Have you choose your fate?

Fate is an action role playing diablo-like game created by WildTangent. The story is really simple. A village was underattacked by mighty demon which reside in the cave afterwards. And our hero will have its destiny to fight those demon by using his/her special skill.

At the beginning of gameplay, we can choose 4 difficulty setting i.e: Page, Adventurer, Hero and Legend. And then we can choose hair style, face, etc. Some unimportant stuff :P...
Our hero will be accompanied by a dog/cat as his/her pet during the mission. Surprisingly, our pet cannot die while in the battle so its will come to really helpful in supporting our hero. Just let our pet fight for our hero and then heal it when its health is in danger. Very simple...

The uniqueness of this game come from fishing mode. Our hero can catch many different fish for feeding our pet and let it transform into another monster form. Each monster our pet transform into has a special skill and ability. But after spending hours fishing, we can become very boring of waiting and buy the fish directly from the fisherman there instead :P...

The game doesn't put some restriction of what our hero will be. We can choose every skill and magic we like to be learned by our hero. Of course, there are limit of what skill our hero can learn at any given time. Every level our hero gained, there are only 2 skill point given.

The similar situation comes apply for our hero charateristics. We can let our hero become witch by raising its magical point but of course with trade-off of lowering his/her strength or maybe dexterity. For each level gained we only get 4 stats point. But the choice of make use these 4 stats points is up to us completely.

In summary, Fate is a average game, with average gameplay. The upside of fate is that it's not require so much processing power nor graphical processing power. You can use your notebook with integrated graphics card for playing it. The downside, of course this game can be really boring. Imagine going 50th level down in the cave full of monsters with the similar enemy and no surprise at all. Wild tangent can do much better by adding some puzzle and secret enemy/character, but they didn't do it while creating fate, making it only deserve 6 from scale 1 to 10!

Logitech speaker update...

After a while, Logitech updated their speaker product line. And this time, Logitech designs their can very neatly. This is a vast improvement from Logitech's previous product line. But is it only design or the sound quality is improved as well? Let's find out real soon!

Logitech has been a major player in computer speaker for the recent years. Their speaker characteristics are best suited for gaming and video purpose since their bass capability is able to shake room! And it seems that Logitech keeps their speaker characteristics to be just like that in the current product release. Enough said, let's take a look at two speakers worth buying from Logitech :)

The first one is Logitech Z4. Priced below $100, this speaker product will hit the market for gamers and movie lovers on budget. Why? Because there are no competitor so far that seems to offer 8" subwoofer on their speaker products for this price range. This is the main strength for Logitech Z4 - Bass. You may wonder, why size does matter for subwoofer? Because the larger the subwoofer, the lower frequency it can produce...

Logitech bundled their 8" subwoofer with 2" dome driver in Z4's satellites. Somewhat, we feel that this is unbalanced system. How can 2" satellite driver keep up with 8" subwoofer? The mid and high will be easily overwhelmed by bass the subwoofer produce.

To tackle this problem, Logitech invent a new technology which they call it pressure driver. Pressure driver is a passive driver whose membrane will be moved along with the real active driver. If we see from the image below, we can see that in each satellite, Logitech included 2 pressure drivers. And to reduce the massiveness of bass produced by Z4's subwoofer, Logitech apparently uses 8" pressure driver in their subwoofer with unknown size of active driver....

Something that is missing from this product is tweeter. If only Logitech include tweeter on their satellite, maybe this speaker will have more musical characteristics, but anyway this is a really good multimedia speaker for gamers and movie lovers. Just take a look for its specification and you'll realise that for its price - below $100 - this is a really good offer.

Z4's Specifications :

• Total RMS power: 40 watts RMS - Satellites: 17 watts RMS (8.5 watts x 2), Subwoofer: 23 watts RMS
• Total peak power: 80 watts
• Frequency response: 35 Hz–20 kHz
• Drivers: Satellites: 2-inch dome driver, 2-inch pressure driver, Subwoofer: 8-inch pressure driver
• Speaker dimensions (H x W x D, inches): Satellites: 9 x 3 x 3.75, Subwoofer: 9 x 9 x 9.37
• Signal-to-noise ratio: >92 dB

Another product worth buying is Logitech Z2300. This is Z5500's sibling, another great product from Logitech which is highly recommended. Catch a glimpe at the image below and we can see that the design of Z5500 is superior than Z4's. But how about the specification? Is it really superior? Let's see it!

