Razer has been running a big PR campaign saying that PC gaming is not dead and that they have what it takes to prove it to the world. Well, now it is here: Razer Blade. And it is the most underwhelming savior we've ever seen.

The kindly folks at Civilization V Community have decided to make the final few days of our waiting for Civilization V a little bit easier by releasing the 210-page manual for our perusal. While I must say that reading the manual will make my final week of waiting (Yup, we Europeans have to wait a bit longer than the Americans) only harder, I'm sure reading the manual will pass a tiny bit of that time a little easier than it would otherwise. Head over to the Community site and download the manual in your favoured language.

Many of us 'older' gamers remember the classic Transport Tycoon from Microprose with certain degree of fondness. This lead to the beginning of a completely open source project to recreate this classic game which started in 2004. The game carries the name OpenTTD and recreates the original game as closely as possible, letting you design the transport systems (land, water, air) between cities and production facilities. The 1.0 version can be downloaded for both Windows and Linux at the project website.

As a very welcome Christmas gift to all RPG players, Funcom treats us with a completely unlimited free trial of Age of Conan. All those gamers who download, install and start "trialing" Age of Conan before the end of the year, will get an unlimited access to the first 20 levels of gameplay and be able to develop new characters and play the introductory missions for all eternity if they so wish.

All StarCraft fans should now dig in and prepare for a bit longer wait than they originally expected. Blizzard has announced that their development of the Battle.net seems to require a bit longer and the publish date of StarCraft II will thus be delayed until the first half of 2010. StarCraft II, as most of you certainly know, is expected to be the Next Big Thing of the RTS genre and thus this announcement will certainly disappoint many people out there. Here's a quote from Blizzard:

Nowadays we rarely get our hands on a good adventure game, so it is great to see some of the classics make a return as remakes - especially when they are free remakes. AGDInteractive Studios has now released their King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown 4.0 Enhanced Edition.

If you've never played the original, you should definitely give this one a try! And even if you know the original, it never hurts to replay an old classic.

I guess people must have been wondering why I haven't been yammering about the Asus EeePC for a while. Especially now that the EeePC 900 series has been launched and the 10" display version has already been announced.

Well, I have been excited to an extent, but one must keep a lid on one's excitement when Asus still hasn't released the EeePC in Scandinavia! Ok, they've said that it will be here this summer, but one can only wonder if it will be the older 700 series and not the new 900 series with 8.9" display and, what's the most awesome thing I've seen in a while, the multi touch pad.

I must say that I assumed that the functionality would be limited to simple zoom in/out and scrolling with two finger swipes, but, as the following YouTube video shows, it can do much much more than that - perhaps even make the mouse completely unnecessary!

It's finally here - the second generation Asus EeePC 900 is showcased at the CeBIT fair and has attracted a lot of press publicity over the past couple of days. And it seems to deserve all this attention. After all, the 7" screen has been upgraded to a 8.9" screen with 1024x600 resolution (finally you can browse HookedGamers.com without sideways scrolling!), a full 1GB of RAM and upto 12GB of SSD (solid state drive) space. To give room for the bigger screen, the unit is very slightly bigger than the original and the speakers have been moved to the bottom of the laptop. Personally, as I always use earphones, the locations of the speakers is a non-issue, but some others have been voicing concerns whether the new location of the speakers will affect the great sound quality that the 700 series of EeePCs were known for. The laptop will come in two versions, one with WindowsXP pre-installed (for those who are REALLY scared of using a non-MS OS) and another with the original Linux flavour.

The battery life will apparently still be around 3 hours, so it is not that impressive, but pretty good for anyone just wanting to use the machine on a short trip or while visiting the local cafe. However, a lot of the specifics are still hazy. There have been indications that the new Asus Eee's would be using a completely new processor - namely the new Intel Atom chipset. If this is true, then the battery life should also go up a little bit, since the low-voltage Atom chipset has been designed precisely for these sorts of on-the-go machines. Naturally, given the way rumours go, the Atom chipset may only be available in the 3rd Gen EeePCs and that we'll have to survive with a shorter battery life for a while longer.

Two nice videos have been released from the CeBIT. Both by non-native English speakers, so be warned. I'll embed the first one here because the presentation is a bit calmer (I'm pretty sure this guy is Finnish - some of my friends have a similar pronunciation):



The second one is a little harder to follow mainly because the reporter seems to have some language problems with the presenter (or talks way too fast for her). You can find it here.

Now, the Asus EeePC 700 series has not yet been released in many European countries (the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries, for example), so it remains to be seen when this unit will be available to most buyers. However, some locations should have it by the forthcoming summer and the price is tagged at around 399 euros (including all taxes). No one seems to want to quote the US price because of the rapidly falling dollar that makes all estimates impossible.

