Skype is one of the most popular free Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) applications today. VOIP services allow you to make phone calls through your computer over the internet rather then through conventional phone likes. The main advantage to using VOIP over a conventional phone line is cost. In Skype, talking to other users of the service is free of charge regardless of where they are in the world. Assuming the bit rate is around 20kbps, this works out to 150 kilobytes per minute. Using my Cogeco service for an example, which is $44.95/mo for 60gb, that works to be roughly 0.01 cents per minute long distance, which is negligible. 1gb gives roughly 7,000 minutes talk time, far more than anybody would use. Calling land lines with Skype costs about $2.95 per month for unlimited US & Canada. It provides a cheaper, no frills alternative to more advanced VOIP services offered through cable companies when features such as call display, voice mail, and call forwarding are unwanted. The biggest flaw of course is that Skype cannot work with a standard phone, unlike VOIP offered through a cable company. It requires additional equipment such as an existing broadband internet connection, wifi router, and a wifi phone in order to use it without having your computer on. The Wifi phones are quite expensive, with the cheapest one going on Skype's site for $134 USD. Fortunately, many smart phones and wireless PDAs have Skype apps available to them, including the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you go searching on the Canadian iTunes Store for Skype, you won't find it, and it doesn't appear it will be coming out any time soon. Unfortunately, the Skype app for the iPhone is not available in Canada. It was apparently barred by the Canadian Radio & Telecommunications Council (CRTC). There have been a couple of rumours floating around as to why. Some claim there were issues with e911. When using Skype, 911 services cannot locate you. Others say it was due to a patent issue over the why Skype handles data. Regardless, Canadians wanting to use Skype on their iPhone or Touch are pretty much out of luck, unless of course you're smart enough to cheat the system. You don't even need to jailbreak your phone to get it. You need to create a US iTunes account. Here's how to do it.

-Open up iTunes, select iTunes Store in the left column, then scroll to the bottom. Where it says "My Store", select "United States" from the list.
-It will prompt you to log in. You can't use your Canadian account so you'll need to make a new account. The EULA will say it's for American buyers only. Just ignore that. We're not buying anything after all. Follow the on screen instructions.
-Create a different username and password from your Canadian one.
-When it asks for a credit card, select "none".
-Under address, enter your name (real or fake, it doesn't matter).
-Enter a fake street address but use a real city and matching zip code.
-Enter an email address and phone number that's different from your Canadian account.
-Once you're done, it will send a confirmation email to the account you provided. Open it and click the link. There, you're all done.
-Now, just search for Skype, it's a free app, and download it. Now you can make all the VOIP calls you want from your iPhone or Touch instead of having to use your computer.

Now, I should mention a couple of things about signing up for an account that's in a different country from your own. It does violate the EULA. Apple probably won't come breaking down your door but you'll get no warranty or technical support. Secondly, you'll only be able to purchase free apps. The iTunes Store requires that you have a credit card issued in the same country as the address provided so if you have a Canadian card it won't work. Despite that, you can now access the entire American App Store library. There are quite a few free apps that are only available there and not abroad. I tried the American only Sirius/XM app as well. XMRO is still free to Canadian hardware radio subscribers. However, the App requires a US based subscription so unfortunately my Canadian username and password did not work. (as a side note, XM Canada and XM/Sirius are two separate companies even though they provide an identical service, sans premium Sirius content of course. XM Canada and Sirius Canada did not merge unlike the US companies)

Source: Wifitalk.ca

Using a standard keyboard & mouse to control your computer isn't always practical. It would be ideal to remotely control your HTPC without resorting to bulky wireless keyboards or expensive Bluetooth enabled universal remotes. That's where Air Mouse Pro (AMP for sort) comes in. This app gives you full remote control of your computer using your iPhone or iPod Touch. It normally retails for $6.99 but is currently on sale for a thrifty $1.99. The app boasts a long list of features including multi-touch support, accelerometer enabled motion control for mouse movement, media controls, web controls, two button mouse, programmable hot keys, and a full digital touch keyboard. This is a god send for HTPC users. The app works for both OS X and all current versions of Windows from XP up to 7.

I tested the app with Windows 7 RC1 and OS X Leopard. In order for it to work, you have to download a server client so it can interface with your computer. Everything sets up easily and once that's installed, Air Mouse will automatically detect your computer. On Windows 7, it setup quickly. I didn't need to adjust anything with the firewall. OS X required some minor firewall adjustment as I had forgotten I had set it to allow only essential services. You'll have to set it to allow access for specific applications and then add Air Mouse Server (recommended), or set it to allow all incoming connections (not recommended).

