Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

The world is such a better place when you’ve got what everyone has. But what makes it even better is when you’ve waited for something for the better part of a decade! Since November 2002, we’ve waited. But now it’s here and Live will now see a new breed of gamers – Maharaja styleee!

Announced to launch officially on 05/11/07, we all waited for that day when Monday would be everyone’s most favourite-est day. But yesterday (04/11/07, well?!), I walked into my regular game/music store to pick up my copy of Orangebox so I could check what all the buzz around Portal was, and what actually greeted me was the nice, ‘hard-to-rip-off’ orangey soft pack screaming for my attention! Xbox Live was here and a day before the official launch date! Now I don’t know how much trouble this will get me into, but what the hell, I’ve said it now!

So yeah – Gold subscriptions here now in 1, 3 and 12 month subscription options and Live points are here too. I picked up a pack of 1600 points for ± 1000 INR (± $26). Picked up good old Castlevania – SOTN and Geometry Wars, although strangely, Doom was not available for purchase! Strange, indeed.

Up next, I’ll check out all the “Edutainment” products we were promised. Hell, maybe they WILL have an ‘Arbiter teaches typing’ game after all!!

Could this even be possible? Well, that’s what Cody Brocious’ ALKY PROJECT would have us believe. According to Cody, who’s a “19 year old software reverse-engineer” in San Diego, California, it could soon be possible to play all your DirectX 10 games without necessarily having to upgrade to Microsoft’s shiny new OS, Windows Vista.

Considering how the DirectX 10 API is exclusive to the new OS, Microsoft has explicitly said that if you want to play a DX10 game in all it’s graphic richness, you’d need to get yourself a nice big DX10 card and then fork over the dough to get yourself onto the Vista bandwagon. Unfortunately, Vista isn’t all that it was touted to be. Even though there are lots of newsitems flying around the web about how Microsoft is retiring Windows XP sometime late next year, a lot of us haven’t really seen the benefits of jumping from a stable gaming platform to one that is yet to prove itself indispensable, especially considering how the 64-bit version of the OS causes more problems than it fixes, which sucks especially if you’ve forked over hard earned money for a spanking new quad-core 64-bit QX6700/8800 GTX SLi/Windows Vista Ultimate x64 rig to take advantage of the OS’ 64-bit/multiprocessing improvements.

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