Hardware

• Drivers: Satellites: 2.5-inch polished aluminum phase plug driver
• Subwoofer: 8-inch long-throw ported driver with sixth-order bass reflex enclosure
• Speaker dimensions (H x W x D, inches): Satellites: 6.75 x 3.5 x 6, Subwoofer: 11 x 11 x 15
• SoundTouch™ wired remote control: Master volume, Subwoofer volume, Headphone jack, Power/standby

Technical Specifications

• Total RMS power: 200 watts RMS Satellites: 80 watts RMS (40 watts x 2) Subwoofer: 120 watts RMS
• Total peak power: 400 watts
• Frequency response: 35 Hz–20 kHz
• Signal-to-noise ratio @ 1 kHz: >100 dB
• Amplifier: Ultra-linear, high-capacity analog
• Compatibility:PC or Mac, CD playerDigital, (MP3) music player, DVD player, PlayStation®, PlayStation®2, PLAYSTATION®3 (with provided game console adapter), Xbox®, Xbox 360™ (with provided game console adapter)

Z2300 has 200 watt RMS power! It's more than enough to make your computer table be shaken when you turn up this beast to its maximum. Z4's with modest 40 watt RMS really looks pale compared with Z2300. Being high in RMS power means that this speaker can be played at loud volume without have any perceived distortions. Logitech Z2300 also has been THX's certified which marks this speaker capability as small home theater speaker.

This speaker is offered in price range $160, making this speaker will face Edifier's C3 directly. Who will be the winner? You'll decide :)

The Battle for Wesnoth...

There are a lot of freeware games that can be downloaded from the internet, but only some of them are worth playing ;). One of them is The Battle for Wesnoth. The Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based strategy game. It's licensed under GPLd. It means that everyone has a freedom to download the source code and modify it to whatever they like.

The Battle for Wesnoth can be played across many platform. So far it has supported Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and Open Solaris. Maybe in the future it will support more :). Compatibility accross many platform like this is really great because there are multiplayer mode that can be played online. To be played in online multiplayer mode, there is one restriction, i.e : all players must use the same version of this game. The latest version of The Battle for Wesnoth is 1.4 and player who wants to play online are encouraged to download 1.4 version because this version has the biggest online community players among other versions.

Just take a glimpse of this game for a while and soon our memory will recall classic games like "Romance of three kingdom" or "L'empereur" published by Koei long time ago. Don't expect graphical pleasure when playing this game, but for core gamers, graphics is second below storyline. That's what maybe will make this game have a big community. So far, The Battle for Wesnoth has been downloaded many times, until the number reached 2,1 millions. Wow.....

Wanna try it? The installer size is more or less 150 MB and it can be downloaded here.

Have fun ^_^

Shock Troopers' Very Brief Review...

Yesterday, I finish playing Shock Troopers 1 and 2. They are old games, shooting-action games similar to Metal Slug. But in my opinion, they are more fun than Metal Slug because the character movement is more flexible.

In Metal Slug, we can only move our character from left to right, but in Shock Troopers, we can move them anywhere we like since we see the character from upper view. And this also add some difficulties of playing it ;). And of course-more fun :D..

Shock Troopers 1 is modest in graphics (what can you say to 1997's game :P) but I believe in their era the graphics can be categorized as good. The really nice feature from Shock Troopers 1 is we can select 8 different characters. Each characters have their own attributes. Some can move slowly but have deadly attack and some can move faster while slightly damage the enemy.

And we can select two mode game, lonely or team mode. In lonely mode, we play only one character from the beginning until the end. In team mode, we can choose up to three characters and switch them in-game while we need their special capabilities. Very useful feature ;). We also can select the route our character will take to the enemy stronghold. And this is the very nice feature I like from shooting-action game like this..

Shock Troopers 2 shows major improvements in graphics with release date only differ by 1 year (1998). But the drawbacks are now we can only select 4 characters and the number of stages are only 5. So it would be ended shortly. So sad, because I think everyone who plays Shock Troopers 2 will expect more stages to come. Another drawback is the route can only be selected at the beginning of game, unlike Shock Troopers 1 which offers route changing at some point in the game. Overall, this is a very good shooting-action game. Saurus has done a very good job by making this game :).

If you ask me, I prefer to play Shock Troopers 2 despite of its drawbacks ;).