So how well does Air Mouse preform it's job. Pretty well actually. I'm actually using it to type part of this article. It used the standard iPhone keyboard and therefore is subject to the same flaws that it is. Unfortunately, autofill is missing meaning that it won't automatically correct mistakes or punctuate contractions. Plus you have to flip back and forth between letters and numbers/punctuations, which can be irritating, especially if you just want to type a period at the end of a sentence. The mouse functions vary well. Under OS X, it is vary responsive and accurate. You can switch between trackpad mode and motion sensing wand mode by tapping the cross icon in the top right corner of your iPhone screen. I'm actually curious as to how PC based shooters would play with this since it works similarly to the Wiimote. You are required to hold down a virtual trigger to move the mouse pointer in order to avoid accidental input. Air Mouse provides four function modes. Standard input with keyboard, media remote complete with playback buttons, web remote that accesses basic browser controls, and a hot key mode which could alternatively function as a gaming mode. The hot key mode can be used to execute key commands and quick launch programs. All work as advertised.

Under Windows 7, I did notice that input seems to be more sluggish than the OS X version. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this is. It is also reported that the app can occasionally crash. The people behind AMP say that this happens if the iPhone runs out of memory, and rebooting the phone fixes the issue. I've had AMP crash once on me so far. It's also worth noting that using this app will probably kill your battery. It works through wifi, which can drain a lot of power. My iPhone is usually plugged in next to my couch so it's not an issue for me. I just recommend putting your phone to sleep when not using AMP. The app does support adhoc wifi connections so a router isn't necessary provided your computer has built in wifi. It works with wired systems that connect to a wifi router as well.

There are a couple of features I'd like to see improved. Namely Bluetooth support. The AMP people claim this is because Bluetooth is not accessible to third party apps. Whether this has changed since iPhone OS 3.0 was released is unknown. It would be vary handy to be able to control something like a Playstation 3 with it. Wake-on-LAN would also be handy. This would allow you to remotely start up an HTPC. I'm aware that there is another app that does just that but it's not worth $2.99 for just that feature. Speaking of price, I think AMP is more than worth the $1.99 sale price. However, I think the regular price of $6.99 is a bit much given what else is in that same price point. I think I would probably pay $4 at most for this feature. It's not a full replacement for a keyboard but it's definitely vary handy for HTPC enthusiasts.

You can download this little gem from the iTunes App Store, where else.

Update July 9th: One little thing I didn't realize about this app is that you can't use it to log into a computer (ie type in your username and password). This is because the server has to be running in order to do this; so you need to be booted to the desktop. It's a bit of a pain in the butt that could easily be fixed with Bluetooth support. However, when/if Apple plans to open up BT access is anybody's guess?

What Works
-Remotely control any Windows or Mac OS X PC over wifi
-Responsive controls
-Easy to set up
-Wiimote like motion control function
-Multiple functions for media and web browsing, quick launch applications and hotkey commands

What Doesn't Work
-No Bluetooth support
-Occasionally freezes on iPhone
-iPhone keyboard not the best in the world
-No iPhone autofill text correction function
-No wake-on-LAN support
-Full price of $6.99 is a bit much, pick it up while it's on sale

Score: 8.5 out of 10

Despite the extensive beta testing, Apple really dropped the ball with iPhone OS 3.0. A lot of people have been complaining about the many problems involved. So much so that they're already pushing 3.1 out the door; it's currently in semi-public beta. I'd thought I'd list off a couple of the problems I've noticed with it.

Inaccurate GPS
A lot of users have complained that the GPS system on the 3G is no longer accurate after upgrading. Some claim it can be a couple hundred meters up to miles off of where they actually are. It's not the GPS chip that's gone bad but rather how the iPhone calculates your location. It uses two ways of doing this. When you're outside, it uses the GPS satellite signal; if it can't find the satellite it uses triangulation. This second method measures your distance between the three nearest cell towers to approximately judge your location. 3.0 has broken triangulation on my phone but is still accurate when using the GPS. The free MotionX GPS Lite app will tell you which location method your phone is using.

