Bioware made it big riding on the back of Baldur's Gate, and its success became the basis for add-ons, sequels and spin-offs that established Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk as legends in the gaming industry. A mix of undiluted 2 edition D&D rules along with party combat dynamics, well-paced leveling and a strong, character-driven narrative produced an experience so satisfying, its remains a benchmark other RPGs are measured against. Overhaul Games, fresh off the slick remake of MDK2 HD, aimed its sights considerably higher in the Bioware back catalog and produced a long-requested and highly anticipated update to this crown jewel of gaming. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition ($20, buy-only) introduces official native high-resolution visuals, new story content, multiplayer support and a gladiator-style combat mode for quick action. It delivers on these promises, but like most translations, something of the original spark is lost in the process. Overhaul Games, who started out life as a division of online game distributer Beamdog, petitioned Bioware for over a year before being given access to the sacred Infinity Engine source code, the lifeblood from which Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape flowed. What followed were hundreds of bugs fixes and improvements as the engine was refitted for modern OS and hardware environments along with visual upgrades to the artwork and interface graphics. The technical improvements are largely successful. The game runs in crisp high resolution without lag and supports widescreen monitors natively, feats the original game can only perform with substantial end-user modification. Engine improvements from later games in the series, such as Shadows of Amn, have been retroactively fitted so additional class kits and subraces are available to round out character creation. The experience cap has also been raised, giving a little headroom for point gobbling multiclass builds. Gameplay is largely the same, with characters arrayed on the right side of the screen, mode selections to the left, and actions across the bottom. Control is more like an RTS game than a traditional action RPG, focusing on mob attacks using a pause-go command flow to issue orders to your party or relying on AI. Quick slots let you pick preferred weapons or items via function keys and despite its age, the ergonomics of the layout are easy to appreciate. In some ways, they surpass the radial menu paradigm Bioware used for the subsequent Neverwinter Nights series.
Time is on your side, at least according to Mick Jagger. (Think: song lyric.) But it rarely seems that way when you get to the end of the day and realize you didn't have nearly enough of it. Where on earth does the time go? ". Number one? You guessed it: email. Thirty-three percent of survey respondents spend 1-2 hours per day dealing with email, while 22 percent spend more than two hours. In an eight-hour day, that's a full fifth of your time devoted solely to your inbox. Next up? You guessed it again: the Web. Fully 80 percent of those surveyed admitted to spending at least two hours per day surfing the Internet. Granted, some or all of that might have been work-related, but there's no denying the distracting siren song of Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and other non-work destinations.
It's official. be releasing new Radeon desktop GPUs "from top to bottom" in 2013, though you won't be seeing the next-gen Radeon 8000 series graphics cards until late in the year. Instead, the company will be firmly focused on the Radeon 7000 series cards currently available on the market for the first half of 2013, company officials told journalists during a conference call. That doesn't mean that AMD will be sitting on its heels until the holidays, however. Officials said we can expect to see some new 7000-series GPUs released during the first half of the year, though they wouldn't provide any juicy details beyond that. Why stick with a generation of graphics cards that was first introduced more than a year ago, at the finish line of 2011? AMD officials say that their current Radeon 7000 series has GPU leadership over Nvidia's GTX GeForce 600 series in terms of performance—especially given the recent launch of the beastly , which sports dual Radeon 7970 GPUs and 6GB of RAM. Also, despite its long-ago launch, the Radeon 7000 series is actually gaining traction. AMD says that the Radeon HD 7000 series' January 2013 sales volumes were higher at any point in 2012, including the holiday season. "With sales volumes continuing to ramp, it would be premature to launch a new series," officials said.
As an avid reader, and an especially big fan of ebooks, I thought subscribing to Amazon Prime seemed like a good idea. After all, the $79/year membership lets you check out one ebook per month from the Kindle Lending Library, which is rapidly approaching 300,000 titles. Just one problem: How in the heck do you find those titles? If you've ever gone searching for "Kindle Lending Library," you know that there's no such thing—not in your Web browser, anyway. Although Amazon lets you browse the collection on an actual Kindle, but there's no direct link to it anywhere on Amazon's site. Hassle! Fortunately, reader Danner discovered that you can indeed browse the Lending Library in your browser; it just takes a little doing. Here's the process:
Microsoft confirmed thursday that a retail copy of Office 2013 is permanently tied to the first PC on which it’s installed, preventing customers from deleting the suite from one machine they own and installing it on another. The move is a change from past Office end-user licensing agreements (EULAs), experts said, and is another way Microsoft is pushing customers, especially consumers, to opt for new “rent-not-own” subscription plans. “That’s a substantial shift in Microsoft licensing,” said Daryl Ullman, co-founder and managing director of the Emerset Consulting Group, which specializes in helping companies negotiate software licensing deals. “Let’s be frank. This is not in the consumer’s best interest. They’re paying more than before, because they’re not getting the same benefits as before.” Prior to Office 2013, which debuted last month, Microsoft’s EULA for retail copies of Office plainly stated that customers could reassign a license when, for example, they replaced an aged PC with a newer model, or the original machine gave out.
.
