Monthly Archives: May 2003
Whiptail Interactive – Postal 2
The original Postal game was banned so quickly that this reviewer never even clapped eyes on it. Still hasn’t, in fact. This makes for loads of good publicity, in much the same way that ‘Frankie goes to Hollywood’ benefited from ‘Relax’ getting the big thumbs down, but selling an outlawed product is morally questionable at…
IMSI – FloorPlan 3D
Thanks to the success of TV programmes such as ‘Changing Rooms’, people all over the country have been annoying their neighbours and putting their families through major stress by ‘redesigning’ the interiors of their houses. A note of cynicism there? Well, we have nothing against a bit of painting and decorating, but once you move…
Iiyama – ProLite E430S
Ah, the wonder of economies of scale. Little did we ever think, when nodding through the stultifying tedium of A-Level Economics – not for nothing dubbed the dismal science – that the bit called economies of scale would actually turn out to be rather marvellous. After all, it was only a very few years ago…
Hauppauge – WinTV PVR 350
It’s happened to all of us at some time. Your favourite TV programme is showing, and you’re fighting a growing urge to go to the toilet. Of course, you won’t have time to fumble around with a video recorder. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just press a button and pause the TV…
Microsoft – Freelancer
The setting for this “space opera” game is the 23rd Century, which in a galactic time-frame can be roughly described as just before the insanity that was Buck Rogers and just after the Space Odyssey. A civil war has ripped Earth and our Solar System apart, with the losing faction, the Alliance, escaping to deep…
DVD writers group test
As one of the members of the DVD Forum, Panasonic is one of the companies trying to make DVD-RAM and its ilk more popular. This format group has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages first; a DVD-RAM disc can be re-written to up to 100,000 times (DVD-RW only manages 1,000) and it doesn’t require any special burning…
Jasc – Paint Shop Pro 8
When we reviewed a recent version of Paint Shop Pro, our conclusion was that it had some great features, but they were obscured by a cluttered range of add-ons and extras that simply got in the way. Jasc seems to have taken that message on board for this new version, which is simpler and yet…
Microsoft – XBox Live Starter Kit
“I want to end up sort of unforgettable” – Ringo Starr. Luckily, The Beatles also produced some rather more sensible quotes, such as “I get by with a little help from my friends…”, which is particularly apt when it comes to XBox gaming. A frenetic four-player thrash on Fuzion Frenzy (the classic MS party game)…
Multivision – Ionix GL
The austere, all-black case of Multivision’s new Ionix GL system is clean-cut and smart, while harbouring a couple of interesting innovations. Most impressive of these, particularly for those who like to work on their PCs to tweak performance, is the clever hinge which enables the entire system board and expansion cards to fold out for…