Wifi Connection
Spotty wifi connectivity seems to be another issue. My iPhone will frequently claim it can't find my household wifi connection even though my laptop it's sitting right next too it shows full bars. Granted my office is on the second floor and the router is in the basement, but that never phased my iPhone before.

Overheating
The 3G seems to run noticeably warmer with 3.0, though not anywhere close to as warm as some 3GS phones get. Battery life also seems shorter, particularly when using 3G. I'm not sure if 3.0 has caused that or if it's just my imagination.

Slow Response Time
2.x felt a lot more snappy than 3.0. There seems to be a lot of lag when using common apps. Obviously Apple has optimized it for the 3GS, which sports a faster processor. Perhaps releasing universal updates isn't the best idea.

Now that we've seen the most overrated, lets look at the most underrated. You know the ones. The games that are just so good but for one reason or another, nobody played them. Here's my top six in no particular order. Why six? This one was more of a head scratcher and I couldn't think of any that were good enough to round out the four remaining. lol

Okami (PS2, Wii)
A beautiful, stunning, masterpiece of a game who's sales ranged from modest in North America to mediocre in Japan. That last one being rather ironic since it is based on classical Japanese legends. Okami stands as the only game that can really rival Myamoto's Zelda series in size, scope, and quality. It featured beautiful sumi-e/ukiyo-e style cell shaded graphics, a haunting classical Japanese score, an engaging story, and to top it off it was just plain fun to play. What other game lets you play as a wolf with god powers?

Grim Fandango (PC)
This is the game that killed the LucasArts adventure games. Sales were poor at best and yet this game is so good. It truly was the studio's magnum opus. A four year journey through the Aztec land of the dead done in a 1930s film noir style. It featured Manny Calavara at the centre of a gripping conspiracy story that saw tickets for free passage to heaven being stolen from souls, then bought and sold on the black market to the undeserving. The game had great art deco visions and a wonderful jazz score. After this game's financial failure, LucasArts too one more stab at the adventure genre and then closed up shop for good. The games that made them famous disappeared, replaced by a seemingly endless stream of Star Wars titles. Now that Monkey Island is being remade and Sam & Max saw a revival, hopefully LucasArts will take another crack at this fantastic adventure game.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (PC, Xbox)
This game was broken and rushed due to strict LucasArts deadlines. It had huge plot holes. It goes unappreciated because of this. However, Obsidian still manged to create a sequel worthy of the original, and even surpassing it in some cases. It was one of the first Star Wars titles to ever question the clear cut nature of the force seen in most other works, showing that good and evil were not as black and white as they were made out to be. The game is heavier on dialogue and explores a lot of the philosophy in depth. It was vary well written and far darker than any other Star Wars game. The Sith Lord Kreia is regarded as one of gaming's best characters. KotOR II is vary much a thinking man's Star Wars.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
Majora's Mask has largely been overshadowed by the epic Ocarina of Time that preceded it. It took the Zelda series in a direction I think a lot of people weren't ready for. It still stands as the darkest and saddest game in the series. It also turned gameplay upside down by having a 72 hour deadline to finish events before having to reset a la Groundhog Day. The story involves the theft of Majora's Mask, a legendary mask involved in ancient black magic rituals that became so powerful, it took on a life of its own. The mask is stolen by Skull Kid who wants to use it to destroy a world that he feels wronged him, by crashing the planet's menacing looking moon onto Clock Town. Link has to resurrect the four Guardians of Termina and stop the disaster before time runs out. It stands as a unique entry into the series that brought something refreshing. Compared to more recent entries targeted at kids, this is one adults can strongly appreciate.

Flower (PS3)
I could criticize Flower on several points. Namely it's short length and lack of any complex gameplay. Many other reviewers have in the past. However, there is a certain beauty in Flower's simplicity. The calm gentleness of it all and how it seems to blend perfectly with the PS3's motion controller. Each blade of grass is rendered in full 3D and the score almost has a calming effect to it. It's one of those games you pick up after a hard day when you just need to zen out for a bit.

Sonic CD (Sega CD)
Probably the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made. It had beautiful graphics, a lively early 1990s sound track, and a meaningful time travel system that actually tripled the size of the game's six levels. Naturally Sonic CD sold poorly, mostly because it's system sold poorly. Despite being one of the best Sonic games around, it doesn't get the same love as many other titles. Crappy games such as Sonic Labyrinth and Sonic 3D Blast frequently appear on compilation discs but Sonic CD has only made one; on the Sonic Gems Collection for the Gamecube and Japanese PS2. A PC version compatible with Windows 9x was released and is arguably the best port, including high res cut scenes compared to the Sega CD's poor quality FMV.