Right in time for the CeBIT fair, Greenpeace has prepared a report of the greenness of electronics that were available on the market in 2007. Considering that entering the review process was voluntary and the manufacturers who did take part must have chosen their greenest products to enter, the results aren't really that impressive. Although Greenpeace admits that the industry is making progress and even going ahead of the legislation in their innovations for green products, there is still a long way to go.

Out of the electronics reviewed in the study, we are naturally most interested in desktops and laptops. The scoring criteria takes into account the use of hazardous chemicals, energy use during consumption, product lifecycle and innovations and marketing. When looking at the following scores, you should be aware best score that you can get is 10. First, the desktops:

1st Rank: Dell Optiplex 755 & Hewlett-Packard dc5750 - Score: 4.71
3rd Rank: Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo E5720 - Score: 4.65
4th Rank: Lenovo Thinkcentre A61e - score: 3.66

Notice why it is necessary to mention that the top score is 10? None of the reviewed products get even close to it, let alone the halfway point. It should also be noted that the scores are based on the company's own information about the products and thus, even though all manufacturers claim recyclability rates of over 80%, Greenpeace notes that it is unlikely that such rates meet the current reality of recycling in EU (i.e. recycling hasn't been properly organised).

The laptops that were reviewed fare a tiny bit better:

1st Rank: Sony Vaio TZ11 - Score 5.29
2nd Rank: Hewlett-Packard Compaq 2710p - Score 4.82
3rd Rank: Toshiba Portégé R500 - Score 4.74
4th Rank: Dell XPS M1330 - Score 4.38
5th Rank: Lenovo Thinkpad X61 - Score 3.98
6th Rank: Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook P7230 - Score 3.52
7th Rank: Panasonic Toughbook W5 - Score 3.49

A quote from the study: "The Sony Vaio TZ11 is the only notebook claiming to avoid completely beryllium and its compounds (beryllium is one of the toxic chemical groups not regulated under RoHS). This, and three other green initiatives (PVC-free internal cables, BFR-free main printed circuit board and mercury-free LED backlight in LCD screen) secures it the top spot. The HP Compaq 2710p notebook comes second, scoring particularly well in the category of RoHS exemptions and upgradeable parts. It also features a mercury-free LED backlight in its LCD screen."

Overall, we can only hope that the manufacturers keep improving the greenness of their products so that next year we will see products that get at least a bit better scores than the present products do. You can read the full study here (.pdf file).

In an another tech testing venture, Varg and I got our hands on the Asus PG221 gaming monitor. It was quite a leap from our regular monitors as far as comes to its size: a whopping 22" instead of the 15.4" of my laptop and the 17" LCD that Varg uses. And the size was not the only thing that impressed us. Read more here.

Of all the games from my youth, Ultima IV, V and VI are some of the bright stars in my memories. I can never forget the first time I was transported to Britannia after responding to a series of questions by a travelling gypsy - questions that ultimately decided my role in the coming adventures. The Quest of the Avatar was my first real RPG experience on a computer and no other game ever came close to Ultima IV. And when I had to find and rescue Lord British in Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, the quest felt like a personal responsibility to me - I simply had to succeed in it.

I never got to play Ultima Underworld and I still remember the burning desire to purchase a PC just in order to play the game - but I resisted. And at that point, I lost track of the Ultima series for good. And I only really got back into RPGs when Falconer insisted that I should try Oblivion (thank you, Falc!). But even as I was playing Oblivion, my memories took me back to Britannia and I wondered if there was ever going to be a game that would allow me to revisit Britannia again.

And, then, quite by an accident I saw the word Ultima mentioned in my RSS feed and I clicked on it before my brains actually registered what was happening. The link took me to the home page of The Ultima 6 Project. This is the home site of a project by Team Archon which aims to bring Ultima VI back to the modern players - with an updated interface and seriously improved graphics. And, what's more, there already exist a similar transformation of Ultima V out there, called Ultima V: Lazarus. Both of these games use the engine of another RPG: Dungeon Siege.

And, what's even MORE, there is a team working on Ultima IX, using the Elder Scrolls: Morrowind engine and the game will be called The Titans of Ether. And the same team is already planning a sequel, Ultima X: The New King, that will use the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion engine. The first of these projects is reputedly about 75 % done, so we can only hope that it will get finished someday soon (Ultima game running on the Elder Scrolls engine would be something to drool after!).

However, I haven't had time to try any of the updated games yet - I simply had to run and write this blog entry first. But, as soon as my workload eases up a bit, I'll install the latest milestone build (Milestone 4) of Ultima VI and give it a go... While waiting for a true sequel to the series to come out.