To millions of people around the world, the name Photoshop inspires images of sharks leaping out at helicopters, phony disaster photos, and retouched celebrity shots. Now, the original computer code that started it all is available for inspection. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California recently made the ). The original program that would become Photoshop was written in the late 1980s by Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan. He and his brother John, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic, developed Photoshop into a full-fledged consumer-ready application. The first commercial release from slide scanner maker Barneyscan only sold about 200 copies under the name Barneyscan XP, and came bundled with the company’s hardware. Soon after that initial commercial foray, Adobe licensed the rights from the Knolls and released an improved version of the program, Photoshop 1.0. At its original release, easy to use. “Considering the vast number of features and tools involved,” Macworld said. “Adobe has done a good job of keeping things organized and simple.”
The head of CBS, Les Mooonves told analysts during a fourth quarter earnings call that the network is currently in talks with Intel about a programming deal. That's one network down for Intel, countless more to go for the chip maker turned content provider.
Calling it "sensationalist rhetoric," federal authorities took the offensive late Thursday for the second time in as many months to blast Megaupload for its contention that the authorities entrapped the now-shuttered file-sharing service.
How is it possible that a dozen different motorists around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were able to capture video of a massive meteor flying through the sky? Because almost everyone in Russia has a dash-mounted video camera in their car.
Most people in the U.S. woke up to a spectacular sight this morning: videos from Russian dashboard cameras showing a fireball in the sky crashing down to the Earth. The 15-meter meteorite impacted the atmosphere and exploded above the Chelyabinsk region of central Russia, injuring an estimated 1,200 people and causing roughly 1 billion rubles ($33 million U.S.) in damage. It was the largest meteorite to hit the country in more than a century.
Airbus is activating what it is calling "Plan B" and dropping lithium-ion batteries from its newest composite airliner even as Boeing continues investigating why the technology has created epic problems for its flagship 787 Dreamliner.
The SIA Snow Show is the CES for people who play in the snow, the place to see the latest gear you'll be saving your pennies for.
Valve's gaming service Steam is now available for Linux users, the company announced Thursday.
Few people have seen as many volcanoes as the astronauts that inhabit the International Space Station. Here, Wired Science blogger Erik Klemetti presents a gallery of some of the best images of volcanoes from space -- including some volcanoes that most people don't even know exist!
The day has come for our planet to get a cosmically close visit from asteroid 2012 DA14. The 50-km-diameter space rock will make its closest approach to Earth at 11:24 a.m. PST/ 2:24 p.m. EST, at which point it will be only 27,700 km above the surface, less than one-tenth the Earth-moon distance and well within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites.
For the past century, physicists have puzzled over cosmic rays, particles that hurtle through space at high speed and seem to come from all directions equally. What's the source of these galactic projectiles? And how do they come to be traveling so fast? Today, scientists announced a major step toward answering those questions.
Webmonkey talks to developer Lea Verou about her new role at the W3C, why web standards matter and how you can get involved and have a voice in the process.
Space is out to kill you. There is no way to stem its aggression. But it¿s usually an incompetent killer, so don¿t freak out.
And the first cable network looking to capitalize on the
Computer security specialists hunted down a Chinese hacking mastermind, only to find he was running a Facebook business on the side.
What goes better with Star Wars than a nice side dish of physics? Nothing. Recently, Wired Science blogger Rhett Allain did a Reddit AMA on the Science of Star Wars. Now, Rhett has some Reddit-inspired Star Wars physics homework problems for you to answer. Before he does.
If you've never really noticed the absence of women in
This week on the
When it comes to RC vehicles, there tends to be two types of user: those who buy pre-made toys, and those who build fast, powerful kits.And then there's I-Wei Huang.
To cool down advanced, overheated 3-D microchips, the Pentagon¿s researchers want to embed them with tiny fluid channels to circulate even tinier-sized blobs of water.
After spending $142 million of a $151 million federal Recovery Act grant to set up the factory to make batteries for the Chevy Volt and other EVs, LG Chem Michigan has yet to produce a single battery cell that can be used in an electric car sold to the public. And it gets worse.
Growing up, kids are taught to pose and smile when they¿re in front of a camera. We want them to look cute. Problem is, kids aren¿t always cute. Photographer Jan von Holleben knows that and avoids this photographic trap by letting his young subjects be their creative and sometimes obnoxious selves.
For the First Ascent line, Eddie Bauer brought in a new crop of expedition guides to help design and test its products.
Making movie-games was actually a lot riskier than it seemed from the outside. And a few industry shifts were all it took for the whole house of cards to come down.
#EmojiArtHistory -- where art-smart geeks recreate work by famous artists using emojis on Twitter.
Before J.J. Abrams was a twinkle in George Lucas' eye,
New York Times reporter John Broder responded in detail Thursday to Tesla president Elon Musk's data-driven takedown of Broder's review of the Model S sedan.
The arrest of Oscar Pistorius is a tragic epilogue to a story that transcended sports and inspired millions of people.
Will Alameda County become California's first local government to deploy a drone? If the decision were up to dozens of angry residents and several civil rights groups, the answer would be a resounding "No." They urged the Bay Area county's leaders, in a public hearing sometimes filled with acrimony Thursday, to squash a plan by the Alameda County Sheriff's Department to deploy up to two small, lightweight drones.
The Army has killed its massive spy blimp. And as the Long Range Multi-Intelligence Vehicle dies, so too does an entire model of aerial surveillance for the foreseeable future.
A Monday iOS update specifically designed to address battery and cellular connectivity issues for iPhone 4S owners looks to be leaving many still struggling to get through the day on a single battery charge.