It is being reported that Sony has filed a patent for Emotion Engine emulation using the Cell Processor. Umm, ok, I thought this technology was already out there. It turns out that this story, originally reported by Siliconera, is considerably out of date as EE emulation has been around since 2007. It is possible that Sony only recently filed a patent for it but there's nothing new to see here.

Here's a brief rundown of the PS3's foray with backwards compatibility. The original 60gb and 20gb PS3s were essentially two systems in one. They featured the PS2's Emotion Engine processor and Graphics Synthesizer GPU alongside the PS3's Cell and "Reality Synthesizer" GPU. The problem was putting these four chips into one system drove up the cost of the PS3 so the Emotion Engine was cut out of the system all together for the original 80gb unit. Playstation 2 games were software emulated using the Cell but the graphics processor proved more difficult to emulate, which is why the GS was retained. Backwards compatibility was reduces somewhat, down to 80% from the near 100% compatibility of the previous models. To further reduce costs, PS2 backwards compatibility was cut from the new 40gb models all together. That irked a lot of PS2 fans. It is possible to use two consoles of course but the allure of an all in one system is strong. Full software emulation is the holy grail for those who don't have the older backwards compatible systems. However, the difficulty emulating the GPU is what has held this back.

Source: Siliconera

Are cell phone companies gouging their customers? Myth Confirmed. Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame got a rude awakening after AT&T charged $11,000 in roaming fees for web surfing he did while vacationing in Montreal. The company charges a rate of $0.015/kilobyte for out of country internet usage, which works out to 750 megabytes worth of data. Savage claims he was just using the service to browse a few websites for a couple hours over the entire week long trip and wasn't downloading videos or pictures. Upon getting the shock of his life, the famed special effects artist and TV host posted his complaint on Twitter. It soon became the number two thread following the death of Michael Jackson. After the Twitter complaints stirred up a massive response and his assistant spending hours on the phone with AT&T, the company eventually agreed to drop the charges. “A lot of people on Twitter are saying, ’Well it’s great that it worked for you, because you’ve got 50,000 followers, but what about the rest of us?’ ” Savage said. “And I totally agree with them.”

Adam Savage fights the machine and wins, once again proving his status as the Geek God. In his defence, it is vary hard to use 750mb just surfing web pages. Back when I was in college, we had a 1gb per week allocation for the university wifi. Even listening to internet radio between classes, I never broke 200mb per week. You'd have to be watching a heck of a lot of flash video or downloading vary large files. This whole debacle exposes some major issues with the cell industry and the way it charges customers. For example, I pay $44.95 per month for high speed internet. That gets me 60gb of data transfer, which works out to roughly $0.75 per gigabyte. By contrast, Rogers/Fido's usual 3G data plan costs $30 per month for 1gb. Therefore, using 3G internet costs 40x more than using cable broadband. Furthermore, Cogeco cable also provides me with email service included in the price, something Rogers Wireless does not offer. I admit I do love being able to view web content on the go but I can't help but wonder whether the convenience is worth that much.
I'm not picking on any company in particular here since they all do it. (So Rogers don't sue me.) Savage's dilema shows just how archaic cell companies treat data. While most other service providers charge you by the megabyte or by the gigabyte when you go over your limit, cellular data plans charge per kilobyte. Back in the days of 28kbps dialup internet, this may have been acceptable but to charge per kilobyte in the age of broadband is simply gouging. Roughly speaking, an average five minute song at 256mbps quality off iTunes would cost $0.33 to download over mobile broadband, a third of it's retail value. More shockingly, if you're out of country the same song would cost a whopping $172 under AT&T's roaming fees. By contrast, the same song would cost only $0.008 to download over cable. That gives you something to think about next time you consider downloading songs or apps using 3G on your iPhone.
Phone and text services aren't much better. Fido's cheapest plan costs $0.30/minute ($15 for 50 minutes) while landline local calls are unlimited. Bell Home Phone Lite for example costs $22.95/month for unlimited local calling. Long distance cell rates are $0.35/minute anywhere in Canada. By contrast, $0.15 or less is typical for landlines. VOIP through your cable company usually runs $40 for unlimited local and long distance calling including features such as call display and answering services. For cell phones, these same additional services are usually $5-$10/month extra. Texting is the most costly feature of all, with average price being $0.15 a message with many companies now charging to both send AND receive them. This means you'll also have to pay for any spam received, which is increasingly becoming a problem. A one minute phone conversation costs the same as a single text back and forth. I know I can say a lot more in a minute than I can write in a text. With the average email several paragraphs long being around 20kb, well, you get the idea. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to use conventional services.

