Another review here, a quick short and sharp review of DICE’s masterpiece Mirrors Edge.  So.. you’ve seen a few videos, you heard about it from a friend and you have seen some of thos annoying adverts for videogames they play at the most random times,  as theres no best time to run them… and your asking yourself … should i get this game… well stop right there the answer is a definite yes.

Gameplay:

This game features some of the most unique gameply since Doom was released, forget the impression that this is an FPS, even forget about those screenshots you’ve seen where she is actually holding a gun!!,  this is not your typical run and gun adventure,  sure you can grab peoples guns,  disarm them and punch their lights out,  but the main focus of the game here is to run about using the surroundings to escape using your skills as a free runner, this is further emphasised by the fact that jumping with a gun will actually hinder you,  so its best to run for your life rather than have a Rambo moment.

Yes… its a gun.. so what.. your master-chief now… no

Click read more for the full review and an overall score.

Graphics:

I don’t need to tell you this game looks nice it uses the Unreal 3 engine… (Geekmumblings Fact: Was going to use the frostbite engine (Bad Company 2), but this wasn’t finished in time!) and the animations are superb, her hands look more realistic than my own. The blank dystopia textures which originally weren’t my cup of tea are now on a list of colours for my house… the animations are nice, but not in keeping with the style of the overall game, gladly though, they aren’t really required to understand the story and are only used as filler for loading screens, which brings me neatly onto the next section of the lifts…

Yup.. cut-scenes from Youtube…

Overall:

Overall i love what this game has done, it’s tried something new and exciting and has pulled it off well, and before finishing i would just like to mention the lifts,  they’re not bad per se, its just after going through 3 on each level, with identical lifts , i get a little bored… there i have had my rant, i like that its a novel idea for a loading screen, but it isn’t really hiding anything and something else would be much more appropriate. This is a good solid game, and well worth buying especially seeing as it is now around $15, well worth it, if only for the time trials… see you next time

Overall Score: 8.2/10

Quicktime X, the latest version of the media player developed by Apple, has had some shady details released about it as of late,  in particular a screenshot of a new UI, this screenshot has since been taken down after Apple found the pictures and threatened to press charges, what has already been stated by Apple however is that Quicktime will be available for Mac OS X in June next year, or a month or so after the users who have brought Snow Leopard have a chance to play about with it first

But… thats not all, amazing news… Apple have decided that they will unlock the pro features in Quicktime X and give them to everyone for free, this is likely to have come from the fact that it wasn’t selling many, if any copys, what this means is that users don’t have to download bad software for their OS, ad that they can use all of the features straight out the box.

[Update: Apple has enabled QuickTime Pro for developers in the past, so its presence in this build does not guarantee it will be that way when Snow Leopard ships.]

…It’s been a little quiet on the Windows 7 front, and in general on nearly every other area this blog is dedicated to, and while Windows 7 is hidden away, Apple have been busy, possible workin on a new UI?… This is almost100% true, as a recent post by Apple related blog world of Apple had to take down some screenshots of Snow Leopard after Apple found them, perhaps they were hiding their new masterpiece?, heres the link to where the pictures were.

http://news.worldofapple.com/archives/2009/02/23/a-look-at-build-10a261-of-snow-leopard-images-video/

As stated before in a earlier post, i stated this was a maintenance relase, and Apple have done that,  the major applications have been reduced in size, and are much less RAM hungry and take up far less disk space, overall, it is a significant change for the platform, and a significantt improvement over the Leopard package. Click Read more for a full list of the changes made so far to the file sizes.

Apple’s suite of stock applications seem to have also gone on a strict diet and exercise regime, with nearly all the included apps radically reduced in size. For example, iChat in Leopard weighs in at 114MB while the Snow Leopard version drops to 22 MB, Dashboard goes from 184 KB to 111 KB and Mail goes from 289 MB to 36 MB. Overall Snow Leopard’s application appear to save around a gig of drive space compared to Leopard.

The screenshots also seem to show that Snow Leopard will make good on Steve Job’s promise that applications will use “breakthrough amounts of RAM.” “Breakthrough” may be marketing-speak, but a capture of Snow Leopard’s Activity Monitor show some apps using significant drop in RAM usage over the same apps running in Leopard (other apps appear to using more RAM, though differences in hardware may be to blame).

Snow leopard, the next version of Mac OS X is set for release in around about 3 months, while it has already been said that the upgrade will be purely maintenance, what they didnt mention, and something which i really think they should be boasting about, are some of these new features that they are developing for the Mac OS, which if licensed could actually change the way Windows PC’s run forever. The most prominent feature and amazing feature that will deliver this difference is called OpenCL, Open Computing Language, imagine this, you have a Macbook or any other Mac for that matter, being a Mac obviously it has a graphics card which most of the time is going unused, this Code converts the GPU, into a CPU ad effectivly gives you a triple core computer… stop reading if this sounds too nerdy…
Here is the quote, i won’t try explaining as i am quite tired.

“Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.”

So.. there you go, if you dont play games, then this is amazing… i’d like to see intel make a dual core run as a triple.

Ok, i know that a lot of you have been waiting for some news on this latest bit of kit, well fret not, this video should answer all your questions, Credit goes to Gizmodo…