a game where the hard level cap is 35). A tutorial zone is to be expected, but here it takes a good eight-plus hours to get through its painfully-protracted questline. You learn some vital things along the way, but too much of your time is spent on uninteresting fetch quests for ungrateful and unvoiced NPCs. You don't have to worry about PvP or partying up until you hit 25, but that brings into relief how empty the game world feels without those elements. There are buildings and villages in the world, but no lore tidbits, chatty NPCs, or meaningful loot within them, nor are there spontaneous sidequests out in the wilderness to break up your exploration of Crowfall's lands At least your time in this most purgatorial of tutorials lets you get used to the combat. It's your classic hotkey-and-cooldown-based setup, ostensibly leaning towards a more 'action game' style by removing auto-attack, adding 'reflex' moves like dodges and jumps, and implementing a manual targeting system over traditional MMO tab targeting. But these technicalities seem a little arbitrary when dodging has a long cooldown, your only non-hotkey weapon attack is executed by holding down the mouse button, and hitboxes are so vague that you can shoot the general airspace around an enemy and still score a hit. The combat lacks the kind of physicality we see in Black Desert Online, Guild Wars 2 or even Elder Scrolls Online. Once you hit level 25, you can head out into the PvP wildlands of the starting world, or jump over into the guild-vs-guild 'Dregs' world. But travelling between worlds isn't that simple—it involves a lot of logging out, logging in, and stripping your character down to their undies. See, to go to Dregs you have to deposit whatever you want to take over in the bank, exit back to the game menu, spend some of a finite number of import tokens to move items into your Dregs bank vault, sign into Dregs, then retrieve those items from the vault. The same process applies when moving over to other worlds like the Eternal Kingdoms—player-made worlds that may be anything from marketplaces to guild halls or PvP arenas with custom rules. All this makes Crowfall feel fragmented—a feeling exacerbated by low player numbers and the fact that all zones within a world are connected by portals rather than, say, mountain passes or rivers. Each area feels flat too—thin forests amidst stumbling hills, with no geologically imposing terrain. This is probably a side-effect of the fact that most of the lands are procedurally generated and disposable, getting destroyed when a campaign ends. Which brings us onto one of Crowfall's more interesting systems. Each world exists for a limited period of time (between a month and a year). And during that time each one goes through the seasons, starting in springtime with the map enshrouded in a fog of war as players learn the lay of the land, before progressing through increasingly dangerous seasons and culminating in a cosmic cataclysm. Your characters survive, while guilds and factions that meet the victory conditions (mostly related to territory capture and PvP) get rewards to carry over to the next campaign. But the world, along with all the territory ownership and guild politics, dies. It's an original way to prevent the PvP stagnating, even if there's a certain inevitability that dominant guilds from the previous campaign will quickly establish a stranglehold over the new one. To offset that imbalance there is an alliance system, whereby smaller guilds can join bigger ones in sharing the spoils. From level 25, you're going to be spending most of your time in PvP territory, so the first thing you should do is join a guild if you ever want to see the key content of the game. After that, you can start specialising your character. Upon levelling up, you alternate between improving your basic attributes and picking a 'Talent' to progress your skill tree. There's plenty of room to experiment here. Beyond the usual mix of passive and active abilities, you go down two different layers of subclass. Clerics, for instance, are typically healers, but you can eventually turn them into a damage-dealing Radical, a crowd-controlling Arbiter, or heal-centric Crusader. Then, at the end of the skill tree, you can specialise further using 'Domains' like Death, Shadow, and Music, unlocking various high-level abilities. Meta players and class tinkerers will appreciate the depth here, especially given that the journey from tutorial to PvP endgame is an unusually brisk one. Link up with a good PvE hunting group in Dregs, and you can get from level 25 to 30 in just a few hours. PvE generally focuses around clearing villages or camps of monsters, with the occasional group or raid boss thrown in. This straightforward loop is spiced up by Hot Zones—highlighted areas where for short periods of time you can get XP boosts and better loot drops, at the risk of being ambushed by enemy players hunting for those same rewards. The threat of PvP intervention always hangs over you in Crowfall, which is either thrilling or frustrating depending on the context. It's great when your group fends off an ambush from an enemy group, and larger-scale sieges are always a blast. On the other hand, it's not nearly as fun to get stampeded and looted by a player mob when you're out chopping trees on your lonesome. Lucky for me, my plucky Guinecean Duelist has the ability to burrow underground and move undetected, making him perfect for solo harvesting and recon missions sniffing out nearby enemies. The most significant form of progression in Crowfall is 'Disciplines'. These replaceable stones are split into Major, Minor, and Exploration (essentially crafting/harvesting), and come in different forms of rarity that define how powerful they are. Craftsfolk should expect to spend long hours out in the wilderness chopping trees or smashing stones to get the respective harvesting disciplines, while combat-based major and minor disciplines drop off particular kinds of monsters—after a whole lot of grinding, of course. I appreciate the ability to freely swap these in and out to find which combinations work best in given situations, such as equipping disciplines that improve your ability to maintain and use catapults during sieges, or ones that help you regenerate health on the rare occasion that you're soloing. Crowfall is at its best when you're part of a well-organised guild (which I was lucky enough to find). Each land in Crowfall is speckled with forts, keeps and outposts to scrap over. While outposts can be captured any time, forts and keeps can only be contested at specific times and days. The battles over these structures can be vast, though they do tend to boil down to those familiar PvP siege patterns of madly spamming hotkeys to drop overlapping circles of AoE abilities all around you. The vaunted manual targeting system is all but negated when you have 40-plus characters on-screen fighting each other, and it still feels like MMO siegecraft hasn't meaningfully moved on from the seminal foundations laid by Dark Age of Camelot in 2001. Perhaps my favourite part of Crowfall comes in the afterglow of capturing a Keep. There's an air of camaraderie as everyone does their little part in building it back up; setting up a guild vault where players can deposit gear for others to use, erecting respawn and blessing statues, building walls and mounting trebuchets, and gathering resources for those all-important master craftspeople. video:

¤ Your Nickname (same as in forum): i have changed my name on forum its quben on sv and darkness when i got admin i will change to darkness ¤ Your Address Skype, facebook: only csbd and ts3 ¤ Age: 19 ¤ Languages That You Can Speak: English,Urdu,Pushto ¤ Your Location: Pakistan ¤ Experience As Admin (last server GT link): - ¤ Can You Stay Spectator Or Playing Between These Hours (24:00 To 12:00 PM): yes i can you can contact other admins about my activity ¤ Link Of Hours You Played On Server ( CLICK HERE You Must Write Your Nickname) quben ¤ Reason That You Want To Be Admin: to help sv ¤ Password/key for admin[ Read The Rules to find it] : NewlifeZM2021