So why are mobile services considerably more expensive than their landline counterparts? Cell companies usually try to dodge this question when it is asked. However, there are a couple of legitimate reasons for this. Namely wireless bandwidth is far more limited than wired bandwidth given that cell phones must share the radio spectrum with a gaggle of other devices. Cables using digital transmission don't have this limitation and therefore can accommodate far more people using them at one time. So you pay more for a volatile resource. Cell companies might be able to weakly justify charging double the rate for phone calls but it's vary difficult to do the same thing with text and data services that cost up to fourty times more than vastly superior landlines. The government has already stepped in, threatening to ban receiving charges for texts, and rightly so. Srinivasan Keshav, a leading Canadian based computer scientist estimates that text messages cost cell companies no more than 0.3 cents. That represents a markup of 4,900%. So for every 10,000 texts sent, it costs cell providers $30 but they receive $1,500, equating to $1,470 in pure profit. No other business would get away with that. (Well except maybe a certain company who sells HDMI cables.) Consumers need to start putting the pressure on cell companies to bring their rates down to something that's more comparable with landlines, especially now with so many replacing home phones with their cells. They're gouging, pure and simple. I haven't even begun to rant about the contracts they force you to sign either.

Source: Canada.com

Ever heard somebody say how great a game is, or a lot of people for that matter. So you say it must be great so you go out and buy it or rent it. Then you realize you've been had. The game just doesn't live up to what your friends have been telling you. It's not to say they're bad games but they're just... meh. Here's my top ten most overrated games, in no particular order. To get on this list, I have to have played them.

God of War Series (Playstation 2, PSP)
The God of War series, featuring the fallen Greek god of war Kratos has become the de facto standard for melee beat-em-ups. The series is also said to be one of the best on the Playstation, ever. It has spawned imitations such as Heavenly Sword and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. While the gratuitous sex and violence ropes you in, the games themselves are only so so. God of war looks good, the story is good, but like so many good games gone bad, the controls are an issue. Namely they can be sluggish at times or the button pressing action sequences often don't give you enough time to react. Sometimes the controls won't respond at all. To add insult to injury, the game is vary unclear regarding objectives and can it can be quite frustraiting at times. Overall, the entire God of War series just feels stiff to play. Hopefully this is fixed for its third outing.

Bioshock (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
Bioshock was named one of 2007's best games by the press and gamers alike. However, when I played it, I quickly discovered it was another typical console shooter, but with super powers and a moral system along the lines of Jedi Knight. It looked fantastic but there was really nothing special or innovative about the gameplay. Plus it had a lot of technical flaws, especially in the PC version.

Fallout 3 (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
Wow, for a game about a post-apocalyptic war zone, this title is boring. While the Mad Max elements are there, you spend a great deal of time just looking for items or a bed to recover health around the Capital Wastes. There really isn't a lot of meat to the main story either. Enemies in the game tend to fall into two camps: annoying or nearly invincible. I find Fallout 3 gets stressful and tedious to play after sitting with it for more than an hour at a time. Unfortunately you do need to spend hours on end to get anything accomplished. I wish I had bought the PC version. At least that has cheats. Whatever happened to the fun cheats that used to be in console titles? No more big head, paintball, or god mode. Sigh.

Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)
Another game I found tedious and stressful to play. Complex controls, a lot of slow moving from point A to point B, and so much cheese in the dialogue, it would makes the French jealous.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (PC)
As readers will know, I hate this game with a passion. It's just so bad. However, back in my flight simming days, a lot of people talked about how great it was. In reality it was so broken the game was unplayable on pretty much any computer I threw it on. I doubt my Phenom II and HD 3850 would do much better since the original system I had vastly exceeded the recommended (not just the minimum!) requirements.

Echochrome (PS3, PSP)
Like watching paint dry, that's how I describe this game. Bland, colourless, and boring, it belongs more as a looped video exhibit at a university art gallery. There's little point to it and certainly nothing pretty to look at. I guess the living-Escher painting idea is interesting but as a game it turned out as incredibly dull. A bit like watching Sinefeld reruns. I have no idea why so many people love this title.