We (Varg and I) got time for another review of a laptop aimed for the gamers. This time, it is HP Pavilion HDX9050 - a laptop that challenges the whole idea of laptops with its 20+ inch widescreen display and 4+1 speakers. Pretty impressive set-up, if we may say so. Check out the full review here.

Me and Varg got to know a bit more about the gaming laptops that you can find on the market today. This piece starts off our series of articles of various gaming laptops with a review of Asus G2S - a pretty sexy piece of machinery that recently won the 2008 IF Design Award for its... well, design. We have to say that it is indeed a great looking machine that will surely adorn many gamers' game rooms, although our review also revealed some issues that might make it even better for gaming. Check the full review out here!

I think that by now almost everyone following the computer business has heard of AsusTek. As a product line, Asus notebooks, motherboards etc. have been around for a long time, but they didn't really cross the threshold of international attention until AsusTek proclaimed that they aim to be one of the biggest laptop producers in the world and soon after announced the EeePC.

Many people believed that the EeePC was just a niche product and worked only as a marketing ploy for other Asus products, but the reality showed otherwise. The EeePC has become very popular everywhere it has been released (most wanted Christmas gift on Amazon etc.) and stocks are running out as fast as new shipments are brought in. Now, AsusTek recently made another huge announcement by saying that by 2010, the EeePC product line (more stuff coming) will have taken 20 % of the PC market share worldwide. That's quite a big claim, but naturally you would not get into news if you didn't claim something big. Can the EeePC actually become THAT popular? Well, we can only wait and see. In any case, the EeePC and the claim have got AsusTek a lot of publicity.

Another venue where AsusTek is making grand announcements is their Eco line of computers. Their new Asus Eco Book is actually made of bambu (well, the case is - I suspect the insides still profess the usual amount of silicon and heavy metals). Bambu, as I'm sure everyone knows, is quite a fast-growing wood-like product, usually used as nutrition by some cute but big furry animals but also as building material for beach shacks etc.

Making a laptop out of wood, or bambu, is certainly something that will get you to the news, even if it is still a prototype product. It may also be that working bambu into a laptop frame is more ecological than doing the same thing to plastic (remembering that we need oil for plastic). But since the engineers have yet to test the bambu material's suitability for laptops (whether it will withstand the heat produced by the electronics, the bumps and scratches of everyday use etc.), I must say that one can only call it a marketing stunt at this point. A pretty stunt, but still a stunt.

Whereas the EeePC was a risky and daring step to take for AsusTek (as the cheap price could have influenced the reputation of their high-end laptops), it seems that the other stories - becoming one of the biggest laptop producers, EeePC taking 20% of the whole PC market and the bambu laptop - are just aggressive marketing at this point. AsusTek really wants to be out there, getting their name on the news as often as possible. And as long as the marketing stunts are accompanied by actual results (such as the EeePC), it should be nothing to worry about. But one has to wonder how many further breaking news items AsusTek can come up with in the future that will keep them in the public eye... Perhaps we'll see motherboards made out of bambu next? Or will the next EeePC generation also be a bambu product?

Still, I cannot be too critical of AsusTek - as you've probably seen in my text above. They have made some serious work in order to make their products more ecological (powerwheels on the units that can be used to adjust efficiency and the power consumed by the laptop while using it), while still winning design prices for their product lines (such as the G line of laptops). They also brought us first what no one else seemed to think a viable product line: affordable, easily transportable laptops. All in all, AsusTek seems to be a company to keep an eye on.

The main goal of AsusTek has been, from the beginning, to market Asus Eee to kids and the elderly - people who have never used, or have little experience with, computers before. That's why the laptop comes with the easy UI with tabbed interface, making everything extremely easy to find.

However, I must say that advertising computers has never got this creepy before! Just imagine these kids approaching you dressed in white and singing "Highway to Hell" with those frozen smiles on their faces!



Since the other target group are the elderly, I'm looking forward to the ad videos with white-haired elderly people in white suits and with white umbrellas, singing "Stairway to Heaven" (my wife's idea!) and waving around the umbrellas and Eee computers...

It seems that AsusTek never expected the laptop to become popular with nerds, although the buzz has been almost unbelievable in the 'net for the past six months. Now, the people who buy the EeePC the most are certainly neither the kids nor the elderly, but computer enthusiasts, travelling businessmen, soldiers on the field, security people etc. All those people who have been looking forward to an affordable, small laptop for many many years. It is a market that always existed, but was apparently never recognised before now.

As it is, Asus EeePC is nr1 selling product at Amazon, at least, and seems to be selling better than Nutella crepes in Paris!

Well, how about me? Well, I live in Finland, which is in Scandinavia, and it seems that the demand for the Eee is so big everywhere else, that the Scandinavians (e.g. me) will only get their hands on the Eee sometime next year.

Well, patience is a virtue, as they say.