The Legend of Zelda: The Phanton Hourglas (DS)
It's a Zelda game but not like any other Zelda game. Not as out there as Zelda II was but a black sheep none the less. Obviously designed for young kids, a lot of adult gamers professed their love for this title. I found it boring and way too easy. Plus who wants to talk to their game on the subway? The story was also pretty dumb too. I can't believe Nintendo actually made a sequel to this game using the same formula. If you want portable Zelda games, get the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance titles.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)
Widely considered to be the best in the original trilogy of Sonic games, I only found this one to be so so. It's certainly not equal to Sonic 3 by any means and lacked the charm Sonic 1 had. The Spin Dash was neat and Super Sonic was cool if you ever could beat all 7 special stages, which were known for their punishing difficulty. The Sonic Team actually toned the difficulty on them down for the Sonic 2 & Knuckles expansion. Tails was also a pointless addition to this game since all his powers were identical to Sonic, and in co-op play, he just got in the way. He didn't become useful until Sonic 3.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (PC)
Hugely popular but the single player campaigns sucked. There seems to be no way to avoid dying in them every two seconds. Hero characters were pointless.

Echo the Dolphin (Genesis)
This is on everybody's must have list of Genesis and Sega CD titles. I don't know why because this game is so incredibly boring, long, and difficult. There's not much to gameplay, the sonar attack is useless, and it just seems to go on forever. Another one of those titles that looks pretty but has no substance to it. Who would have thought dolphins didn't make good videogame characters!

I got a text from FIDO today saying that iPhone owners with Firmware 3.0 will be allowed to tether their phones to a laptop and use it as a 3G Internet stick. The only catch is that you must have a minimum 1gb data plan with the phone, which costs $30 per month. No additional fees apparently, which is good news for those who were concerned that there would be. Unfortunately, Rogers and FIDO still do not offer unlimited data plans like AT&T does. The best plan is $80 a month for a 5gb cap, which is pretty pathetic.

Movie based games have traditionally been... well... just awful. So of course I was a little sceptical when X-Men Origins: Wolverine landed on the PSN Store a couple weeks ago. After all, the movie its based on got fairly bad reviews and sits with a dismal 36% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I haven't seen the movie yet but the game can't be any better, can it? ... Holy crap, this game is good, damn good.

Gameplay
You play as Wolverine naturally, who is based on Hugh Jackman's character from the movie, who actually looks and sounds like the actor for a change. That's because Jackman actually voices him. That's a good start but it wasn't good enough to hold up Iron Man. The game itself is a God of War clone. The controls are pretty much identical complete with light and heavy melee attacks, being able to throw enemies, lunging at them, special combos, etc. If you want details, read my God of War: Chains of Olympus review. The gameplay is pretty much the same. One of the tings that really took me back though was just how incredibly violent Origins is. You can literally rip your enemies to shreds complete with satisfying squirts of blood and flying limbs going everywhere. Even Kratos must be a little jealous. (I bet that would be one heck of a battle but my money is still on Kratos) As you progress, you level up and gain new skills in a fashion similar to The Force Unleashed. Gameplay is a touch repetative though but overall satisfying.
Level design is good in the game with colourful and varied environments. The demo level is a cliched tropical rain forest setting. It offers a wide variety of features to show off the game from melee fights, boss battles, and even some platforming & wall climbing. Raven has done a good job at bringing the world of Wolverine to life.


Technical
The technical side of this game is overall average. The demo at least looks good but it's not on the same level as a lot of other PS3 games like Uncharted or God of War III. Textures can look a little washed at times. Audio is solid though and its nice to hear Jackman actually voice the character. It's little things like that turn a average game into a good one. Some comments in IGN's review have suggested that the game does have some technical flaws, namely freezing. I didn't see these in the demo though but then again, that's only a small slice of the game. Freezing seems to happen on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

Conclusions
For a movie based game, Origins: Wolverine is a vary nice, well polished title. That's rare for a genre that has built an infamous reputation over the last twenty-five years. The game isn't exactly original but its solid and fun, even if it does get repetitive after a while. Then again, even God of War could be accused of the same thing. It's the best X-Men game I've played since the classic and highly regarded Genesis title.

What Works
-Solid gameplay
-Good level design
-Satisfyingly violent, definitely not for the feint of heart
-Hugh Jackman reprises his voice as Wolverine

What Doesn't Work
-Textures appear washed
-Freezing problems reported on both Xbox 360 and PS3
-Lack of originality in gameplay, almost a direct clone of God of War

Score: 8 out of 10

It's not often I talk about operating systems and such because quite frankly, they're boring. Still, anybody running a tech site cannot help but get caught up in the Mac vs PC debate. We've all seen the commercials as both sides try to get the upper hand on each other. The truth for Microsoft is that Windows Vista, the anticipated successor the the venerable Windows XP, was a disaster when it first came out. It was and largely still is plagued with software and hardware incompatibilities and required significantly more computing power than previous generational jumps did. I'm not saying Vista is necessarily a bad OS but it's not a good one either. Microsoft spent a great deal of time playing catch up to Mac OS X and Linux in terms of features and ease of use, but the end product felt incomplete and more difficult to use than it should have been. After only about a year, Windows 7 was announced as the successor to Vista and it will release on October 22nd. Microsoft is promising there won't be the hiccoughs this time. Buyers of new systems will, as usual, have Windows 7 forced onto them. The questions are whether it is something that can rival OS X and XP and whether it's actually worth upgrading to. For this review, I'm using the Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate 64-bit version.

Benchmark: Memory Foot Print
I could drone on about new features but what people are really interested in is performance. I've compiled a brief benchmark looking at memory usage. Here we have two test systems, both with fairly similar configurations that balance each other out.

Windows 7 Test System
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ "Manchester" 2.00ghz
Motherboard: ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
Memory: 2gb (2x 1gb) DDR-400 PC3200
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3850 256mb GDDR3 PCIe
Audio: Creative Labs Soundblaster X-FI XtremeMusic
HDD: Maxtor 7200rpm 80gb PATA (Win 7), Samsung 7200rpm 80gb SATA (XP), WD 7200rpm 500gb SATA
Optical: LG DVD+RW 16x Multi Drive, LG 16x10x40x CDRW
Operating Systems: Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit, Windows XP Home SP3 32-bit

Comparison System
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 "Penryn" 2.00ghz
Motherboard: Apple Macbook (Late 2008)
Memory: 2gb (2x 1gb) DDR3-1066mhz
Graphics: nVidia Geforce 9400M 256mb shared DDR3
Audio: nVidia integrated
HDD: 160gb 5400rpm SATA
Optical: Apple Superdrive
Operating Systems: Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7

Idle Memory Usage:
Looking at how much memory an operating system consumes is one of the best judges of performance and it's simple to test. Both test systems have the same amount of memory. What we're interested in seeing is how much each operating system consumes, notably whether Windows 7 uses less than Vista as claimed. Both systems are left at idle on the desktop with only an antivirus program (all Windows systems are using the same version of Avast) and task manager running in the background. Areoglass was set to maximum and three widgets were open. Mac OS X was run with just the desktop and eight Dashboard widgets open.

Windows 7: 34% or approx 696.2 MiB in use
Windows Vista: 45% or approx. 806.5 MiB in use
Mac OS X Leopard: 20% or approx. 409 MiB in use
Windows XP: 28% or approx. 574.9 MiB in use

I'm sure nobody is surprised by the Windows results. Vista has the largest idle memory footprint in it's stock configuration than any other operating system, using nearly half of the 1,792 MiB available for it. Windows XP uses the least amount of ram, using just over a quarter of 2 GiB. Windows 7 sits in between the two, using a respectable 34% memory footprint, so indeed Microsoft has leaned it out considerably. It also shows how bloated Vista actually is and why most Vista systems today ship with a minimum 2gb. To give you some idea, 2gb largely still is the standard for XP based gaming systems while Vista needs double to perform the same task. The Mac OS X Leopard results are interesting though. OS X seems to fluctuate on idle from between about 360 MiB to about 460 MiB; with around 409 being the average. Activity Manager seems to calculate this as being a division of the whole 2gb available, meaning a 20% memory foot print. Even if we calculate this by taking out the RAM allocated to graphics, it's still a respectable 22.8%. Arguably OS X is tailor-made for specific hardware but even so, it is considerably lighter than all Windows operating systems while providing similar visual styling and the same functionality. OS X wins this round but Windows 7 shows a major improvement over its predecessor.

Note: 1 MiB = 1024 kilobytes, 1 MB = 1000 kilobytes